Murder, My Sweet (1944)

This film is considered the best of the Philip Marlowe movies. Dick Powell is the private eye who is hired by an ex-con named Moose Malloy to find his missing girlfriend. He has no luck locating the girl, named Velma, and takes on another case. He is to go with a Mr Marriott to a blackmail dropoff. Marlowe is knocked out and when he comes to he realizes that Mr Marriott has been murdered. Obviously he becomes the prime suspect in the murder and decides to take on another case of people who want to find Moose. It seems that Helen Grayle's expensive jade necklace has disappeared and they want Marlowe to find it. It seems that someone wants to keep Marlowe from unraveling the mystery and they keep knocking him out. Eventually Marlowe decides that Moose is the center of the mystery and must determine his connection before he ends up dead himself.

This movie is a film noir gem. Dick Powell is wonderful as the hard boiled detective Marlowe. He had to fight for this role since most studios only saw him as the leading man in musicals. Anne Shirley is also wonderful as the step-daughter of one of his clients, Ann Grayle. The film is gritty and dark and a wonderful detective story. There were two other versions of this Raymond Chandler novel - The Falcon Takes Over from 1942 and Farewell, My Lovely starring Robert Mitchum in 1975.