The Falcon Takes Over

While out at a local club, Gay Lawrence finds himself close by when a man called Moose Malloy comes into the club looking for his Velma, killing the manager in the process of asking. The police pick up on the case but Gay starts searching for Velma. He picks up a lead that involves a meeting, before getting a call out of the blue from a man looking for help. When the 'case' turns out to be a trap designed to kill Gay, he finds himself in the middle of something bigger than he expected.

I'm not sure why, after so many films, the Falcon series suddenly reached into Raymond Chandler for its source material. Perhaps it was the fact that Sanders was fed up doing the films and maybe they were trying to provide of a film for him to work with. Certainly this is a rather different entry in the series that manages to change some elements of the series while also keeping aspects that make it a Falcon film – however this is a weakness rather than a plus point because the two aspects detract from one another. Being the first filmed version of Farewell, My Lovely, this film gets off to a good start; in fact I was surprised to see Moose Malloy looking for Velma and I started to think maybe it was spoofing the film, until I realized that this was made a couple of years before the most famous version. The plot is dark and mysterious and is better delivered as noir – something that the Falcon film cannot do whilst trying to remain a Falcon film. So although the plot follows the source material well, it never really gets a tone that it deserves.

The reason for this is that the material is mixed with the usual Falcon brand of humours and characters. Elements such as Goldy's quips and the discussions between O'Hara and his detective are funny but they don't fit well. Of course this hurts the Chandler material more than it hurts the Falcon series because the addition of a good plot helps add to the usual Falcon aspects – so it turns out to be a good Falcon film but a very average version of the Chandler story. The cast don't really help either, some failing on their own terms while others show their shortcomings when compared to different actors playing the same roles in other versions. Sanders was one film away from leaving the series – as with his suicide, when he had had his fill of things he simply stepped out without fuss. In his performance here you can see that his heart is not in it anymore - he makes little effort with the material given him although it is not all his fault; he couldn't be expected to suddenly turn the Falcon into the complex, downbeat hero of Chandler's story. Jenkins does his usual stuff pretty well but I think he knew that he was an add-on to the story and he tried hard to compensate. Gleason is pretty funny in a minor role but the story specific characters are not as well played as they would later be. Bond may well have been a good model for later versions but he is not as good as them. He tries hard and has a good presence but I just found it hard to accept him as the character. The actresses in the roles of Velma and Riordan are all OK, but nothing more than that.

Overall this is an OK Falcon film despite the weaknesses. The plot is better than normal but not as well used as the same source would be in other films later on. The Falcon humour and character take away from the core of the story and stop it being the noir it deserves to be, while the mix of material and series formula is not totally successful – not quite oil/water but certainly strange bedfellows. Fans of the Falcon and Chandler completists will seek it out but for most people it will just be an average crime film or a poor version of a story done better elsewhere.

Put this one in the same category as "Satan Met a Lady". An amusing way to kill some time for hard-core fans (of Chandler or Hammett), but so far from "essential" that you can't even see the road back to "essential".

I guess that we have "The Thin Man" to blame for all this. The success of that movie (and franchise) must have inspired every movie studio out there to create their own version of the suave, wise-cracking society detective.

It terms of the source material, it's kind of a "mystery" to me (sorry) why they even felt it necessary to borrow part of the plot from "Farewell, My Lovely". The movie is only 65 minutes long, so you barely get past the first visit to Amthor (the psychic) and things are starting to wrap up. That's only about 1/4 or maybe 1/3 of the way through the original novel -- and most of what *is* taken from the novel had to be twisted around to fit the characters in this movie -- so you get none of the classic Chandler material about Santa Monica (excuse me, "Bay City"), the sanitarium, the gambling boat, etc, etc, etc. Also, the whole setup with Lindsay Marriott coming in to ask the detective to accompany him to his payoff is pretty absurd when the main character is a society bon vivant who solves crimes in his spare time rather than a professional private investigator. It seems to me like it wouldn't have been that much harder to just write a new mystery (or adapt some less incongruous one) but I guess that starting with "Farewell My Lovely" allowed them to finish the script for this movie in, say, twenty minutes instead of an hour.

So there's nothing "noir" about this movie at all; it's really only for hard-core fans of Chandler's writing or light 30s/40s mystery/comedies, but it's a fun way to pass some time on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

This entry in an otherwise it-is-what-it-is series of crime programmers merits attention because it preserves the first filming of a novel by Raymond Chandler: Farewell, My Lovely – two years before Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet, one of that handful of 1944 films that really got the noir cycle rolling.

Often such adaptations bear scant resemblance to their original material, bringing to mind the screenplay Joe Gillis (in Sunset Blvd.) wrote that started out with Okies in the Dustbowl and ended up on a torpedo boat. But The Falcon Takes Over startlingly opens with a character called Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) looking for his Velma (Helen Gilbert can't even begin to pinch-hit for Claire Trevor). Along the way we visit that drunken old streel Jessie Florian (Anne Revere, every bit as good as Esther Howard) and Jules Amthor (Turhan Bey, complete with turban and crystal ball).

Given the quality of much of the cast and the initial fidelity to Chandler's material, the movie promises to be much better than it turns out. And what sinks it is the notion that Chandler could supply fodder for a `programmer.' First of all, 90 or 100 minutes offer too brief a span for his baroque tales to unfurl; an hour plus change mutilates them irreparably. Second, franchises like Charlie Chan, or The Saint, or The Falcon are struck from the same template, to which all material must conform. So the setting is not the languorous corruption of Los Angeles but the hurly-burly of New York; missing as well is any sense of Chandler's awareness of the advantages conferred by wealth and class.

But most conspicuous in his absence, of course, is Philip Marlowe. He disappears into George Sander's last run as The Falcon, before he bequeathed the franchise to his brother Tom Conway. (Sanders walks through this picture as if he had given up on the last one.) He has a sidekick, too (Allen Jenkins), who's chock-full of amusing malapropisms. Sidekicks and malapropisms are about as far from Chandler's dark universe as it's possible to go.

Ward Bond is Moose Malloy, deranged escaped convict searching for a one time girlfriend named Velma. Drawing considerable noisy attention to himself, the Moose tracks down a shady night club manager who seems to know something—but is quickly murdered. That's just the beginning of a complicated plot that includes seedy characters, dimly lit locales, and more questions than answers.

George Sanders is excellent as Gay Lawrence—also known, of course, as the Falcon. Sanders handles the picture's serious mystery elements with gravity and style. He also manages to fit into the other half of the plot, which is essentially comic relief provided by the Falcon's right hand man Goldie Locke (Allen Jenkins) and the usual bickering police duo (James Gleason and Edward Gargan as exasperated inspector and dumb assistant detective).

Lynn Bari is fine as the female in the case – unexceptional but solid as the usual plucky girl that the Falcon teams up with. She and Sanders exchange some decent banter: "You believe me, don't you?" she asks at one point. "I like you," he answers, "which is much more important."

Easy viewing for fans of series mysteries, with Sanders' strong performance standing out.

Anyone who has seen the definitive Edward Dmytryk film noir `Murder My Sweet' (1944) will blanch at this low-budget Falcon version of Raymond Chandler's 1940 `Murder My Lovely.' Life is not fair – more viewers will have seen the subsequent performance of Dick Powell as detective Philip Marlowe than George Sanders efforts as Gay Lawrence. These films are simply not comparable although they are based on the same novel. And it isn't that Dmytryk never made Falcon-class films – he directed `The Falcon Strikes Back' in 1943. It is just that `The Falcon Takes Over' comes nowhere near the superior `Murder My Sweet' and thus anyone who has seen both versions will be disappointed.

Director Irving Reis was teamed with George Sanders on the first three of the Falcon films – this one being the last appearance for both in the series. George Sanders especially disappointed me – he has done better in this type role and I am pre-disposed to like anything that he has done. Ward Bond does a good job at playing the hulk Moose Malloy – but anyone who has seen Mike Mazurki will not be as impressed. Allen Jenkins does well as faithful sidekick Jonathan 'Goldy' Locke but in the Tom Conway Falcon series, Edward Brophy is a good substitute. James Gleason is always good as the policeman in charge.

See this to compare or to round out your viewing of the Sanders Falcon series.