Irving Reis's The Falcon Takes Over

The Falcon Takes Over (RKO, 1942) is an okay B detective story, based on Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely (1940), before Chandler became well known.  It has crisp photography by George Robinson, who did many B movies, and an impressive cast of character actors, my favorite being Ann Revere, later a victim of the blacklist, as an inebriated housewife trying to keep a secret.  The direction by Irving Reis is relatively impersonal but the biggest problem with the film is that, like many B pictures, it tries to appeal to every part of the audience:  beautiful women for the men, suave George Sanders for the women, somewhat goofy cops and sidekicks for the children.  The film runs a brisk 65 minutes and can accommodate only a small part of Chandler's original story and the tone is too light for his dark vision.  Two years later Edward Dmytryk used the same story for Murder My Sweet, with Dick Powell, and Dick Richards made it again in 1975 with Robert Mitchum; both of these were closer to the original story but suffered from relatively uninspired direction.  There are, of course, other films of Chandler's novels  but none effectively capture his bleak and fatalistic view of Los Angeles.