The New Pictures, Dec. 18, 1944

Farewell, My Lovely (RKO-Radlo) is as good a piece of melodramatic 20-minute-egg sentimentality as the famous Double Indemnity (TIME, July 10). In some ways it is even more likable, for though it is far less tidy, it is more vigorous and less slick, more resourcefully photographed, and even more successfully cast.

The picture has one glaring fault: it is far too fond of reproducing, by direct quotation, samples of the worst of the careful but uneven prose in which Raymond Chandler wrote the original thriller. Aside from that it handles Chandler’s extremely cinemadaptable story so well that, if anything, it improves it in the retelling. It is the story of an indigent Los Angeles private detective (Dick Powell) who, for the sake of a few spare dollars, helps a gigantic imbecile named Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) to hunt down the girl he loved when he went to jail. In the course of the quest the detective interviews a wonderful, boozy old floozy (Esther Howard) who could bring Hogarth up to date. Before long he finds himself suspected of murder and hired by several conflicting sides in a fight whose meaning and dimension he only gradually finds out. It involves invaluable jade, the slaughter of a gigolo, a psychoanalytic theosophist (Otto Kruger), a charlatan (Ralf Harolde), an aging multimillionaire (Miles Mander), his sexy young wife (Claire Trevor), and her angry stepdaughter (Anne Shirley). The wife treats the shabby detective with brazen cozyness, the theosophist slams him across the chops with a pistol, the charlatan pumps him full of dope, the stepdaughter feeds him alternate Scotch and scorn, and the elderly, harmless-seeming nabob is in savagely at the climactic kill. The hyperpituitary ex-convict, incidentally, finds his lost lovely at last.

Farewell is done to a fare-thee-well by everybody from the costumer to the excellent cast. Sets that should look threadbare have seldom looked so rat-ridden. The neon sign outside a crummy dive is almost too properly defective. There is an enthusiastic appetite for everything possibly sinister about a big city and its people. The makers of the film go farther with their realism: they try to make sensations and states of mind visual. Best: the drug sequence, presenting through double exposure an indecipherable web of confusion and dreamlike memory.

The Man In Half-Moon Street (Paramount) polishes up quite a nice thriller out of a question which has troubled the world (if only in its leisure moments) ever since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The smoldering question: does scientific curiosity transcend morality?

Julian Karell (Nils Asther) appears at first blush to be no scientist at all, but merely a London artist of the 19303 who paints such a conventionally fashionable portrait of his socialite fiancée (Helen Walker) that some of her cultivated friends discern in it “touches of genius.” Others recognize it as identical in bloom and brushwork with the work of a portraitist who died some 50 years before. Even when Artist Karell lays aside the palette for a chemist’s flask he is no Frankenstein, intent on making a living man out of spare parts of dead ones. He wants merely to preserve himself at a perpetual 35 by getting periodical surgical instalments of the glands of other men, who customarily die as a result of the transaction.

By the time Karell is 90 in years and as smooth as ever in façade, the brilliant old surgeon (Reinhold Schunzel) who performs the operations is shocked to realize that his patient cares far less about science and the general welfare than he does about keeping himself in prime condition for Miss Walker. Karell tries desperately to find a willing surgeon; he even snatches his next gland supply—a would-be suicide—out of the Thames. But at last, after Scotland Yard has dug up gruesome details of his past, he is literally unmasked. In a hair-raising scene in a railway coach with his betrothed, his body comes of age.

The real stars of the picture are the makeup men who achieve this gradual yet swift and terrible transformation, and the tailors who cut black clothing to flap as bitterly as it should on Mr. Asther’s eloquently ancient body as he makes his last hunched, fearsome flight from the laws of nature and of man.