Philip Marlowe series

Critique • At the movies

George Sanders (right) is Marlowe—er, the Falcon—in the first adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel.

Missing Marlowe

The Falcon Takes Over (1942): Film, 65 minutes; director Irving Reis; writers Lynn Root and Frank Fenton; featuring George Sanders, Lynn Bari, Ward Bond, James Gleason

The first couple of Philip Marlowe's appearances on screen went by many filmgoers because the fellow on screen wasn't called Philip Marlowe. Two of Raymond Chandler's novels featuring the private detective were adapted as entries in established film series—featuring detectives with other names.

The first such flick was The Falcon Takes Over (1942). It came out just two years after the Chandler novel it adapts, Farewell, My Lovely.

George Sanders as the sleuth.

The Falcon Takes Over is the third in a long series of B-movies, the first four of which star George Sanders as the amateur detective known as the Falcon.

Somehow Chandler's Farewell plot is shoehorned into the series here with Marlowe replaced by the Falcon, his rough-and-tumble gumshoeing replaced by Sanders's more happy-go-lucky sleuthing.

You never really mistake the Falcon for Marlowe. The sophisticated Sanders' charm and cynicism work on an altogether different level from that of the gritty slumming angel in Chandler's novels.

Some of the important secondary characters of Farewell are also present—especially, the ex-con Moose Malloy who's looking for his Velma. But so are some very unChandleresque characters, like the detective's goofy sidekick and the humorously hopeless cops.

So, it's a disaster as a Marlowe film, but entertaining on its own merits.

And it's one of the best, most substantial of the mildly diverting Falcon films, if that counts for anything.

The Falcon Takes Over is still watchable today, if you can forget Chandler and Marlowe are supposed to be involved.

— Eric

Critique • At the movies

1942, 1942b, 1944, 1946, 1947, 1947b, 1969, 1973, 1975, 1978, 1998, 2022