Murder by Contract (1958)

December 1958 release date

Directed by Irving Lerner

Screenplay by Ben Simcoe

Music by Perry Botkin

Edited by Carlo Lodato

Cinematography by Lucien Ballard

Vince Edwards as Claude

Phillip Pine as Marc

Herschel Bernardi as George

Caprice Toriel as Billie Williams

Michael Granger as Mr. Moon

Cathy Browne as Mary, the secretary

Joseph Mell as Harry, the hotel waiter

Frances Osborne as Miss Wiley, Williams’s former maid

Steven Ritch as the plainclothes officer with the tear gas

Janet Brandt as the woman in the movie theater

Davis Roberts as the clerk at Hall of Records

Don Garrett as James William Mayflower

Gloria Victor as Miss Wexley

Cisco Houston as the rifle salesperson

Distributed by Columbia Pictures

Produced by Orbit Productions

The use of music is very effective in Murder by Contract, much like the zither in The Third Man (1949). The Columbia logo is the first thing to appear on the screen with no sound, just silence. Then the film cuts to the opening credits, which appear over a man (Claude, the contract killer) shaving and getting dressed. Now comes a kicky, whimsical, foreign-sounding guitar score on the soundtrack. This guitar score is the theme music for the film and is repeated throughout. The man continues dressing, with a suit and a tie, and then he shines his shoes. He could be any businessman getting ready for an office job.

After the credits, the film cuts to Claude visiting Mr. Moon and asking him for a job. He says that Mr. Brink sent him. Mr. Moon is skeptical and not very encouraging. From their dialogue, viewers know that Claude isn’t looking for any ordinary business job, although he is dressed in his suit, tie, and shined shoes for this very different interview. He wants a high-paying job to buy a house, so Claude is definitely hard to pigeonhole. He aspires to be a contract killer because he wants the money to afford a middle-class life. As soon as Claude leaves, Mr. Moon calls Mr. Brink. They might be able to use him after all.

Claude completes his initial assignments successfully, and Mr. Brink sends Claude to Los Angeles to kill a witness in a federal trial. Two men, George and Marc, pick him up at the train station. The shot of George and Marc waiting for Claude at the train station is very strange because of the rear projection. It creates the sensation that they are parked on the tracks. And this odd use of rear projection is unfortunately consistent throughout the film. Maybe it worked in 1958, but I found it very distracting. It stood out, perhaps, because everything else about the film is so finely tuned.

And so is Claude. He wants to take his time and conduct some research before he kills his mark. Before he gets to the particulars of the contract hit, George and Marc take (or Claude takes George and Marc) swimming; deep-sea fishing; and to the zoo, the driving range, and the movies. At the movies, Claude slips out of the theater while Marc is preoccupied with the film and George is asleep in his seat. George and Marc return to the hotel room without Claude and discuss what to do next. They finally decide to go looking for him, and when they open the door to the hotel room, Claude is standing on the other side of the threshold. Claude tells them that he tailed them so that he could be sure that no one was tailing any of them.

Claude refuses to allow emotion to enter into his work. He is a professional, and he is good at what he does. He tells Marc and George: “The only type of killing that’s safe is when a stranger kills a stranger. No motive. Nothing to link the victim to the executioner. Now why would a stranger kill a stranger? Because somebody’s willing to pay. It’s business. Same as any other business. You murder the competition. Instead of price cutting, throat cutting. Same thing.” Claude doesn’t care about conscience, religion, family, punishment. He is frightening because he makes a lot of sense on some level. The difference between what he does and what businesspeople do is a very fine line. The risk in his work is high, but the profit is high. He has trained himself well, and he is very convincing. Before long, he is literally in the driver’s seat: George and Marc are letting him drive their car.

Four days before the trial, Claude agrees to see the hit. He learns then that it is a woman. He knew that her name was Billy Williams, but he assumed that it was a man’s name. For the first time in the film, viewers see that Claude is ruffled. He tells Marc and George: “I don’t like women. They don’t stand still. When they move, it’s hard to figure out why or wherefore. They’re not dependable. It’s tough to kill somebody who’s not dependable. I’ll do it, but I want more money.”

Once Claude agrees to the new contract, he is just as meticulous as he was from the start. He tries to learn about Billie’s habits. He learns from her former maid that Billie reads the newspaper in the morning, watches television all day, and plays the piano. She is too afraid to do anything else while she is being guarded by FBI agents. He uses this information to devise his murder plans.

(This blog post about Murder by Contract contains all the spoilers.)

Murder by Contract is a perfect example of why I always say that film noir shows viewers exactly what not to do. The two handlers, George and Marc, want Claude to do what he agreed to do and move on, but Claude is meticulous and wants to do the job right. Against their better instincts, George and Marc let Claude take his time. Before too long, George starts to appreciate Claude’s technique and his sense of humor. Marc grudgingly agrees, but he still raises objections here and there. He still worries that the murder won’t be done before the witness has a chance to testify, but he is the only one. Viewers come to appreciate the camaraderie between Claude, George, and Marc, too. Their banter provides some genuinely funny moments. And then there’s that guitar score that has been used from the opening scene and credits. It is pleasant, whimsical, but it also emphasizes some of Claude’s most gruesome work. It’s another detail that seems to lull viewers into thinking that everything will be okay after all, although nothing is okay for Claude’s victims.

And that’s how the spell, for lack of a better word, is created. No one else enters Claude, George, and Marc’s small circle. If supporting actors appear at all, they aren’t on-screen for very long. They rarely even speak. Instead, the kicky guitar music is heard on the soundtrack, or Claude, George, or Marc are heard speaking whether or not they are in the shot. All three main characters and the viewers are drawn into the small circle.

Everything is meticulously planned and carried out. Claude sees to it. But none of the characters account for fate, coincidence, the long arm of the law, and Claude’s own superstitions (he isn’t the perfect killing machine after all). As soon as the rest of the world intrudes on the criminals’ small circle, their plans blow up in their faces. None of the three main characters survives. I was pretty sure that Claude wouldn’t make it to the closing credits alive, but I have to admit I was surprised that George and Marc didn’t.

And maybe that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t enjoy Murder by Contract as much as I thought I would. From a technical perspective, everything worked to perfection. But all that precision and character bonding led only to justice being served in a very violent way. Claude, George, and Marc may have been enjoying themselves, but I grew tired of all that planning and energy expended with nothing more than murder and money as the endgame. Claude’s misogyny grated on me, too. He may have found it difficult to kill a woman, but he is the man for the job of terrorizing her until she wishes she were dead. Murder for Contract is only about eighty minutes long, but it’s a long time to spend with a man like Claude.

Marlowe (1969)

September 19, 1969 (Germany), October 22, 1969 (United States), release dates

Directed by Paul Bogart

Screenplay by Stirling Silliphant

Based on the novel The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler

Music by Peter Matz

Edited by Gene Ruggiero

Cinematography by William H. Daniels

James Garner as Philip Marlowe

Gayle Hunnicutt as Mavis Wald

Carroll O’Connor as Lt. Christy French

Rita Moreno as Dolores Gonzáles

Sharon Farrell as Orfamay Quest

William Daniels as Mr. Crowell

H. M. Wynant as Sonny Steelgrave

Jackie Coogan as Grant W. Hicks

Kenneth Tobey as Sgt. Fred Beifus

Bruce Lee as Winslow Wong

Christopher Cary as Chuck

George Tyne as Oliver J. Hady

Corinne Camacho as Julie

Paul Stevens as Dr. Vincent Lagardie

Roger Newman as Orrin Quest

Anna Lee Carroll as Mona

Read Morgan as Gumpshaw

Warren Finnerty as Haven Clausen

Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Produced by Katzka-Berne Productions, Cherokee Productions

I wanted to see Marlowe for many reasons. I am a big fan of Stirling Silliphant’s writing. He wrote many of the episodes of two wonderful classic television shows: Route 66 and Naked City. And he adapted the screenplay for Marlowe from Raymond Chandler’s novel The Little Sister. I haven’t finished Chandler’s novel—yet—but I’m more than halfway through. Seeing the film inspired me. I have read that many of the snappy lines of dialogue in the film are taken almost word-for-word from the novel, which is true so far and makes for fun reading.

Another reason to see the film was James Garner. I have always been a fan of his, and I thought it would be interesting to see him in the role of Philip Marlowe. Humphrey Bogart made Philip Marlowe, the detective in the rumpled trench coat, his own in The Big Sleep. I wondered how Garner would fare in the role (just great, by the way). And then there’s Rita Moreno and Carroll O’Connor in supporting roles. I had high hopes—and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I watched the film twice, two days in a row, because it was so much fun the first time. (It was fun the second time, too.)

And films from the 1960s and early 1970s are fun in their own right. The clothes, the hairstyles for women, the décor: all of it makes these films seem even more dated than films noir from the 1940s and 1950s. But in Marlowe, they also serve a purpose: The film opens with Marlowe driving up to a ramshackle hotel call “The Infinite Pad.” The hotel’s façade is covered with peace signs and flower-power symbols. People in hippie-style clothing lounge about on the front stairs and porch. And Marlowe shows up in his suit jacket and tie, trying to find the lost brother of his client, one Ofamay Quest. The juxtaposition of the traditional with the new reinforces the idea that Marlowe, the character, is a throwback to the past, a relic of pulp novels from the 1930s and 1940s. But Silliphant’s screenplay and James Garner’s acting make him relevant still in 1969.

I have always said that viewers have to pay attention to the details in many films noir, and the same can be said of Marlowe. Even the opening sequence, with its pop theme song and neon colors, is important, and not just because of the opening credits. The stills and film shots are included for a reason. It’s easy to be distracted by the clever design and the eye-popping colors. I was! The bright colors, constant movement, and catchy theme song meant I had to restart the film so I could catch the credits, too. But the opening sequence should be considered part of the exposition of the upcoming narrative. The photographer taking the pictures in the opening sequence is the person in the photo stuck between the metal parts of the dashboard in Marlowe’s convertible, and it is the person Marlowe is looking for in the rundown hotel.

The manager of the hotel, Haven Clausen, is sleeping soundly. Marlowe tries nudging him awake, and when that doesn’t work, he stuffs a towel in his mouth and pinches his nose. In another juxtaposition between Marlowe and the counterculture of the 1960s, Clausen reaches for a joint, not a cigarette, and Marlowe lights it for him. (A lot of people were still smoking tobacco in 1969, by the way.) Marlowe needs a passkey from Clausen to get into Orrin Quest’s room. When he gets into the room, he learns that it is now occupied by Grant W. Hicks and that Quest left ten days earlier.

Before Marlowe leaves the hotel, he checks for the register, but it’s been tossed in the wastebasket and the page registering Quest has been ripped out. He also checks a telephone directory for Dr. Vincent Lagardie because Clausen called him earlier, when Marlowe first questioned him. He suddenly realizes that Clausen has been awfully quiet, and when he checks on him, he finds Clausen has been killed with an ice pick to the neck. Marlowe’s missing person case now includes murder.

Marlowe returns to his rented office in a large building that reminded me of an old high school. Next door is Woodbridge College of Cosmetology, Hair Styling. The proprietor is Chuck, who informs Marlowe that the client from Kansas is back. And so she is: Orfamay Quest. She has hired Marlowe to find her brother, but she is not very happy with his work so far.

Marlowe’s office and office building (above) also remind me of Harper’s (below) in Harper. Click here for my blog post about Harper, starring Paul Newman.

While Orfamay Quest complains about Marlowe’s lack of results finding her brother, he calls Dr. Vincent Lagardie, who denies knowing Orrin Quest. (Ofamay is more interested in complaining than in giving Marlowe a chance to explain why he is calling the doctor.) He also gets a phone call from Grant W. Hicks, who will pay him to come to the Alvarado Hotel and get some information (Hicks wants Marlowe to save him from Orrin Quest, but he doesn’t tell Marlow that). When Marlowe arrives at the Alvarado Hotel, he finds Hicks, who is now dead with an ice pick to his neck, and a well-dressed woman, who threatens him with a gun. She injures Marlowe enough to keep him from following her, but the hotel’s security cop, Oliver (Ollie) J. Hady, follows her, learns that she is driving a pale yellow Jaguar, and writes down her license plate number.

Marlowe concentrates on Hicks. He now has one missing person and two murders, both by ice pick, and an alarming trend to consider. In Hicks’s toupee, Marlowe finds a claim ticket for Benson’s Camera Shop. Suspecting that a claim ticket hidden in a toupee has to be important (why else would it be hidden in a toupee?), Marlowe mails it to himself from a mailbox in the lobby of the Alvarado Hotel. He counts Hicks’s cash, a substantial sum, and leaves everything else as is.

The film cuts to the police investigation of the Hicks murder scene. Marlowe called the homicide detectives, and among them are Lieutenant Christy French and Sergeant Fred Beifus. They are well acquainted with Marlowe, and Christy grills him about what he knows, but they decide finally to let Marlowe and Hady go. Marlowe catches up with Hady because he wants to know what happened to Hicks’s money; the sum noted by the police detectives didn’t match Marlowe’s count. Hady pocketed over $100, but he refuses to give it up until Marlowe threatens to turn him in. But Marlowe gives it back, bill by bill, when Hady provides one piece of information after another that he has on the woman who escaped: what she was wearing, the car she drove, the license plate number, and so on.

Marlowe uses the information from Hady to find Mavis Wald, a very popular television actress, and her address. When Marlowe gets to Mavis’s penthouse apartment, he finds Dolores Gonzáles, a friend of Mavis’s. Mavis refuses to talk, and when Marlowe leaves the apartment building, Sonny Steelgrave is waiting outside. Three of Steelgrave’s henchmen beat Marlowe and rip his favorite suit jacket when he refuses to hand over the photos.

When Marlowe returns to his office, Winslow Wong (played by Bruce Lee in his first role in an American film) pays him a visit. The first thing Wong does is kick a hole in the wall between Marlowe’s office and the Woodbridge College of Cosmetology, Hair Styling next door. Then he kicks the glass lighting fixture into shards. Chuck and his students rush in to Marlowe’s office to complain, but they leave when Marlowe says that he is just “redecorating.” Wong has a proposition (a bribe) for Marlowe, courtesy of his boss Steelgrave, but Marlowe refuses.

At this point in the film, viewers have met most of the main characters, but several plot twists and turns are still to come. As you can already guess, Marlowe is as complicated as any film noir, with several interconnecting characters and a detailed plot and subplots. I enjoyed following the story, and I enjoyed the subtle humor even more. Garner, as Marlowe, has a good sense of timing and delivers all his lines perfectly. The film lived up to all my expectations.

I had one complaint about the film, and it might be more a function of the DVD presentation than the film itself. The music on the soundtrack was great, but it was extraordinarily loud. I missed some lines of dialogue because they seemed to be overwhelmed by the music, and even when there wasn’t any music, they just weren’t loud enough. If the DVD had come with closed captioning or subtitles, I might not have noticed, but without either option, the lack of clarity for some the actors’ lines became obvious.

Reviewers writing about Marlowe when it was released in 1969 apparently weren’t very kind toward the film. I tried to read some reviews, starting with Roger Ebert’s, but Ebert got it all wrong so I stopped there. Everybody wants Marlowe to be Humphrey Bogart (or is it the other way around?), and I couldn’t disagree more. I agree that Humphrey Bogart was good in the role of Marlowe in The Big Sleep, but others can play Marlowe, too. I don’t want to see an actor playing Marlowe imitating Humphrey Bogart. The comparison between Bogart and every other actor who portrays Marlowe, perhaps inevitable, is unfair in so many ways.

Another complaint about the film’s contemporary reviewers is the tendency to reinforce the myth that the plots of Raymond Chandler’s novels and the films based on them do not make much sense. Supposedly no one can follow the plot of Chandler’s novels, and film viewers shouldn’t try either. Nothing could be further from the truth! Yes, there are a lot of characters to keep track of; yes, there are plots within plots within plots. But what’s the fun of solving a mystery if the answer is given to you at the outset? Isn’t it realistic to present a detective story, one that is told from the point of view of the detective, the way he or she experiences it: with a puzzle that is missing a lot of pieces because someone, maybe more than one person, doesn’t want anyone knowing the details?

Click here for my blog post about The Big Sleep, which includes some discussion about the plot of that film. The Big Sleep is based on Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name.

Please don’t let comparisons between leading actors and disparaging comments about Chandler’s plots prevent you from seeing Marlowe. Forget about Humphrey Bogart. Forget about Raymond Chandler. Enjoy Marlowe on its own terms. I enjoyed Marlowe enough to see it twice.