From my point of view, this excessively convoluted, 1945 Crime-Thriller just barely managed to scrape by on the skin of its teeth with a 3-star rating._____ Murder, My Sweet's story started out intriguing enough, but before long it became too muddled and confused as too many characters and unimportant situations were introduced into the whole business of having gumshoe, Philip Marlowe solve what seemed to be a very simple case of blackmail and murder._____ By rights the Marlowe character should've been bumped off within this film's first 20 minutes, but, boy, as it turned out, this guy certainly had more lives than a cat!_____ I think that this sort of plotline confusion was characteristic of a typical Raymond Chandler Murder-Mystery, which Murder, My Sweet was adapted from. Chandler was noted for purposely adding irrelevant twists to his stories as a way of keeping his readers guessing right up to the very end._____ Unfortunately this sort of approach doesn't work well when transposed into a motion picture (even with voice-over narration added to fill in all of the gaps). It only leaves the viewer exasperated and dissatisfied, as it did with me._____ But, all-in-all, with that all said, from a nostalgic point of view, this film was fairly entertaining in its own right.

THIS is it. THIS is how you define film noir. Raymond Chandler was genius. Anything for a buck private dick Philip Marlowe's razor sharp narration to the cops about getting "sapped" on the head with a blackjack by an unseen mystery person in the fog, sending him into a "black pool"... Poetically sparking a match to light his smoke on Cupid's rear-end... Big goons named "Moose", femme fatales, stolen jade necklaces, a dead client, Dr. Jekyll (Marlowe's words, not mine) induced hallucinations... Absolutely top shelf shadowy sinister suspense. The whole cast is brilliant (particularly Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, and Mike Mazurki). FIVE STARS.

What a winding trip this movie provides on the way to solving a crime. Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe is wonderful - his clipped narration is perfectly in tune with his character.