In this 1944 movie adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Dick Powell became the first actor to portray gritty gumshoe Philip Marlowe on screen. (It would take two more years for Humphrey Bogart to personify the same character in 1946’s The Big Sleep.) Powell was determined to shake his movie-musical crooning idol image, and this film accomplished that very effectively. And Claire Trevor, as the story’s femme fatale, played her part very well as well.