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Old and filthy rich Mrs Murdock (Florence Bates) hires private
detective Philip Marlowe (George Montgomery) to retrieve for her the
almost priceless Brasher doubloon that has only recently been stolen from
her safe - a case Marlowe initially doesn't much care for because Mrs
Murdock refuses to give him the whole truth, but ultimately he's swayed by
the old woman's lovely secretary Merle (Nancy Guild), who seems to be
constantly bullied by her employer and yet would do anything for her.
Thing is, she's also one of only two logical suspects for the theft, the
other being Mrs Murdock's son Leslie (Conrad Janis), who doesn't care too
much for the private eye and makes his feelings vocal. Marlowe follows the
trail of the doubloon to a coin collector (Jack Conrad) and a coin dealer
(Houseley Stevenson) but finds them both murdered, but on the former he
also finds a ticket for a P.O. box, and checking the box he finds
the doubloon. He returns to the Murdock place, but refuses to hand over
the doubloon, after all the investigations have landed him in the middle
of a murder case, with him being a logical suspect. Still, Mrs Murdock
refuses to talk, but later persuades Merle to try and seduce Marlowe and
steal the doubloon - but he sees through her charade. However, Marlowe
also receives visits from crooked club owner Blair (Marvin Miller), who
tries to persuade him to drop the case, and another coin collector,
Vannier (Fritz Kortner), who tries to force Marlowe to hand over the
doubloon. Instead Marlowe gets some information out of him, as it seems he
has film footage of the murder of Mrs Murdock's husband, him having been
pushed out of a window. From Merle, Marlowe learns that it was her who
killed old man Murdock because he tried to force sexual favours out of
her. Marlowe and Merle pay a visit to Vannier - to find him murdered. But
they find the incriminating film, too. Now Marlowe has the police collect
all the suspects and plays the film that proves without a doubt that it
wasn't Merle but Mrs Murdock herself who pushed her husband out of a
window, and she has also killed Vannier. The other coin collector and the
coin dealer were killed by Leslie, who has also stolen the doubloon, and
who, together with Blair, wanted to blackmail his mother. And in the end,
Marlowe of course gets the girl. Between 1944 and 1947, Philip
Marlowe was a busy film character, leading no less than four
features for four different studios, Murder
My Sweet, The Big Sleep,
The Lady in the Lake, and
this one, the last and arguably least of the quartet - and it's not so
much that The Brasher Doubloon is a bad movie per se, it's just a
very routine (yet nicely filmed) film noir with a bit too muddled a plot
(not an unusual problem with Raymond Chandler adaptations) and a lack of
wit to butter over the incongruencies. And while George Montgomery
delivers an ok performance, he's no match for Dick Powell in Murder
My Sweet or Humphrey Bogart in The
Big Sleep. That's not to say this isn't an at least to some extent
entertaining film, just one of the lesser, more forgettable Philip
Marlowe movies. By the way, Raymond Chandler's novel The
High Window has previously been filmed in 1942 as Time to Kill (Herbert
I. Leeds), yet here Marlowe was replaced by series detective Michael
Shayne, as played by Lloyd Nolan.
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