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- The Observer,
- Sunday July 20 2008
No 24
Dick Powell 1904-63
Born in remote Mountain View, Arkansas, Powell went into the music business via Little Rock College, clerking at a telephone company and playing several instruments and singing in a light tenor with dance bands. Shortly after being spotted by a Warner Brothers scout, he was appearing as a romantic lead opposite Joan Blondell (his second wife) and Ruby Keeler. He was a key star of cheerful Depression musicals, the best of them classic backstage stories like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933
'I started out with two assets - a voice that didn't drive audiences into the streets and a determination to make money,' he once said. Warners gave him the chance of something different in 1935 by casting him as Lysander in a bizarrely eclectic A Midsummer Night's Dream (Cagney as Bottom, Rooney as Puck). But fed up with typecasting, he moved to Paramount in search of more challenging roles and found one in Preston Sturges's masterly Christmas in July (1940).
The big transformation came when Powell joined RKO and fought for the role of the cynical, wisecracking private eye Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, a film version of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. An immediate success, this classic film noir transformed Powell from the cherubic star of the Thirties into a tough, anxious hero of the mid-Forties.
He went on to appear in numerous noir thrillers, playing relentless pursuers of fugitive Nazi war criminals in Cornered (1945) and Rogues' Regiment (1948); a federal narcotics agent in To the Ends of the Earth (1948) and a secret serviceman protecting Abe Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War in Anthony Mann's The Tall Target (1951).
This string of hard-boiled roles led to one of the best parts he ever had, as the historian who writes a Civil War bestseller that's turned into a Hollywood blockbuster by ruthless producer Kirk Douglas in Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
At that point, Powell entered the highly lucrative third phase of his career as a producer-director for TV and cinema. The films he directed were always competent but never truly distinguished.
Powell on his career 'What counts most is survival. There were lots of stars bigger than me, but I saw them come and go. Somehow I've managed to survive and that's what I'm proud of.'
The crucial transitional In a calculated farewell to terpsichore, Powell as Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet dances a few steps in the baronial reception hall of a rich client before going down those mean streets of Los Angeles.
Essential DVDs 42nd Street/Dames (Warner Brothers); Murder, My Sweet (aka Farewell, My Lovely) (RKO); The Bad and the Beautiful (MGM)
Next week: Simone Signoret
