Cute as lace pants

Murder, My Sweet

(1944)

This was a Friday-night candidate for deaccession, and it didn't clinch staying in my library until the final reel, with the untangling of the plot and the comic/romantic denouement. It's still true that Dick Powell is a pale imitation of a Philip Marlowe, but the brilliant Ukrainian character actor Mike Mazurki makes up for that as the moose-brained, moose-brawned Moose Malloy.