The Falcon Takes Over could be the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. First appearance of a Raymond Chandler story on screen? – this is it, a version of his Farewell, My Lovely, which would get a bigger-budget workthrough two years later as Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell in the lead.
Here, it’s 1942, we’re in B movie territory and it’s George Sanders as the detective on the case of a missing person. Big bruiser Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) would very much like to know where his showgirl girlfriend has disappeared to, and so presses Gay Lawrence aka The Falcon (Sanders) to find her. Chandler’s loads up the plot – a jade necklace, a nosy journalist (Lynn Bari), a wiseguy cop (James Gleason), a blackmailed man (Hans Conried) and Lawrence’s sidekick Goldy (Allen Jenkins) are all stirred into the pot, until, eventually, a turbaned conman (Turhan Bey) with a sideline in high-end extortion brings everything to a satisfying conclusion.
This is the third of 16 Falcon movies, the penultimate one starring Sanders as the urbane detective. Eventually he’d pass the role on to his brother, Tom Conway, before escaping to more lucrative gigs on A movies. Before playing The Falcon he’d played urbane detective The Saint five times, and had even starred in a film called The Saint Takes Over two years before. Unsurprisingly Leslie Charteris, author of The Saint books, sued the producers of The Falcon for copyright infringement. Even the lobby posters for the two films are similar.
If you know the Chandler original then it’s obvious that he’s being shoehorned into an existing property here. Much of the witty dialogue has gone, though the shape of the story and the overall smart tone remains. Sanders makes for a rakish if possibly too laid back detective with his hat tilted over his left eye. The Falcon/Lawrence’s driver/sidekick Goldy is clearly not a Chandler creation, though Goldy is useful as an explicatory sounding board and Jenkins is good at the double takes and Three Stooges comedy-scrambles, though they don’t really fit the film.
How devastatingly attractive to women this Falcon is. The scenes between journalist Ann Riordan and Gay Lawrence are powered by relentless flirting and give the film a bit of bounce. The uncredited Bond, as Moose Malloy, gives it menace. His bonehead Malloy is so similar to Mike Mazurki’s two years later that you wonder why the producers of the Powell film didn’t just hire Bond.
There are nightclubs and butlers, socialites and gangsters, with the sweep of society being taken in until Lawrence arrives at the house of Jules Amthor, where Turhan Bey – also uncredited, though this was his second Falcon movie – gets to play another of his exotics, this time a psychic whose reading of the future extends no further than the amount of money his victims will soon be transferring into his bank account.
It works as a film in its own right, as an example of how much can be got through in 65 minutes if everyone is speaking quickly and a decent director, Irving Reis, is holding the reins. Perhaps it works best of all as a compare and contrast with Murder, My Sweet – now known almost always as Farewell, My Lovely, but first released under the alternative title by distributors nervous about audiences thinking it was just another Dick Powell musical.
In the days before linear TV stations stole the programming format of a night at the movies – B movie, cartoon, newsreel, big picture, with advertising and trailers linking all together – a film like The Falcon Takes Over was a vital part of the ecosystem. Shorn of all those trimmings, it stands up pretty well all these decades later.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
