This now-classic version of Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely remains one of the most inventive crime thrillers in combining hard-boiled cynicism with dark expressionism. In 1944, Dmytryk's direction heralded a new era of realism on the back lots of the big studios, and the baby-faced crooner Dick Powell was so effectively pummeled into a vision of seediness as Chandler's Philip Marlowe that he became an icon of the film noir era. James Agee's praise is typical of the critical esteem bestowed on this unusual film: "It handles Chandler's extremely cinematographic story so well that, if anything, it improves on the re- telling.... There is an enthusiastic appetite for everything possibly sinister about a big city and its people. The makers of the film go further with their realism: they try to make sensations and states of mind visual."