It was hard to get Mike Mazurki (Moose Malloy) to tower over Dick Powell, because the former singer stood 6' 2", with Mazurki only slightly taller at 6' 4 1/2". For many scenes, Powell had to stand in a trench.

For Mazurki's first appearance, reflected in the window of Powell's office, director Edward Dmytryk couldn't get the taller actor to appear large enough because the window was too far from the camera. Instead, he had a plate of glass placed between the camera and Marlowe's desk, then reflected Mazurki's image in that. On screen, the plate glass is undetectable, making the large reflection seem to be farther from the camera.

Another trick Dmytryk used to make Mazurki more threatening was having the sets built with slanted ceilings to force the perspective. As Mazurki walked closer to the camera, he seemed almost to grow.

For the scene in which Marlowe is drugged, Dmytryk showed Powell falling through a sea of faces. In this he borrowed a trick from Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942) by having the camera pull back from the actor to make it seem he was falling. He had the camera accelerate as it pulled back, as well, to intensify the horror.

To protect his leading man in the final shoot out, when Marlowe dives for Grayle's gun only to have it go off right in front of his face, Dmytryk used the plate glass trick from the film's beginning to reflect the gunshot at a safe distance from Powell. Since Miles Mander had held the gun in his right hand in all other shots for that scene, he had to hold it in his left hand to disguise the reflection.

The film was shot under the book's title, but when it premiered in Minneapolis in December 1944, it bombed. Executives realized that the marquee "Dick Powell in Farewell, My Lovely" made the film look like a musical. When they changed the title, the picture became a hit.

With the success of Murder, My Sweet, RKO President Charles Koerner abandoned plans to star Powell in a series of musicals and cast him in more hard-boiled detective and action films instead.

by Frank Miller