Ladies, I don’t know if you know this, but the cure for frigidity is George Montgomery.
Let’s pretend that you are a young woman who is terrified of a man’s touch, due to some unstated trauma in your past. You work for a tyrannical old dowager who has an unnatural attachment to her spoiled, weak-willed son. You tremble at the sound of the old woman’s voice, and you live in her Southern California mansion as a virtual slave.
Then, one day, a man appears at the front door. He’s tall, he’s trim, he’s 30 years old, and he has high cheekbones and a nice mustache. In short, he’s the complete package. He’s come at the behest of your mistress, Mrs. Murdock, who wants him to track down a coin that has been stolen from her. The coin is the Brasher Doubloon of the title, and it’s a coin with “a romantic and violent history.”
If this man approached you privately after meeting with the old woman and you told him you don’t like to have men touch you, and he responded — “Well, in that case you better do something about your appearance. And that perfume you use … Night of Bliss. You just can’t seem to make up your mind, can you, Miss Davis?” — would you accept his offer to “take it very slowly” and cure you of your phobia?
Of course you would.
In John Brahm’s The Brasher Doubloon, private investigator Philip Marlowe (Montgomery) accepts both cases — tracking down the missing coin owned by Mrs. Murdock (Florence Bates) and curing her secretary, Merle Davis, of her frigidity.
Merle is played by Nancy Guild (rhymes with “wild”), who looks a little like a softer-featured Margot Kidder. She and Montgomery are an attractive pair, but their limits as thespians keep The Brasher Doubloon from being a top-flight picture.
Montgomery delivers every line in an emphatic huff. If it’s supposed to be hard-boiled it doesn’t come across that way. When a slimy coin dealer named Elisha Morningstar (Houseley Stevenson) asks Marlowe if he’s threatening him, Marlowe responds, “Yes…,” as though he’s not sure. When Marlowe tell Mrs. Murdock, “I do things my own way,” he sounds like a petulant child.
Throughout the film, Guild looks as though she’s been thrown into the deep end of the pool and doesn’t know how to swim. (This was only her second film — the first was Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1946 noir Somewhere in the Night.) Luckily, wide-eyed panic is what her character calls for. Unfortunately, her performance remains pitched at exactly the same level throughout the film.
Dorothy Bennett’s screenplay, which is adapted from Chandler’s 1942 novel The High Window, is pretty good. John Brahm’s direction is excellent. Unlike The Big Sleep (1946), this isn’t a picture that’s overly difficult to follow, and the settings — from baronial mansions to smoky underworld dives and rented rooms — are well-done.
The Brasher Doubloon is one of the least well-known films adapted from a Raymond Chandler novel. After two B movies adapted from Chandler novels that did not retain the Philip Marlowe character were released — The Falcon Takes Over (1942) and Time to Kill (1942), based on Farewell, My Lovely and The High Window, respectively — the two most famous Philip Marlowe movies were made: Murder, My Sweet (1944), which starred Dick Powell as Marlowe, and The Big Sleep (1946), which starred Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947) rounds out the “big three” Philip Marlowe films of the ’40s, and while it’s not as well-regarded as the other two, it’s available on DVD, and is an interesting picture.
The Brasher Doubloon is currently unavailable on DVD, which is a shame. While the acting by the two leads is pretty bad, and there’s a really cheesy scene at the end in which Marlowe assembles all of the suspects and explains to them who committed the murders, overall this is a pretty tight noir mystery.
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