Anyone who has seen the definitive Edward Dmytryk film noir `Murder My Sweet' (1944) will blanch at this low-budget Falcon version of Raymond Chandler's 1940 `Murder My Lovely.' Life is not fair – more viewers will have seen the subsequent performance of Dick Powell as detective Philip Marlowe than George Sanders efforts as Gay Lawrence. These films are simply not comparable although they are based on the same novel. And it isn't that Dmytryk never made Falcon-class films – he directed `The Falcon Strikes Back' in 1943. It is just that `The Falcon Takes Over' comes nowhere near the superior `Murder My Sweet' and thus anyone who has seen both versions will be disappointed.

Director Irving Reis was teamed with George Sanders on the first three of the Falcon films – this one being the last appearance for both in the series. George Sanders especially disappointed me – he has done better in this type role and I am pre-disposed to like anything that he has done. Ward Bond does a good job at playing the hulk Moose Malloy – but anyone who has seen Mike Mazurki will not be as impressed. Allen Jenkins does well as faithful sidekick Jonathan 'Goldy' Locke but in the Tom Conway Falcon series, Edward Brophy is a good substitute. James Gleason is always good as the policeman in charge.

See this to compare or to round out your viewing of the Sanders Falcon series.

This entry in an otherwise it-is-what-it-is series of crime programmers merits attention because it preserves the first filming of a novel by Raymond Chandler: Farewell, My Lovely – two years before Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet, one of that handful of 1944 films that really got the noir cycle rolling.

Often such adaptations bear scant resemblance to their original material, bringing to mind the screenplay Joe Gillis (in Sunset Blvd.) wrote that started out with Okies in the Dustbowl and ended up on a torpedo boat. But The Falcon Takes Over startlingly opens with a character called Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) looking for his Velma (Helen Gilbert can't even begin to pinch-hit for Claire Trevor). Along the way we visit that drunken old streel Jessie Florian (Anne Revere, every bit as good as Esther Howard) and Jules Amthor (Turhan Bey, complete with turban and crystal ball).

Given the quality of much of the cast and the initial fidelity to Chandler's material, the movie promises to be much better than it turns out. And what sinks it is the notion that Chandler could supply fodder for a `programmer.' First of all, 90 or 100 minutes offer too brief a span for his baroque tales to unfurl; an hour plus change mutilates them irreparably. Second, franchises like Charlie Chan, or The Saint, or The Falcon are struck from the same template, to which all material must conform. So the setting is not the languorous corruption of Los Angeles but the hurly-burly of New York; missing as well is any sense of Chandler's awareness of the advantages conferred by wealth and class.

But most conspicuous in his absence, of course, is Philip Marlowe. He disappears into George Sander's last run as The Falcon, before he bequeathed the franchise to his brother Tom Conway. (Sanders walks through this picture as if he had given up on the last one.) He has a sidekick, too (Allen Jenkins), who's chock-full of amusing malapropisms. Sidekicks and malapropisms are about as far from Chandler's dark universe as it's possible to go.

George Sanders is again The Falcon in "The Falcon Takes Over," a 1942 entry into the series. This one is the plot of "Farewell, My Lovely," and Ward Bond as the nearly catatonic strongman Moose Malloy walking around in a fog looking for Velma.

They've sort of stuffed The Falcon and Goldy into this plot, a complicated story that was tough to cram into 65 minutes. Consequently this isn't the breezy Falcon we're used to, and most of the comedy goes to Goldy, who is terrified of Malloy and sees him around every corner. James Gleason, as the Inspector O'Hara, investigating the murder of a night club manager, also had a funny bit he did several times with his underling.

Hans Conreid has a serious role here as Marriot, and Turhan Bey has a small role as swami Jules Amthor.

All in all, entertaining, maybe not the usual Falcon except for his flirting with every woman, but decent.