An example of film noir taking off, however, it is also the pitfall of film noir. This film is riddled with an overcomplicated storyline that doesn’t seem to end up where it started off. The same problems I have with this film I have with Inherent Vice, which is borrowing heavily from this genre and filmography. It's just convoluted detective stories that become the bulk of Film Noir. Whereas the genre started in this place of exploring the anti-hero and the villain inside us it starts to become mostly dominated by more Pulp based stories that are about overly complex detective thriller serial storylines that are deliberately meant to be confusing and hard to follow.
Dick Powell is really miscast I would say. You can see how the casting for the detective part needs to be more nuanced in regards to them having an inner moral edge. Dick Powell is total nice guy and he can’t sell it otherwise because you know he won’t do wrong. Bogart may kill a man,that’s his power you actually can’t say he won’t do wrong because the way he carries himself is always with this unnerving edge that could result in him pulling out a gun and shooting at you. That’s the beauty of Treasure of Sierra Madre, is the edge that Bogart provides. However Dick Powell has none of that edge so I would say he was a really poor choice for this leading anti-hero detective role. These characters require that the villain is part of them as well as being the hero, that is the anti-hero, a hero who is also the villain.
Although as the book suggests, this interpretation of Marlowe is more along the boyish lines that Chandler set out for rather than the potentially hardened pseudo-criminal detective. Maybe Bogie created a better version of this character trope than the author of this material was trying to create at the time...