Want to know the best Dick Powell movies? How about the worst Dick Powell movies? Curious about Dick Powell box office grosses or which Dick Powell movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Dick Powell movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Dick Powell (1904-1963) was a singer, actor, producer and director. Powell’s career is pretty impressive as he successful went from a singer…..to successful supporting character (early 1930s)….to a successful leading man in comedies, dramas and thrillers (1935-1954). In the 1950s he became a successful producer and film director. His IMDB page shows 72 acting and 6 directing credits from 1932-1963. This page will rank 61 Dick Powell movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Shorts, documentaries and television performances were not included in the rankings.
Drivel part: Well…we thought this page was at the request of TCM’s Top Billed. Top Billed has been working on a weekly January blog that looks at select classic performers. Turns out we wrote down the wrong performer…as he had not requested a Dick Powell page. We blame the movie…..The King’s Vacation….I had that movie written down in my notes…..and we picked the wrong star of that movie. Well since I did all the research on Mr. Powell…we figured we should go ahead and share the information. Not sure if I can get a George Arliss page done before the end of the week.
Dick Powell Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Dick Powell movies by co-stars of his movies
- Sort Dick Powell movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Dick Powell movies by adjusted worldwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions) *** If worldwide and domestic totals are equal then worldwide grosses are unknown
- Sort Dick Powell movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Dick Powell movie received.
- Sort Dick Powell movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Dick Powell Table
- Twenty-two Dick Powell movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 36.07% of his movies listed. Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) was his biggest box office hit.
- An average Dick Powell movie grosses $90.70 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 30 Dick Powell movies are rated as good movies…or 49.18% of his movies. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is his highest rated movie while The Conqueror (1956) is lowest rated movie.
- Thirteen Dick Powell movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 21.31% of his movies.
- Four Dick Powell movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 6.55% of his movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 39.86. 37 Dick Powell movies scored higher that average….or 60.65% of his movies. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) got the the highest UMR Score while Riding High (1943) got the lowest UMR Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Dick Powell
1. Richard Ewing Powell was born in Mountain View, Arkansas in 1903.
2. In 1932, Warner Brothers signed Dick Powell to a movie contract after seeing Powell perform as the Master of Ceremonies at the Enright Theater and the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh, PA.
3. Dick Powell spent most of the 1930s playing boyish crooners in many successful Warner Brothers musicals. His frustration with the never changing roles resulted in Powell buying his way of his contract in 1940.
4. Dick Powell was the first actor to play the famous fictional detective Phillip Marlowe. He played Marlowe in 1944’s Murder, My Sweet.
5. Dick Powell was never nominated for an Oscar® or a Golden Globe®….but he does have 3 stars on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.
6. Dick Powell was married 3 times and had 4 children. His second marriage was to frequent co-star Joan Blondell. His finally marriage was to actress June Allyson.
7. Dick Powell’s daughter, Ellen Powell, has 22 IMDb credits in the makeup department. She worked on 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and 2003’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. His son, Dick Powell Jr., played his father in 1975’s The Day of the Locust.
8. Dick Powell’s adjusted career domestic box total is $5.53 billion.
9. Dick Powell is one of many members of the cast and crew of 1956’s Conqueror that eventually died of a type of cancer. The Conqueror is sometimes called “An RKO Radioactive Picture.” It was filmed near a nuclear test site, and the set was contaminated by nuclear fallout. After location shooting, contaminated soil was transported back to Hollywood in order to match interior shooting done there. Over the next 20 years, many actors (John Wayne) and crew members developed cancer.
10. Check out Dick Powell‘s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
If you do a comment….please ignore the email address and website section.
Hi
I always liked Dick Powell. Who would have thought that the singing crooner of the 30’s would have turned into a hard boiled film noir actor of the 40’s. I actually liked his Warner Brother musicals, looking back there was such an innocence about them. He was very good at light comedy, Christmas in July is a perfect example.
I read that when he was going with June Allison, Louis B Mayer hated the idea of her being seen with a has been, then he made Murder My Sweet and he was a big success again and Louis was all for the relationship. Such is the shallowness of fame.
He desperately wanted the role of Walter in Double Indemnity but Fred McMurray beat him to it. He was also very big in T.V and radio in the 50’s.
So sad that he died so young. When they were making The Conqueror there was a cast and crew of over 200 and at least 91 of those contracted cancer due to working in a contaminated desert, that’s a truly tragic statistic.
Powell was a wonderfully talented guy who left some great work.
Hey Chris….thanks for sharing your thoughts on Dick Powell. Your thought on his transition from light comedy singer to hard boiled film noir action star was mentioned it almost every research article I looked at while doing this page. My Powell knowledge is limited to the 4 Powell movies I have watched….42nd Street (a supporting role), Bad and the Beautiful (his last great role?), The Conqueror (the worst Wayne movie) and Enemy Below (good WW2 movie).
Interesting story about Mayer, Allison and Powell….good thing Powell had another hit….lol. Actually….when looking at his entire career….he did not really have a huge span between hits….which to me means he was a relevant star for over 20 years.
I agree 100%….the behind the story of The Conqueror is so tragic. Good comment as always.
Very informative. Was not too aware of his career before reading this. I am impressed with his 22 hits. I will have to check out Farewell My Lovely.
Hey HOF…..glad you enjoyed this page…. thanks for the visit and the comment.
1 I am a great Wayne admirer and the only two Duke films that I ever found unwatchable were Barbarian and the Geisha and The Conqueror (1956) which unfortunately was directed by Dick Powell. However Dick redeemed himself the following year by directing Mitchum in war/adventure filmThe Enemy Below which Bruce ranks 8th for critic/audience. I also enjoyed Dick’s earlier directorial effort with the programmer Split Second which although not highly praised on this site is given an almost 70% rating by IMDB
1 There is nothing new about light entertainers tackling straight roles and Bing did it successfully with The Country Girl and his pal Hope made a good job in my opinion when he played Beau James. However these forays were sporadic and to me they were just Bing and Bob doing drama. Powell though stunningly reinvented himself and the hard boiled private eye of Murder My Sweet and Farewell my Lovely was a completely different person from the happy go luck Young Man of Music who in earlier times waltzed through those Smiling Jim roles as Bogie used to label them to annoy Golden Holden, though the ‘new’ Powell still found time to star in a nice little comedy with the late Debbie Reynolds, Susan Slept Here in 1954 which earned respectable reviews and crashed the Cogerson $100 million barrier. [However its domestic gross is quoted as 116.5 and its worldwide one as 116.3 so I am not sure of its precise box office status?]
3 The worldwide grosses were as always interesting but as the reverse saying goes every silver lining has a cloud and my 3 favourite Powell movies were Bad and Beautiful, Cornered and Cry Danger and I now know that the latter [which a touch of Bruce’s sorter button will show ranked 7th here for critic/audience] had a worldwide gross so abysmal that it was like something Nicolas Cage would be responsible for on a bad day in the movie markets. Nevertheless overall I warmly welcome this profile of a professional who as demonstrated above had one of the most diverse careers in the classic era.
Hey Bob.
1. I have seen The Conqueror…and I agree that it is one of Wayne’s worse movies. I have not seen the other one you mentioned…even though it was directed by one of my favorites…..John Huston.
2. Good point about how others have successfully moved from light to drama…though Powell did nearly have the success that Crosby did.
3. I really feel…that by not seeing Murder, My Sweet Farewell Love, that I am not able to really understand all the comments on that movie and his performance in it.
4. As for Susan Slept Here….that is my error….that means I do not know the worldwide gross….and error in our database is that it calculates the gross in those categories in a slightly different way…..I will correct that error.
5. Sorry that Cry Danger..was not too successful at the box office…..but it was near the end of his acting career.
🙂
1 As I’ve said before Bruce you are dealing with so many stats and subjects where a change in one can have a domino effect on many others that I find the general consistency across your massive site remarkable.
2 However I read that Tom Cruise was keen to overtake Hanks in the Box Office stakes but I didn’t realise that Cruise was starting to plagiarise in order to achieve his goal – Item 2 of your notes immediately below Dick Powell’s stats table refers ! I had thought that you being a Hanks fan you would have done all in your power to stop the Cruise takeover.
Shouldn’t it have read the average Dick Powell movie grosses.
Hey Dan…..yep….it should have said Dick Powell….it has been fixed now.
Hey Bob….thanks for that catch…..it has been fixed…..another recent update by website provider is it took some “search and replace” options away from me. I used to type in the old name….and then type replace with the new name….and it automatically went through the entire page and changed the names…..well to make things easier….they took that difficult process and now make me replace each name manually….they are really looking out for me….lol.
I was surprised how good Dick Powell was as Phillip Marlowe in Murder My Sweet after seeing him in those 1930s musicals, I never would have expected it. Incidentally Murder My Sweet was called Farewell My Lovely in the UK, which was the title of Raymond Chandler’s novel.
I’ve only seen 12 of the 61 films listed, favorites include – 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Golddiggers of 1933, Murder My Sweet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Bad and the Beautiful and The Enemy Below.
Looking at the trivia -The Conqueror was one of John Wayne’s worst movies and it probably ended up killing him too, though he managed to hang on until 1979.
Looking at the adjusted worldwide grosses, Golddiggers of 1933 was an anomaly. Dick’s biggest movie by far, over half a billion dollars worldwide, twice as successful as other similar musicals released about the same time and by the same team. A fluke?
Good work as always Bruce. Vote Up!
Steve
I have read they changed the title “Farewell My Lovely” to “Murder, My Sweet” because with Powell’s image as a crooner and light comedian, folks would think with a title like “Farewell My Lovely” that the movie would be a comedy or musical.
I agree that Dick Powell was excellent. My one quibble about his performance is that he had rather snazzy and well-tailored suits for a low-rent detective. But then it was Hollywood.
JOHN
1 I’m not certain of this because I always become confused about the two titles and indeed years ago I used to think there were two different films with one being a remake of the other but was not Murder my Sweet the original title which was changed to Farewell my Lovely? for what reason I haven’t a clue.
2 Titles can conjure up funny images in people’s minds and I remember when it was announced that following their success in Trapeze Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis had been signed up for Sweet Smell of Success and one columnist who obviously didn’t know what he was talking about wrote “And colleagues who have been privileged to see the early rehearsals have reported back that some of the song and dance routines performed by Burt and Tony are wonderful.”
Bob
“Farewell My Lovely” was the name of the original novel.
It was changed to Murder, My Sweet according to what I have read for the reason I gave. That reason does make sense as Dick Powell was not known at all up to this point as a tough guy actor.
When the story was re-made in 1975 with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe, they reverted to the original title.
JOHN
1 I think we might be at cross purposes here as I live in the UK
2 Wikipedia and IMDB state that the 1944 Dick Powell Murder My Sweet was changed back to Farewell My Lovely for its release in the United Kingdom. In other words there was ultimately a reversion to the original Chandler title for both the 1944 and 1976 versions. It has always been so confusing particularly after the Mitchum film appeared that I always refer to both titles when I mention the 1944 one. You will see thought that IMDB now refers to both film versions as Farewell my Lovely and Wikipedia quotes both titles for the 1944 movie.
Does this clarify matters for us?
Hey Bob…thanks for the further information…on the title changes on one of Powell’s best movies…it is greatly appreciated.
Hey Bob….you are 100% correct….titles can indeed create an image in a viewers mind. Funny story about the Sweet Smell Of Success….I bet that person wanted that mistake to be forgotten….lol.
Hey John….a private has to look successful even if he is not….good information on the name change…thanks for sharing that information.
Bob
Murder, My Sweet (1944) was released under the novel’s title of Farewell My Lovely in Britain,
but in the United States it has always been Murder, My Sweet. There isn’t any confusion at all in the United States. I own DVD’s of both films. Murder, My Sweet is the Dick Powell film and Farewell My Lovely is the Robert Mitchum film. Nor is there any confusion on the American IMDB. It appears there a different IMDB for each side of the pond, which makes sense as there are a lot of titles which vary by country.
Anyway, thanks for the info on Britain.
JOHN
1 For once we can BOTH claim to be right as you were correctly talking about the change of title from novel to US screen and I was talking about its change back again as it crossed the pond. That’s were we were thinking at cross purposes.
2 Anyway doesn’t it make a refreshing change to be arguing about something that we can prove to each other rather than about the intangible reasons for billing arrangements?
Hey Bob and John….thanks for all the information on the title name in the United States, England and Ireland. Good information….I did not realize that IMDb had a different database for overseas….but it makes sense that they do. 🙂
Hey Steve …somehow I have managed to not see Murder, My Sweet. Tally count: Flora 16, you 12 and me a lowly 4. Yep the first Gold Diggers was HUGE….and Warner Brothers went back to that well many times. Then Paramount copied them with the Big Broadcast movies. Yep another tragic person that The Conqueror got….critics hated the movie…yet it made a ton of money. It did have one huge fan….Mr. Howard Hughes….who watched it thousands of times. Thanks as always for the visit and the comment.
I am thrilled you made a Dick Powell page. I am a fan of his movies as a singer and and as a film noir actor. I enjoy his movies as a director too.
The highest ranked movie I have seen is Number 1: Gold Diggers of 1933.
The highest ranked movie I have not seen is Star Spangled Rhythm.
The lowest ranked movie I have seen is The Reformer and the Redhead.
I have seen 16 of his movies.
My favourites are 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Murder My Sweet, The Bad and the Beautiful and Cornered.
Hey Flora….glad you liked our decision to do a Dick Powell page. Your 16 Powell movies watched is 4 times my total of 4…..and tops Steve’s tally of 12.
I have seen 2 of your favorite movies. 42nd Street and The Bad and The Beautiful. I would say I enjoyed The Bad and the Beautiful the most.
I have seen two of his acting movies and two of his directing movies…so that is 2 for 56 of his acting role….and 2 for 5 of his directed movies. Thankks for the comment and the visit.