Rhapsodies

For this week’s selection I went with films with the same character in this case Raymond Chandle’sr classic hard boiled detective Phillip Marlowe.

I confess I’d never read any of Chandler’s books or seen any of the movies in fact much to my embarrassment, the most I ever learned about Marlowe was from a really weird conversation between two thugs in a Starman comic. Despite that I certainly knew of Phillip Marlowe. Chandler’s popularity pretty much made Marlowe’s name a synonym for the standard cliché hard boiled detective in popular culture.

Marlowe is interesting in that while he may be perceived as the cliche detective for the most part he’s very atypical. He is far from perfect and half the time he’s the villain’s punching bag rather than an unstoppable force of nature. I just had to check him out.

So anyway the first film I started with is certainly the best known, The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Becall directed by Howard Hawks,. Marlowe is hired by an ailing millionaire to find out who is trying to blackmail his youngest daughter this leads to the search for a missing person and murder as well as getting mixed up with the older daughter played by Becall.

I’m embarrassed to say that when I started watching this film for the first half hour I was unimpressed, perhaps I’d been spoiled by Bogart’s other films such as the Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, but as it went on it just kept getting better and better, with ton’s of detail that makes it hard to take everything in on the first viewing but in a good way. On criticism I’d heard about the film was that Bogart was just playing himself as usual and not Marlowe. This was certainly not the case Bogart showed a remarkable amount of range that I had not expected. On top of this his chemistry with Becall was amazing. All in all Hawks certainly knocked this one out of the park and gave me yet another reson to put him on my list of American directors.

The next film on the list was The Long Goodbye by Robert Altman starring Elliott Gould. In this film Altman moves Marlowe into the present day (1973) with Marlowe doing a friend a favor driving him to Mexico an d takes the rest of the movie suffering the consequences as all of the friends enemies come after him in hope of tracking down the friend.

I’m not sure what I felt about this film. I’m normally a fan of Altman’s films at his best he’s fascinating at multiple levils at his worst his work can be like watching paint dry, and while this film was interesting I found it just a little lacking.

At times it almost felt like a parody of the genre. This isn’t a 70’s version of Marlowe it’s the original 50s Marlowe existing in the 1970s and is completely out of place. Altman seems to be going out of his way to tear down everything about film noir and in the process, while Gould’s performance is the best part of the movie, he doesn’t feel like the real Marlowe.