Marlowe
                              
Director: Paul Bogart
Year: 1969
Rating: 6.5
The debate about whether you can bring noir into contemporary times has been going on for a few decades. Does it have to be in black and white to accentuate the shadows and the moral hollowness, does it have to be set in the period of classic noirs in the 1940's and 1950's when jazz played on the radio and in the nightclubs, does it have to have a femme fatale with a brittle heart and a stiletto, does $20 a day for a P.I. to risk his life make sense. I would say yes. There have been a few decent noirs since then - Chinatown and Body Heat - but they were set in the noir period even if filmed after it. Two Philip Marlowe films best exemplify this, both with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. Who was more noir than the craggy faced Mitchum other than maybe Bogart. He was in a few classic noirs in the 1950s but in the 1970's he played Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely in 1975 and The Big Sleep in 1978. Farewell takes place back in the 1940s and is a good film while for reasons that make little sense The Big Sleep was set in contemporary London and is as dead and rancid as horse meat.



This film made in 1969 and set in that time follows the Raymond Chandler book, The Little Sister, plot wise very closely but they squeeze the pulp out of the noir like the cheap orange juice on the grocery shelves. Screenwriter Stirling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night, Charly) and director Paul Bogart announce in the opening credits that noir is not their intention when a cheery pop song is played and Marlowe (James Garner) goes into a motel with a bunch of hippies outside. They take the novel and throw away the guts and turn it into a basic standard Private Eye film. Not a bad one but still this is Chandler. It deserved better. It is a brilliant book, so steeped in noir and darkness that you wonder where the sun went.



When it was published in 1949, it had been six years since Chandler's last book, Lady in the Lake. For as much as Chandler is revered now, that wasn't the case back in the early 40's and his income from his books and movie deals was barely enough for him and his wife to live on. Then Hollywood came calling. They wanted his help on the script of Double Indemnity. Billy Wilder wanted to make the James Cain novel into a film, but Cain wasn't available and his usual writer Charles Brackett thought the book disgusting and didn't want to get near it. It was a tough book to turn into a film because of the limits the Code imposed on films at the time. Wilder read Lady in the Lake and asked Chandler to come on. Chandler thought Cain was a hack but still demanded $250 a week. They told him they had $750 in mind. It was more than Chandler had made since his days as an accountant. Within a few days Wilder and Chandler hated one another. Chandler walked out a few times but they brought him back.



When the film was a critical and box office hit, Chandler was gold and went to work on an original script for the Blue Dahlia. He had to rush it because Alan Ladd had to go off to war in a few weeks and they wanted one more film from him. He knocked it out quickly and the director George Marshall filmed it as the pages came in. Then suddenly no more pages. Chandler couldn't figure out who the killer was. He had planned on it being one of the three navy friends but the navy said no. So, he told the producer John Houseman that he could only finish it if he stayed home and stayed drunk with six drivers on hand to rush his pages to the studio. Houseman agreed and the film was finished though the killer is a reach. He called Veronica Lake, Moronica.



In the same year of 1946 Hollywood came out with The Big Sleep without Chandler helping out.  In the much-told story, he was asked who killed one of the characters as the book was confusing - Chandler had no idea. A few projects fell through and the popularity of The Big Sleep gave a huge bump to his book sales. He wanted out of Hollywood - it paid well for shoddy work - but there was also a clause in his contract that he could not write for himself. He fought the studio and by the time the contract was void, he was bitter. And he wrote The Little Sister which delves into Hollywood much more than the film does. The owner of the studio says with 15,000 theaters we can produce dreck and still make money.



It is a bitter, cynical book with Marlowe sick of the whole world. There are a few lengthy passages of him just in near stream of conscious prose venting and it is brilliant. The film captures some dialogue from the book but Silliphant said Chandler's language was too old. Fuck him. When the cop played by Carrol O'Conner at the end goes into a rage, that is Chandler speaking. Couldn't they have even used "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks in the moonlight"? I want to try that line someday. The ending of the book is as convoluted as a politician's morals and I am not exactly clear who killed who and for what reason. The film doesn't quite understand it either.



A young woman named Orfamy Quest (Sharon Farrell) looking as innocent as primroses and lavender comes into town from Manhattan Kansas looking for her brother Orrin (Roger Newman) who hasn't written home in months. She has his last address and Marlowe begins his habit of finding dead bodies. It leads him to a famous actress Mavis Wald (Gayne Hunnicutt) who appears to be being blackmailed with some pictures of her cavorting with a mobster (H.M. Wynant). If made public, it could ruin her career. The book's pictures of the two of them having dinner and a newspaper date is much smarter. Mavis's friend is played by Rita Moreno who makes a sexual bid for Marlowe like he is the favorite running at Pimlico. A few more dead bodies show up.



Of course, the film is mainly famous now for Bruce Lee's scene of him busting up Marlow's office with a few karate chops and kicks and the finale kicking the overhead light. And it is infamous for the scene on the high terrace when Marlowe implies he is gay and Lee loses his cool. If they ever get around to sensitizing films as they are beginning to do with books, this scene would be my candidate to be cut. A decent film, Rockford, I mean Garner is good but as noir as a picnic, a good cast though far from first stringers - it just tries to modernize it in the worst ways - the pop songs, the hippies, giving Marlowe a girlfriend, the gay hairdresser next door, having the Moreno character as a strip tease artist rather than a sex bomb actress are horrible decisions. Read the book. Then watch the movie.