Good ol' Marlowe
The only actor I know who played Philip Marlowe twice is Robert Mitchum. The sleepy-eyed actor had made his name in several notably dark films of the 1940s and 1950s (including the aforementioned Out of the Past), and so it was no surprise that he could take up the role of Chandler's anti-hero so comfortably as he did in 1975 when, in his upper fifties, he starred in a modest remake of Farewell, My Lovely.
This Farewell, My Lovely was an unexpected hit. In the disco-versus-punk era of the mid-1970s it was a nostalgic throwback in style, in writing and even in actors to the cool of 1940s noir.
Mitchum walks through the film as though Marlowe's clothes
fit him because he's lived in them his whole life. Maybe he's a bit old for gumshoe heroics, but that just adds to the
comfort level.
Ex-heavyweight boxing contender Jack O'Halloran also walks through his first movie role as the hulking Moose, his stiffness and slow-speaking menace perfect for the part. Charlotte Rampling smoulders as the beauty with something to hide. And watch for Harry Dean Stanton as a cop and Sylvester Stallone in a very small tough-guy role.
But mostly the film succeeds for its intelligent use of Chandler's text, one of the most faithful of all his adaptations. It restores much (but not all) of the grittier material from the book that could not be shown in the 1944 take (called Murder, My Sweet) with William Powell.
Also, its dark and smoky cinematography quite cleverly, even in full colour, takes the viewer back to the morally grey days of earlier filmmaking.
Marlowe in the old country
This success led a few years later to a re-filming of The Big Sleep (1978) around Mitchum. But what a difference. Mitchum is now hitting sixty. (I think the character in Chandler's novel is supposed to be about thirty-eight.) But worse, the period has suddenly been updated from the 1940s to the then-present (1970s).
And, far worse, the setting has been moved from the mean streets of Los Angeles to the civilized lanes of Britain. Yes, Marlowe is now a gumshoe in swinging London.
There may be a tiny bit of justification for this in author Chandler having been raised in England, and the script by director Michael Winner (best known for making the vigilante Death Wish movies) is not bad.
Despite being about twenty
minutes shorter than the 1946
Big Sleep with
Humphrey Boagart, it reflects the book's text better, taking huge chunks of voice-over and dialogue straight from the
novel, as well as borrowing some from the earlier film. The line about
meeting the younger Sternwood now becomes, "She tried to sit in my
lap. I was standing up at the time." One plot improvement though: that one
unresolved murder is finally explained.
But Chandler-Marlowe just doesn't work in 1970s England. The brooding moodiness is gone. Marlowe changes from slumming angel to solid, middle-class citizen. The sex and pornography themes are truer to the book, thanks to the more enlightened times, but the scandal attached to them is gone. Marlowe shadowing umbrella-wielding Britishers around London because they're buying and selling books of, gasp, naked women?
Yet, in some ways Mitchum is a better Marlowe than Bogart. (He is better in Farewell, My Lovely anyway). He exemplifies the weary but still decent sleuth. One can only imagine what he could have done with the role in 1946. But we already have a classic Big Sleep from 1946 that we're quite happy with. We may enjoy this later British incarnation as a curiosity. Or not.
