Marlowe
The next entry in our Philip Marlowe Marathon is called, simply, “Marlowe” A late-60s update of the Marlowe character, unfortunately the amount of thought that was put into the title seemed to carry over to the entire production. Let’s take a closer look.
“Marlowe” takes private eye Philip Marlowe, previously star of 40s hard-boiled crime drama and thrusts him into the counter-culture late 60s. 25 years is usually a long-enough period to see a culture transform in some significant fashion. The gap between 1944 and 1969, however, is one of the greatest periods of cultural shift in U.S. history.
A lot changed in the film world as well. The Marlowe pictures of the past could be laced with innuendo, but racy dialog was as close as they ever got to actual sex on screen. Just a couple minutes into “Marlowe”, however, we see a man spying on a couple in a pool as a man removes a woman’s bikini top. It doesn’t take long to feel the shift.
The constants in this production are the setting (Los Angeles) and our private eye hero. That’s well and good, but the problem with this movie is that it all just feels like a watered-down version of the more interesting films noir of the 40s.
James Garner is relatively fun to watch on screen as he begins this story looking for a Kansas woman’s lost brother, but quickly realizes the missing person is part of a larger conspiracy. Okay, that premise is in line with Marlowe tales of the past. But Garner takes the character in a much more laid-back direction as the film moves along. Sure, he’s doing some investigating, but he’s so content with hamming it up that this story feels like it has no stakes at all. The Marlowe of the 40s was quick-witted, of course, but our previous three actors all brought a serious edge to the role that is completely lacking here. Garner seems much closer to James Bond than Philip Marlowe. The film’s opening sequence with its framing devices even reminded me of Bond films.
Of course, a James Bond film is a different animal than hard-boiled crime. Applying a more lighthearted tone to a crime movie can work (Shane Black’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “The Nice Guys” are good recent examples of this), but this just isn’t Marlowe’s world. The aesthetics are occasionally right- take Marlowe’s beyond-dingy office, for example- but more often than not, the seedy, gritty LA that we’ve come to know and love is not really here.
To make the experience worse, the production values in “Marlowe” are super low-rent. This is the first movie I’ve written about so far that looked and felt like a TV show. Shooting a Marlowe story in color does the production few favors, as the noir style almost always plays better in black and white. But “Farewell, My Lovely” showed that a color production can still effectively produce a convincing noir setting. That’s not the case here.
Parts of this movie have not aged well, to put it mildly. Bruce Lee has a pretty hilarious scene where he sends Marlowe a message to stay away from the case by turning his office furniture into kindling, but his next encounter with the detective is cringe-worthy at best. Marlowe is backed into a corner on the roof of a tall building. Things look bad for our hero until he calls Lee’s character gay. Lee is so perturbed by this that he performs a flying kick in Marlowe’s direction, but Marlowe dodges and Lee falls, screaming, to his death. Having trouble with an Asian guy who could seriously kick your ass? Well, just question his sexuality and he’ll be stupid enough to leap off the edge of a tall building. No problem.
As we’ve seen with our first three entries in this marathon, plot isn’t the most important element of a Marlowe film. The process is really what we’re looking for. Unfortunately, in “Marlowe”, neither really comes together. The story sort of lost me from the start and never drew me in. And Marlowe’s process isn’t all that compelling because I never got bought that he was invested in the case. That feeling that he just can’t stop himself from investigating a lead that I got from the prior movies wasn’t here. It felt like Marlowe, and the production in general, was just going through the motions.
James Garner actually could have been a solid Marlowe, had he taken the role a bit more seriously, though it’s hard to say whether that was his choice or just due to the tone of the whole production. He hits a lot of the Marlowe marks, but that darkness lurking below the surface is totally absent here. I spent a good deal of the previous three reviews breaking down the traits of Marlowe as portrayed by each of the three actors. With Garner, though, this would be a useless exercise. Other than the hammy wit, there’s not a whole lot to analyze. It’s really a disservice to the character.
This was a weird experience overall. A lot of the Marlowe hallmarks were present: villainous characters, cops who get in his way, beautiful women who may or may not be up to foul play, and a crime that leads him in a lot of different directions. In spite of all that, it just never becomes cohesive. You can’t toss all of the Marlowe ingredients in a pot and expect it to come out as an amazing dish. Someone has to have the vision and the understanding of how to turn those ingredients into a cohesive meal.
So with “Marlowe”, the filmmakers tried to take a classic character from a different era of American history and plug him into modern times while twisting some of the conventions that people had come to expect with the character and genre. While the results left a lot to be desired, a filmmaker with no lack of vision would essentially try the same thing four years later and exceed in all the places where this movie failed. So with that cliffhanger, we’ll be back soon to take a look at our last movie in the Marlowe Marathon, Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye.”
