"My Name is Marlowe", Part Three --"The Lady in the Lake" and "Marlowe"

"The depths changed again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless langour, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. It broke surface lightly, casually, without haste. I saw wool, sodden and black, a leather jerkin blacker than ink, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes and something that bulged nastily between the shoes and the cuffs of the slacks...I saw a wave of dark blond hair straighten out and hold still for a brief instant, as if by calculated effect, and then swirl into a tangle again".     
--Raymond Chandler, "The Lady in the Lake", Chapter Six.

 

I'm not a big fan of Robert Montgomery's portrayal of Phillip Marlowe in "The Lady in The Lake" (from a 1943 book, the film was released in 1947).

 

 Part of the reason is Montgomery himself--he's a good actor in other roles, but he seems to be a bit too conventional around the edges to be  Chandler's main protagonist. 
The objective-camera technique, which takes up about 95 percent of the film, is another good reason to be weary of this movie if you see it at your local  DVD rental spot or on Turner Classic Movies.  "The Camera Acts!" the trailer for the film proclaims.  Well, its a good gimmick for a scene or two,  but for almost a whole feature film!  No, I don't think so. 

 While this is no clasic film, there are a few good things.  Lloyd Nolan plays a good surly copper, film noir veteran  Audrey Trotter is fine as a hard-as-nails magazine editor/love interest, and a young Jayne Meadows (the future Mrs. Steve Allen) plays a ingenue who starts out nice and ends up a "femme fatale".    

There was another Marlowe film, this time starring George Montgomery (no relation), a B-movie star who helmed Marlowe in something called "The Brasher Doubloon" (1948), a adaptation of Chandler's interesting third Marlowe novel, "The High Window".  I haven't seen that film and will withhold judgement.      

In the late  forties, actors Van Heflin (in 1947) and later Gerald Mohr played Marlowe on radio shows on different networks. Phillip Marlowe was also a television series starring Philip Carey in 1958-9 ( a series Chandler himself helped promote, although he didn't write any of the scripts).

 And then in 1969, Philip  Marlowe returned to the big screen in "Marlowe" starring the affable James Garner in a story about the detective helping a naive Kansas farmgirl find her lost brother, who got mixed up in some sordid doings in sunny LA.   This film is enjoyable and Garner is funny and confident, but he doesn't really have a Chandler/Marlowe vibe, perhaps because Garner doesn't convey the urbanness the character needs. It's really more like a early episode of one of my favorite television shows, Garner's "The Rockford Files" which didn't premiere until five years after this movie came out.  Rita Moreno is also in the cast, in a very good role as a stripper.  She and Garner have good chemistry together, as the second part of this clip shows:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4RQoAJcczE

"My Name is Marlowe..." part two "The Big Sleep (1945-46)

No couple was bigger in Hollywood than the real-life marrieds Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in 1945.  "The Big Sleep" was made in late 1944 and early '45 and sent overseas to be seen by the armed forces troops and sailors.  It was held up for release in the States and elsewhere until 1946.  This was a big break for the movie, and particularly Lauren Bacall. She gave a less than knock-out impression opposite Charles Boyer in an adaptation of Graham Greene's "The Confidential Agent" (1945).  The earliest version of "The Big Sleep"  left Bacall and Bogart shy some of smouldering scenes that had highlighted their first film together, "To Have and Have Not".

 Bacall's agent and others convinced Warner Bros chief Jack Warner to allow Howard Hawks, the director, to reshoot and rewrite several scenes with Bogart to spice up their original chemistry.  Although the new scenes meant cuts in the film that marred the narrative, "The Big Sleep" is almost universally acknowledged as one of the best films of its  era.  To me, its one of my favorite American films, period.

  Here is a scene that is among the reasons why I like it so much, with Bogart and a young Dorothy Malone. Note the sexual subtlety (by modern standards) and Max Steiner's great incidental music.

And here is a clip of one of the new scenes, shot in 1946.  Although this dialouge is not in Chandler's book, much of the great flavor of the film comes from the novel's smart and snappy dialouge, something that director Hawks insisted should only be changed sparingly.

Apologies for the colorization.  I could find no original b/w version of this scene.

 

My Name is Marlowe, Part One

The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said -- partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down. I fumbled it around and grunted.

"Did you hear me? I said it was Clyde Umney, the lawyer."

"Clyde Umney, the lawyer. I thought we had several of them."

"You're Marlowe, aren't you?"

"Yeah. I guess so." I looked at my wrist watch. It was 6:30 a.m., not my best hour.

"Don't get fresh with me, young man."

"Sorry, Mr. Umney. But I'm not a young man. I'm old, tired and full of no coffee. What can I do for you, sir?"

"I want you to meet the Super Chief at eight o'clock, identify a girl among the passengers, follow her until she checks in somewhere, and then report to me. Is that clear?"

"No."

"Why not?" he snapped.

"I don't know enough to be sure I could accept the case."

"I'm Clyde Um--"

"Don't," I interrupted. "I might get hysterical."

from the novel "Playback", 1958.  

One of my favorite popular American writers is Raymond Chandler.  His Philip Marlowe character is a great wit and a tough but flawed hero, a figure to conjour with the likes of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes.

For a time Philip Marlowe--roughly from World War II to 1980--was a popular figure on the big screen.  Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, George Montgomery, James Garner and Robert Mitchum all played Marlowe on screen.  To me, Bogart, Mitchum and Powell were the best--in that order.   There were also several radio and television serials featuring stories based on Raymond Chandler's principal character.   

Chandler also wrote the screenplay, with  Billy Wilder, for "Double Indemnity" (1944) , one of the greatest of the "film noir" cycle of American films, and also colaborrated later--rather testily I'm afraid--with Alfred Hitchcock on the famous film of Patricia Highsmith's novel, "Strangers on A Train" (1952).  

Here is a clip from the first full depiction of a Phillip Marlowe novel, Dick Powell's turn as Marlowe (with a sexy Claire Trevor) in director Edward Dymtryk's "Murder, My Sweet" (1944). Chandler didn't write the screenplay but he apparently was pleased with the results. Powell must have been pleased, too, because the film was such a success that he managed to change his image from that of an aging  musical-comedy star to a full-fledged leading man.      

 

 

The Long Goodbye (1953)

When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for a moment completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people are dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care.

--"The Long Goodbye", Chapter 38

I recently reread this last major novel by Raymond Chandler. It reminded me that one of the great things about reading Chandler is that no matter what novel or collections of short stories you return to with him you get the same quality almost all the way throughout his literary output. I can't say that his last novel, "Playback", (1959) is very good, however, so i wouldn't suggest anyone start off the bat reading that one.

This is one of Raymond Chandler's best Marlowe runarounds--a melange of crooked and violent cops, cheap and not-so cheap hoods and rich and often desperate or bored people in nice mansions, trying to cover up their sordid and sometimes deadly mistakes and character flaws by hiring Our Hero to help cover their traces (or in one case, keep a best-selling author from falling off the wagon and not finishing his sure cestseller of a pop novel.)

It's not set on the "mean streets" of Los Angeles or Chandler's own fictional "Bay City" that figures so well in his early Forties books, "The Lady in the Lake" and Farewell, My Lovely". Thesetting here is more posh; private clubs and boat launches and manicured lawns that are above the creeping smog that is beginning to smoke out the ordinary citizens of the lower bastions of LA. The main arena of fun is the fictional Idle Valley, for instance, a town possibly like Pasadena, where a prominent publisher's daughter is found bludgeoned to death one evening.

The main suspect is a guy named Terry Lennox, a former British Army war hero turned dissapated playboy who Marlowe gives a lift in his car to the Tijuana/San Diego so he can catch a plane for parts unknown. Marlowe doesn't know what Lennox is supposed to have done, but he finds out from the law soon enough. That little car trip indiscretion earns him a few days in the local jail and some tough times from the sergeants in the interrogaton room.

When Marlowe is sprung, after his friend reportedly kills himself in a squallid Mexican "resort" hotel, he gets an offer to track down over Roger Wade, the unstable but profitable author. He refuses at first to take the "babysitting" job, but Wade's beautiful wife convinces him. The best scenes follow as Marlowe gets to interact and reflect on the habits of the high society types who inhabit Idle Valley.

As the above quote should illustrate, however, Chandler is no social commentator with a political agenda. He seems to be reporting on a place (Los Angeles and its inhabitants) as he finds them. Roger Wade is not such a bad guy when sober, for instance, and takes a liking to Marlowe. (Many critics have pointed out that Chandler based a good deal of Wade on himself.) But Marlowe's moral compass is too sharp for him to forget he is only doing a job and he takes no guff from anyone, not even the wealthy publisher who wants him to stop checking into the validity of Terry Lennox's guilt.

The only character Marlowe sets a bit sentimental about is the late Mr. Lennox, a fellow who became a drinking buddy of his from time to time before he blew town in an unusual manner. It is Marlowe's sense of friendship to Lennox and his memory that is the source of his problems; the detective thinks Terry Lennox is at heart a gentleman who wouldn't have murdered his wife no matter how much self-loathing might have come into play. The novel's twist and turns lead to a surprise ending that should have put to rest those critics who say Chandler was past his prime by the early Fifties.

I looked up "The Long Goodbye" on YouTube and came up with the first ten minutes of the 1973 Robert Altman/Elliott Gould film. It's been a long, long time since I've seen this, and I have to say I'm more of a fan of Mr. Chandler than Mr. Altman and his treatment as I recall it, but this opening has its own charms and it was, to be fair, made a good time after the book came out in a post-puritanical, Vietnam/Watergate America. (The opening has almost nothing to do with Chandler's work. A cat features prominently in the scenes, however, and Chandler did like cats.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u0uo0TxS-I

photo of Hollywood Blvd. by P.S. Zollo

Fits Like A Gun In the Hand: More About Chandler

I've looked over a number of online sites for information on Raymond Chandler, looking to recommend one.

I found it below:

www.randomhouse.com/vintage/blacklizard/authors/chandler.html

I think if you haven't read a lot of Chandler, or have read his work but don't know about the man himself, this is the best site going. I learned a good deal from this web locale and I have read my share of biographies of the guy.

There are selections from his letters here to explore and a marvelous bit of work by contemporary mystery author Peter Straub, giving a few dozen details of the man's ecccentricitiess and his rather prickly and sometimes morose personality which was elevated with a knife-sharp wit and a no b.s. attitude toward his novel and story work, Hollywood studios, publicity, the "seriousness" or lack thereof of the detective story and his longtime desire to wrest the mystery form away from pulp writers and typewriting/sadists like Mickey Spillane and make it better than its roots through a turn of phrase or carefully-drawn characters that you wouldn't find elsewhere.

That's really what I want to get through to the uninitiated about Raymond Chandler. His writing is damn percise and funny, but in a way that doesn't distract from the mileau of the seedy, deadly and decadent world Philip Marlowe inhabits in a mid-century Los Angeles that will never die in the field of genre literature thanks to this unique and wonderful writer.

(coming next: my thoughts on Chandler's best--and least--novels. )

Fits Like A Gun In the Hand: Raymond Chandler and Hollywood

"If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I should not have come." -Raymond Chandler

Part of the reason for the allure of Raymond Chandler was the fact that his material was a great fit for the movies, especially in the immediate post-WWII period where the advent of total war brought unexpected social changes to urban America and a sense of pessimism enveloped the screen in a type of movie that somebody French later called film noir.

Thanks to the emergence of Los Angeles as a great metropolis owing in part to the film and aircraft industry (and swarms of folks drawn to its warm, dry climate and varying geography) it became a "Place" in the American Psyche, most often identified with Hollywood. It's hard to separate Chandler from Hollywood, not least of which for the fact that he wrote screenplays for a variety of studios in addition to his work on novels and essays. He was in such demands as a writer that he wrote adaptations for both Billy Wilder ("Double Indemnity", 1944) and Alfred Hitchcock ("Strangers on A Train", 1952) . Both films were successful.

Oddly enough, and in true Hollywood style, neither of these scenarios were original stories by Chandler. "Indemnity" was from a novel by James M. Cain--Cain's work Chandler described in a personal letter as that of a "faux naif". No love lost there, apparently, although Cain's other major novel--"The Postman Always Rings Twice"--was adapted twice for major motion pictures, once for Lana Turner and John Garfield in 1946 at MGM and a 1981 Bob Rafelson directed remake with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange as the adulterous, murderous and unlucky lovers.

The Hitchcock work was based on a work by Patricia Highsmith, more well known today for her novels that inspired the Matt Damon vehicle, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (2000).

As book or movie, "The Big Sleep" is one of my favorite American urban epics, and I would be lying to you if that wasn't in part because of the influence of the 1946 Howard Hawks film with Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Charlotte Sherwood, a daughter of an aged oil tycoon who happens to have a screwball sister who's mixed up in a pornography/blackmail ring. If you've never seen this film, it has been recently released on DVD and includes a great number of bonus features, including an excellent documentary about the making of the film and the unusual amount of re-shooting and new scenes that were added a year after .

But direct discussion of that movie belongs on a future blog. Chandler didn't have anything directly to do with the Bogart/Bacall vehicle. He was unavailable, under contract at Paramount Studios. There's a story that Howard Hawks sent Chandler a telegram asking about a plot point in the story to help sort out the labyrinth of murders in the work: "Who the hell killed the Sherwood's chauffeur?" Ray was asked. The screenwriters couldn't figure it out.

Chandler wired back that he didn't know, either.

That might not have been a wisecrack. Chandler is not a mystery writer to be read for his ultra-tight plots. There' are mystery writers I've read who can do real watertight plots and get all their bases covered by that last chapter. Their prose is most often serviceable, but not memorable. With Chandler you don't care who killed the chauffeur or broke the lock on the hen-house door to hide the smoking gun or ran over the parson's dog back in chapter eleven. It's the smart remarks of Marloew, mixed with that loose-limb, ready-for-anything elan the detective has that stands out in your head after the story is finished--and that he can remain, like Henry Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion, just the same sort of guy with anybody who crosses his path.

If a rich client needs to get a reality check or someone shining his shoes needs a extra bill to improve his memory, Marlowe is always Marlowe. Like other private eyes of the time, he drinks too much and meets the human race with low expectations. And he gets hit a lot--especially from behind. Chandler didn't reinvent the form, of course, or do something others at that time weren't trying. He apparently just did it better. Maybe all that Latin they used to teach back in Dreary Old England (Plutarch and such) mixed with a dash of Sir Thomas Malory and Sir Walter Scott paid off for young Chandler when he was a student . How else to explain how well the character of Philip Marlowe manages to be stay above the sunshine sordidness of mid -century LA("A Man must walk down those mean streets who is not mean himself..., etc") and still have a detective who doesn't seem to be too nice to make a bad guy feel "like a bridge fell on him".

It's that singular prose, not the plots, with its apt descriptions of all realms of the human condition writ large and small (from millionaires to hired killers to bellhops) and places (from mansions and swank hotels to dope dens and seedy rooming houses) that keep you coming back for more of Chandler.

(part three coming soon)

A Favorite: Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."-- "Red Wind"

"His hair was grey and clipped short and his neck had as many folds as a concertina. His feet were small, as the feet of fat men often are, and they were in shiny shoes which were sideways on the carpet and close together and neat and nasty. He wore a dark suit that needed cleaning. I leaned down and buried my fingers in the bottomless fat of his neck. He had an artery in there somewhere, probably, but I couldn't find it and he probably didn't need it anymore anyway. Between his bloated knees on the carpet a dark stain had spread and spread..."--"Trouble is My Business"

He's really dead?" she whispered. Really?"

He's dead," I said. "Dead. Dead. Dead. Lady, he's dead."-"Red Wind"

It's generally acknowledged that pre-World War II America produced two great detective novelists who were not just great writers but iconic figures who refined the genre of detective fiction and made it their own, or rather that of the American urban landscape. One of those men was Dashiell Hammett, who finished his career as a original writer sometime in the early 1930's when he went to Hollywood and became a screenwriter and dialog coach for the plays of his girlfriend, Lillian Hellman. Hammett as a original writer of detective fiction, of Sam Spade and the Continental Operative and Nick Charles, was done by the time he was in his early forties.

At about the same time a forty-something former Southern California manager at a small oil company was fired from his job, either because of the Great Depression or because "his work was interfering with his drinking" as Dorothy Parker once described another fellow.

This middle-aged guy, Raymond Chandler by name, had been schooled at an English "public" academy even though he had been born in Chicago. In his twenties, he failed as a journalist and a poet and sailed back to the country of his birth with his American mother. They went to San Francisco. The young man got a job stringing tennis rackets in the City-By the Bay at the same time that Hammett was working as a Pickerton operative (detective) in the same city. Also like Hammett, he went into in World War I. But he went in as a Canadian, but not until America had entered the war. Quite a hybrid was Mr. Chandler.

So while Hammett dropped off, Chandler started writing detective stories for pulp magazines such The Black Mask in 1933. Six year later and a few dozen stories under his belt, he wrote what is in my humble opinion the greatest detective story ever, The Big Sleep. That book became a movie and that movie was my introduction to Raymond Chandler. Later I read the novel and realized almost all of the best lines in the screenplay came from the original author, not the folks who did the script--even though one of the screenwriters was a guy named William Faulkner. I read more Chandler and discovered for myself why many critics and readers and writers owe so much to this guy.

(to be continued)