At 70, Liam Neeson could be considered a little old to play Philip Marlowe, whom his creator Raymond Chandler usually situated somewhere between 38 and 42. But in fairness, big Liam doesn’t look his age, and is a pretty good fit overall for the most famous of the noir detectives, a thoughtful soul who always listened more than he talked.
Directed by Neil Jordan, Marlowe is based on The Black-Eyed Blonde, a 2014 novel by John Banville which artfully revived the world-weary private eye. In 1930s Los Angeles, Marlowe is chewing his way through a pack of cigarettes when he’s paid a visit by a glamorous heiress, Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), whose Latin lover Nico Peterson (Francois Arnaud) has gone missing.
Intrigued, and well paid, Marlowe begins a slow-moving investigation which will bring him into conflict with Clare’s formidable Irish mother Dorothy (Jessica Lange) and a ruthless low-life called Hendricks (Alan Cumming). And while Marlowe’s triumph is never in doubt, his journey is a tortuous one.
Before taking on the part, Neeson must have paused for thought: this, after all, is no ordinary role, and the list of actors who’ve already played Marlowe is formidable. Dick Powell, James Garner, Robert Montgomery, Elliott Gould and Robert Mitchum, not to mention the great Humphrey Bogart — following that lot must have been a daunting experience.
And while Barcelona and Dublin were not always the most convincing stand-ins for 1930s Los Angeles, Liam Neeson more or less persuaded me that he was Marlowe.
Doing so will have required finesse, because Philip Marlowe is not your run-of-the-mill pulp detective. He plays chess, reads poetry, has been known to quote Shakespeare and is way too sharp to be at the mercy of every passing femme fatale. He’s the thinking person’s private detective, a lonely knight errant armed with his own distinctive moral code.
His creator, Raymond Chandler, wasn’t your bog-standard pulp fiction hack either. Born in Chicago but raised in London by an Irish mother, he read Joyce and Proust and believed style was more important than plot. Strange priorities for a crime writer, but in a series of stories and seven completed novels, he would enrich a normally formulaic genre with literary flourishes and lush descriptive passages.
Marlowe was his most famous creation, the subject of those seven novels and many of Chandler’s stories. And before he died, Chandler got to see several famous actors play his character on the big screen.
In 1942, 20th Century Fox paid Chandler $3,500 for the rights to his novel The High Window. It would become Time to Kill (1942), a mystery noir starring Irish-American actor Lloyd Nolan. He did not play Marlowe, however: in Time to Kill, the detective’s name was changed to Michael Shayne, to align it with a series of crime movies Nolan had already made with the studio. But it was Marlowe alright, whose concern for a damsel in distress in the story led Chandler to describe him as “a shop-soiled Sir Galahad”.
Marlowe’s name was not used in The Falcon Takes Over either; also released in 1942, it was officially part of the Falcon series of movies, which had starred English actor George Sanders as a raffish amateur sleuth. And while the plot of The Falcon Takes Over was lifted from Chandler’s book Farewell, My Lovely, the story was set in New York rather than Los Angeles and Sanders’ character, Gay Lawrence, wasn’t like Marlowe at all.
So we could say that the first real Marlowe movie was Murder, My Sweet, a 1944 noir also based on Farewell, My Lovely. Directed by Edward Dmytryk, it’s considered one of the first proper film noirs, along with Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, which appeared the same year and was co-written by Chandler.
“When your plot hits a snag,” Chandler once said, “have somebody come through the door with a gun.” Plenty of that in Murder, My Sweet, in which Marlowe lands himself in all sorts of trouble after being hired to find an ex-convict’s missing girlfriend. He was played by Dick Powell, a controversial choice, as Powell had made his name as a crooner and comic actor.
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Powell was touching 40 when he made the film, too old, he felt, to still be singing silly songs like Tiptoe Through the Tulips. So he took on the gritty role of Marlowe, and won over sceptics with an assured portrayal. And though restrictions imposed by the Hays Code meant that elements of Chandler’s novel like a homosexual character and implications of drug-dealing had to be excised, Murder, My Sweet is generally considered one of the better Marlowe adaptations. .
Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart married shortly after making The Big Sleep (1946)
In 1944 Warner Brothers hired William Faulkner, no less, to write a treatment of Chandler’s 1939 novel The Big Sleep, in which Marlowe becomes involved with a retired general’s beautiful daughters, one of whom is being blackmailed. Faulkner and the female screenwriter Leigh Brackett wrote a draft together which would later be rewritten by Jules Furthman and the film’s director Howards Hawks: the result would be notoriously complicated.
Humphrey Bogart was cast as Marlowe, and seemed an obvious choice. He’d come up in the classic Warner gangster pictures of the 1930s, playing villains and hard nuts, and had recently starred as the cynical detective Sam Spade in John Huston’s Maltese Falcon. In The Big Sleep he would soften his cough to bring an unflappable calmness to his portrayal of the more urbane Marlowe.
Opposite him, the new love of his life, 20-year-old New York model Lauren Bacall, whom he would shortly marry. She played the more sensible of the two Sternwood sisters, Vivian, and the film would benefit from her and Bogart’s simmering chemistry. It did not, however, benefit from Bogart’s messy and very public divorce from his third wife Mayo Methot: when things got nasty, Bogie hit the bottle, delaying production on several occasions.
When the movie was completed in early 1945, its release was delayed by a glut of patriotic war films. And when given an initial run in November of 1945, The Big Sleep did poorly at the box office and Lauren Bacall’s performance was panned by critics. Bacall’s agent, Charles Feldman, asked Warner to reshoot some scenes to capitalise on public interest in her relationship with Bogart. Twenty minutes were cut, the new scenes added, and the film is now considered a flawed classic.
Is it the best of the Marlowe films? It’s a damned sight better than the two Chandler adaptations that immediately followed it. Robert Montgomery was a suave choice to play Marlowe in The Lady in the Lake (1947), and the likeable star also directed. He took the brave decision to incorporate the first-person narration Chandler favoured in his books, but the original novel’s devilishly complex plot did Montgomery no favours, and left audiences baffled.
George Montgomery (no relation) took over the role for The Brasher Doubloon (1947), in which Marlowe battled gangsters and murderers in his search for a highly valuable stolen coin. It is generally considered the weakest of the Marlowe movies.
As the noir craze subsided in the 1950s, Chandler’s detective was put on ice. The author himself died in 1959, and Philip Marlowe might have ambled into the Hollywood sunset with him.
But he didn’t. In 1968, producers Sidney Beckerman and Gabriel Katzka bought the rights to Chandler’s 1949 novel The Little Sister, which had never been adapted before. The resulting film, Marlowe (1969), was directed by Paul Bogart (again, no relation) and starred James Garner as the great detective.
Garner, a great comic actor who might have become the Cary Grant of his time if the rom-com scripts had been good enough, lacked the darkness necessary for the role. The ditsy 1960s setting didn’t help either, nor did martial arts expert Bruce Lee, playing a noisy henchman. It was all very 1960s, and a far cry from the jaded majesty of Chandler’s vision. However something much closer to that was on the way.
Robert Mitchum as Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely (1975)
Though also set in the present, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) had something new to say about the noir detective genre, and brought the director’s trademark messy realist style to a story involving Marlowe’s search for a missing writer. Elliott Gould’s smart-ass sensibility suited the character, played here as an honourable man all at sea in the amoral maze of 1970s Los Angeles. Though a lot of contemporary critics didn’t see the point of it, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker did. She called The Long Goodbye “a high-flying rap on Chandler and the movies” which achieved a “self-mocking fairy tale poetry”.
Robert Mitchum was born to play Marlowe, and though overlooked in the 1940s, finally got his chance in the 1975 remake of Farewell, My Lovely. Directed by Dick Richards, it was a nostalgic piece, with Marlowe restored to his 1940s splendour and played by an actor who could make the corniest line sound convincing.
“Robert Mitchum,” cooed the trailer, “the last of the tough guys, and Charlotte Rampling, the hottest of the new broads…” Back in those days you could say things like that, but actually the film was better than the trailer would suggest, thanks in large part to Mitchum, who played Marlowe again in The Big Sleep (1978).
So who was the quintessential Marlowe? A case could certainly be made for Mitchum, despite the fairly average nature of the vehicles he appeared in, and a lot of Chandler buffs are very attached to Elliott Gould’s twitchy and laconic Marlowe in The Long Goodbye. For me though, it would have to be Humphrey Bogart, whose chain-smoking Marlowe never seemed fazed by anything.
‘Marlowe’ will be in cinemas from Friday, March 17
