Marlowe (1969) is a neo-noir drama film directed by Paul Bogart. The mystery film was written by Stirling Silliphant based on Raymond Chandler's 1949 novel The Little Sister. It features James Garner as the author's fictional private detective Philip Marlowe. The supporting cast includes Bruce Lee, Gayle Hunnicutt, Rita Moreno, Carroll O'Connor and Jackie Coogan.[1]
The film foreshadowed James Garner's second Los Angeles P.I. character Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files. Many of the wisecracking Marlowe lines written by Silliphant for this movie were taken directly from Chandler's novel.
Stirling Silliphant is best known for his Academy-award winning screenplay for In the Heat of the Night (film) (1967) and creating the television series Route 66 (TV series) and Naked City (TV series). The movie also introduced martial arts legend Bruce Lee to many American film viewers.
Plot
Los Angeles private-eye Philip Marlowe is trying to locate the brother of his new client, a woman named Orfamay Quest. The trail leads to two men who deny any knowledge of the brother's existence. Both are soon killed by an ice pick, so Marlowe deduces that there's much more to this than a simple missing-person case.
Marlowe's path crosses that of a blackmailed movie star, Mavis Weld, and her friend, exotic dancer Delores. A mobster sends karate expert Winslow Wong to bust up Marlowe's office and warn him off the case, while Lieutenant French also cautions the detective to stay out of the police's way.
Hand-to-hand combat between the martial-arts artist and detective leads to Wong's plummeting to his death off a balcony. Several more die along the way in a case that leads to a final shootout during a striptease.
Cast
Critical reception
The staff at Variety magazine gave the film a mixed review and wrote, "Raymond Chandler's private eye character, Philip Marlowe, is in need of better handling if he is to survive as a screen hero. Marlowe, is a plodding, unsure piece of so-called sleuthing in which James Garner can never make up his mind whether to play it for comedy or hardboil. Stirling Silliphant's adaptation of The Little Sister comes out on the confused side, with too much unexplained action...Garner walks through the picture mostly with knotted brow, but Gayle Hunnicutt as the actress is nice to look at toward the end. Rita Moreno as a strip dancer delivers soundly, but a peeler does not a picture make."[2]
Critic Roger Ebert panned the film in his review, writing, "But [Chandler's] books depend mostly on the texture and style of life in Los Angeles, and on the cynical intelligence of Philip Marlowe. That's probably why Marlowe, the latest movie to be based on a Chandler book, is not very satisfactory. Even though director Paul Bogart shot on location, he has not quite captured the gritty quality of Chandler's LA. And James Garner, the latest Marlowe (after Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart), is a little too inclined to play for light, wry, James Bond-style laughs...detective movies have got to function at the level of plot, somehow, unless they star Bogart and are written by William Faulkner and just brazen their way through. Marlowe isn't brazen enough. Somewhere about the time when the Chinese martial arts expert wrecks his office (in a very funny scene), we realize Marlowe has lost track of the plot, too."[3]
See also
References
Notes
External links
|
Bruce Lee |
|
| Main articles |
|
|
| Film |
|
|
| Television |
|
|
| Bibliography |
|
|
| Video games |
|
|
| Popular culture |
|
|
| Related articles |
|
|
| Influence on society |
|
|
