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Philip Marlowe in Film, Radio, Television, Comics, etc.

kevinburtonsmith

FILMS

I‘ve always thought Dick Powell, the first screen Philip Marlowe, was also the best. Director Edward Dmytryk, screenwriter  John Paxton and producer Adrian Scott managed to captured the essence of Chandler that proved so elusive in so many other adaptations.

He was turned down for the lead in Double Indemnity (Paramount, 1944) because director, Billy Wilder thought the public would never buy Powell as anything but a lightweight song-and-dance man. But Powell nabbed the role of Marlowe in 1944’s Murder, My Sweet, now considered a film noir classic,  and never looked back. In fact, Powell’s previous image actually may have helped since nobody had great expectations.

William K. Everson, in The Detective in Film, suggests that “Powell — because the realistic conception of the private eye was relatively new, and because Powell was totally new to it — became Marlowe far more easily than Bogart [in The Big Sleep (Warner Bros., 1946)], who had several other competing images working against him: the gangster image, Sam Spade, Rick from Casablanca. Powell tossed off the tired, contemptuous, yet biting Raymond Chandler wisecracks and insults with superbly underplayed style.”

Me? I like Hawks’ The Big Sleep plenty–it’s a fun film, surprisingly light-hearted at times for a “film noir”–but it’s not Chandler’s Marlowe that Bogey’s playing. In the books, Marlowe is a gentleman, and even a bit of a prude, repelling Carmen’s advances, and wary of both romance and casual sex. In Hawks’ version, he’s a horny frat boy on the prowl, tearing his way through WWII Los Angeles, hitting on every babe in sight, including cabbies, booksellers and Vivian Sternwood.

But after the wild success of Bogart and Lauren Bacall in Hawks’ To Have Or Have Not, Warners was hot for another hit featuring the dynamic duo. Hawks told Warners he would need $50,000 to buy a story he was sure would be another smash, something tough yet romantic enough to capitalize on ther obvious chemistry between the two stars. That story was Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

But only $5,000 went to Chandler — the rest went to Hawks. Still, Hawks certainly earned his cut. By the time it was released, after numerous rewrites (and even going back and re-shooting key scenes almost a year later), Chandler’s dark existential stroll down the mean streets seen through the eyes of a world-weary detective had turned into a cheeky, sexy romp through LA, following a P.I. who spent much of his time flirting with man-hungry females.

There was another substantial difference between the two films, though.  Mike Davis lays it out plainly in City of Quartz: “Film noir remained an ideologically ambiguous aesthetic that could be manipulated in dramatically different ways. ThusHoward Hawks chose to flatten the deep shadows of The Big Sleep (Chandler’s moist anti-rich novel) into an erotic ambience for Bogart and Bacall, while the more tough-minded Edwatd Dmytryk and Adrian Scott (both future members of the Hollywood Ten) evoked premonitions of fascism and brainwashing in… Murder, My Sweet.”

After the one-two punch of Murder, My Sweet and The Big Sleep, films featuring Marlowe have been a decidedly mixed bag, ranging from the sleepily sublime (1975’s Farewell, My Lovely) starring a decidedly too-old-but-still-powerful Robert Mitchum to the ridiculous (1947’s Lady in the Lake, a stiff, pretentious piece of mangled film-making that utilized subjective camera, directed by and starring a very smarmy, gee-I’d-like-to-punch-him-in-the-face Robert Montgomry, the worst Marlowe ever). By comparison, such woozy creative re-interpretations as 1969’s Marlowe starring a too bemused James Garner, 1973’s The Long Goodbye directed by Robert Altman, with Elliot Gould as a half-stoned slacker and even 1978’s huh? remake of The Big Sleep with a half-awake Mitchum fumbling around 1970’s no-longer-swinging London, England don’t seem so bad.

Well, that The Big Sleep remake was bad, but Mitchum’s rumbling voice-over at the end of Marlowe’s soliloquy (excised in the Hawks version) almost makes up for it:

“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a stagnant lake or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”

The Long Goodbye, meanwhile, remains notable for its audaciousness. The still controversial re-interpretation of Marlowe by Altman and Gould followed a lost and befuddled Marlowe meandering through seventies-era Los Angeles, a man definitively out of time. But at least Altman and Gould knew who Marlowe was. You might not agree with their interpretation, but at least it was an honest interpretation, an honest attempt to imagine Marlowe in another era.

By 2023’s Marlowe, directed by Neil Jordan and starring an elderly Liam Neeson, they barely bothered with Chandler at all, instead choosing to base the film on a so-so Chandler pastiche by Benjamin Black). This disappointing and cynical travesty was more about branding and marketing, than anything else—although by 2023, would the mention of Marlowe or Chandler really pack ‘em in? Really? Maybe that’s why everyone involved did whatever the hell they wanted, regardless of almost anything Chandler ever wrote. Neeson often seems confused, and who can blame him? The film made little sense. It couldn’t seem to make up its mind if it was Chinatown or Die Hard or yet another Neeson action flick or maybe just a bad burrito. Friend of this site Nick Anez called it “Dull, poorly directed, badly acted and unbelievable, with Neeson looking like he should be in a wheelchair playing bingo,” and that about sums it up.

Nice props, though.

And then there’s MAZAN FILIP, a 2003 Czech comedy that was supposed to be an Airplane-type spoof of Chandler and American detective films of the 1940s in general, full of sight gags, wild puns, and slapstick humour, written and directed by Václav Marhoul. Tomás Hanák actually looked pretty good in the part of Marlowe, but Vilma Cibulková, who was supposed to be the femme fatale, was a bit long in the tooth for the role — she looks more like the femme fatale’s mother. But at least she could act, which is more than could be said for most of the rest of the cast — including Hanák — of this decidedly unfunny train wreck. According to one of its harshest online critics, it was “boring, almost narcoleptic,” while another suggested that is “puts the ‘sleep’ into The Big Sleep…”

 

RADIO & AUDIO

Dick Powell (him again!) reprised his role as Marlowe in a radio adaptation of Murder, My Sweet for Lux Radio Theatre in 1945. It was a toned-down but nevertheless successful version of the Chandler novel, and made Powell the first radio Marlowe. He later went on to become radio’s Richard Diamond.

Two years later, NBC produced Philip Marlowe as a summer replacement series for The Bob Hope Show. It featured several adaptations of Chandler short stories, but was considered too talky and slow-moving. Erle Stanley Gardner, in a letter to Chandler, confided he found it all rather difficult to follow. But the CBS series, The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, that followed the next year, really clicked.

After a three episode trial run on The Pepsodent Program in September of 1947 with Van Hefflin in the title role, The Adventures of Philip Marlowe premiered as a weekly series on September 26, 1948. It was well-produced, less introspective than the books or the previous series on NBC, but it had a secret weapon: Gerald Mohr. Mohr excelled as Marlowe, and his snappy delivery, coupled with well-written stories and intriguing characters made for entertaining listening. By 1949 the show was pulling the biggest audience on American radio, with a rating of 10.3 million listeners. In 1950, Radio and Television Life Magazine named Gerald Mohr as the Best Male Actor on radio.

“And it had the best hard-boiled opening lines of any radio detectives series,” according to faithful contributor and OTR fan Stewart Wright. “It has to be heard to be fully appreciated…

“Get this and get it straight! Crime is a sucker’s road and those who travel it wind up in the gutter, the prison or the grave. There’s no other way, but they never learn.”

“I once used it as the voice mail message on my work phone and people called just to hear it,” Stewart confesses. “When I got back, I had lots of blank messages.”.

Finally, in 1977, the BBC had a whack at Marlowe, producing several full-length adaptations that, from all reports, are very very good, indeed. Raymond would have been pleased…

TELEVISION

   

Marlowe made his television debut in 1954, played by Dick Powell (who else?), in a live adaptation of The Long Goodbye that served as the premiere episode of the anthonology series CLIMAX! Powell had, of course, played Marlowe ten years on the big screen, earlier in RKO’s Murder, My Sweet. By most accounts, it was generally a very good production, and was even featured on that week’s TV Guide cover, with a close-up of Powell as Marlowe in a clench with co-star Teresa Wright. But the live telecast is probably best known for the scene in which actor Tris Coffin, whose character had just died, gets up and walks away. Apparently Coffin thought he was out of camera range. He wasn’t. Unfortunately any recordings of the live episode have long since disappeared. Or been destroyed?

There’s not a whole lot of available information, either, on the first video series featuring of Chandler’s sleuth, PHILIP MARLOWE, which ran for 26 episodes from 1959-60 on ABC, and no memorable stories about it to make it stand out. Philip Carey, a big, tough and usually watchable actor, would seem to have been a decent choice to play Marlowe in 1959. Carey’s Marlowe differed from the books in at least two (and probably more) ways in that he sported a scar on one cheek and apparently had a marina apartment and his own boat. Huh?

The latter two changes prompted Time, in an article on the glut of TV detectives at the time, to question if Carey’s Marlowe might be on the take from some “wrongos. ” The series came out of the Goodson-Todman shop. These were the game show producers but they also made occasional forays into dramatic television (The Rebel, Branded). The line producer and frequent scripter was Gene Wang, a radio/television veteran who was also the first story editor on the Perry Mason television series. Frank MacShane’s biography of Chandler indicates that E. Jack Neuman, a top-drawer radio-television writer who later developed such long-running series as Dr. Kildare and Joseph Wambaugh’s Police Story, may have written for the series. Other writers included Charles Beaumont, best known for his work on The Twilight Zone, and James E. Moser, creator of Ben Casey and Medic. Obviously, some good talent behind the camera, but the show didn’t distinguish itself and only twenty-six episodes were aired. With so few episodes, it may not have even been syndicated. To my knowledge, episodes haven’t popped up on the video trading markets and it’s a question of whether the prints even still exist. Which is too bad. Even if the show were indifferent, it would be interesting to see what it looked like and, given the time, what the score sounded like. (Contributed by Ted Fitzgerald)

Far more faithful to the source material was PHILIP MARLOWE, PRIVATE EYE, a short (five episodes) series produced in England (and a second series, produced in Canada, responsible for another six episodes), tailored for the American cable television market, starring Powers Boothe as Marlowe. A real plus was that the shows were all adapted from Chandler short stories, even if they weren’t all originally Marlowe stories.

A lot of people really liked this one, but I thought it was all a little too fussy. Too much attention paid to detail, with not enough emphasis on how it all ties together made it look like an overly-bright, sterile period piece. Los Angeles in the dirty thirties and forties comes off as a quaint little setpiece with all the personality of an operating room. And the voice-over narration came off as overcooked Magnum. For me, Marlowe should carry a bit of world-weary introspection in his voice. And in this series, Marlowe had a girlfriend of sorts, in Annie Riordan, tucked away in (where else?) Bay City. The shows ran on HBO and the CBC in North America.

In July 1998, HBO took another crack at Marlowe, with the Bob Rafaelson-directed POODLE SPRINGS, starring James Caan as an aging Marlowe (it’s set in 1963). It’s based, at least theoretically, on the Robert B. Parker-completed version of Chandler’s unfinished novel. Caan was an intriguing choice, but some of the changes seem rather suspect. Linda Loring is now Laura Parker (?), and she’s no longer a spoiled rich kid, but a working attorney, and Poodle Springs is no longer Marlowe’s (and Chandler’s) derogative term for Palm Springs, but a small town where Phil and Laura settle down. Makes you wonder why they bothered paying for the rights to Chandler’s (or Parker’s) book at all, especially if they were going to let Tom Stoppard have free rein anyway.

Mind you, not everyone was disappointed. Cy Silver of Berkeley wrote in to say that he thought “it went well. The actual setting of the desert community in the production was very much like Palm Springs. And its location in the desert not too distant from the Nevada border does fit a Palm Springs-like ambience. And having James Caan play it as someone from another era gave it a time-warp quality, which I found intriguing and enjoyable. And not inconsistent with the inherent tension between Marlowe and Linda Loring.”

The next stab at reviving Marlowe on television was equally misguided. In 2007, ABC/Touchstone did a pilot/first episode for a potential series, MARLOWE, starring Jason O’Mara as Philip Marlowe. He is, of course, a Los Angeles private eye, but that’s where the resemblance ends. And it’s more than just the lame “updating” to modern times that sinks it — it’s the total lack of any meaningful relationship to Chandler that sends this one down the drain. O’Mara spouts a few predictable, obvious Chandlerisms, but this cocky, horny chatterbox (there’s plenty of voice-over narration) bears no resemblance at all to Marlowe or Chandler. There’s no poetry, no melancholy, no soul; no understanding of what made Chandler so special. Although this Marlowe has a secretary (who has a crush on the boss). But maybe I was hoping for too much. The less you think or Chandler or Marlowe, the easier it might be to enjoy this so-so P.I. outing. The pilot never even aired, but you can see it on YouTube.

Six years later, in 2013, ABC was at it again. This time they decided they’d get Andrew Marlowe (no relation), then riding high as the creator, executive producer and showrunner of Castle, and feature producer Michael De Luca (Captain Phillips, Fifty Shades of Gray) to turn Chandler’s eye into television magic. Marlowe was reportedly going to co-write the script with his wife, Terri Edda Miller, who’d also wriiten for Castle. Alas, the only magic involved was the complete disappearance of the show–it never even reached the pilot stage.

Faring much better was an unauthorized Japanese adaptation of THE LONG GOODBYE that came out the next year. The five-part mini-series, set in Tokyo (instead of Los Angeles) in the 1950s has private detective Banji Masuzawa looking into the death of his friend Tomotsu Harada, who apparently committed suicide after murdering his actress wife and fleeing to Taiwan. In its own way, this was as much a reimagining of the source material as Robert Altman’s 1973 feature film, the social and cultural upheavals of postwar Japan serving as the backdrop. I’ve never seen this one, though, so I’m only guessing. But it sure sounds intriguing.

COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS

PLAYS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Ted Fitzgerald, Chris Mills, Henry Cabot Beck, Barry Ergang, Steven Ardron and Marc LaViolette for their help with this page. And a special thanks to Rina Fox for the TV Guide cover.

 

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