While both acknowledging the past, Mitchum’s remake of The Big Sleep (which I previously reviewed here) belongs to those films like Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Robert Culp’s Hickey & Boggs (reviewed here) that sought to update the concept for the present day and comment on the present by presenting the past with a sardonic, cynical, and contemporary eye. Intriguingly, his two remakes can be seen as representative of the two dominant approaches to the genre of that decade. Robert Mitchum got to play Philip Marlowe twice during the nostalgia boom of the 1970s and the renewed interest in the private eye mythos. “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket” While Marlowe tries to find her, he is also hired to ransom some stolen jade, which ultimately leads to a murder,the wealthy Grayle family and a drug ring involving a psychic by the name of Jules Amthor. Now the hulking great brute wants her back. Marlowe is hired by Moose Malloy to track down his old girlfriend Velma, who has disappeared during his many years in jail. But it is all pretty well integrated here (most hardboiled novels have an A and B plot structure anyway), so that along with Chandler’s fine prose and crackling dialogue we also get a pretty impressive narrative structure. This is still partly true here as the basis for Farewell is to be easily found in three short stories: ‘Try the Girl’ (1936) about a hood looking for an old girlfriend ‘Mandarin’s Jade’ (1936) which includes stolen jewellery and a crooked psychic and ‘The Man Who Liked Dogs’ (1937) that includes the climax on the yacht three stories in this order provide the basic outline for the 1940 novel. While I remain a huge fan of his debut, The Big Sleep there is no denying that the plotting could be a bit choppy due to its origins in several short stories. This was Chandler’s second novel and was originally published in 1940. “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food”
The following review is offered for Bev’s Golden Age Vintage Mystery Challenge Tuesday’s Overlooked Film meme over at Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom blog and Katie’s Book to Movie Challenge at Doing Dewey (for links, click here) Charlotte Rampling is the beautifully coiffed leading lady who is more than she seems, David Shire supplies the lustrous musical score while noir legend Jim Thompson and a young Sylvester Stallone provide acting cameos … Robert Mitchum pl ays Raymond Chandler’s immortal private eye Philip Marlowe in this beguiling valentine to the classic 1940s detective yarn.
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