Everybody Loves Raymond, Part II

Concluding our overview of Raymond Chandler’s screen career and that of his best-known creation, private eye Philip Marlowe.

The less said about Marlowe’s next appearance, Lady in the Lake (1947), the better, and even “appearance” is a bit of a misnomer for a film in which he is visible only when he walks in front of a mirror, since director-star Robert Montgomery decided to shoot the whole thing with a subjective camera. That’s a great idea in one respect, allowing us to spend less time looking at Montgomery, but as a directorial choice, it stinks, making for a pretentious mess that wasted one of my favorite Chandler novels (from whose title it also excised the initial article). Similarly, The Brasher Doubloon (1947) was an otherwise good adaptation of The High Window, hampered yet again by an abysmal Marlowe, in this case George “No Relation” Montgomery.

Per the IMDb, Chandler’s work was adapted into episodes of The Philco Television Playhouse (“The Little Sister”), Robert Montgomery Presents (“The Big Sleep”), Nash Airflyte Theatre (“Pearls Are a Nuisance”), Studio One (“The King in Yellow”), Climax! (“The White Carnation,” “The Long Goodbye”), Schlitz Playhouse of Stars (“Tower Room 14-A”), and Storyboard (“I’ll Be Waiting”). Meanwhile, he labored fruitlessly on Strangers on a Train, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith and partly filmed at the railroad station in my former home of Danbury. Shortly after Chandler’s death, ABC ran a single-season Philip Marlowe series involving Richard Matheson, but my research was unable to document his specific contribution.

James Garner had yet to play Jim Rockford when he appeared in Marlowe (1969), but in retrospect, it’s easy to see that the star of The Rockford Files was an apt choice for the role, not surprisingly focusing on his charmingly smart-aleck side. Despite such modern-day interpolations as a flamboyantly gay hairdresser and a martial artist (Bruce Lee) who trashes Marlowe’s office, the film is a fairly faithful adaptation by Stirling Silliphant of The Little Sister. Silliphant’s work ranged from the heights of Village of the Damned (1960), his Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Charly (1968) to the dregs of Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (1975) and the Irwin Allen bombs The Swarm (1978) and When Time Ran Out… (1980).

If Robert Altman indeed intended to subvert the private-eye genre with The Long Goodbye (1973), then his (mis)casting of one of my least favorite actors, his M*A*S*H (1970) star Elliott Gould, as a nebbishy Marlowe was surely a step in the right direction. One wonders if Big Sleep vet Leigh Brackett was in on the joke, since the film ostensibly derived from her script includes an inexplicable sequence in which Marlowe is struck by a car and winds up in a body cast. Among its other oddities are an omnipresent title song, which recurs in a variety of versions at hilariously regular intervals, and a typically eclectic cast featuring the great Sterling Hayden, soporific director Mark Rydell, Laugh-In’s Henry Gibson, and baseball player Jim Bouton.

The character was restored to an atmospheric period setting in Dick Richards’s Farewell, My Lovely (1975), with noir mainstay Robert Mitchum as an aging and world-weary Marlowe, a respectful script by David Zelag Goodman, an excellent main-title theme by David Shire, and the young Sylvester Stallone in a small role as a thug. With The Big Sleep (1978), Mitchum became the only actor to play the role in two features (produced, as was The Long Goodbye, by Elliott Kastner), although his wisdom in doing so is open to question, especially at the hands of aptly named writer-director Michael Winner. The story was reset not just in the present but in London, effecting a 180 that not even James Stewart, slumming as General Sternwood, could overcome.

Perhaps as a result, Marlowe has since been absent from the big screen, if not from cable television, where Chandler’s short stories—many of which were cannibalized in his novels—became the basis for the series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, starring Powers Boothe, and episodes of Fallen Angels (“Red Wind,” “I’ll Be Waiting”). Another of my least favorites, James Caan, played Marlowe in HBO’s Poodle Springs (1998), directed by Bob Rafelson and adapted by prestigious playwright Tom Stoppard from a novel with an interesting history. Chandler’s unfinished manuscript had been completed by Robert B. Parker (often seen as his successor), who also authored Perchance to Dream, a sequel to The Big Sleep, and died at 77 on January 18, 2010.