Obviously, I have my own notions, but I’m curious what the name means to the culture at large. I myself would tend to treat Chandler’s writings as a privileged authority on the character of Marlowe, but as of last year there was yet another attempt at creating a television show about him, though the network was presumably not hoping to attract just the people who have actually read Chandler’s books.
Of course, in this forum I would expect most people who would be interested in posting on the subject are going to be a self-selecting crowd, but what the hell?
So, who is Marlowe to you? What, for example, would you expect from a show called Phillip Marlowe, Private Eye that you would not expect from a show about a 40’s private dick by some other name? What would make such a character clearly not a Phillip Marlowe in your mind? How is he different in your mind from that other most famous fictional private dick, Sam Spade?
In an older Marlowe series (originally aired on HBO), Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, Powers Boothe did a damn good job of embodying Marlowe as I imagine him.
Marlowe is more human than the average hard-boiled private eye. When Marlowe’s softer side, for lack a better term, is shown, it does not feel tacked on or false. He is more moral than many private eyes.
I would expect it to be exactly like every other private eye show. Nobody has ever done the book Marlowe on screen and I don’t believe such a thing is possible. Marlowe was a creature of pre-war Los Angeles. (I know that a couple of the books were written later, but the character and Chandler’s mindset were clearly formed earlier.) That period is so long gone it cannot be recaptured and means nothing to us today.
No, I think, on the outside at least, they’re the same. Except Marlowe is better educated with a larger vocabulary and more literary and cultural refernces. So I suppose what it boils down to is that Marlowe can be smoother if he wants, or pound your head into the pavement.
Marlowe also has a more complex inner… character?.. voice?.. than Spade.
As Exapno Mapcase said, Marlowe on screen is awfully hard to distinguish from any other guy with a fedora on his head and a smoke hanging from his lip. Even in his own day Marlowe was an anachronism; he embodied, and expected, a kind of gallantry that he knew was long gone and that made him weak and vulnerable. It’s probably not impossible that a sufficiently talented writer or producer could make that happen, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
I’d add that his vulnerability and almost self-conscious (but not quite) way of dealing with it simmers just below the surface.
We never see Spade questioning himself or trying to figure out what to do next. It’s not that Marlowe explicitly voices self-doubt, but I think that’s part of what motivates him. You almost want to feel sorry for Marlowe, but on the other hand you wouldn’t want to embarrass him like that.
I’ll echo Boyo, Shimmery and Nonesuch. Marlowe has much more moral complexity than Spade. A shopworn Gallahad in a time where gallantry has lost it’s currency. Chandler made much of the knight imagery (chess anyone?) and symbolism. I think even the ‘shopworn Gallahad’ phrase is Chandler’s. This is very difficult to show onscreen, and all you’re left with is noir cliche.
Down these mean streets a few good men must go. But no one did it with as much heart as Marlowe. It’s hard to film heart.
No Marlowe film has failed to disappoint me. Even the Bogart ones.
Bogart made more than one Marlowe film? What did I miss?
The Big Sleep is the best example of why Marlowe is impossible to film. The film is really three short, separate movies, paralleling the structure of the book, which was formed of rewritten novelettes.
The first movie is a brilliant, fast-moving reimagining of the private eye theme. Marlowe thinks fast, acts on his feet, has an intellect that he uses to stay ahead of his opponents. He doesn’t use a gun at all, IIRC.
The third movie Marlowe is a standard stumblebum. He drives into trouble without a plan, gets beaten, tied up, rescued by the girl, barely has a single smart line to say. Guns are everywhere.
They are two different movies with two different Marlowes, based faithfully on the same primary material. Which one is real? Both? Neither?
Nope, but you’re absolutely right, which is why it was so easy for me to conflate it into more than one film. Plus all the noir cliche made me think there were other Chandler novels that had been made into films, that I hadn’t seen. There haven’t been, but should have been. I’ve also read Chandler’s excellent screenplay for ‘Playback’, which makes it easy for me to think I’ve seen a film of it.
“I reject your reality, and substitute my own” - Jamie Heineman.
I’d hate to think that the name is now nothing but a pointer to the generic archetype, but I fear that the public imagination has whittled away the nuances that made him survive a lot of also-rans that were quite popular back in the day.
In a lot of ways, I like the fact that Eliot Gould’s big goofball version of the character at least accentuated the softer core of Marlowe that most versions would ignore. Marlowe cares about people, often when he would be the first to tell you they don’t deserve it, and does so for twenty-five dollars a day, plus expenses.
Red Wind is probably the most exemplary of the short stories about Marlowe’s softer side. It was originally a John Dalmas story, but I don’t tend to distinguish the pre-Marlowe dicks as all that importantly different. It’s more like different meditations on the same idea. Nowhere else is Marlowe’s humor more self-effacing, his vulnerability more on display, and his compassion more central to the unfolding story. The audiobook of this story, by the way, is where Eliot Gould’s ability to understate smouldering emotions really shines. Compared to the performances of Van Heflin and Gerald Mohr of this same material as radio plays, Gould seems to really get what’s going on with Marlowe. Of course, Gould seems to kind of phone in the audiobook of The Long Goodbye, but I kind of think Chandler did also. Feel free to disagree.
These days people are more likely to define masculinity as the inability to turn down sex. Marlowe embodies a somewhat old fashioned idea that it’s masculine to be in control of one’s sexual impulses, though his resolve pretty much fails when he nearly gives in to the seduction of his client’s wife in The Long Goodbye, only to be saved from himself by an interloper.
