Marlowe (1969)
(On Cable TV, December 2022) Oh my. There are many things in Marlowe that I like a lot. There’s the hard-boiled fiction/film noir angle that inspired it. There’s the dependable James Garner, Rita Moreno and even Bruce Lee in two short scenes. There’s the permissiveness of the late 1960s, finally able to mention what dared not be mentioned during the Production Code years. With those things in place, it’s fine to wonder—how can this fail? Well, I’ll tell you how: By taking the material unseriously, then very seriously. By not understanding what made noir so much fun. By miscasting, misdirecting, and mishandling material in a flippant fashion. I really do like Garner a lot, and I see how casting him in a contemporary update to Philip Marlowe made sense at the time: he could be smooth, he could (to a lesser extent) be tough, and he could be likable or sexy, depending on the audience. I can also see how updating Marlowe to a semi-comic contemporary attitude could have worked for late-1960s audiences rejecting the classic Hollywood mould. Updating the setting beyond the post-WW2 years gives opportunities for the story to take advantage of the permissiveness of the time, and blending Garner, comedy and the late-1960s feels like an entirely valid choice. But you have to commit to the bit, and Marlowe doesn’t. From a light-hearted beginning and middle, it flounders in excessive darkness toward the end and thus betrays a lack of understanding of its ideal nature. Much of the blame goes to legendary screenwriter Sterling Silliphant, then a social-issues master who apparently found himself defeated by the demands of a genre potboiler. It’s not that the script is bad on fundamentals (not in the way it spins a few subplots and a labyrinthine plot in the hard-boiled tradition), it’s that it can’t make up its mind as to whether the texture of its moments should be funny or tragic. After the first two acts that are essentially comic, it goes tragic toward the end and creates a tonal problem the film can’t recover from—especially for those viewers already put off balance by seeing Marlowe charmingly quip his way past situations where its literary namesake would have shot a few people. I don’t quite dislike Marlowe—it’s got too many good things for that—but I find it clumsy, disappointing and wasteful of incredible opportunities.