This is an interesting failure. As you might gather, it's a film of the Chandler Marlowe novel, but the twist is that, apart from an opening and closing scene where Robert Montgomery's Marlowe addresses the viewer directly, everything is literally seen through his eyes. This means you only ever see him in mirrors from that moment on, and you see his hands reach out on either side of the camera, and you see the screen go blurry when (as happens often) he is slugged on the head, and you even see him staring at a sexy blonde secretary and ignoring the person talking to him. Oh, and a pair of lips loom in to the camera when he gets a kiss (from Audrey Totter, who plays the principal female role, and who is the best thing about the movie). Sadly, this approach does not work (as you might gather from the fact that no other film does it). Basically it's as if you're playing a video game, only you're not controlling it. The main problem is that it makes for a boring watch, because there are LONG scenes where people are just talking at you. You can't have the camera roam around people or have interesting camera angles - everything is dictated by the height of Marlowe's eyes at that particular juncture. Another problem is that Marlowe is obnoxious. I mean, I know the character of Marlowe is a misogynistic drunkard at the best of times, but this one is smug with it, and has an annoying voice that makes him sound, well, a bit thick. As I have found with other Chandler/Marlowe stories, the plot is pretty much incomprehensible (I believe that even Chandler professed not to be able to follow the plot of The Big Sleep) - the chief pleasures are supposed to be the snappy repartee. That's why it's an almost fatal blow to have Marlowe not be good at it. I'll give it a shot, though. Marlowe has decided to make money by writing stories for pulp magazines based on his real experiences. One "A. Fromsett" calls him in to the office to discuss his story, and it turns out to be the aforementioned Audrey Trotter. Why is she the best thing in the film? I'll let the gifs do the talking:
Anyway, she's the assistant to the big boss, whose wife has gone missing, and she has worked out from Marlowe's story that his an honest sap and wants to hire him to detect where the wife is. She invites him back to her place where a wire is lying out conspicuously supposedly from the wife from Mexico saying she's running off to marry Chris Lavery. But Adrienne (that's what the "A" stands for) knows that Lavery isn't in Mexico and tells Marlowe to find him in "Bay City" (not the one in Michigan, a fictional part of LA, it seems). Marlowe finds him, and finds him to be a Southerner, and gets knocked out for his troubles, and wakes up in the Bay City jail, because he was found in a wrecked car reeking of alcohol. He gets a lecture from Captain Kane and his surly assistant Lt. DeGarmot, but goes on his way. Anyway, there's a lot of back and forth, during which time he surmises that Adrienne wants the wife out of the picture so that she can move in on her millionaire boss. She admits as much, but sends him off to the boss's ski lodge where his housekeeper has been arrested for allegedly murdering his wife. Then there's another woman (who seems a little unhinged),
a subplot involving DeGarmot (who tries the old "cover him in alcohol" trick on Marlowe again, but Marlowe manages to substitute an actual drunk and crawl away, Chris Lavery is found shot in the shower... There's a lot of plot. And through it all we're supposed to believe that Adrienne is falling for Marlowe despite his loutish behavior and leering comments.
Oh, and it turns out to be an Xmas movie, thus accidentally continuing our theme of the last film. A funny little oddity.
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