“I’m too old for this s---” Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson)
If you consider the film history of Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, then Liam Neeson should be given a bravery medal for trying to join that club: Dick Powell in “Murder, My Sweet” (1944), Humphrey Bogart in “The Big Sleep” (1946), Robert Montgomery in “Lady in the Lake” (1947), James Garner in “Marlowe” (1969), Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye” and Robert Mitchum, in “Farewell My Lovely” (1975) and “The Big Sleep” (1978). This iteration is based, not on Chandler but rather John Banville’s 2014 “The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel.”
Neeson enhances world-weary in the new Marlowe (see opening quote), helmed by acclaimed director Neil Jordan. However, even the dual femme fatales of Jessica Lange and Diane Kruger can’t match the sweet sarcasm of Lauren Bacall in the 1946 classic directed by Howard Hawkes. Yet, Neeson’s Marlowe has a chill that improves on Bogie’s natural distancing.
Marlowe here is again hired by a dangerous blonde, Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), to find her deceased ex-lover, Nico Peterson (Francois Arnaud), who may not even be dead, through a convoluted plot that makes sense in the end while keeping faithful to the Chandler spirit and the noir formula. The blinds’ shadowed bars, the ubiquitous cigarettes, the neon signs reflected in puddles, and the overhead fans are all there while the cinematography is a rich golden brown and the period cars immaculately clean.
Danny Huston as club owner Floyd Hanson and Allen Cumming as gangster Lou Hendricks add the proper heavy weight to outsized villains while every small-part actor, like Colm Meany as a well-meaning cop, is first rate, as if pulled right from classic noirs. You have to love war veteran Hanson’s casual remark about a corpse: “Once, after an artillery strike, I found a friend’s tooth in my whiskey glass. I drank the whiskey…. “He was dead, and I needed the whiskey.” Even clunky dialogue like this has a pleasantly nostalgic ring: “I’m just an ordinary Joe, trying to earn a buck and stay out of jail.” It’s all hardboiled and worthy of William Monahan’s pen, which won him his “Departed” Oscar.
The dialogue gets me every time, and here it’s rich. Together with the period detail and seedy world, “Marlowe” is a sweet time at the movies that makes you both remember and forget the classics of the past.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
