I Watch Films: Marlowe

 

Marlowe

Philip Marlowe, private detective, is hired by glamorous heiress Clare Cavendish to find her lover, who was the prop master at a film studio. It’s Hollywood 1939, and Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is the classic noir detective. The lover was apparently killed outside an exclusive club, but Marlowe figures out that he died inside and pulls strings to get access.

It instantly gets more complex. Cavendish claims to have seen him in Tijuana after his supposed death. Her mother, aging film star Dorothy Quincannon, quizzes him; also there is the head of the film studio, Quincannon’s former lover and soon to be Ambassador to “England”*.

This goes on in classic noir fashion. Everyone has secrets and an agenda. People at the top of society all have dark pasts. Cavendish is at odds with her mother because for many years she claimed her daughter was her niece to protect her film career, at the behest of the studio head, and where has that got her now she’s too old to act**? Every few scenes someone decides to threaten or beat up Marlowe. A female character explains a bit to him, is immediately kidnapped and then horribly killed. There are questions within answers and wheels within wheels, everyone having an angle or trying to extort someone.

I say classic noir fashion; Phillip Marlowe is a Raymond Chandler character, but this is based on a 2014 novel by another author. The period detail is good, but the way the film transitions between scenes and flashbacks is dreamlike, a much more modern style. Neo-noir is the word, with virtues and vices of the old and the new.

Watch This: A cool period detective thriller
Don’t Watch This: A convoluted mystery with few answers and fewer characters to root for

 

* In the UK it would be “Ambassador to the Court of St James.” Ambassadors are sent to the Sovereign Of The United Kingdom. This is, however, a very LA and period appropriate way of referring to it.

** I mean obviously not, but the number of roles for older women, still limited today, was almost non-existent back then.