Marlowe (1969)

September 19, 1969 (Germany), October 22, 1969 (United States), release dates

Directed by Paul Bogart

Screenplay by Stirling Silliphant

Based on the novel The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler

Music by Peter Matz

Edited by Gene Ruggiero

Cinematography by William H. Daniels

James Garner as Philip Marlowe

Gayle Hunnicutt as Mavis Wald

Carroll O’Connor as Lt. Christy French

Rita Moreno as Dolores Gonzáles

Sharon Farrell as Orfamay Quest

William Daniels as Mr. Crowell

H. M. Wynant as Sonny Steelgrave

Jackie Coogan as Grant W. Hicks

Kenneth Tobey as Sgt. Fred Beifus

Bruce Lee as Winslow Wong

Christopher Cary as Chuck

George Tyne as Oliver J. Hady

Corinne Camacho as Julie

Paul Stevens as Dr. Vincent Lagardie

Roger Newman as Orrin Quest

Anna Lee Carroll as Mona

Read Morgan as Gumpshaw

Warren Finnerty as Haven Clausen

Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Produced by Katzka-Berne Productions, Cherokee Productions

I wanted to see Marlowe for many reasons. I am a big fan of Stirling Silliphant’s writing. He wrote many of the episodes of two wonderful classic television shows: Route 66 and Naked City. And he adapted the screenplay for Marlowe from Raymond Chandler’s novel The Little Sister. I haven’t finished Chandler’s novel—yet—but I’m more than halfway through. Seeing the film inspired me. I have read that many of the snappy lines of dialogue in the film are taken almost word-for-word from the novel, which is true so far and makes for fun reading.

Another reason to see the film was James Garner. I have always been a fan of his, and I thought it would be interesting to see him in the role of Philip Marlowe. Humphrey Bogart made Philip Marlowe, the detective in the rumpled trench coat, his own in The Big Sleep. I wondered how Garner would fare in the role (just great, by the way). And then there’s Rita Moreno and Carroll O’Connor in supporting roles. I had high hopes—and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I watched the film twice, two days in a row, because it was so much fun the first time. (It was fun the second time, too.)

And films from the 1960s and early 1970s are fun in their own right. The clothes, the hairstyles for women, the décor: all of it makes these films seem even more dated than films noir from the 1940s and 1950s. But in Marlowe, they also serve a purpose: The film opens with Marlowe driving up to a ramshackle hotel call “The Infinite Pad.” The hotel’s façade is covered with peace signs and flower-power symbols. People in hippie-style clothing lounge about on the front stairs and porch. And Marlowe shows up in his suit jacket and tie, trying to find the lost brother of his client, one Ofamay Quest. The juxtaposition of the traditional with the new reinforces the idea that Marlowe, the character, is a throwback to the past, a relic of pulp novels from the 1930s and 1940s. But Silliphant’s screenplay and James Garner’s acting make him relevant still in 1969.

I have always said that viewers have to pay attention to the details in many films noir, and the same can be said of Marlowe. Even the opening sequence, with its pop theme song and neon colors, is important, and not just because of the opening credits. The stills and film shots are included for a reason. It’s easy to be distracted by the clever design and the eye-popping colors. I was! The bright colors, constant movement, and catchy theme song meant I had to restart the film so I could catch the credits, too. But the opening sequence should be considered part of the exposition of the upcoming narrative. The photographer taking the pictures in the opening sequence is the person in the photo stuck between the metal parts of the dashboard in Marlowe’s convertible, and it is the person Marlowe is looking for in the rundown hotel.

The manager of the hotel, Haven Clausen, is sleeping soundly. Marlowe tries nudging him awake, and when that doesn’t work, he stuffs a towel in his mouth and pinches his nose. In another juxtaposition between Marlowe and the counterculture of the 1960s, Clausen reaches for a joint, not a cigarette, and Marlowe lights it for him. (A lot of people were still smoking tobacco in 1969, by the way.) Marlowe needs a passkey from Clausen to get into Orrin Quest’s room. When he gets into the room, he learns that it is now occupied by Grant W. Hicks and that Quest left ten days earlier.

Before Marlowe leaves the hotel, he checks for the register, but it’s been tossed in the wastebasket and the page registering Quest has been ripped out. He also checks a telephone directory for Dr. Vincent Lagardie because Clausen called him earlier, when Marlowe first questioned him. He suddenly realizes that Clausen has been awfully quiet, and when he checks on him, he finds Clausen has been killed with an ice pick to the neck. Marlowe’s missing person case now includes murder.

Marlowe returns to his rented office in a large building that reminded me of an old high school. Next door is Woodbridge College of Cosmetology, Hair Styling. The proprietor is Chuck, who informs Marlowe that the client from Kansas is back. And so she is: Orfamay Quest. She has hired Marlowe to find her brother, but she is not very happy with his work so far.

Marlowe’s office and office building (above) also remind me of Harper’s (below) in Harper. Click here for my blog post about Harper, starring Paul Newman.

While Orfamay Quest complains about Marlowe’s lack of results finding her brother, he calls Dr. Vincent Lagardie, who denies knowing Orrin Quest. (Ofamay is more interested in complaining than in giving Marlowe a chance to explain why he is calling the doctor.) He also gets a phone call from Grant W. Hicks, who will pay him to come to the Alvarado Hotel and get some information (Hicks wants Marlowe to save him from Orrin Quest, but he doesn’t tell Marlow that). When Marlowe arrives at the Alvarado Hotel, he finds Hicks, who is now dead with an ice pick to his neck, and a well-dressed woman, who threatens him with a gun. She injures Marlowe enough to keep him from following her, but the hotel’s security cop, Oliver (Ollie) J. Hady, follows her, learns that she is driving a pale yellow Jaguar, and writes down her license plate number.

Marlowe concentrates on Hicks. He now has one missing person and two murders, both by ice pick, and an alarming trend to consider. In Hicks’s toupee, Marlowe finds a claim ticket for Benson’s Camera Shop. Suspecting that a claim ticket hidden in a toupee has to be important (why else would it be hidden in a toupee?), Marlowe mails it to himself from a mailbox in the lobby of the Alvarado Hotel. He counts Hicks’s cash, a substantial sum, and leaves everything else as is.

The film cuts to the police investigation of the Hicks murder scene. Marlowe called the homicide detectives, and among them are Lieutenant Christy French and Sergeant Fred Beifus. They are well acquainted with Marlowe, and Christy grills him about what he knows, but they decide finally to let Marlowe and Hady go. Marlowe catches up with Hady because he wants to know what happened to Hicks’s money; the sum noted by the police detectives didn’t match Marlowe’s count. Hady pocketed over $100, but he refuses to give it up until Marlowe threatens to turn him in. But Marlowe gives it back, bill by bill, when Hady provides one piece of information after another that he has on the woman who escaped: what she was wearing, the car she drove, the license plate number, and so on.

Marlowe uses the information from Hady to find Mavis Wald, a very popular television actress, and her address. When Marlowe gets to Mavis’s penthouse apartment, he finds Dolores Gonzáles, a friend of Mavis’s. Mavis refuses to talk, and when Marlowe leaves the apartment building, Sonny Steelgrave is waiting outside. Three of Steelgrave’s henchmen beat Marlowe and rip his favorite suit jacket when he refuses to hand over the photos.

When Marlowe returns to his office, Winslow Wong (played by Bruce Lee in his first role in an American film) pays him a visit. The first thing Wong does is kick a hole in the wall between Marlowe’s office and the Woodbridge College of Cosmetology, Hair Styling next door. Then he kicks the glass lighting fixture into shards. Chuck and his students rush in to Marlowe’s office to complain, but they leave when Marlowe says that he is just “redecorating.” Wong has a proposition (a bribe) for Marlowe, courtesy of his boss Steelgrave, but Marlowe refuses.

At this point in the film, viewers have met most of the main characters, but several plot twists and turns are still to come. As you can already guess, Marlowe is as complicated as any film noir, with several interconnecting characters and a detailed plot and subplots. I enjoyed following the story, and I enjoyed the subtle humor even more. Garner, as Marlowe, has a good sense of timing and delivers all his lines perfectly. The film lived up to all my expectations.

I had one complaint about the film, and it might be more a function of the DVD presentation than the film itself. The music on the soundtrack was great, but it was extraordinarily loud. I missed some lines of dialogue because they seemed to be overwhelmed by the music, and even when there wasn’t any music, they just weren’t loud enough. If the DVD had come with closed captioning or subtitles, I might not have noticed, but without either option, the lack of clarity for some the actors’ lines became obvious.

Reviewers writing about Marlowe when it was released in 1969 apparently weren’t very kind toward the film. I tried to read some reviews, starting with Roger Ebert’s, but Ebert got it all wrong so I stopped there. Everybody wants Marlowe to be Humphrey Bogart (or is it the other way around?), and I couldn’t disagree more. I agree that Humphrey Bogart was good in the role of Marlowe in The Big Sleep, but others can play Marlowe, too. I don’t want to see an actor playing Marlowe imitating Humphrey Bogart. The comparison between Bogart and every other actor who portrays Marlowe, perhaps inevitable, is unfair in so many ways.

Another complaint about the film’s contemporary reviewers is the tendency to reinforce the myth that the plots of Raymond Chandler’s novels and the films based on them do not make much sense. Supposedly no one can follow the plot of Chandler’s novels, and film viewers shouldn’t try either. Nothing could be further from the truth! Yes, there are a lot of characters to keep track of; yes, there are plots within plots within plots. But what’s the fun of solving a mystery if the answer is given to you at the outset? Isn’t it realistic to present a detective story, one that is told from the point of view of the detective, the way he or she experiences it: with a puzzle that is missing a lot of pieces because someone, maybe more than one person, doesn’t want anyone knowing the details?

Click here for my blog post about The Big Sleep, which includes some discussion about the plot of that film. The Big Sleep is based on Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name.

Please don’t let comparisons between leading actors and disparaging comments about Chandler’s plots prevent you from seeing Marlowe. Forget about Humphrey Bogart. Forget about Raymond Chandler. Enjoy Marlowe on its own terms. I enjoyed Marlowe enough to see it twice.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945)

August 17, 1945, release date

Directed by Robert Siodmak

Screenplay by Stephen Longstreet

Based on the play Uncle Harry by Thomas Job

Music by H. J. Salter

Edited by Arthur Hilton

Cinematography by Paul Ivano

George Sanders as Harry Melville Quincey

Geraldine Fitzgerald as Lettie Quincey

Ella Raines as Deborah Brown

Sara Allgood as Nona

Moyna Macgill as Hester Quincey

Samuel S. Hinds as Dr. Adams

Harry von Zell as Ben

Judy Clark as Helen

Coulter F. Irwin as Biff Wagner

Craig Reynolds as John Warren

Dawn Bender as Joan Warren, John’s daughter

Ethel Griffies as Mrs. Nelson

Will Wright as Mr. Nelson

Rodney Bell as Joe

Barbara Pepper as Annie

Walter Soderling as Judd Jessup

Distributed by Universal Pictures

Produced by Charles K. Feldman Group

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry lives up to its name: It is a strange little film—and I mean that in a good way! Even its ending is bit odd, and I give nothing away here by describing it. The ending starts off like so many other film endings. The screen shows the same art deco background that was behind the opening credits, with type that one would expect, especially in a classic film from 1946:

THE END

A Universal Release

Then the following type appears over that:

In order that your friends

may enjoy this picture,

please do not disclose

the ending.

So you won’t find any spoilers in this blog post. Plot surprises are part of the fun of watching films, and I can’t ignore a request like this one at the end of The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry because almost all the twists and turns took me by surprise.

Other films that warn viewers about spoilers are Les diaboliques (1955) and, I believe, Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). If you know of more films or can confirm my belief about Psycho, please leave a comment.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry starts with a long shot of a town in the distance, and a voice-over narrator tells viewers that they’re looking at Corinth, a small town in New England. He’s from the town, but viewers have no idea who he is and he never identifies himself. He does say this: “The folks that live here, well, we’re people like yourselves.” He shows off the statue of General Melville Quincey in the town square and then describes how the Quinceys lost most of their money in the Great Depression. Then he talks about the Warren Mill and adds this: “Harry Quincey worked there, day in, day out.” And then viewers are left on their own, so to speak.

I guess viewers can assume that the narrator is probably not Harry Quincey, although in a film like this one, we can never be too sure. The narrator uses the past tense: Is this an older Harry Quincey telling his story? I guess the only thing we can be sure of is that the story is already in the past, already being told around town.

John Warren is the owner of the Warren Mill, but his purpose seems only to be romantic competition for Harry Quincey. Harry is a bachelor who lives with his sisters Hester and Lettie, and he supports them with his work designing fabrics for the mill. He is working at his desk when he is interrupted by Annie. She has come to tell him that she is engaged to be married, which makes him feel old and left out. Right after she leaves his office, Deborah Brown, the new designer from New York City, arrives with John Warren and seemingly with a plan to solve Harry’s problem. Deborah takes a liking to Harry immediately. She wants to hear about his work and she enjoys his sense of humor.

In the next scene, Deborah and Harry are on a date at a women’s league softball game. John Warren is there, and he calls Deborah to join him and his daughter Joan in their front row seats. Harry goes down to the front row seats with Deborah, but there isn’t enough room for him, and he is forced to sit one row behind, holding onto his and Deborah’s cotton candy. The shot of his face between the two fluffs of cotton candy is a successful bit of comic relief; it is also a way to show that Harry isn’t the one who will instigate much of the action.

John Warren and his mill can’t stand in Deborah’s way, however. John Warren takes Deborah home after the softball game, but his daughter Joan is in the front seat with them and—even more important—Harry is in the backseat. Harry gets out of the car with Deborah in front of her hotel, so he gets the alone time with her. She wants to stargaze, and he invites her to his renovated carriage house behind the family home to use the telescope that he built himself.

Hester, Harry’s sister, sees them from the house, and she is just thrilled that Harry has a date. When she runs to Lettie’s room to tell her, Lettie seems a bit edgy about the news. After a few months, during which Lettie has the chance to sharpen her line of attack, Deborah comes to the Quincey house for the first time to meet the sisters. Lettie has some pointed advice for her:

• Lettie: “We feel we know what’s best for Harry. Deborah, I hope you won’t misunderstand if I, if I give you a little advice.”

• Deborah: “I shan’t misunderstand, Lettie.”

• Lettie: “We Quinceys have lived a great many years in Corinth. And our name is rather well known here. It’s ridiculous, of course, but, but there it is. So we have to be rather careful how we conduct ourselves. If you know what a small town is.”

• Deborah: “Yes, I do. I picked one to be born in.”

• Lettie: “Well, then. Now, please don’t think I intend anything personal by this. People here are set in their ways, ordinary minded. And a newcomer among us needs to be especially careful. Now, don’t think that this is my point of view, but people do talk. And if, for instance, Harry were to be observed leaving your hotel late at night, it might be misinterpreted. Mightn’t it?”

• Deborah: “Yes. I suppose it might.”

• Lettie: “Well, then, that’s settled. I’m so glad we had this little talk. You’re such a sensible girl. I’m sure we’re going to be very good friends now that we understand each other.”

• Deborah: “We understand each other. But if Harry wishes to stop by my hotel at any time, I’ll always be glad to see him.”

Deborah sees right through Lettie and Lettie’s barely concealed desire to exclude her. Lettie does care about her family name and even more so about her brother. She is the femme fatale in The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry and she may not be ordinary minded, but she is set in her ways and she is very possessive of her brother.

Deborah and Harry work around romantic obstacles and agree to marry. Harry arrives home and announces his engagement. Lettie and Hester will move out of the family home so that Harry and Deborah can move in. Lettie doesn’t object outright, but she starts her own campaign of stonewalling that eventually wears out Deborah’s patience. When Lettie gets sick at church one Sunday, she’s taken away in an ambulance. Deborah and Harry were to leave for New York City to be married that night. Deborah gives Harry an ultimatum: Choose between her and Lettie. Harry can’t leave Lettie behind when she might be seriously ill, or that’s what he is afraid of. He seems to be the only one who cannot see that Lettie has been faking her various illnesses for years.

After Deborah’s departure, Harry finds a bottle of poison in a desk drawer in the living room and learns that Lettie bought it when they thought their dog would have to be put down. Harry sneaks it into his pocket and takes it with him to the carriage house. He sits in a chair and holds the bottle of poison in front of him. In a wonderful shot, the camera moves in on the bottle as Harry contemplates what to do with it. Lettie shows up outside the carriage house, and Harry, standing now at his telescope, invites her inside to join him. She gladly accepts. Their conversation in the carriage house is chilling:

• Harry: “You know, Lettie, when you look up at the stars, you feel awfully small. Our problems seem so petty against all that space on space out there. We are mere drops of nothing compared to a sun with a hundred million miles for a backyard. So why do we torture ourselves trying to discover what’s good and what’s evil? What’s right and what’s wrong? So unimportant.”

• Lettie: “Yes, Harry. We understand each other.”

• Harry: “Yes, we do. . . .”

One surprise after another follows this point in the film. The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry is barely eighty minutes long, but it manages to incorporate all sorts of themes about domestic happiness and the lack of ordinariness in an ordinary small town. The back of the DVD cover from Olive Films calls it a film noir; Wikipedia calls it a film noir drama. I wasn’t so sure that it was film noir the first time that I saw it, but I could really appreciate the film’s dark moments on second viewing. From what I have read, the play on which it is based, Uncle Harry, is bleak compared to the film. Several details of the play were apparently changed so that the film version of the story would satisfy the Motion Picture Production Code. I haven’t read the play, and maybe it is more noir than the film.

But there’s no doubt that The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry is a fun noir with some really dark moments. George Sanders is fantastic in the role of Harry Quincey. He captures all the nuances of Harry’s romantic dilemmas and desperation. Ella Raines does the same with her character, Deborah Brown. But Geraldine Fitzgerald really shines in the role of Lettie. Lettie is not a typical femme fatale, but The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry is not a typical film noir. Lettie uses illness, not sex, to manipulate her brother into giving her what she wants. And she certainly knows all the tricks of manipulation. The film showcases what she is capable of.