Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: The Long Goodbye

From: Anders Engwall ( anders.engwall@comhem.se)
Date: 11 Feb 2007


Terrill Lankford wrote:

> And it is important to note that most of the differences between the book and
the movie
> predate Altman's involvement and originate with Brackett's script - including
the notorious
> ending.

This thread made me reread Brackett's own writing on the subject ("From the Big Sleep to the Long Goodbye", reprinted in The Big Book of Noir). Turns out that Brian Hutton (WHERE EAGLES DARE, KELLY'S HEROES) was the director initially assigned, and Altman was only brought in when Hutton become busy elsewhere
(presumably with something called NIGHT WATCH, starring Elizabeth Taylor).

Anyhow, Brackett's essay is very convincing about why the script turned out the way it did. The way she tells it, it seems it was almost inevitable. Recommended.

And get this:

"Twenty-five years had gone by since THE BIG SLEEP. In that quarter-century, legions of private eyes had been beaten up in innumerable alleys by armies of interchangeable hoods. Everything that was fresh and exciting abouth Philip Marlowe in the forties had become cliché, outworn by imitation and overuse. The tough loner with the sardonic tongue and the cast-iron gut had become a caricature.
  Also, in twenty-five years, the idiom had changed.
  By Chandler's own definition, Marlowe was a fantasy, not a real man in a real world. He existed only in the context of the Raymond Chandler world especially invented for him, with its stylized corruptions, its stylized characters who represented attitudes, not people, its stylized orchestrations of violence. Take away that context, and who is Marlowe?
  Time had removed the context. The Los Angeles upon which Chandler based his literary world is as dead as Babylon."



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