Terrill,
Re your comments below:
> And I believe you are. Sorry Jim, but I think your
thinking is very
one dimensional on this subject and your statements seem very
clear on the matter. No need to backpeddle now. You think
losers are losers. And it's a bad thing.
Beck-pedalling? I'm not back-pedalling at all. I've never
back- pedalled. The question isn't what Altman thinks about
losers, or what I think about losers, but whether or not
Chandler thinks Marlowe's a loser (and he doesn't) and
whether or not Altman's depiction of Marlowe as a loser when
he isn't is a betrayal (and it is).
>But Altman, thriving in the 60s and 70s, looked at
history - and
what was going on in the present - and decided that the
winners were not always in the right. And that small
victories were occasionally to be enjoyed by the losers - who
also would then manage to look themselves in the mirror in
the morning because they stayed true to their convictions, no
matter what the cost to them personally. It is in this spirit
that I believe his version of Marlowe was born.
Fine. That's Altman's view of losers. So what? It's not
Chandler's view of Marlowe, and Chandler's view of Marlowe is
the version that Altman was obliged to put on the screen, to
the best of his ability, and he failed in that obligation. If
he felt such hostility and contempt for the kind of character
Marlowe was, he shouldn't have made the movie. Which is what
I've said all along. So where am I back-pedalling?
> And, as others have said, I don't think he was far
from Chandler's
vision.
Marlowe, as portrayed by Gould, certainly was anything but a
man fit for adventure, a hero, everything. And by being the
antithesis of the kind of protagonist Chandler described, he
was about as far from Chandler's vision as a character can
get and still be called Philip Marlowe.
> That's an extremely debatable opinion as
well.
>
> I don't see Marlowe kicking his heels in joy at the
end of most of
Chandler's stories.
Maybe not. But he IS a man who keeps his self-respect and his
pride. He IS a "suffers no man's insolence without a due and
dispassionate revenge." When the mob figure in the novel did
nothing more than call Marlowe "cheapie," Marlowe punched him
out. When the counterpart character in the film broke his
mistress's nose with a Coke bottle, Gould just looked
horrified and barely uttered a word of protest. Gould spends
virtually the whole movie suffering the insolence of just
about every other character in the film, and the closest he
comes to a due and dispassionate revenge is murdering an
unarmed man at the end.
Get used to it, Terrill. Chandler's Marlowe is a round hole,
and there's just no way you'll get the round peg that is
Gould's characterization to fit, and certainly no way you'll
ever convince me that you have.
> I think the last scene of THE SEVEN SAMURAI sums up
the knight
errant philosophy perfectly. Two samurai look at the
villagers they have saved, who are now enjoying their freedom
from the bandits who oppressed them, then they look on the
hill where four of their dead comrades are buried and one of
them remarks that despite winning the overall battle, the
villagers are the only winners here. The samurai are,
ultimately, the losers. They lost their comrades and now must
leave the village because they are not fit to live among the
normal citizens. It would be intolerable for both the
classes. They are, ultimately, alone in the world.
>
> And so is Marlowe.
You're really stretching if you think Gould's
characterization is in any way comparable to the supremely
competent warriors in either Kurasawa's original film or John
Struges's remake.
They're alone in the world because they've chosen to be
warriors. So has Chandler's Marlowe. Altman's Marlowe has
chosen to be a nebbish.
JIM DOHERTY
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