Terrill,
Re your comment below:
> And while you may hate the movie, Altman, and
perhaps even cats, I
don't think you can honestly make a claim that he defecated
on you or your expectations since he didn't know you at the
time.
He wouldn't have had to know me to have had a pretty good
idea what Chandler fans would expect. And he deliberately
didn't measure up to thos expectations.
> He's says he is at the end of the movie. He even
says that he lost
his cat.
Marlowe doesn't say he's a loser. Gould's heretical
characterization of Marlowe says he's a loser. Marlowe isn't
a loser. The character in the movie was. That's why the movie
is wrong.
> But he still gets the last shot in. Isn't that good
for something?
He commits a murder. You're right. That's absolutely true to
Chandler's character. NOT!
> Now you're talking crazy talk. The only thing that
movie has going
for it is the first scene with Bruce Lee. (The second scene
is incredibly stupid.)
Not at all. It's truer to Chandler, far more faithful to the
novel down to many of the lines of dialog, and features the
bronze medalist
(after Powell's gold and Bogart's silver) in the Marlowe
Olympics, to say nothing of the actor who, physically,
probably comes closest to Marlowe's conception.
> That movie is good evidence that Altman was
right.
>
> It's tolerable, but pedestrian.
It's evidence that Altman was wrong. It's highly entertaining
and unpretentious.
> [It's OK with me] may be [Marlowe's] mantra through
most of the
film, but by the end I think we all understand that it WASN'T
okay with him.
If it takes 'til the end before we realize that he was
speaking ironically, then he's not very good at irony (unlike
Chandler's Marlowe). Chandler's Marlowe, the Marlowe Altman
was obliged to put on the screen but didn't, wouldn't have
let himself get pushed around the way Gould's Marlowe
did.
JIM DOHERTY
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