RARA-AVIS: Re: The Long Goodbye

From: jimdohertyjr ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 11 Feb 2007


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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