----- Original Message ----- From: jimdohertyjr To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com Sent: 2/11/2007 6:28:26 PM
Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: The Long Goodbye
> 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!
He kills a man who has brutally beaten his wife to death,
escaped to Mexico and made Marlowe his fall guy. He kills a
man who would certainly kill him if Marlowe tried to drag him
back across the border to civilized justice. Marlowe's
disgust when he says he saw the photos of the murder scene
and Sylvia's condition tells us all we have to know about
where his heart is. And just because Marlowe doesn't allow
Terry to fire first, like Bogart does with Canino (who he
pretty much sets up to be tricked and slaughtered), doesn't
mean he has made a huge leap away from Chandler's creation.
It just means the story is taking place in a modern world for
the time the movie was made.
>
> 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.
You sir, are very easily entertained.
> [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
Perhaps. But in the 70s that would mean he'd have to be dead
by the third or fourth reel. It would be a little hard to
believe that Marlowe could "push back" against five or six
thugs and survive. Especially if one of them was the
Terminator. And most of us knew he was speaking ironically
from the very beginning. The bullet was just an exclamation
mark. One that I would think would guarantee clarification
for the few confused stragglers out there who hadn't gotten
it yet.
TL
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