Brian,
Re your questions and comments below:
"Jim, could you give us a source on that quote of Altman?
I've never heard it anywhere else."
Dave Zeltzerman asked the same question last February.
At that time I was able to provide the following
link:
http://www.moviejustice.com/vault/index.php?
p=getitem&db_id=4&item_id=543
Unfortunately, the sight is currenly undergoing some
refurbishing and the link no longer works. However, if you
will go to this link to the original message:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/message/8685
and follow the ensuing thread from there, you'll see, from
the responses that Dave and others gave, that it did work at
the time.
The full quote of Altman's is, "I see Marlowe the way
Chandler saw him, a loser. But a real loser, not the fake
winner that Chandler made out of him. A loser all the
way."
Since Chandler did NOT see Marlowe as a loser, Altman's
vision of the character is clearly, and deliberately, at odds
with the creator's vision of the character.
"You know, one guy's 'best man in his world' is another guy's
'loser.' That's literature for you."
This isn't a question of a difference in interpretation.
Altman's Marlowe is, simply, a wholly different character
than Chandler's. For all the faults of many of the other film
versions, this is NOT true of Powell's depiction, of
Bogart's, of either Robert or George Montgomery's, of James
Garner's, or of Robert Mitchum's. It's only true of Gould's.
One may kvetch about how close they came, or how good the
resulting films were, but no one can say that their
characterizations were deliberately at odds with the
creator's vision of the role.
>He transformed Marlowe into an ineffectual
nebbish,
>and this was certainly his intention. So he
was
>successful at what he was trying to do.
"As for your statement that Altman transformed Marlowe into
an 'ineffectual nebbish,' like I said, the hippy-dippy mantra
notwithstanding, what does/doesn't Marlowe accomplish in the
book/movie?Let's see: He helps Lennox skip town in
both."
That involved getting behind the wheel of a car and driving.
Big deal.
"He goes to jail for days and days rather than give up his
friend in both."
Chandler's Marlowe stayed in jail as an act of defiance.
Gould's as an act of acquiesence. Like almost everything else
he does in the movie is an act of acquiesence.
"He helps Roger Wade get out of the quack's drunk-tank in
both."
The quack was a much more formidable figure in the book and
getting him out took a good deal more moxie. How formidable a
figure is Henry Gibson?
"Menendez is far more menacing in the movie than in the book,
and yet Marlowe succeeds in keeping his hide intact in his
run-ins with that guy and his crew (and the scene with the
flat Coke in the green bottle in the movie IS
hilarious.)"
That's a scene that proves my point more than anything. Can
you really imagine Chandler's Marlowe sitting around and
doing nothing while a helpless woman's ose is broken by a
bullying thug? In the book, Marlowe stood up to Menendez, and
Menendez cae out second best in a punch-up. Marty Augustine,
Menendez's counterpart in the film, isn't any more menacing
than Menendez. It's just that he SEEMS more menacing
precisely because Marlowe is such an ineffectual
nebbish.
"Let's take it one step further: look at the ending. Altman
updated it, Lennox doesn't get away with murder
(because Marlowe shoots him after tracking him down in
Mexico), as opposed to Chandler's ending where Marlowe
actually talks to Lennox and doesn't do anything to stop him
from getting away with the perfect crime. So who's the
ineffectual nebbish? How is letting Lennox get away with
(which I thought was a brilliant touch in the novel) BETTER,
less nebbishy than tracking the guy down in his new digs in
Mexico, and shooting him down like a dog? How is that last
bit the act of an
'ineffectual nebbish?'"
So Marlowe shoots down an unarmed man? And this seems more in
keeping with Chandler's character?
To be fair, I can, as I've said on other occasions, see a
situation where Marlowe shooting down Lennox might've seemed
like a more satisfying ending than what Chandler did in the
book. But there would have had to have been some
foreshadowing, some suggestion that Marlowe cared enough
about justice to want to bring it about.
There's simply nothing like that in the film. Marlowe
continually gets pushed around by everyone, the cops and the
hoods, and the closest thing to a protest is his continual
mantra, "It's okay by me." He's like the Neville Chamberlain
of private eyes, hoping that by appeasement and acquiesence,
he can stave off the violence that threatens.
Then, somehow at the end, he decides that "something must be
done" and takes violent action against practically the only
person in the movie who's NOT a personal threat to his
safety.
What a guy.
Further, his final dispatching of Lennox seems to me to be
less because he's concerned about Lennox being unpunished for
the murders, than because he's pissed off at Lennox's
betrayal of their friendship, hardly a capital crime.
No, there's nothing about the way that Altman ends the film
that redeems it.
"It seems to me that your problem is with the presentation,
rather than with Altman's plot, which over all, is incredibly
faithful to Chandler's book."
I never said it wasn't. It's precisely the presentation that
makes me despise the film. AIRPLANE is, plotwise, very
faithful to its source material, Arthur Hailey's RUNWAY
ZERO-EIGHT, but it's hardly a faithful presentation of the
story. It's a parody. It evokes a completely different
reaction precisely because of its entirely different
presentation.
"Just because Chandler might not have liked it, that's no
reason not to do it."
Here's where I most disagree. I think an adapter has an
obligation to be true, to the degree that the medium allows
him to be, to the source material. If he has no respect for
the source material, then he has no business adapting
it.
"Jeeze Jim, since when is watching a film a moral decision?
In the aggregate I still agree with you in overall disliking
the film. As I said I think it meanders too much in act II,
and some of the scenes feel slapped-together."
MAKING a film is, in a certain sense, a moral decision. And
adapting a novel just so you can trash it is an immoral
decision.
"That said, it's *art*. Some of the best art ever made has
been considered 'immoral' by would-be censors."
I'm not talking about censorship. I'm talking about being
true to the source material. I think that IS a moral
obligation, and I think Altman, very deliberately, failed to
meet it.
This is an old discussion, and I won't dredge up every point
I've made on earlier occasions, but you can find my comments
about this in the archives.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 12 Nov 2007 EST