The Talkies

...To show just how sentimental a character Marlowe really was, Altman set The Long Goodbye in the 1970s, where whatever virtues the private eye possessed seemed anachronistic and foolish—as they had been all along, anyway...

...What nearly saves Farewell, My Lovely from all these contrivances is the casting of Robert Mitchum as Marlowe...

...The title itself is an unintentionally ironic farewell to Mitchum-as-tough-guy, to the movie Marlowe and all his faded cinematic glory, to the novels of Raymond Chandler, and to the private-eye film...

...Likewise, Marlowe's loyal friend (another character not found in the novel) turns out to be a newsboy—not a cripple, fortunately, but something almost as hackneyed: a has-been prizefighter...

...Hollywood heroes, and antiheroes, have contributed significantly to the national idiom...

...For example, the latest movie Marlowe (Robert Mitchum) gets the inspiration to continue his investigation from a young black boy (significantly, a character not found in the original Chandler novel) whose father was murdered—a piece of Hollywood sentimentality that even audiences of an earlier era would have derided...

...and Hollywood had proved adept at catering to the audience's need for a fantasy figure at either level: a strong silent type who could ward off Indian attacks, or a cynical outsider who could plumb the murky depths of the underworld but still maintain, in spite of his alienation, a personal—and romantic—code of honor...

...But the crucial difference between the two lies precisely in the updating: The private eye is the archetypal modern figure, the antihero lost in the wasteland of the big city...

...As if in reaction to that film, the latest adaptation of yet another Raymond Chandler novel, Farewell, My Lovely, is deliberately staged back in the 1940s—complete with well-preserved autos, period clothing and hairdos, and throwaway remarks about DiMaggio, Hitler, and Eleanor Roosevelt...

...Twenty or even ten years ago Mitchum would have been fit to play this tough-guy role with contemptuous ease...

...but like the old cars, they are just empty mechanisms...

...To judge from the hostile reaction of audiences and critics, many people were upset by Altman's deft parody of the conventions of the private-eye movie...

...and the time has come when the hardboiled detective should follow the lonesome cowboy into a cinematic sunset...

...unfortunately, it succeeds only as a sagging tribute to a tired cinematic genre, propped up by a sagging, bur still powerful, actor...

...A couple of years ago, Robert Altman made a movie of Raymond Chandler's novel The Long Goodbye, starring Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe, the detective character that Bogart had made famous thirty years ago in The Big Sleep...

...Gould's portrayal of Marlowe, particularly, was seen as a betrayal by those fans who had elevated Bogart's Marlowe into a veritable icon of popular culture...

...Substitute a .38 police special for a Colt .45 and a slouch hat and trenchcoat for a Stetson and buckskins, and Humphrey Bogart might be playing much the same character as John Wayne...

...However, the private-eye movie is not free from its own kind of romantic foolishness...

...The antiheroes of our adolescence are perhaps more difficult to give up than the heroes of our childhood, but the artificial perpetuation of artificial myths serves no one but those who profit from the marketing of phony nostalgia...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 23...

...and the transformation of character from the rugged individualist facing the Opening of the West to the alienated outsider in the underworld of crime helps to explain the attraction which movie audiences have felt for the hardboiled detective...

...by Robert Asahina Although the lonesome cowboy has been for some time an object of derision or nostalgia or parody (or even self-parody, as with John Wayne), the hardboiled detective has remained a peculiarly evocative screen figure for successive generations of movie audiences since the 1940s...

...and it is our shared recognition of his seeming inappropriateness for the role that gives Mitchum the ironic edge to cut through the self-conscious treacle of the rest of the production...

...But what those outraged audiences missed, or blinded themselves to, was precisely what Altman had recognized: that the hardboiled detective was just as much a Hollywood fake as the lonesome cowboy...

...Farewell, My Lovely therefore seems like a desperate rearguard action to save the private-eye movie from parody and, ultimately, derision...

...The fundamental premise of the private-eye movie was, and is, the very same cynicism which proved to be the undoing of the old Hollywood Western: The larger-than-life virtues which had made the cowboy ride so tall in the saddle were eventually scorned as mere Hollywood trappings...

...that his tarnished cynical armor was just so much tinsel, especially since it covered that same old Hollywood heart of gold...

...At first, Mitchum would seem to be entirely wrong for the role...

...has become an anachronism...

...Phony nostalgia only cheapens their memory...

...For one thing, he's simply too old: What used to be his chest is now barely contained by his belt, andthe deep lines in his face terminate in the jowly pouch that used to be his neck...

...Worse yet is the casting of Charlotte Rampling as the female lead—a deliberate and bungling attempt to exploit her physical resemblance to Lauren Bacall, who had played opposite Bogart in The Big Sleep...

...And when Mitchum begins the movie with the words, "It was this past spring that I finally realized I was getting tired, and growing old," we realize why he can succeed in the role: Mitchum himself, like Marlowe and like the entire private-eye genre...

...The cowboy may have been a child's idea of a hero, but the private eye, as Farewell, My Lovely Pauline Kael has noted, was surely an adolescent's idea of an antihero...

...Mitchum has never been a great actor, but he always has been a powerful one, bringing an immense physical presence to the screen: The insolent dangling cigarette, the casual slouch, and the heavy, hooded eyelids are his trademarks that suggest vast animal power kept smoldering under his surface...

...But at the age of 58, he would seem to be as unsuited to play Philip Marlowe as John Wayne is to play the marshal in yet another Western...

...In many respects, of course, the private eye is merely an updated version of his Western counterpart...

...The only purpose these clumsy contrivances serve is to evoke a phony nostalgia...

...But Mitchum does not indulge in the pathetic self-parody that Wayne and other old Western stars have in recent years...

...The idea obviously is to evoke the feeling of the 1940s, and especially the feeling of the movies of that decade—as if the reawakened sentiments of the audience could breathe new life into the tired conventions of the private-eye movie...

...Whatever the intent, Farewell, My Lovely shows just how flabby the hard-boiled detective has become in thirty years...

...and the movies have played a much larger part in the shared fantasy life of supposedly sophisticated audiences than they are willing to admit to themselves...

...but audiences too cynical to accept white-hatted heroes were all too ready to respond to trenchcoated antiheroes...