"Farewell, My Lovely," gets all of this just right (Angelo Graham's art direction is a triumph) and then places Mitchum's Marlowe in the center of it and leads him through one of Chandler's tortuous plots. Although everything does finally tie together in this one (as it never did in Chandler's labyrinthine "The Big Sleep"), it doesn't matter that much. What's important is the gallery of characters Marlowe encounters, each grotesque and beautiful in his own way.
The most touching is Moose Malloy, played by an ex-prizefighter named Jack O'Halloran. Moose towers over everyone in the film. Both in stature and in the immensity of his need. Seven years ago he fell in love with a hooker named Velma and they were going to be married, but something went wrong during a bank job, and Moose took the rap. When he gets out of prison, he hires Marlowe to find his Velma.
Marlowe's quest for Velma, a faded memory from a hopeless love affair, leads him, as we might have known, into a case a lot larger and more important than he could have suspected. There is an odyssey through a lurid whorehouse and a killing in a ghetto bar, and a midnight rendezvous that ends in another death and always there is Lt. Nulty, of the L.A.P.D., trying to figure out why Marlowe winds up attached to so many dead bodies.
Richard's approach, with screenplay by David Zelag Goodman, is to start the story at the end with Marlowe trying to explain things to Nulty and then flash back to the beginning and let Marlowe elaborate on the story voiceover. It is a strategy that is often distracting in movies. But not this time, because it borrows from Chandler's own first-person narrative. And it gives great one-liners, as when the elusive Velma (Charlotte Rampling) sizes Marlowe up and down and he says, "She threw me a look I caught in my hip pocket."
"Farewell, My Lovely" is a great entertainment and a celebration of Robert Mitchum's absolute originality. It also announces the arrival of Richards as a promising new American director. His "Culpepper Cattle Company" and the the last half-hour of the otherwise uncertain "Rafferty And The Golddust Twins" had an interesting way of seeing things, and now here is a totally assured piece of work. The day after I saw it, I found myself describing lines in scenes to friends, which is always the test in these cases, because most of the time private-eye stories have no meaning at all unless it is in the way their heroes behave in the face of the most unsettling revelations about human nature. This time Philip Marlowe behaves very well.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46fmKudp5q5rXnMsmSlp6aaubp5kHJubg%3D%3D