I got to watch this film adaption of the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel for my film class. It’s #169 on the IMDb Top 250, and I am still unsure about how I feel about it.
The film comes just 4 years after the Humphrey Bogart masterpiece, Casablanca, and 5 years after my personal favorite of his work, The Maltese Falcon. When the credits began rolling, I saw that the screenplay was written by the famous American writer William Faulkner.
So it started off on a good note. Plus I had just finished the book. So I had high expectations.
The film stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, as Bogart’s character (Philip Marlowe) unravels a mystery about Bacall’s (Vivian Rutledge) family. Vivian is part of the Sternwood family, a wealthy family headed by the patriarch of General Sternwood. He originally hires Marlowe because a man named Geiger is blackmailing the younger of the two daughters, Carmen Sternwood. Oh right, she’s crazy.
She’s young, sexy, and wild. She basically sleeps around and gets into a lot of trouble. So General Sternwood hires Marlowe, without having a clue what any of this is about. Turns out, Geiger is just the beginning of a huge mess of blackmail, pornography, and gambling problems that Carmen comes into contact with on a daily basis. In an early scene, she gets drugged and poses for pornographic pictures for a business that Geiger runs. She’s really messed up.
But aside from Carmen’s mess, Marlowe actually begins uncovering an even bigger mystery about the disappearance of Vivian’s husband, Rusty Rutledge. For some reason he’s Rusty Regan in the book, but yeah. So the book is actually a combination of two of Raymond Chandler’s detective stories, which is why Wikipedia refers to the plot as “unusually complex.” And it really is. Vivian is an avid gambler, Carmen is a slut, and Marlowe spends all of his time trying to uncover a world of lies and murders that the girls have set up. I can’t say I loved the movie, but I definitely respect it for being hard for the viewer to figure out. Although I couldn’t imagine seeing it without reading the book.
One thing I didn’t appreciate was that the movie has a different ending than the book. The book is a classic detective story, but the movie strays a little closer to the “film noir” style, keeping common tropes that the style is known for (such as a femme fatale for the main character to fall in love with in the end). I can’t say much else against the movie, but for what the book gave it, the film took a complicated plot and made it enjoyable.
No comments:
Post a Comment