Farewell, My Lovely | |
---|---|
Directed by | Dick Richards |
Screenplay by | David Zelag Goodman |
Based on | Farewell, My Lovely 1940 novel by Raymond Chandler |
Produced by | Elliott Kastner Jerry Bruckheimer George Pappas |
Starring | Robert Mitchum Charlotte Rampling John Ireland Sylvia Miles Anthony Zerbe |
Cinematography | John A. Alonzo |
Edited by | Joel Cox Walter Thompson |
Music by | David Shire |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Avco Embassy Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 95 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $2.5 million [1] |
Box office | $2 million [2] |
Farewell, My Lovely is a 1975 American neo-noir [3] crime thriller film directed by Dick Richards and featuring Robert Mitchum as private detective Philip Marlowe. The picture is based on Raymond Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely (1940), which had previously been adapted for film as Murder, My Sweet in 1944. [4] The supporting cast features Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Jack O'Halloran, Sylvia Miles, Harry Dean Stanton, Joe Spinell, Sylvester Stallone and hardcore crime novelist Jim Thompson, in his only acting role, as Charlotte Rampling's character's elderly husband Judge Grayle. Mitchum returned to the role of Marlowe three years later in the 1978 film The Big Sleep , making him the only actor to portray the character more than once in a feature film.
In 1941 Los Angeles, private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by just-paroled bank robber Moose Malloy to find his old girlfriend Velma, whom he has not seen in seven years while he has been in prison. Malloy goes to ground after killing the new owner of the nightclub where Velma used to work. Using a photo supplied by Velma's old nightclub friend Tommy Ray, Marlowe traces her to an insane asylum but when he breaks the news to Malloy, he discovers that the photo supposedly of Velma was really of a different woman.
Meanwhile, a man named Marriott hires Marlowe to accompany him to a rendezvous where he is to pay $15,000 ransom for the return of a valuable fei tsui jade necklace stolen from an unnamed female friend. At the location of the pay-off, Marlowe is knocked unconscious by an unseen assailant and when he recovers, the police are at the scene and Marriott has been killed. At the police station Marlowe is told that Malloy has fled to Mexico and is warned to stop looking for Velma.
Deciding to investigate Marriott's death, Marlowe is given a lead on a collector of fei tsui jade named Baxter Grayle, who is a judge and a powerful figure in Los Angeles. At Grayle's mansion he meets Grayle and his wife, the younger and seductive Helen. Helen wants to know who killed Marriott, whom she had known for years, and hires Marlowe to find out. Marlowe is abducted and brought to the brothel operated by Frances Amthor, a notorious madam. Amthor mentions Malloy, then beats and drugs Marlowe. After waking from his drug-induced stupor and discovering the body of Tommy Ray, Marlowe overpowers a guard and confronts Amthor, but she is uncooperative. Jonnie, an employee of Amthor, shoots her when she beats one of her girls, and Marlowe flees to his friend Georgie's house.
Later Helen telephones Marlowe and arranges to meet him at a party later that night. At the party, Marlowe meets underworld figure Laird Brunette, who pays Marlowe $2,000 to arrange a meeting with Malloy. Later Marlowe meets Velma's old nightclub friend Jessie Florian, who says Velma has contacted her and wants to contact Malloy. Marlowe meets with Malloy at Georgie's house, where Velma telephones and arranges to meet him. Marlowe drives him to the motel where Velma is supposedly waiting but instead they are ambushed by two gunmen, whom Marlowe kills in a shootout.
Marlowe and the police find Jessie Florian murdered. Marlowe suggests to his police friend Nulty that whoever used Florian to set up Malloy at the motel also got Tommy Ray to supply the fake photograph to send him off on a wild goose chase. Marlowe is convinced that Brunette knows what is going on, so he and Malloy sneak aboard Brunette's gambling boat and confront him. Helen appears and it is revealed she is Velma, a former prostitute under Amthor, who married Baxter Grayle without his knowing about her background. Velma has been working with Brunette to kill off anyone who knows her real identity. Velma shoots Malloy and in turn Marlowe shoots her. As Nulty and the police arrive, Marlowe leaves and returns to his hotel room. He decides to give the $2,000 that he had received from Brunette to Tommy Ray's widow and young son, both of whom he had met earlier.
Producer Elliot Kastner had made a series of films based on detective novels, including Harper and The Long Goodbye . The latter was a Philip Marlowe novel by Raymond Chandler and Kastner was keen to film other Chandler novels. He had a script done which was set in contemporary LA and showed it to director Dick Richards. Richards was interested in filming the book, but only if it was a period piece. [5]
Richards hired David Zelag Goodman to write the screenplay. They set the movie in 1941, so that they could stamp the film "with a time mark" by turning Marlowe into a baseball fan who followed Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak of that year. [5]
Sir Lew Grade had previously invested in Kastner's film Dogpound Shuffle . The producer approached him to invest in Farewell, My Lovely and Grade agreed, knowing the movie could be easily pre-sold to television. [6] The movie would be part of Grade's initial slate of ten feature films, including The Return of the Pink Panther , Man Friday and The Tamarind Seed. [7]
Mitchum later recalled:
The producer, Elliott Kastner, comes by with Sir Lew Grade, the British tycoon. He has a black suit, a black tie, a white shirt and a whiter face. 'I know nothing about motion pictures,' Sir Lew says. 'What I know is entertainment: Ferris wheels, pony rides.' I suggested we buy up the rights to Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell, re-release it and go to the beach. But, no, they hired a director, Dick Richards, so nervous he can't hold his legs still. They have all the hide rubbed off them. He started doing TV commercials. He was accustomed to, you know, start the camera, expose 120 feet of film and tell somebody to move the beer bottle half an inch clockwise. He does the same thing with people. [8]
According to Mitchum, Kastner originally wanted the role of Philip Marlowe to be played by Richard Burton, with whom Kastner had worked a number of times. However, Burton was busy so they approached Mitchum. (Richards says he was only ever interested in doing the film with Mitchum.) [5] [ dead link ]
Marlowe's client, Moose Malloy, is played by Jack O'Halloran, a former professional prizefighter. Mitchum called O'Halloran "one great find on this picture. At least, he's a find if we can ever find him again... They hired him for $500 a week. He looked perfect for the part. One time he hit the producer. One of the producers. We had seven of them. We called them the Magnificent Seven. Jack was swinging this poor bastard around his head like an Indian war club. I tried to explain to him: 'The guy can be talked to, Jack.' He shakes his head. 'Mitch,' he says, 'I was crying too hard.'" [8]
Mitchum says Charlotte Rampling "arrived with an odd entourage, two husbands or something. Or they were friends and she married one of them and he grew a mustache and butched up. She kept exercising her mouth like she was trying to swallow her ear. I played her on the right side because she had two great big blackheads on her left ear, and I was afraid they'd spring out and lodge on my lip." [8]
Mitchum later admitted, "This kid Richards, the director, he's got something. It'll be a good picture." [8]
An original motion picture vinyl soundtrack album composed by David Shire was released in 1975 by United Artists Records. The album contained 11 tracks. [9]
Track listing
The film was profitable. Television rights were subsequently sold to NBC for $1.2 million. [1] [10]
Critic Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, "These opening shots are so evocative of Raymond Chandler's immortal Marlowe, archtypical[ sic ] private eye, haunting the underbelly of Los Angeles, that if we're Chandler fans we hold our breath. Is the ambience going to be maintained, or will this be another campy rip-off? Half an hour into the movie, we relax. Farewell, My Lovely never steps wrong...in the genre itself there hasn't been anything this good since Hollywood was doing Philip Marlowe the first time around. One reason is that Dick Richards, the director, takes his material and character absolutely seriously. He is not uneasy with it, as Robert Altman was when he had Elliott Gould flirt with seriousness in The Long Goodbye . Richards doesn't hedge his bet." [11]
Gene Siskel gave the film three stars out of four and wrote that "if a remake of Farewell, My Lovely isn't something fresh—and following on the heels of Chinatown doesn't make it any fresher — at least the casting of Mitchum as Marlowe was inspired. Mitchum, the actor who makes nodding off seem glamorous, plays Marlowe with a delicious ease. He sounds just like Marlowe should sound." [12]
A review in Variety was more critical, calling it "a lethargic, vaguely campy tribute to Hollywood's private eye mellers of the 1940s and to writer Raymond Chandler, whose Philip Marlowe character has inspired a number of features. Despite an impressive production and some first rate performances, this third version fails to generate much suspense or excitement." [13]
Richard Eder of The New York Times described the film as "a handsome mediocrity" with an ending that "may produce some confusion," though he praised "the high quality of a lot of the acting". [14]
Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the score by David Shire and the casting of Mitchum as Marlowe both seemed "exactly right", but criticized the voice-over narrative, finding that "the effect undercuts the visual splendors and reveals the plot complications at their most preposterous. Too bad, because it breaks the fine mood Richards & Company establish and makes Farewell, My Lovely an interesting but mixed blessing instead of the unmitigated triumph it almost was." [15]
In a retrospective review, critic Dennis Schwartz expressed that actor Robert Mitchum was well-cast and wrote, "The film's success lies in Mitchum's hard-boiled portrayal of Marlowe, its twisty plot and the moody atmosphere it creates through John A. Alonzo's photography. Los Angeles looms as a nighttime playground for hoods, beautiful women and suckers ready to be taken by all the glitzy signs leading them astray." [16]
The film maintains a 68% film rating on Rotten Tomatoes, from 28 reviews. [17]
Nomination
The novel had been adapted for the screen twice before: in 1942, as The Falcon Takes Over directed by Irving Reis and featuring George Sanders as The Falcon in place of Philip Marlowe; [18] and in 1944, as Murder, My Sweet , featuring Dick Powell as Marlowe and directed by Edward Dmytryk. [19]
Mitchum played Marlowe again in 1978's The Big Sleep , becoming the only actor to play the character in two feature films. Instead of 1930s Los Angeles, the 1978 remake was set in then-present day and in England, with Marlowe reimagined as a middle-aged ex-pat. Grade financed this movie as well. [6]
Actors who played Marlowe in earlier movies include Dick Powell (1944), Humphrey Bogart (1946), Robert Montgomery (1947), George Montgomery (1947), James Garner (1969) and Elliott Gould (1973). After this 1975 film came Poodle Springs , a 1998 neo-noir HBO period film directed by Bob Rafelson, starring James Caan as Marlowe.
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime. All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler who was characteristic of the hardboiled crime fiction genre. The genre originated in the 1920s, notably in Black Mask magazine, in which Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op and Sam Spade first appeared. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas", starting in 1933.
Farewell, My Lovely is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1940, the second novel he wrote featuring the Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. It was adapted for the screen three times and was also adapted for the stage and radio.
The Long Good-bye is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1953, his sixth novel featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. Some critics consider it inferior to The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but others rank it as the best of his work. Chandler, in a letter to a friend, called the novel "my best book".
Tessa Charlotte Rampling is an English actress. An icon of the Swinging Sixties, she began her career as a model. She was cast in the role of Meredith in the 1966 film Georgy Girl, which starred Lynn Redgrave. She soon began making French and Italian arthouse films, notably Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969) and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974). She went on to star in many European and English-language films, including Stardust Memories (1980), The Verdict (1982), Long Live Life (1984), and The Wings of the Dove (1997). In the 2000s, she became the muse of French director François Ozon, appearing in several of his films, notably Swimming Pool (2003) and Young & Beautiful (2013). On television, she is known for her role as Dr. Evelyn Vogel in Dexter (2013).
Lady in the Lake is a 1947 American film noir starring Robert Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan, Tom Tully, Leon Ames and Jayne Meadows. An adaptation of the 1943 Raymond Chandler murder mystery The Lady in the Lake, the picture was also Montgomery's directorial debut, and last in either capacity for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) after eighteen years with the studio. Montgomery's use of point-of-view cinematography and its failure was blamed for the end of his career at MGM.
Murder, My Sweet is a 1944 American film noir, directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Dick Powell, Claire Trevor and Anne Shirley. The film is based on Raymond Chandler's 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely. It was the first film to feature Chandler's primary character, the hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe.
Lew Archer is a fictional character created by American-Canadian writer Ross Macdonald. Archer is a private detective working in Southern California. Between the late 1940s and the early '70s, the character appeared in 18 novels and a handful of shorter works as well as several film and television adaptations. Macdonald's Archer novels have been praised for building on the foundations of hardboiled fiction by introducing more literary themes and psychological depth to the genre. Critic John Leonard declared that Macdonald had surpassed the limits of crime fiction to become "a major American novelist" while author Eudora Welty was a fan of the series and carried on a lengthy correspondence with Macdonald. The editors of Thrilling Detective wrote: "The greatest P.I. series ever written? Probably."
George Victor Bishop, known professionally as Ed Bishop or Edward Bishop, was an American actor, predominantly based in the UK. He was known for playing Colonel Ed Straker in UFO, Captain Blue in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and for voicing Philip Marlowe in a series of BBC Radio adaptations of the Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler.
The Big Sleep is a 1978 neo-noir film, the second film version of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel of the same name. The picture was directed by Michael Winner and stars Robert Mitchum in his second film portrayal of the detective Philip Marlowe. The cast includes Sarah Miles, Candy Clark, Joan Collins and Oliver Reed, and features James Stewart as General Sternwood.
The Little Sister is a 1949 novel by Raymond Chandler, his fifth featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. The story is set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s and follows Marlowe's investigation of a missing persons case and blackmail scheme centered around a Hollywood starlet. With several scenes involving the film industry, the novel was partly inspired by Chandler's experience working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and his low opinion of the industry and most of the people in it. The book was first published in the UK in June 1949 and was released in the United States three months later.
Jack O'Halloran is an American actor and former boxer. O'Halloran fought in 57 professional boxing matches, but he is best known for acting in such films as Farewell, My Lovely, the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis-produced remake of King Kong, Superman, Superman II, Hero and the Terror and the 1987 Dan Aykroyd/Tom Hanks spoof Dragnet.
The Long Goodbye is a 1973 American neo-noir film directed by Robert Altman, adapted by Leigh Brackett from Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel of the same name. The film stars Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe and features Sterling Hayden, Nina Van Pallandt, Jim Bouton, Mark Rydell, and an early, uncredited appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Elliott Kastner was an American film producer, whose best known credits include Where Eagles Dare (1968), The Long Goodbye (1973), The Missouri Breaks (1976), and Angel Heart (1987).
Dick Richards is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Known as a storyteller and an "actor’s director", Richards worked with Robert Mitchum, Gene Hackman, Martin Sheen, Blythe Danner, Catherine Deneuve, Alan Arkin, Wilford Brimley, and many others.
Harper is a 1966 American mystery thriller film directed by Jack Smight from a screenplay by William Goldman, based on the 1949 novel The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald. The film stars Paul Newman as Lew Harper, with a cast that includes Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, Arthur Hill, Janet Leigh, Pamela Tiffin, Robert Wagner and Shelley Winters.
American actor and filmmaker Sylvester Stallone has appeared in over 81 films. This is a list of his acting roles as well as directing, screenwriting, producing credits.
The BBC Presents: Philip Marlowe was a series of BBC radio drama adaptations of novels by Raymond Chandler that ran from 1977 to 1978, and again in 1988. The radio show adapted six out of the seven of Chandlers novels starring Philip Marlowe, played by Ed Bishop. The show was adapted by Bill Morrison and produced by John Tydeman. Other actors featured included Don Fellows and Robert Beatty,
Time to Kill is an American mystery film directed by Herbert I. Leeds. It is the first screen adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel The High Window, which was remade five years later as The Brasher Doubloon. The detective was changed from Philip Marlowe to Michael Shayne for this version, with Lloyd Nolan playing the part and Heather Angel in a rare turn as leading lady. It is also the final Michael Shayne film starring Lloyd Nolan made at Fox, who closed down their popular B movie unit which included Mr. Moto, Charlie Chan, and the Cisco Kid. In 1946 the series would be reborn at Producers Releasing Corporation with Hugh Beaumont taking over the role.
The Falcon Takes Over, is a 1942 black-and-white mystery film directed by Irving Reis. Although the film features the Falcon and other characters created by Michael Arlen, its plot is taken from the Raymond Chandler novel Farewell, My Lovely, with the Falcon substituting for Chandler's archetypal private eye Philip Marlowe and the setting of New York City replacing Marlowe's Los Angeles beat. The B film was the third, following The Gay Falcon and A Date with the Falcon (1941), to star George Sanders as the character Gay Lawrence, a gentleman detective known by the sobriquet the Falcon.