Poodle Springs | |
---|---|
Genre | Crime Drama |
Based on | Poodle Springs by Raymond Chandler Robert B. Parker |
Screenplay by | Tom Stoppard |
Directed by | Bob Rafelson |
Starring | James Caan Dina Meyer David Keith |
Music by | Michael Small |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
Production | |
Executive producers | Jon Avnet William Horberg Jordan Kerner Sydney Pollack |
Producer | Tony Mark |
Cinematography | Stuart Dryburgh |
Editor | Steven Cohen |
Running time | 100 minutes |
Production companies | Avnet/Kerner Productions Mirage Enterprises HBO Pictures Universal Television |
Original release | |
Network | HBO |
Release | July 25, 1998 |
Poodle Springs is a 1998 neo-noir HBO film directed by Bob Rafelson, starring James Caan as private detective Philip Marlowe. [1]
The film is based on the unfinished novel Poodle Springs by Raymond Chandler, completed after his death by Robert B. Parker and published in 1989. [1]
Playwright Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay. [1]
In 1963, an aging Philip Marlowe (James Caan) is newly married to young socialite Laura Parker (Dina Meyer). The private investigator leaves his Los Angeles apartment behind and sets up a new base of operations in Poodle Springs, an upscale community in the desert a couple of hours from L.A. (a parody of Palm Springs), where he and his wife intend to live.
"I don't do divorces," Marlowe impatiently explains to potential clients in a peaceful, relatively crime-free town. His rich wife Laura would prefer that Philip get out of this line of work entirely and live off her money or come into business with P.J. Parker (Joe Don Baker), her politically connected father, but Marlowe isn't ready to permanently hang up his gun.
While looking into a matter at a gambling club just beyond the city limits, Marlowe sets out to find a photographer with a gambling debt and is soon mixed up in blackmail and murder.
Larry Victor, the photographer (David Keith), is a bigamist, two-timing Laura's wealthy friend Muffy (Julia Campbell) with a drug addict named Angel (Nia Peeples). He is threatening to expose photos of a former stripper (La Joy Farr) who is now running with Muffy's billionaire father, Clayton Blackstone (Brian Cox).
As things progress, Marlowe realizes that his new father-in-law is involved in a land swindle on such a massive scale that it could end up altering the California/Nevada state border. Also, any further snooping on the detective's part could quickly end his wedded bliss.
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.
The Big Sleep (1939) is a hardboiled crime novel by American-British writer Raymond Chandler, the first to feature the detective Philip Marlowe. It has been adapted for film twice, in 1946 and again in 1978. The story is set in Los Angeles.
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Poodle Springs is the eighth Philip Marlowe novel. It was started in 1958 by Raymond Chandler, who left it unfinished at his death in 1959. The four chapters he had completed, which bore the working title The Poodle Springs Story, were subsequently published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962), a collection of excerpts from letters and unpublished writings. In 1988, on the occasion of the centenary of Chandler's birth, the crime writer Robert B. Parker was asked by the estate of Raymond Chandler to complete the novel.
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