Marlowe: Gentlemen preferred blondes

The craft of a private investigator disposes to adventures: here and the search for pets, and the observation of spouses on the slippery path of adultery, and the development of a film with evidence of adultery. Oh, and the search for pets, there’s no way without it. But if a burning brunette / languid brown-haired / blonde with an angelic face crosses the threshold of the office, expect exciting troubles and intriguing troubles. Raymond Chandler warned me.

Fall of 1939 in Los Angeles. In Europe, the flywheels of a giant meat grinder are slowly unwinding, the British passenger liner Athenia was sunk by a German submarine, and a new Pope settled in the Vatican. But it’s not cloudless in California either: the first color films have to be shot on a heavy three-night camera that requires a break every half hour, and the threshold of the office of private detective Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson, “Rob Roy”, “Walk among the Graves”) is crossed by the fatal beauty Claire Cavendish (Diane Kruger, “Troy”, “The Bridge”). Married and well-to-do Mrs. Cavendish hires Marlowe to find her missing lover Nico Peterson, the owner of a bon Vivant moustache employed in Hollywood. Gigolo is not a canary, he responds to the nickname, the case promises to be trivial, until Dorothy (Jessica Lange, “The Postman always rings twice”), Claire’s mother, a faded movie star and owner of oil assets, turns out to be interested in him. Further searches will drag Marlowe all over the underside of the well-fed American dream, where Mexican drug dealers are not the worst of the devils.

The Irish director Neil Patrick Jordan, who has in his portfolio such iconic works as “Interview with the Vampire”, “Breakfast on Pluto”, took up the staging of the story about the Irish detective, invented by the Irish writer, and collaborated with the Irish actor Neeson for the first time in 1996 at the meetings of “Michael Collins” about the hero of the struggle for independence of Ireland. It is also interesting that the basis is not Chandler’s novel, which would be most obvious, but a recent book by John Banville, an Irish author who writes noir under the pseudonym Benjamin Black: “The Black-Eyed Blonde/Blonde with black eyes.”

The author of the film adaptation was William Monahan, who won an Oscar for the script of Scorsese’s “Renegades”. Only the cameraman Chavi Jimenez, a Spaniard, winner of the Goya Prize, gets out of this slender row of Celts. Could this Irish mafia make a bad movie? No, it’s not. Was Marlowe a masterpiece? Raymond Chandler always lacked Hammett’s mischievous madness, O’Connor’s eschatological pathologies or Kane’s destructive passions, and his denunciation of social vices never, and even more so in the era of McCarthyism, did not reach white heat, at the same time he allowed himself to borrow fragments from his own short prose, feeding them to later big novels, long anticipating such Dovlatov’s methods.

Liam Neeson has never played badly and, although he has recently devoted himself to strong passing thrillers, in the role of a veteran hero, principled even in the manner and degree of drunkenness, he is absolutely organic. Diana Kruger exudes emotions from herself, as they exude poison from a snake under the cold and how a lady from a sudden aristocracy should behave. Jessica Lange, who attends covens on a broomstick in tandem with Grace Zabriskie, charmingly parodies the crazy Black Queen from the chessboard of the Looking Glass. Textures are given to the second plan by such mastodons as Colm Meaney, Danny Huston and the only Black man for the entire timekeeping – Adewale Akinoye-Agbaje, whose presence is logically justified for the first time in a decade. The narrative is slightly torn and leaves a hint of understatement, as in reality, where one person can only guess what the other person is doing there “forty-eight working hours without panties.”

Jordan and camarilla, without becoming secondary, created a careful stylization, chandleresque, with great love for the genre of the cool and hard-boiled detective, which is commonly confused with the related noir. The soundtrack deserves special attention, where, in addition to Billie Holiday twilight jazz and The Mills Brothers, there is a great original music by David Holmes, an Irish composer, of course, who got his hands on collaboration with director Soderbergh. Holmes flawlessly weaves a web of anxiety and hidden threat without sinning for a second with anachronistic nonsense, and the song “The Light Shines Brightest In The Dark” performed by John Baptiste is already conquering the charts of parallel universes.

Jon Batiste – The Light Shines Brightest In The Dark

Perhaps Marlowe is not a masterpiece in the conventional sense, but it leaves an aftertaste, as if from gatherings with an intelligent interlocutor in a cozy country house over a glass of pinot noir. This film penetrates the consciousness on soft paws and pleasantly tickles the mind. It is such pictures that fill the Cinema with the necessary content and are remembered with warmth years later.