BEFORE: Last night was a noir(ish) thriller, so another one of those is in order. I inadvertently set up a chain of films based on novels from noted authors - Booth Tarkington wrote "The Magnificent Ambersons", Graham Greene wrote "The Third Man", and tonight's film is based on a novel from Raymond Chandler (and William Faulkner worked on the screenplay!). Backtracking a bit with the linking - Joseph Cotten from "The Third Man" was in "Airport '77" with Jimmy Stewart, who was in "The Shootist" with Lauren Bacall (last seen in "Misery").
THE PLOT: Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by a rich family. Before the complex case is over, he's seen murder, blackmail, and what might be love.
AFTER: The second film that Bogart and Bacall made together (first was "To Have and Have Not"), it's a real twisty mystery story - maybe too twisty. I should note that I was feeling the first effects of a spring cold, and that Bogart's monotone has proven in the past to have a soporific effect on me. Those two things didn't help, in fact they made the film's title very appropriate.
But, at the end of a film that's as confusing as this one, I'm hard pressed to determine whether the fault is mine, or the film's. If I have to look up the plot summary on IMDB or Wikipedia after, then a failure has occured - now I just need to assign blame.
From posted comments, I find I'm not alone - there are simply too many characters in this film, too many shady suspects, and we never really find out for sure who killed whom, or who in fact is behind it all. That's also a result of this 1940's "shoot first, and sort it out later" mentality. Dead men can't offer up a defense, so isn't it a little too easy to say which crimes they were responsible for? What happened to fingerprints, DNA evidence, and gunshot residue? Or were they all invented later?
So we've got blackmail, gambling debts, a missing husband, pornography dealers, and other seedy bits from the original novel that were edited out of the film due to the Hays Code. (Couldn't have references to gay men, and what Carmen was doing in the blackmail photos had to be left to the imagination) And a long conversation between Marlowe and the D.A., laying out the facts in the case, was apparently also chopped. So it's not just me, the film is by its very nature confusing and abstract.
I put forth the notion that maybe Lauren Bacall's character was the criminal mastermind behind everything, though there is no direct evidence to support that (but wouldn't a criminal mastermind eliminate all direct evidence?). Her husband disappeared (and don't the police always suspect the spouse first?) and she hangs out with a lot of shady men, plus she always turns up in this film as the dirty deals are going down. And I'm not all moony-eyed over her like Marlowe is - so I think she's in it up to her sultry eyeballs. Am I crazy?
Also starring Martha Vickers, John Ridgely, with cameos from Charles Waldron and Elisha Cook, Jr.
RATING: 4 out of 10 promissory notes
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