A look at Marlowe (MA 15+)
Raymond Chandler wrote a number of books centred on rugged private detective Philip Marlowe and this film features Liam Neeson in the central role.
Now, Neeson is no Humphrey Bogart and although he exudes the appropriate dose of world weariness he’s perhaps a tad too old to be playing a tough PI. Nevertheless, he starts off with the classic Marlowe introductory scene: a glamorous blonde is visiting his office to find out where her ex-lover might be.
Diane Kruger plays Clare Cavendish and she engages Marlow to find out whether Nico (Francois Arnaud) actually died when he was run down not far from the exclusive club they both belong to, or whether he’s still alive.
Witnesses say they saw Nico dead on the road, but Clare’s instincts that her lover staged his demise prove right when he’s spotted in Mexico purchasing some antique Mayan artefacts.
It’s 1939 in Los Angeles and Marlowe has some curly corners to navigate. Clare’s mother Dorothy (Jessica Lange), a wealthy and well-connected former movie star, also wants ‘in’ on the investigation. Marlowe enlists an old police force buddy, Detective Joe Green (Ian Hart) who informs him in no uncertain fashion that Nico is in the morgue.
Unconvinced that Green is right, Marlowe investigates further. He breaks into the supposedly dead man’s house and encounters his sister.
But it’s not where he uncovers more details about Nico. This comes at the private club where he encounters a suspicious manager Floyd Hanson (Danny Huston) and later out on the LA streets where he meets up with gangster and drug runner Lou Hendricks (Alan Cumming). Just as Dorothy wants to know where Nico is so do Hanson and Hendricks.
A big stash of cocaine is the central focus.
But it’s not with either of this pair that Marlowe gets to the bottom of the mystery. He and Clare arrange a meeting with Nico and fortunately Marlowe has Hendricks’ driver and ‘muscle’ Cedric (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) on his side by now.
The whole thing comes to a blazing climax in the props warehouse of a major film studio and, as in most Raymond Chandler endings, there’s a volley of gunshots.
Neeson turned 71 this month and was 69 when this movie was filmed.
To say it’s a trifle ridiculous to see a man into his seventh decade brawling with – and knocking out – three Mob thugs in the basement of the exclusive club is blatantly obvious.
Marlowe does make a concession though. “I’m getting too old for this,” he mumbles as he dusts himself off.
But we’re spared from any romantic entanglements when Marlowe, locked in a tight, dance embrace with Clare, tells her that he’s “twice her age.”
So we audience members are spared nothing more than a few swirls to 1930s romance phonogram music.
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