Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/20/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, July 20, 2024

The Big Sleep (Michael Winner, 1978)

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, Richard Boone, Candy Clark, Joan Collins, Edward Fox, John Mills, James Stewart, Oliver Reed, Harry Andrews, Colin Blakely, Richard Todd. Screenplay: Michael Winner, based on a novel by Raymond Chandler. Cinematography: Robert Paynter. Production design: Harry Pottle. Film editing: Frederick Wilson. Music: Jerry Fielding.

Just don't. At least not unless you've seen Howard Hawks's 1946 version of Raymond Chandler's novel, which is set, as it should be, in Los Angeles. The shift of the action to London is disastrous, necessitating some lame exposition about why Philip Marlowe and the Sternwood clan are in England. Chandler's plot remains as enigmatic as ever, but in the hands of Hawks and screenwriters Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett, and William Faulkner, we didn't much care whodunit and why. Michael Winner's screenplay just leaves us with a muddle that has no redeeming flavor and texture. Seldom has a cast of superbly accomplished actors been so sadly wasted as they are here under Winner's direction.