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| Robert Mitchum and Charlotte Rampling in Farewell, My Lovely |
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Sylvia Miles, Anthony Zerbe, Harry Dean Stanton, Jack O'Halloran, Joe Spinell, Sylvester Stallone, Kate Murtagh, John O'Leary, Walter McGinn. Screenplay: David Zelag Goodman, based on a novel by Raymond Chandler. Cinematography: John A. Alonzo. Production design: Dean Tavoularis. Film editing: Joel Cox, Walter Thompson. Music: David Shire.
Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely had been filmed before, as Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell playing Philip Marlowe and Edward Dmytryk directing, and it's in many ways better than this attempt by director Dick Richards and screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. What this version has going for it is the absence of Production Code censors blue-penciling the script. Goodman is able to be open about the fact that one character is gay and another is the madam of a whorehouse, and he can emphasize the homophobia and racism of some of his more unsavory characters. But his script lacks the wit of John Paxton's earlier screenplay, not to mention that of William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman's script for The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), the best of all the Philip Marlowe movies, in which Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe was paired with Lauren Bacall. That comparison is inevitable, because Charlotte Rampling in Farewell, My Lovely is made to look and act uncannily like Bacall, but there's no real heat between her and Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. Mitchum does what he can with the role, but he's too old for it. The standout in the cast is the Oscar-nominated Sylvia Miles as the alcoholic Mrs. Florian, one of the many gears and springs and cogwheels in the intricate, impenetrable plot. Dean Tavoularis's design and John A. Alozo's camera give us a gritty, neon-lit re-creation of 1940s Los Angeles, but there's something tired and perfunctory about the film.
