In yet another sign of the TV and film industry’s scraping of the ideas barrell, Philip Marlowe is lighting up his smokes and priming his woman-beating hand for a big return. Following recent news that ABC is to finance a TV series of the private eye’s adventure in noir, it has now been announced that Marlowe is to appear on the big screen too.
In a recent interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal (oh yes, we dig up all sorts in Screenhead), producer Marc Abraham, who produced the recent and entertaining Children of Men, has announced not only will there be a film of Marlowe’s investigations, but he will be played by Clive Owen.
Now, Clive Owen is not a bad choice. I was hoping that he avoided any franchaise, as he does have the capacity to become a decent actor, whereas if he accepted the role as Bond, he’d end up like Sean Connery, limited and leering. Although many considered him to be the weakest link in Sin City, I felt he had enough dashing appeal to be the easiest character to associate with. And he’s strong enough to take the lead for Sin City 2, which is due to be filmed this year.
But the real concern is the character of Marlowe himself. He is an utter anachronism, and his film-noir attitude has no place in the modern cinema, as my Screenhead colleague aptly points out. Noir only works these days in its most extreme, ridiculous form, like the comic-book world of Sin City, or the mad-cap deconstructionism of The Big Lebowski. And even the attempt to make Marlowe real has already been achieved with utter brilliance, in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, where Elliot Gould plays a somewhat dishevelled, grumpy, and impotent image of a private-dic. This makes me wonder, when Hollywood runs out of franchaises to revive, will they eventually remake The Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat Station?
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Richard Pulfer said
February 4 2007 @ 10:01 am
Actually, I think noir can work, but making it work for Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe will be very difficult. It most definitely would be a period piece, and even if you nail that aspect, you also have to contend with the less savory sides of Marlowe’s personality and Chandler’s style – with trace amounts of sexism, racism and even Anti-Semitism.
If Hollywood really wants to modernize Raymond Chandler, someone should probably tell them they are sixty years too late. There are several noir detective writers, such as current bestseller Robert B. Parker, who stand as the successor to Chandler (Parker even penned Chandler’s unfinished sequel to “The Big Sleep”). Look here for source material, but as you pointed out, Eion, don’t assume from “Sin City” that all noir is do-able.