Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

Director:

Dick Richards

Writers:

David Zelag Goodman (screenplay)
Raymond Chandler (novel)

Release Date:

8 August 1975 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Mystery | Thriller

Plot:

This, the second adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel, is much closer to the source text than the original - Murder, My Sweet (1944)...

Plot Keywords:

Private Eye | Nightclub | Murder | Convertible | Secret Past

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar. Another 1 nomination

Cast

Robert Mitchum	...	Philip Marlowe
Charlotte Rampling	...	Helen Grayle
John Ireland	...	Det. Lt. Nulty
Sylvia Miles	...	Jessie Halstead Florian
Anthony Zerbe	...	Laird Brunette
Harry Dean Stanton	...	Det. Billy Rolfe
Jack O'Halloran	...	Moose Malloy
Joe Spinell	...	Nick
Sylvester Stallone	...	Jonnie
Kate Murtagh	...	Frances Amthor
John O'Leary	...	Lindsay Marriott
Walter McGinn	...	Tommy Ray
Burton Gilliam	...	Cowboy
Jim Thompson	...	Judge Baxter Wilson Grayle
Jimmy Archer	...	Georgie (as Jimmie Archer)

Runtime:

95 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Norway:16 | Iceland:12 | France:U | Germany:16 (DVD rating) | Netherlands:12 | Argentina:16 | Australia:M | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15 | UK:15 | USA:R

Filming Locations:

1024 S. Grand Avenue, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

EK

Trivia:

The dark pin-striped suit worn by Robert Mitchum in the film was the only one available from the wardrobe department, with no backup suit available if needed. Originally made for Victor Mature during the 1940s, Mitchum hated the outfit, and complained constantly during production about having to wear "Victor Mature's old farted-up suit."

Goofs:

Continuity: When the boat captain, Marlowe, and Malloy are negotiating about the boat rental fee, the captain's cigarette suddenly disappears between shots.

Quotes:

Lt. Nulty: [during an interrogation] All right, Marlowe, let's start again, huh? From the beginning.
Philip Marlowe: I've told you twice. Now, why don't I make it easy on all of us and tell you what you want to hear? This fairy hired me to exchange a necklace for cash for a friend of his. We drove out to the woods. I shot him. I buried the fifteen grand. I drove my car back to his place, walked *fifteen miles* back to the woods, knocked myself on the head and then called the police.

Movie Connections:

Featured in The Man Who Shot Chinatown: The Life and Work of John A. Alonzo (2007)

Soundtrack:

Sunday

Nice film; magic Mitchum.

In the wake of 'The Long Goodbye' and, especially, 'Chinatown', there was a profusion in the mid- to late-70s of recreated films noirs of the Chandlerian bent, many featuring aging stars. 'Farewell My Lovely' is one of the best - while it does not reek of the depravity of Dmytryk's 1944 version, starring Dick Powell, it is broader in scope, and truer to a kind of lived-in realism, as opposed to hard-boiled iconography. It's nice to see 1940s L.A. close to what it might have looked like, and not the vague dreamworlds presented by classic noir. it would be a mistake to assume that this is a progressive, or revisionist movie - while it scores well in its treatment of race, the fundamental misogyny of Chandler's source novel and Dmytryk's film lingers. Indeed, it is less palatable, in that 40s Hollywood made its villainesses glamorous, charismatic and desirable; Charlotte Rampling seems barely to exist on screen, a mere assemblage of corruption and cold amorality.

The hard-boiled detective fictions of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were created in conscious opposition to the reactionary puzzles of the English Golden Age (eg Agatha Christie), which were exercises in asserting order and social control. Chandler tried to express a bleaker reality, one where arbitrary violence and corruption is not so easily contained, where smaller crimes may be solved, but society itself is rotten, diseased, irredeemable. Chandler pits his hero Philip Marlowe against this malaise, tough, solitary, misanthropic, frequently compared to medieval knights, as hopelessly out of his time as Don Quixote.

Chandler's novels are completely filtered through the prejudiced narration of Marlowe, so instead of realism we get a barely controlled expressionism, riddled with ideology. Marlowe is unable to trust anyone, and defines himself against everyone else, the Other, especially women and blacks. This is a subtext in the novel, but RIchards foregrounds it in the early scenes of this film. When Marlowe enters a black neighbourhood investigating Velma, he is very uncomfortable in an alien environment. Although, as a detective, he has the freedom to navigate the city, to access both poor black neighbourhoods and obscenely wealthy white mansions in a way neither one of these nor the other can, he is still constrained by ideology, the ideology of his times - he is not as apart from the corruption as he thinks. And so we frequently see him indoors, even imprisoned, by cops and criminals alike - like a conservative, everything is connected for Marlowe, except everything stinks.

This making mental states physical is important for a narrative seen through its hero's head. It puts us on our guard, distances us from Marlowe in a way Chandler never lets us, allows us to be more critical. Another device is the bizarre use of narrative voiceover. This seems conventional enough, Marlowe telling us the story, controlling, interpreting, often verbatim from the book. But his voiceover is broken - he starts addressing us, then, within that, he tells Nulty a story; so that the viewer is at two removes from a story that we only have it's teller's word for its veracity. In its modest way, the film DOES have revisionist aspirations.

Unlike Altman's film, 'Farewell' is purely enjoyable on the level of a murder-mystery thriller - the plot is satisfyingly, Chandlerianly (sic?) opaque; there are sufficient interesting supporting characters; the violence seems quaintly 1940s; the music is exciting. The film, therefore, would be pleasant, but harmless, except for one crucial element: Robert Mitchum, America's greatest actor. His aging Marlowe might be more appropriate to 'The Long Goodbye', but this is an astonishing portrait of middle- giving on to old-age, a study of a man struggling with cynicism, trying to maintain order (wisecracks; narration; frequent references to baseball, a game with rules) and humanity (the kid) in a world that only offers diabolic inversions of each.

Even more resonantly, the film is a film about film noir, about acting, about Robert Mitchum, soon to become famous in the period represented, soon the embodiment of the doomed noir hero. The Chandlerian dialogue that works wonderfully on the page can seem corny and stilted when spoken, but Mitchum pulls it off with melancholy beauty. He is the only screen Marlowe that seems like an actual human being who has lived - not even Bogie quite managed that.