Soft-Boiled

By JAY COCKS

FAREWELL, MY LOVELY

Directed by DICK RICHARDS

Screenplay by DAVID ZELAG GOODMAN

This is the sort of private-eye period piece that means to do honor to the traditions of Raymond Chandler and the hard-boiled melodrama. But through its own dim eagerness it ends up making a mockery of them. How can anyone take such an enterprise seriously, after all, when the detective runs around in a trench coat six inches too short and 25 years too new for him?

Style and hemline are more pertinent than they should be to Farewell, My Lovely because Director Dick Richards (Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins) seems mostly interested in matters of decoration. No use telling him or Screenwriter David Zelag Goodman that just under his plots, Chandler was writing about Los Angeles, about levels of corruption, about resistance to the hard sell and the strong arm. Those are difficult matters to deal with, and Richards and Goodman avoid them. Goodman wrests a standard mystery plot from the book that Chandler considered his best. Richards uses it as an excuse for a sort of 1940s masquerade. Watching this movie has approximately the same effect as being locked overnight in a secondhand clothing store in Pasadena. There is an awful lot of dust and, after a while, the dummies look as if they are moving.

Low Life. Farewell, My Lovely (filmed once before in 1945 as Murder, My Sweet) is the caper in which Philip Marlowe gets mixed up with a huge bruiser named Moose Malloy. Moose is just out of jail and looking for his old girl friend Velma. Before she is run to ground, Marlowe works his way through L.A., low life to high society and back again, trailing in his wake subplots and an ever increasing number of corpses. This time around, Robert Mitchum stars as Marlowe. He is all wrong. For Chandler, Marlowe was a kind of rogue knight. Mitchum plays him with the same sloppy self-loathing that he has frequently used to demonstrate his superiority to a role. If this contempt suits Mitchum, it ill becomes Marlowe. With the main character deep-sixed, Farewell, My Lovely loses its moral center and its dynamic.

As Velma, Charlotte Rampling, a sexy, skillful actress, is called upon to do Lauren Bacall imitations from The Big Sleep and looks abashed. There are a couple of sharp secondary performances--by a Philadelphia pug named Jack O'Halloran as Moose and Walter McGinn as a strung-out musician--but the rest of the cast is mostly good faces with no roles to match.

The movie's ambience is stilted and uneasy, as if to match the dialogue. Some smart Chandler lines have been retained, but Richards and Goodman have added some others ("It's Snow White." "With or without the dwarfs?"), presumably of their own invention. Up against the real thing, these emendations stand out, as Chandler once wrote, "like a tarantula on a slice of angel food."

Jay Cocks

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