At Christmastime, Detective Philip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery) is hired by magazine editor and femme fatale Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter) to find her boss’s (Leon Ames) wife, in the hopes that the wife has done something illegal and Fromsett can take her place. Marlowe follows the trail to Chris Lavery (Dick Simmons), the wife’s supposed boyfriend, but he turns up dead and the local police, Captain Kane (Tom Tully) and Lieutenant DeGarmot (Lloyd Nolan) blame Marlowe. With bodies stacking up, it is clear that DeGarmot and an ex-nurse named Mildred Haveland (Jayne Meadows) are somehow connected to the killings, and it looks like Fromsett might be involved as well. Marlowe must solve the case before he is arrested for murder or killed.
This is a horrible film. And I’m recommending it.
Well, I’m recommending it if it comes on TV or you can rent it cheap. It isn’t any good, but it is fascinating. It is an experiment that failed in a “I wonder what will happen if I hold two pieces of uranium and smash them together” kind of way, which makes it a part of film history. Everyone should see it once, but once is quite enough.
The idea must have sounded clever: shoot the film in first person. The audience will see what Marlowe sees and nothing more. It will pull the viewer into the film, making him part of the action. Except it doesn’t. It’s hard to think of a film that pushes away the viewer so completely. It feels like playing a broken first-person shooter video game (with only minimal shooting). When Marlowe opens a door, you see his hand. When he gets kissed, you see the puckered lips approaching. The only time you see Marlowe is when he looks in the mirror (and in three short speeches made to the camera). With this approach, I kept wanting to use a joystick to make him do something other than what he was doing.
The technique fails in so many ways. At any time, the contrivance of it would draw attention away from the story, but in 1946, the technology didn’t exist to make it just tedious. There were no steadicams. Movie cameras were bulky affairs more often wheeled very slowly. This leads to Marlowe never going where the camera can’t roll, and never moving faster than it can be pushed. So he spends a lot of time slowly strolling down hallways and sitting. Even in a fight (which looks particularly preposterous), he is forced to move like molasses. While much of the mystery takes place in a mountain resort, we never see any of that (the camera would never be able to “walk” up the hills). Everyone he meets stands unnaturally still and directly in front of him. It looks like they are posing for a series of family portraits.
The acting is universally horrendous. It sounds exactly like what you get in a video game, with everyone taking their cue from the camera’s orientation and then reading their lines very s-l-o-w-l-y a-n-d c-l-e-a-r-l-y. I can’t recall worse performances in a Hollywood film. As the cast had some skilled members, it was apparently style that threw them: “Now Audrey, you are sexually excited by this camera lens. Go at it!” No wonder they were lost.
Robert Montgomery, who was trying to change his fluffy image, directed and starred, so much of the blame can be dumped on him. He could hardly help the other actors as he didn’t know what do to himself. His performance is one of the worst in the film, and most of it is voice only. But then he was a poor choice for Marlowe. He was too slight for the hard-bitten PI, and his faked “tough-guy” accent is comical. The plot calls for Marlowe and Fromsett to fall for each other, but nothing Montgomery or Totter do makes that believable.
It wraps up with a particularly unlikely conclusion that is so silly, it fits perfectly with the absurdity that came before.
The other actors who have portrayed Philip Marlowe on the big screen are: Dick Powell in Murder My Sweet (1944), Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946), George Montgomery in The Brasher Doubloon (1947), James Garner in Marlowe (1969), Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye (1973), and Robert Mitchum in both Farewell, My Lovely (1975) and The Big Sleep (1978).