On what looks like a standard missing persons case, detective Philip Marlowe (James Garner) meets a blackmailer (Jackie Coogan) who is later murdered. A set of incriminating photos of a sitcom star (Gayle Hunnicutt) and a gangster (H.M. Wynant) that the blackmailer was holding leads Marlowe along a convoluted trail of dead bodies and uncooperative people, including a stripper (Rita Moreno), a TV executive (William Daniels), a kung fu hit man (Bruce Lee), a shady child psychologist (Paul Stevens), and a frustrated, police lieutenant (Carroll O’Connor).
You don’t read or watch anything based on the works of Raymond Chandler for the plot. To do so would be an exercise in frustration. It’s unlikely you’ll ever completely find out what’s going on, and what you do learn is rarely of any interest or importance. Things happen; sometimes they have causes and sometimes they don’t. It didn’t matter to Chandler.
What you’re there for is the characters and the style, and the return of Chandler’s most famous character in Marlowe has the style of a standard TV detective show. The direction can be politely labeled “competent” and the acting clicks in as “acceptable.” There’s a Noir situation in play, but I wonder if director Paul Bogart even saw a Film Noir. So, we’re left with James Garner’s charm (and the implied assists of Rita Moreno) to keep the film interesting. He’s not bad, but no one is that charming.
Garner also lacks a grasp of the character. He would take on the role of Jim Rockford just a few years later in the mildly successful television series The Rockford Files, and there is little to differentiate Marlowe from Rockford. Chandler’s dialog is there, but I’d have never recognized Marlowe without being told it’s him (and then only accepted it as a sign of alien pod people invading our cities).
The project was in trouble before the cameras rolled. Updating Chandler to modern times is never a good idea, particularly when “modern” means the late ’60s. This isn’t Marlowe’s world. His dialog is out of place (well, everyone’s dialog is out of place) and the major characters belong to another era. If the setting had to be the ’60s, why not start with a new PI?
A pre-fame Bruce Lee makes an appearance as a martial arts enforcer and plays it for comedy. His last moment in the movie is absurd, but perhaps the most enjoyable bit in the film.
Marlowe had previously been portrayed with varying degrees of success by Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, and George Montgomery, but it was Humphrey Bogart who defined him for the screen in 1946’s The Big Sleep. Elliott Gould would be next to try out the role, followed by Robert Mitchum in Farewell, My Lovely and the poorly conceived 1978 remake of The Big Sleep.