Selma Blair, photoshoot by Nicholas Moore for Arena magazine, September 2008
Selma Blair in a photoshoot posing like a 40's femme fatale
Lauren Bacall plays Vivian Rutledge in "The Big Sleep" (1946)"Vivian tries to disturb Marlowe’s investigation, she has no interest in Marlowe finding out what happened to her husband Rusty Regan. She even uses her sexuality to seduce Marlowe, which is a typical move for the beautiful, dangerous femme fatale to make, but he can withstand.
From her appearance and her behaviour Vivian seems to be a femme fatale, but in the end of the novel we learn that she is not, because she lacks one important feature of the femme fatale: She does not do it for herself, but to protect her father from the knowledge that he raised a murderer and Carmen from being imprisoned. In contrast, the femme fatale is egoistic, she wants freedom, wealth and independence and she stops at nothing to achieve this goal"-"Women in Film Noir" by Janey Place
"When Vivian leaves Eddie Mars' gambling house in reel 8, another retake was inserted. The scene where Marlowe rescues Vivian from a robbery exists in both the 1945 and the 1946 versions, but in the 1946 version, both Bogart and Bacall are more relaxed and the scene plays better. 
Reel 9 of the 1946 version has a scene between Marlowe and Carmen that is priceless; she sucks her thumb and attempts to bite Marlowe.
The true manic and childish nature of Carmen is shown". Source: www.imagesjournal.com
"Marlowe’s neurotic alienation, his fears about loss of agency, about violations of self and fragmenting identity are expressions of characteristically modernist anxieties.” Horsley suggests that Chandler’s novels “shift the focus of his thrillers away from wider socio-political disorder and corruption, and towards terrors that are more inward". For Horsley, Chandler’s take on Modernism was shown by Marlowe’s apparent aversion to personal relationships and to sex, with the representations of the femme fatale. 
For Marlowe, the violations of the self feared by Modernist writers are those of a sexual nature, of physical violation by manipulative women.
Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and Martha Vickers on the set of "The Big Sleep" (1946)Horsley also suggests that perhaps the way Marlowe is repeatedly knocked unconscious had links to a loss of control and this is the type of fragmentation he fears most. Marlowe describes a sexual encounter with Eileen Wade as follows: 'Then she treshed about and moaned. This was murder. I was as erotic as a stallion. I was losing control'. In The Big Sleep, Marlowe finds Carmen Sternwood naked in his bed. He becomes revolted and angry, saying "I couldn’t stand her in that room any longer" -"The Noir Thriller" by Lee Horsley and Paul Auster’s deconstruction of the traditional hard-boiled detective narrative in The New York Trilogy by Dan Holmes
"A cut of The Big Sleep as it stood in 1945 is said to show both Martha Vickers as the younger sister and Dorothy Malone as the bookstore manager stealing the spotlight from Bacall. Before the film was released in 1946 the studio had Vickers's sexy scenes cut and more glamorous, sympathetic shots of Bacall inserted, building up the relationship between the big sister and Marlowe.
The Big Sleep is closer to the novel than you might expect of Hollywood, a film you want to go on and on, despite the intricacies of plot. You want to see Bogart continue to play Marlowe in adaptations of the rest of Chandler's books. Too bad this didn't happen.
Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe in "The Big Sleep" (1978)This success led to a re-filming of The Big Sleep (1978) around Mitchum a few years later. But what a difference. Mitchum is now hitting sixty. (I think Marlowe in the novel is supposed to be about thirty-eight.) But worse, the period has been updated from the 1940s to the then-present (1970s). And, far worse, the setting has been moved from the mean streets of Los Angeles to the civilized lanes of Britain. Yes, Marlowe is now a gumshoe in swinging London.
But Chandler-Marlowe just doesn't work in 1970s England. And in sunshiny colour! The brooding moodiness is gone. Marlowe's no slumming angel but a solidly middle-class citizen. The sex and pornography themes are truer to the book, thanks to the more enlightened times, but the scandal attached to them is gone".Source: www.editoreric.com
"The Big Sleep, published in 1939, was the first of seven Philip Marlowe novels written by Chandler. Over the years, six of them have been adapted into films (several more than once): The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, and The Long Goodbye. Only Playback, Chandler's final Marlowe book, has never made it to the screen. Marlowe, the hard-drinking loner with a sharp one-liner for any situation, has been played by the likes of George Montgomery, Robert Montgomery, Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum (twice), James Garner, James Caan, and Bogart. Of all of these portrayals, Bogart's is easily the most memorable, and if you ask any movie-lover who the real cinematic Marlowe is, the answer will be immediate and unqualified". Source: www.reelviews.net
1 comment :
When Marlowe says he was "as erotic as a stallion" in The Long Goodbye, it's from the bedroom scene with the delusional Eileen Wade, not Sylvia Lennox.
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