Martha Vickers as Carmen Sternwood in "The Big Sleep" (1946) directed by Howard Hawks
Next he sees somebody kill Geiger in his apartment. Carmen Sternwood is in the same room, without clothes. The next day a man calls Marlowe and says that Owen Tayler is dead. Owen Tayler was Sternwood’s chauffeur. Later Marlowe is held prisoner by Eddie Mars. Eddie Mars is a crook who has killed some people. Finally Marlowe finds out that Geiger was using Carmen to blackmail her father, but also that Eddie Mars was behind Geiger.
Claire Trevor plays the femme fatale in "Murder, My Sweet" (1944) directed by Edward Dmytryk, based on Raymond Chandler's novel "Farewell, My Lovely".
Philip Marlowe tells Police Lieutenant Randall in his novel "Farewell, My Lovely" (1940): "I like smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin."
Dick Powell plays the detective Philip Marlowe in "Murder, My Sweet" (1944)
"Farewell, My Lovely" is famous for its metaphors. Chandler's second novel also features one of the richest troves of bizarre characters in American literature. This was Chandler's favorite novel, and many critics think it his best. There are three previous short stories whose parts or motifs are contained in "Farewell, My Lovely": “The Man Who Liked Dogs” (1936), “Try the Girl” (1936) and “Mandarin’s Jade” (1937). “The Man Who Liked Dogs” and “´Try the Girl” were originally published in Black Mask magazine. Chandler later changed publisher and “Mandarin’s Jade” (1937) was published in Dime Detective, which was contemporary alternative medium for pulp crime fiction.
Lindsay Marriott calls with a job: Marlowe iss to pay an $8,000 ransom for a jade necklace. The two drive to the rendezvous, but no one appears; when Marlowe investigates, he is sapped. Anne Riordan is waiting the next day in Marlowe's office, with the news that Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle owned the jade necklace. Anne has persuaded her to hire Marlowe. The plots of the two stories begin to merge when it is revealed that Mr. Grayle owns KFDK radio, for Malloy's girl Velma was a singer. Anne then introduces Marlowe to the Grayles. After she and Mr. Grayle leave, Marlowe and Mrs. Grayle talk, drink and share a brief kiss.
"The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building. The floor was covered with Oriental rugs and there were paintings along the walls. We turned a corner and there was more hall. A French window showed a gleam of blue water far off and I remembered almost with a shock that we were near the Pacific Ocean and that this house was on the edge of one of the canyons."
"She reached for my glass and her fingers touched mine a little, and were soft to the touch. "George gets Thursday evening off. That's the usual day, you know." She poured a fat slug of mellow-looking Scotch into my glass and squirted in some fizz-water. It was the kind of liquor you think you can drink forever, and all you do is get reckless. She gave herself the same treatment."
-"I was wearing a white fox evening wrap"
-"I bet you looked like a dream," I said.
-"You're not getting a little tight, are you?"
-"I've been known to be soberer."
She put her head back and went off into a peal of laughter. I have only known four women in my life who could do that and still look beautiful. She was one of them.
-"You'd better sit over here beside me."
-"I've been thinking that a long time," I said. "Ever since you crossed your legs, to be exact." She pulled her dress down.
-"These damn things are always up around your neck," she explained.
-"I have to work in my own way." I took a long drink and it nearly stood me on my head. I swallowed a little air. "And investigate a murder," I said.
-"That has nothing to do with it. I mean that's a police affair, isn't it?"
-"Yeah -only the poor guy paid me a hundred bucks to take care of him- and I didn't. Makes me feel guilty. Makes we want to cry. Shall I cry?"
-"Have a drink." She poured us some more Scotch. It didn't seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.
I took the refilled glass out of her hand and transferred it to my left and took hold of her left hand with my right. It felt smooth and soft and warm and comforting.
-"You're a little old-fashioned, aren't you?" She looked down at the hand I was holding.
-"I'm still working. And your Scotch is so good it keeps me half-sober. Not that I'd have to be drunk-" She slapped my wrist. She said softly:
-"What's your name?"
-"Phil. What's yours?"
-"Helen... Kiss me."
"She fell softly across my lap and I bent down over her face and began to browse on it. She worked her eyelashes and made butterfly kisses on my cheeks. When I got to her mouth it was half open and burning and her tongue was darting red between her teeth. The door opened and Mr. Grayle stepped quietly into the room. I was holding her and didn't have a chance to let go. I lifted my face and looked at him. I felt as cold as Finnegan's feet, the day they buried him."
"The blonde in my arms didn't move, didn't even close her lips. She had a half-dreamy, half-sarcastic expression on her face. Mr. Grayle cleared his throat slightly and said: "I beg your pardon," and went quietly out of the room. There was an infinite sadness in his eyes. I pushed her away and stood up and got my handkerchief out and mopped my face".
Marlowe wakes in a private sanatorium in "Bay City," modeled on Santa Monica, suffering withdrawal from an unknown drug. He overpowers an attendant and escapes, glimpsing Malloy on the way out. Anne Riordan's house is nearby; she feeds and repairs him and asks him to spend the night, but he returns to his apartment.
Marlowe and Riordan clear up loose ends over drinks. Mrs. Grayle killed Marriott, because he knew she was Velma and was blackmailing her. She used him to keep Jesse Florian quiet. Jesse gave Marlowe's card to Marriott and was accidentally killed by Moose. But the case does not conclude neatly. Mr. Grayle still loves Velma, who he elevated from vaudeville. He won't cooperate with police.
To spare him, Velma flees East and sings in nightclubs until a Baltimore policeman recognizes her, then she commits suicide. Like Othello, to whom Marlowe alludes in the novel's last lines, Malloy and Mr. Grayle both "loved not wisely, but too well." Spying on Malloy and necking with Velma, bringing him to face her infidelity, Marlowe could function as Iago. But Chandler avoids that implication by his final burst of empathy for Velma.
Perhaps the most literate hard-boiled novel ever written, Farewell, My Lovely explodes with metaphors and allusions. Their density is manifest on the first page: Moose Malloy "looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food" is not only a stunning contrast of black and white, the edible and the poisonous, but an allusion to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, in which a spider emerges from Miss Havesham's wedding cake. When he and Marriott drive to the rendezvous, he remarks that "this car sticks out like spats at an Iowa picnic": This refers to the well-dressed politicians who courted the votes of immigrant Iowans at the Iowa Society picnic every January 18 in Long Beach.
Beneath the novel's frantic action, the theme is tightly knit. In the astonishing revealed plot, all the crime results from Velma's rise to become Mrs. Grayle. She believes in the great American economic myth, but must give up her profession, her name, and her boyfriend to succeed – and then lives in constant fear of discovery. Chandler, as an immigrant living in the foremost city of migration, shows not only the cost of success, but that it is antithetical to that sentiment called love, represented in Malloy.
Some of Marlowe's wisecracks in "Farewell, My Lovely":
"We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did."
"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room."
"The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love."
"His dinner clothes were midnight blue, I judged, because they looked so black. I thought his pearl was a little too large, but that might have been jealousy."
Marlowe alludes to soured romance and love interests that could only come through personal experience:
"All men are the same. So are all women — after the first nine."
"Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."
Marlowe is, described by Chandler: "a complete man, a common man and an unusual man… I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things."
"Therefore, while the reader may be concerned with the intimate details of Marlowe’s private life, wondering about his past romances and relationships, Chandler is telling us simply to take Marlowe for what he is—a man of honor. What is inside his heart does not matter. If he is honorable, we just know that it is there. Instead, Chandler has to focus on making Marlowe into the ideal man. This gives Marlowe a tempered, unemotional machismo that shields us from seeing what is inside him. Therefore, masculinity can be seen as a driving force behind Chandler’s novels. They are works into which men can escape and be the hardboiled tough-guys they only dream about, and that give women an icy yet attractive man they want to get to know better." Source: home.comcast.net
In "The Little Sister", Marlowe describes the Los Angeles that used to be: “There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches.” He admits that he “used to like this town… a long time ago” and laments its transformation from the so-called “Athens of America” to “a neon-lighted slum.” The transformation of the city and the feelings it engenders in Marlowe are made clear when he spies a club with a packed terrace and parking lot. It is so overcrowded, that the people are “like ants on a piece of overripe fruit.” The image immediately tells the reader what has changed Los Angeles: the population boom of the early twentieth century. Marlowe, too, is reminded of what Los Angeles has become, and begins to name its faults. Source: ue.ucdavis.edu
