Raymond Chandler (the hard-boiled Proust): A Mysterious Something in the Light

"The more real things get, the more like myths they become." -Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Yesterday was Raymond Chandler's Anniversary (1888-1959). When Raymond Chandler died on 26 March 1959, The Times declared in his obituary that ‘in working the common vein of crime fiction, he mined the gold of literature’. John Sutherland, emeritus professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, said: ‘Raymond Chandler qualifies as the Marcel Proust of the hard-boiled detective novel. For Chandler literary style was all that mattered.’ His most famous creation was the private detective Philip Marlowe: "Of course Marlowe is a failure and he knows it", Chandler explained, "But you must remember that Marlowe is a creature of fantasy. Your private detective in real life is usually an ex-policeman with a lot of hard practical experience who runs around trying to find out where people have moved to".

Some of my favourite impersonations of Philip Marlowe in the cinema (Dick Powell was the first Marlowe and the closest to the novel's character in a risky choice of his career, Bogart's cynic detective is the most iconic, Montgomery's Marlowe was more a mysterious presence and Mitchum fit Marlowe like a glove around a decadent European neo-noir scenario):

Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe in "Murder, My Sweet" (1944) directed by Edward Dmytryk

Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in "The Big Sleep" (1946) directed by Howard Hawks

Robert Montgomery as Philip Marlowe in "Lady in the Lake" (1947)

Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe in "Farewell, My Lovely" (1975) directed by Dick Richards

"A new biography about Raymond Chandler has been released on July 16 by Aurum Press Ltd, written by Tom Williams: "What we know of Raymond Chandler is shrouded in secrets and half-truths as impenetrable and deceptive as anything in his magisterial novel, The Long Goodbye. Now, drawing on new interviews, previously unpublished letters and archives on both sides of the Atlantic, literary gumshoe Tom Williams casts light on this most mysterious of writers. The Raymond Chandler revealed is a man troubled by loneliness and desertion from an early age – experiences that fuelled his writing as much as they scarred his life." Source: www.aurumpress.co.uk

Raymond Chandler was otherwise described, in the course of his life, as cynical and gullible; reclusive and generous; depressive and romantic; proud and paranoid. Two things stabilized him. Being drunk, which he often was, and Philip Marlowe. Chandler tried different types of writing, but he always returned to detective fiction and to Marlowe. ‘I simply cannot operate without him,’ he eventually decided. Described by Evelyn Waugh in the late 1940s as no less than ‘the greatest living American novelist’, he was admired by the likes of T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Edmund Wilson. Chandler picked up several prizes towards the end of his time at Dulwich. He was outstanding at mathematics. (This was a proficiency Chandler shared with the two other most famous crime writers of his generation: Georges Simenon and Dashiell Hammett.) On the basis of his short apprenticeship at the Admiralty and his proficiency at mathematics, Chandler decided on accountancy.

Of his hero, Chandler wrote a month before his death that he always saw him ‘in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated’. Like Marlowe, Chandler in 1913 was intelligent but without immediate prospects. In the four-year gap between Cissy Pascal’s divorce and Florence Chandler’s death, Chandler supported the two women in different houses in Los Angeles. Both lived in cheap apartments in mixed neighbourhoods south of the city: Cissy on Hermosa Beach; Florence in South Catalina Street on Redondo Beach.

Southern California had special reasons to anticipate prosperity: oil and land. Chandler was fascinated by the new corporate giants like Du Pont, Alco and Standard Oil.

Chandler experienced blackouts, or alcohol-induced amnesia, when he drank heavily. There would be an intense blackout scene involving amnesia and usually alcohol in every one of Chandler’s Marlowe novels, as well as in one of his Hollywood screenplays. In fact, the blackout scene became a distinct trademark of Marlowe’s adventures. These scenes were given such prominence and space throughout Chandler’s writing that they beg at least two clear biographical correlations. First, the German bombardment that left Chandler unconscious during the First World War and ended his infantry career. Second, the blackouts that he experienced when he drank heavily; specifically, the sustained binge he embarked on at Dabney’s.

Cissy had kept her model’s figure and, according to Chandler’s colleagues at Dabney’s, had the sexual presence of a thirty-year-old. For each wedding anniversary, Chandler would fill the house with red roses and the two of them would drink champagne. Cissy called Chandler ‘Raymio’ because he was so romantic and she was a good foil to his erratic daydreams. Cissy had no money of her own and he had successfully insulted most of the friends who might previously have helped. "There is nothing like losing your money," Chandler later said, "in order to see who your friends are". And by 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler had none. He and Cissy would have to move out of central Los Angeles to the cheaper rents of Santa Monica, but for the time being they could survive on what they had while he tried to earn money by writing fiction ("I spent five months over a 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180.")

Black Mask was a pulp magazine which had been set up by two New York editors in 1920 to support the lossmaking but prestigious literary magazine Smart Set. The connection with Smart Set – whose most famous contributor was F. Scott Fitzgerald – was an ironic one for Chandler. What was even more inspiring for Chandler was that, despite his respect for Dashiell Hammett (he met him once at a Black Mask dinner in LA), he did not consider Hammett to be an especially good writer: ‘What he did he did superbly,’ decided Chandler, ‘but there was a lot he could not do.’ While Chandler started work on his second Black Mask story in 1933, he and Cissy continued to exhaust his savings. Chandler, who had been earning almost $3,000 a month before he left Dabney’s, hated not having money and felt no sense of dignified poverty about his situation. He disagreed entirely with the idea that struggling writers were more creative the closer they were to the breadline. He and Cissy were almost on that now, and he hated it. ‘I never slept in the park,’ he said, ‘but I came damn close to it… it didn’t kill me, but neither did it increase my love of humanity.’ Self-deprivation was almost natural to a man who had just painfully forced himself out of a drink addiction. There was, however, the guilt of not being able to look after Cissy properly, as well as the guilt of having brought such a situation upon himself.

"The Smell of Fear" was the name Chandler would later give to an anthology of his pulp stories. In an introduction to the book, he put Black Mask stories within the context of this permanent edginess: "Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction. The streets were dark with something more than night." While achieving growing recognition and earning larger fees – though still never more than $350 – for his Black Mask stories, Chandler continued to live in low-rent Santa Monica. Even writing five stories a year, as he did in 1936, only earned him $1,500. In contrast to the grandeur of nearby Beverly Hills, Santa Monica contained thousands of small wooden houses on near-identical streets that were spread either side of Pico Boulevard.

Dime Detective paid Chandler $400 per story, but that was not enough to enable him and Cissy to move out of the Santa Monica apartment. The break came in 1938, when a New York literary agent called Sydney Sanders showed some of Chandler’s pulp stories to the publisher Alfred Knopf. Knopf was impressed, and told Chandler that he would be interested in seeing a novel. He had promptly become the best pulp writer in America. But he had done so at a cost: for five years he and Cissy had cut themselves off from the world while he wrote, and this seclusion had hurt him. His complexion had paled, he suffered from rheumatism in his right arm, and he had become almost totally reclusive. ‘Most writers,’ he later said, ‘sacrifice too much humanity for too little art.’

"The Big Sleep" was written in Chandler’s Santa Monica apartment over the summer of 1938. Named after Marlowe House at Dulwich College, the novel’s narrator and hero was thirty years old and single: ‘I’m unmarried because policemen’s wives don't like me.’ It was soon obvious that Marlowe was no ordinary pulp private detective. He played chess by himself, and often felt paranoid: "My mind drifted through waves of false memory, in which I seemed to do the same thing over and over again, go to the same places, meet the same people, say the same words to them, over and over again, and yet each time it seemed real, like something actually happening, and for the first time."

"Marlowe was an idealist," said Chandler, ‘he hates to admit it, even to himself.’ Here was a tough, independent character with an acute and almost constant sense of life’s absurdity. To end a murder story questioning the significance of death was a new departure for a crime writer. The suspense was still there, but it was there as atmosphere rather than in hidden clues. Not even Hammett had risked going this far with his detectives; nor had Hammett developed the vision of crime fiction that Chandler was now developing. The character of Philip Marlowe was therefore a way in which Chandler might explain his own eccentric reclusivity. The book itself sold 18,000 copies – including British sales – which grossed Chandler only $2,000. Compared to Hammett and Cain, this was negligible. The former’s 1932 novel "The Thin Man" had sold 20,000 copies in America in its first three weeks, and MGM had bought the film rights for $21,000.

The money he had earned from "The Big Sleep" meant that he and Cissy could leave the cramped apartment they had been in for the last five years. Their departure did not, however, break the spell of their self-containment, and for the next five years, they lived in a series of coastal towns, LA suburbs and budget Californian holiday resorts. They continued to see almost no one except each other. When they left Santa Monica in 1939, Cissy was approaching seventy and had been badly weakened by her bouts of pneumonia. She had ‘not particularly liked’ The Big Sleep. Chandler received letters of encouragement from John Steinbeck and S. J. Perelman, both of whom had read The Big Sleep. He had been warned by other pulp writers about the critics.

"Farewell, My Lovely" was published in May 1940, but was again ignored by the critics. Despite an unusually large advertising budget from Knopf, it was not reviewed and sold worse than "The Big Sleep" (11,000 copies in America and 4,000 in Britain). Chandler could not relate to the revitalized Los Angeles. He saw a mass-produced culture emerging around the city; a corporation-sponsored ‘culture of the filtered cigarette’, where people were turning generic in their tastes and simple in their ambitions. "The Lady in the Lake" (1943) continued to show Marlowe’s frustration. Nothing makes him happy, all is phoney, and ‘everything’s for sale in California’. The novel shows Chandler and Marlowe at their most misanthropic. Of all the towns that he and Cissy flitted between, Big Bear Lake was still Chandler’s favourite.

Poster of Audrey Totter & Robert Montgomery in "Lady in the Lake" (1947) directed by Robert Montgomery

Shortly before "The Lady in the Lake" was published in 1943, a 25-cent edition of "The Big Sleep" appeared in America for the first time. Convinced that Chandler was never going to be recognized by the critics, Knopf had finally sold the pulp rights to the first novel to Avon. It immediately sold 300,000 copies, and a further 150,000 copies were sold in a special armed services edition. On the back of this success, Knopf allowed Pocket Books to publish a 25-cent edition of "Farewell, My Lovely" four months later. The book sold more than a million copies. As a result of this exposure, more hardback copies of "The Lady in the Lake" were sold in America than any of the other Marlowes, and although 14,000 was still not an enormous number, it earned the author $3,500. It was all slowly starting to happen – paradoxically, just as Chandler was starting to get bored with his writing.

[While working on "Double Indemnity" with Billy Wilder] he and Cissy moved into a small house at 1040 Havenhurst Drive, off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. It was just five minutes from the Paramount lot. Years after the project, Wilder would describe Chandler as ‘one of the greatest creative minds I’ve ever encountered’, as well as ‘a naive, sweet, warm man’. He also said that the crime writer gave him ‘more trouble than any other writer I ever worked with.’ Chandler and Cissy had now moved to Drexel Avenue, further to the south of Hollywood, off La Cienega. Producers, Chandler found, were generally ‘low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat and the artistic integrity of a slot machine.’

Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in the “Big Sleep” (1946)

The year that Chandler left Hollywood was, paradoxically, capped by his greatest triumph of all. The release of "The Big Sleep" in 1946, starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by Howard Hawks, propelled both Chandler and Marlowe into the realms of international stardom.

Bogart felt a bond with this character who, having little time for food, managed to exist through lunchless dinners and dinnerless days with the aid of a bottle of bourbon. ‘Why doesn’t he go overboard for a girl?’ he asked Chandler. ‘Marlowe would lose something by being promiscuous,’ said Chandler. ‘I know he can’t go on forever saying no the way he does – the guy’s human – he’ll have to break sometime but I’ve never wanted the sex bit to dominate either him or the story.’ Chandler would remain grudgingly fascinated by Hollywood even after he had left Los Angeles. Chandler bought a $3,000 Steinway piano for Cissy, though at seventy-six she was getting too old to play for long; when she did, she played Chopin. She had her own bedroom now; the most elegant room in the house, with chaises longues and elaborate French lamps, and there she kept the platinum and gold jewellery that Chandler had bought her with his Hollywood money.

Chandler said that he thought American critics were suffering from ‘pseudoliterate pretentiousness.’ Intellectuals had no dreams left to offer people, he said, and were embarrassed by any emotion other than disappointment: "An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except that cleverness of a decadence". Of Graham Greene’s "The Heart of the Matter", Chandler remarked that it had everything that made a good book ‘except verve, wit, gusto, music and magic’. Eugene O’Neill was ‘utterly artificial’; Auden ‘leaves me groping’; Osbert Sitwell was ‘an Edwardian who stayed up too late’; and the critics who fawned around T. S. Eliot were sterile neurotics looking for ‘stale cake’ to ‘wrap up in a fancy name and sell to the snob-fakers’. Chandler believed that the entire intellectual establishment was in a state of terminal self-delusion, cut off from the public it despised. Such people thought they could write, he said, ‘because they have read all the books’, but they were in fact hacks. ‘There is more life in the worst chapter Dickens or Thackeray ever wrote, and they wrote some pretty awful ones’.

Farley Granger and Ruth Roman in "Strangers on a Train" (1951) directed by Alfred Hitchcok (screenplay by Raymond Chandler)

"Alfred Hitchcock never forgave Chandler for calling him a ‘fat bastard’ yet Chandler seemed impervious to the fact they were no longer friends. When he died in a La Jolla Hospital in March 1959, the official cause of death was pneumonia, but in truth he had been almost constantly drunk since Cissy had died. It was simply too much for his body to bear. His funeral was attended by only 17 people, a sad but in some ways appropriate end for a man who had never gone out of his way to make friends." Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Chandler thought Communism was just a ‘fashion’ in America and ‘just as corrupt as Catholicism underneath.’ Suspicious as he was of most institutions, Chandler was politically non-partisan. He disliked the Church, but he also thought that scientists were held in too much awe: ‘they are the sacred cows of our times’. In defence of murder fiction, Chandler told his correspondents that few people seemed to realize that most of the world’s surviving literature has been concerned with violent death, rather than ‘drawing room neuroses or threadbare intellectualism’.

The trouble was, he believed, that post-war Western culture was being controlled by the first generation of highbrows not to have a grounding in the classics. Without God and without heroes, it was a generation that admired the art of writing itself rather than writing about things that meant anything. Nervous fashion had replaced wisdom. ‘The critics of today’, he told Charles Morton, ‘are tired Bostonians like Van Wyck Brooks or smart-alecks like Fadiman or honest men, confused by the futility of their job, like Edmund Wilson.’ They were all hooked on syntax and pessimism, ‘the opium of the middle classes’.

He had begun "The Little Sister" while at Paramount, but had kept having to stop work on it. It was set in Hollywood, and was threatening to confirm Chandler’s suspicion that it was almost impossible to write a good Hollywood novel because the whole place was itself already a kind of novel. The book was ambivalently reviewed in America on its publication in October 1949. Evelyn Waugh called Chandler ‘the best writer in America’.

“She was the beat of my heart for thirty years. She was the music I heard faintly at the edge of sound,” Chandler wrote at the time Cissy died.

After Cissy's death in 1954, Chandler’s return to full-scale drinking both emboldened and confused him in his search for someone to replace her: "I always opened the car door for her and helped her in. I never let her bring me anything. I always brought things to her. I never went out of a door or into before her. I never went into her bedroom without knocking. I suppose these are small things – like constantly sending her flowers, and always having seven presents for her birthday, and always having champagne on our anniversaries. They are small in a way, but women have to be treated with great tenderness and consideration – because they are women". (Chandler's letter to Deirdre Gartrell, 1957)

Chandler's taut flow of words transport us to a decaying and sometimes badly illuminated no-return world. Philip Marlowe, in his most 'private' moments, met shady characters at the most recondite locations in the South of California where he unravelled some dead-end mysteries. And in his most unexpected moments, the underpaid, callous, and principled detective mirrored the very chords that sustain our humanity, and what's more important than that? Chandler wanted Marlowe to be real, and to talk ‘with a rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness’. He had once been asked by a Canadian journalist whether he ever read his own fiction: "Yes, and at the very risk of being called an egotistical twerp, there must be some magic in the writing after all, but I take no credit for it. It just happens, like red hair." -"Raymond Chandler" by Tom Hiney (1999)

"I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes. I get my material in various ways, but my favorite procedure consists of going through the desks of other writers after hours. I am thirty-eight years old and have been for the last twenty years. I do not regard myself as a dead shot, but I am a pretty dangerous man with a wet towel. But all in all I think my favourite weapon is a twenty dollar bill.” —Raymond Chandler, "Raymond Chandler Speaking" (1997)

Audrey Totter plays Adrienne Fromsett in "Lady in the Lake"

In my class of literature during my college years, we were assigned to read one crime detective novel and I chose "The Lady in the Lake", which is possibly my favorite novel by Raymond Chandler although it's not as highly regarded as "The Long Goodbye". I prefer "The Big Sleep", "Farewell, My Lovely" and even "The Little Sister" over "The Long Goodbye". I recently read about the Lago Retba (Lago Rosa/Pink Lake) on the Cap Vert, surrounded by a landscape of dunes and palmtrees, whose water's color changes due to a different salt concentration (caused by the Dunaliella salina bacteria) and the variable intensity of the sun's rays that altere the water's chromatism from pink to mauve. These changes reminded me of Chrystal Kingsley and Muriel Chess's changes of hair color. Lago Retba reminded me of Little Fawn Lake.

"She moistened her lips and held her head on one side, staring at me fixedly. There was a quiet little silence. The damp breath of the Pacific slid into the room around us." -"The Lady in the Lake" (1943) written by Raymond Chandler

Neo-Noir Releases & Unsurpassed Femme Fatales of Noir

Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin, Anthony Mackie, Michael Pena and Giovanni Ribisi stars as a special unit of the LAPD tasked with taking down notorious mob boss Mickey Cohen, played by Sean Penn, in this neo noir true-crime thriller from director Ruben Fleischer. Co-stars Nick Nolte and Emma Stone, opens Sept. 7.

"Gangster Squad" boasts about as good a cast as you could hope for: Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Anthony Mackie, Michael Pena and Giovanni Ribisi. Surely you can find a few names on that list that will pique your interest in this true-crime actioner set in post-WW II Los Angeles about the LAPD's war with East Coast gangster Mickey Cohen.

Still of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in "Gangster Squad" (2012) directed by Ruben Fleischer

And in true noir fashion, Stone appears to play the femme fatale, a gangster's girlfriend who catches Gosling's eye. If Stone and Gosling keep falling into bed together, people are gonna talk.

Based on the book by Paul Lieberman, the screenplay was adapted by Will Beal for director Ruben Fleischer, of "Zombieland" fame. "Gangster Squad" opens Sept. 7. Source: www.nbcnewyork.com

Emile Hirsch and Matthew McConaughey in "Killer Joe" (2011) directed by William Friedkin

In recent years, Matthew McConaughey has become the go-to guy for bland romantic-comedy, making impressionable girls go weak at the knees in the likes of Failure to Launch, Ghosts of Girlfriends Part and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

His army of adoring female fans will be somewhat shocked by his latest effort however, a gothic neo-noir in which the Texan charmer commits some truly despicable acts, including one particularly nasty party piece involving an innocent KFC drumstick. The film is Killer Joe, with McConaughey playing the title character, though Joe is far from the lead.

That honour goes to Emile Hirsch, who plays Chris Smith, a low-level drug dealer who owes $6,000 to some very bad people when proceedings commence. Source: uk.ign.com


Following (1998) directed by Christopher Nolan (starring Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw and Lucy Russell) - Burglary scene

Chris Nolan’s Following: Fascinating Neo-Noir That Plants Seed For Later Masterpieces: In terms of establishing character, this is a great scene for both Cobb and the film’s protagonist, as it shows their true colours. One is a heartless sociopath who relishes in people’s sadness (rationalizing it as a form of rejuvenation for them), and the other is an ambling loner willing to be led down dangerous roads.

Nolan on "Following": “The script was written along the lines of what I see as the most interesting aspect of film noir and crime fiction; not baroque lighting setups and sinister villains, but simply that character is ultimately defined by action. In a compelling story of this genre we are continually being asked to rethink our assessment of the relationship between the various characters, and I decided to structure my story in such a way as to emphasize the audience’s incomplete understanding of each new scene as it is first presented.” Source: whatculture.com

Ella Raines plays a courageous secretary in "Phantom Lady" (1944) directed by Robert Siodmak

“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.” ―Hermann Hesse

The conventional view of the “hard-boiled” form is that it attempts to uncover truths about American reality, what David Smith calls the “tarnished metal beneath the glittering paint.”

Linda Fiorentino as Bridget Gregory in neo-noir "The Last Seduction" (1994) directed by John Dahl

The movie features Linda Fiorentino as the femme fatale, Peter Berg as a small town man whose one night affair turns into more than he wanted, and Bill Pullman as Fiorentino's husband who is chasing her and running from loan sharks at the same time. Fiorentino's performance generated talk of a possible Oscar nomination but she was disqualified because the film was shown on cable television (HBO) before it was released to theatres.

In The Last Seduction, Bridget is not a woman; she is the woman. "Verbally as well as visually, Bridget is presented as an almost supernatural femme fatale." William Covey explains in his essay Girl Power: Female Centered Neo-Noir, "woman centered neo-noirs intermingle both new and old noir themes within new critiques of patriarchy and analyses of female identity." The Last Seduction takes this critique and recombination a step further, uniting two key character types of film noir: the justifiably violent, isolated detective and the sexually empowered but brutally violent femme fatale.

She, Bridget, personifies the individual style of the isolated detective hero while clearly remaining the femme-noire antihero. (Even her name, "Bridget Gregory," symbolizes her dual female and male identities.) While it is her stoic detachment that enables her to survive and continue self-sufficiently, it is her dark, seductive nature that empowers her to work for her own good which is, essentially, evil. As Thomas Schatz explains in Hollywood Genres, "as a form," like film noir, "is varied and refined, it is bound to become more stylized, more conscious of its own rules of construction and expression." It is this fusion of the unstoppable detective with the irrepressible seductress into one ultra-anti-heroine that makes The Last Seduction refreshing." Bridget's does indeed feel like the 'last' seduction, a final turn of the narrative screw for a noir icon." Source: www.girlsaresmarter.com

Mary Astor as femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) directed by John Huston

Still of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in "Out of the Past" (1947) directed by Jacques Tourneur

Evelyn Keyes and Charles Korvin in "The Killer That Stalked New York" (1950) directed by Earl McEvoy

As much as I admire the redefinition of the femme fatale in the modern noir films I feel their neo femme fatales lack the fugacious but inescapable charms of their predecessors. Despite of the physical salvation of modern spider women on the screen (they don't usually die in the end unlike their older sisters), I envisage they cannot beat the indurated delicacy of the classic dames: Claire Trevor (The Queen of Noir), Barbara Stanwyck, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Greer, Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor, Ann Savage, Jean Gillie, Mary-Beth Hughes, etc.

Despite of accusations of misogyny in some classic noir tales, I actually find a rare philogyny beneath the incomparable splendor from such timeless characters as Kathie Moffat, Jane Palmer or Lilith Ritter: they remain unsurpassed (and exceedingly so in the lesser neo noir efforts) by most of modern actresses who recreate these mythological creatures revelling excessively in their hard-boiled qualities more than in the erratic torments the classic muses inflicted on their male suitors after a dark apogee.

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford in "Human Desire" (1954) directed by Fritz Lang

Although Bosley Crowther of The New York Times panned Grahame's performance in "Human Desire", saying her portayal of Vicki Buckley was "as wholly devoid of fascination as a lush on a stool in a saloon", the film's director Fritz Lang took a far different view: "Gloria Grahame is definitely on the way up. Like all stars, she is a personality with her own individuality. She represents today's femme fatale". -"Femme Noir, Bad Girls of Film" (1998) by Karen Burroughs Hannsberry

Jake Gyllenhaal as Officer Taylor and Anna Kendrick as Janet in "End of Watch" (2012)


Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña in "End of Watch": "Starbucks and Quinceanera" clip

The scene finds cop pals Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña shooting the shit, and riffing on the differences between white and Mexican wives, before they are called out on a gig. The generous amounts of swearing are bleeped out, though they could've just put this trailer under a red band instead, but we suppose that would limit the audience who doesn't know how to lie to get past age gates. Anyway, it's not particularly remarkable or funny, but the sequence does show David Ayers' voyeuristic approach utilizing all kinds of different cameras -- in the car, strapped on a helicopter -- to give the picture an added immediacy. Source: blogs.indiewire.com

Drum Kits in "Phantom Lady" by Robert Siodmak

Ella Raines and Elisha Cook Jr. in "Phantom Lady" (1944) directed by Robert Siodmak (jazz drums scene).

The scene in the jazz cellar is a significant turning point in the film’s plot; exploiting stereotypes carried over from “the jazz age” and long held assumptions about the jazz lifestyle. Ella Raines as Carol wears a costume with no mixed messages; even a Midwestern girl new to the big city knows precisely how to communicate her intentions to Cook’s drummer man (including the beauty patch that passes as a mole). What follows is a barely masked display of drugs, jazz and sexual innuendo, which could not have been lost on wartime audiences watching the film for the first time (the drum solo is not listed in the credits, some sources claim Gene Krupa but evidence exists that Dave Coleman, Sr. might have been the drummer for this scene).

Director Robert Siodmak, producer Joan Harrison, Ella Raines and Franchot Tone on the set of Phantom Lady

The distinctly different styles used in each of these sequences further punctuate the fact that music is not used elsewhere in the film. There is no atmospheric or incidental music, and little to no exterior noises. The world of this Siodmak film is an eerily silent and sterile one.

Film noir often brings the hero in contact with the classic female characters of the genre: the actress, the call girl, the dancer and the singer. Phantom Lady brings the heroine in contact with the classic male characters of the genre: the bartender, the cabdriver, the detective and the musician. Source: distant-voicesandflickering-shadows.blogspot.com

In short, Cook's insane Gene Krupa-dubbed solo in the basement bar is one of the most gloriously unseemly bits of sexual sublimation in sound cinema. It's sexual sublimation gone horribly right and wrong at the same time. And though Ella Raines is basically cozying up to him to get information, she still turns into a kind of creepy jazz-loving libertine, conjuring up his ferocious solo like its a spirit borne wailing from her fallopian tubes to his drum sticks and back again. Source: acidemic.blogspot.com

Raymond Chandler's hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe transformed

Humphrey Bogart (as Philip Marlowe), Lauren Bacall (as Vivian Rutledge), Sonia Darrin (as Agnes Lowzier) in "The Big Sleep" (1946) directed by Howard Hawks Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe is self-critical as well as socially critical. What he sees as his work goes far beyond the often straightforward tasks imposed by his clients; self-employed and without family ties, he exploits the singular nature of his job to negotiate among contesting groups, ever conscious of the fact that simplistic definitions of "good" and "evil" will hamper his efforts. Richard Slotkin nevertheless holds to the old paradigm and overemphasizes the Western provenance of the hardboiled detective as exemplified by Marlowe. He posits, intriguingly, for example, that Chandler's detective, like James Fenimore Cooper's Hawkeye, is first and foremost a "rescuer" of the innocent, that both heroes are "engaged in unmasking hidden truth."

In response to one of Orfamay's many complaints (in "The Little Sister") about the evils of Los Angeles, Marlowe simply says that "we have to take the bad with the good in this life", an offhand, sarcastic comment, yet one that neatly sums up the detective's philosophy. Marlowe eschews confronting problems idealistically, but he pragmatically confronts them daily on a professional and personal basis. And by guardedly engaging the citizens of the city, he avoids the opposite extreme of nihilism as found in Hammett, whose Continental Op in Red Harvest, for Sinda Gregory, "is made to appear as guilty and morally reprehensible as the rest of the gangsters". One might then expect Chandler's class bias to have endeared him to a Marxist critic such as Ernest Mandel, who, however, feels that Marlowe, among other detectives, is a sentimentalist who wastes his energy on pursuing criminals who wield only "limited clout". It is doubtless Chandler's reluctance to make any global condemnation of the capitalist system that bothers Mandel. Chandler consistently and symbolically sought redress for social ills within the democratic system as he knew it in the United States, within the liberal tradition. In "The Simple Art of Murder," for example, he insisted that no social or political hierarchy is truly divorced from the "rank and file" in a democracy, and thus cannot be completely blamed for its failures. Ross Macdonald's primary criticism of Chandler is that he is too moralistic; Like other critics, Macdonald misreads Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder," overemphasizing Chandler's call for "a quality of redemption" as a "central weakness in his vision" in novels. Chandler isolates his hero, Philip Marlowe, by means of "an angry puritanical morality" and erects barriers, including those of language. Chandler's deepest concerns - his interest in the community as well as the individual, his hatred of the abuse and the abusers of power, his conviction that ethical conduct cannot be reduced to simplistic formulae and must be continually scrutinized - are inevitably what Hollywood was most concerned to change. While classics of film noir and exciting, entertaining narratives in their own right, Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet and Hawks' The Big Sleep not only simplify Chandler's novels but also defuse Chandler's social critique, transforming plot and adapting characters when not eliminating them outright. “Murder, My Sweet” is Philip Marlowe’s film debut and director Edward Dmytryk certainly captured the look and feel of a good 1940’s crime film. While the film varies from the novel – most notably Anne Riordan, the persistent reporter, has morphed into a Grayle daughter from a previous marriage – the changes aren’t as drastic as they would be with the Howard Hawks’ production based on The Big Sleep or Robert Altman’s production based on The Long Goodbye. An often-heard quote about Powell’s performance is that he was the “eagle scout” Marlowe. That quote originated with Dmytryk and it wasn’t about Powell, it was about Marlowe. In an interview about why he cast Dick Powell, Dmytryk said: “[Dick Powell] fit the character, as far as I could see. After all, what is Marlowe? He’s no Sam Spade. He’s an eagle scout among tough guys. He’s a moral, ethical man, with a strong sense of responsibility.” Philip Marlowe may be re-envisioned by filmmakers for whatever they need for their particular movie as many characters of literature often are. Chandler also cast Marlowe in many different guises and the Marlowe of Farewell, My Lovely varies a great deal from the Marlowe of The High Window or the Marlowe of The Big Sleep or the Marlowe of The Long Goodbye. The Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely is a very passive Marlowe, subjected to the whims of Moose Malloy and Dr. Sonderborg and Jesse Florian. This is not the Marlowe of control but the Marlowe of defeat. It is one of the rare times that Marlowe doesn’t understand what is happening until the shooting starts and where the motives of any number of people don’t become obvious until it is almost too late. Anne Shirley as Anne Grayle and Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe in "Murder, My Sweet" (1944) directed by Edward Dmytryk That isn’t the Marlowe of other novels and in this novel – unlike any of the others – he gets the girl. Not the rich, well-settled Anne Grayle of the movie who will inherit everything from her father but the down-to-earth Anne Riordan of the novel who has nothing and owes nothing to anybody. This is a ghost of Marlowe surrounded by the poetry of Chandler. It is the smoke of Marlowe and not the fire and in this case someone such as Dick Powell is perfect for the role of Marlowe because a tough guy would show that this book is only hard-boiled in plot. As with The Big Sleep and The Lady In The Lake, Farewell, My Lovely was based on short stories that were published in the pulp magazines. None of those stories featured Philip Marlowe although after Chandler became successful those stories were collected for publication and the main characters were then renamed Philip Marlowe. In the book, Marlowe is working for the police who are trying to find Malloy after Malloy kills the owner of a nightclub where Velma once worked. LAPD Detective McNulty convinces Marlowe that Marlowe needs “friends” in the police department and Marlowe accepts the non-paying job of trying to find Malloy. “Nothing made it my business except curiosity,” Marlowe muses in the book. “But strictly speaking, I hadn’t any business in a month. Even a no-charge job was a change.” However one tries to frame this relationship, the word “informer” keeps entering the picture. Marlowe tells McNulty, “Okey, if I think of anything, it’s yours. And when you get the mug, I’ll identify him for you. After lunch.” Yet he sets out to track down Velma – who might lead him to Malloy – immediately after the conversation. Source: www.williamahearn.com "Will you make love to me tonight?" she asked softly. "That again is an open question. Probably not." "You would not waste your time. I am not one of these synthetic blondes with a skin you could strike matches on. These ex-laundresses with large bony hands and sharp knees and unsuccessful breasts." "Just for half an hour," I said, "let's leave the sex to the side. It's great stuff, like chocolate sundaes. But there comes a time you would rather cut your throat. I guess maybe I'd better cut mine."

I turned west on Sunset and swallowed myself up in three lanes of race-track drivers who were pushing their mounts hard to get nowhere and do nothing. "I used to like this town," I said, just to be saying something and not to be thinking too hard. "A long time ago. 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. Little groups who thought they were intellectual, used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum either." We crossed La Cienega and went into the curve of the Strip. The Dancers was a blaze of light. The terrace was packed. The parking lot was like ants on a piece of overripe fruit. "Now we get characters like this Steelgrave owning restaurants. We get guys like that fat boy that bawled me out back there. We've got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit-and Cleveland. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup. Out in the fancy suburbs dear old Dad is reading the sports page in front of a picture window, with his shoes off, thinking he is high class because he has a three-car garage. Mom is in front of her princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes. And Junior is clamped onto the telephone calling up a succession of high school girls that talk pigeon English and carry contraceptives in their make-up kit." "It is the same in all big cities, amigo." "Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood-and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail-order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else." "You are bitter tonight, amigo." "I've got a few troubles. The only reason I'm driving this car with you beside me is that I've got so much trouble a little more will seem like icing." "You have done something wrong?" she asked and came close to me along the seat. "Well, just collecting a few bodies," I said. "Depends on the point of view. The cops don't like the work done by us amateurs. They have their own service." "What will they do to you?" "They might run me out of town and I couldn't care less. Don't push me so hard. I need this arm to shift gears with." She pulled away in a huff. "I think you are very nasty to get along with," she said. "Turn right at the Lost Canyon Road." "I was pretty good in there, no?" she said softly. Then the car backed violently with a harsh tearing of the tires on the asphalt paving. The lights jumped on. The car curved away and was gone past the oleander bush. The lights turned left, into the private toad. The lights drifted off among trees and the sound faded into the long-drawn whee of tree frogs. Then that stopped and for a moment there was no sound at all. And no light except the tired old moon. -"The Little Sister" (1949) written by Raymond Chandler

Where Carroll John Daly's, Dashiell Hammett's, and Mickey Spillane's heroes display the self-sufficient, self-aggrandizing traits of classic rugged American individualism, Chandler, through Marlowe, critiques the individualist ethos. While other hardboiled detectives often abuse the power they possess and isolate themselves in the process, his actions are pointed consistently at getting contentious or potentially contentious individuals to work together. Unlike other hardboiled heroes, Marlowe is acutely critical of his own thoughts and actions; he questions his own role and the power he wields, and his actions reflect changes in attitude as he learns from others; In a world in which the police are as guilty of egregious violence as criminals, Marlowe roundly condemns both; his toughness is measured not by resorting to such extreme measures, but by his refusal to respond violently to the threats of gangsters (Eddie Mars in The Big Sleep, Laird Brunette in Farewell, My Lovely) or the police (Christy French in The Little Sister, Detective Dayton in The Long Goodbye). "No matter how smart you think you are, you have to have a place to start from; a name, an address, a neighbourhood, a background, an atmosphere, a point of reference of some sort." -Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye" (1973) directed by Robert Altman Cynthia S. Hamilton insists that, in keeping with the genre, "Chandler's misanthropy demands an absolute separation between Marlowe and the moral squalor of his society". In her view Marlowe is antisocial, an "alienated outsider who vindicates that stance by his demonstrable superiority in a society unworthy of his services." Chandler took on the daunting challenge of using the highly individualistic figure of the private eye to explain how and why American rugged individualism has failed. In transforming the figure of the hard-boiled detective, he created a new paradigm, not only for a new detective, but for a new individual as well. -"Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: The Hard-Boiled Detective Transformed" by John Paul Athanasourelis (2011)

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Source: watch.accesshollywood.com