RARA-AVIS: Re: Getting Sentimental (or Hardboiled Hearts of Mush)

Kevin Smith (kvnsmith@colba.net)
Thu, 21 May 1998 08:59:14 -0500 > relatively normative?
>a prelapsarian world?

I think it's time for that guy Chandler was always speaking about to come
through the door with a gun in his hand....

But I agree (I think) about the sentimental streak that underlies much of
Hardboiled fiction. I think Robert Parker has even gone so far as to call
most private eye novels (and certainly his and Chandler's) romances (not in
the Harlequin sense, but in the same sense that the Arthurian legends, the
Leatherstocking Tales, Ivanhoe, etc. were). The trick in the hardboiled
novel, of course, is to not let the sentimentality, that allows the hero to
push on, to override the cynical detachment that allows him to survive.

Or, as Marlowe put it in Playback, "If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive.
If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive."

>It's always seemed to me that the best hard-boiled voices are not just
>cynical or amused by it all. They have an undertone of disappointment, of
>a loss of something or someone that could modulate into sentimentalism if
>they ever let up. I've always read the conclusive kiss-off of Brigid
>O'Shaughnessy, for instance, as more self-denial than sadistic (regardless
>of where Bogart took it). And I always liked Dick Powell's Marlowe in
>_Murder, My Sweet_, in part because he manages to express a hurt behind the
>wise cracks.

Bill's right. And I wonder: does anyone else think that Powell was the
best film Marlowe?

I always felt Bogart's version was just Spade: The Sequel, and Mitchum,
while good, was too old, too big, too reptilian. Montgomery, on reflection,
just wasn't there; and Garner was already warming up for Rockford (not that
there's anything wrong with that). I also liked Elliot Gould's portrayal,
but I think Powell really captured the two sides of Marlowe better than
anyone. I think of him, half-dead, being interogated by the cops, and that
(apparently improvised) scene where he does the little dance step.

But I digress....

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