Terrill Lankford wrote:
> And it is important to note that most of the
differences between the book and
the movie
> predate Altman's involvement and originate with
Brackett's script - including
the notorious
> ending.
This thread made me reread Brackett's own writing on the
subject ("From the Big Sleep to the Long Goodbye", reprinted
in The Big Book of Noir). Turns out that Brian Hutton (WHERE
EAGLES DARE, KELLY'S HEROES) was the director initially
assigned, and Altman was only brought in when Hutton become
busy elsewhere
(presumably with something called NIGHT WATCH, starring
Elizabeth Taylor).
Anyhow, Brackett's essay is very convincing about why the
script turned out the way it did. The way she tells it, it
seems it was almost inevitable. Recommended.
And get this:
"Twenty-five years had gone by since THE BIG SLEEP. In that
quarter-century, legions of private eyes had been beaten up
in innumerable alleys by armies of interchangeable hoods.
Everything that was fresh and exciting abouth Philip Marlowe
in the forties had become cliché, outworn by imitation and
overuse. The tough loner with the sardonic tongue and the
cast-iron gut had become a caricature.
Also, in twenty-five years, the idiom had
changed.
By Chandler's own definition, Marlowe was a
fantasy, not a real man in a real world. He existed only in
the context of the Raymond Chandler world especially invented
for him, with its stylized corruptions, its stylized
characters who represented attitudes, not people, its
stylized orchestrations of violence. Take away that context,
and who is Marlowe?
Time had removed the context. The Los Angeles
upon which Chandler based his literary world is as dead as
Babylon."
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