Mark,
Re your comments below:
"The research material we used primarily was Raymond Chandler
Speaking, a series of letters, and I made everybody that
worked on the picture read that thoroughly. I took the two
main characters, both Philip Marlowe and Roger Wade, and I
took character traits of Chandler and I applied them to both,
and I made one the voice and the other the conscience. His
plots are so complicated and so full of holes that the way he
plugged the holes was to further complicate them. But he used
this thread to hang about sixty thumbnail essays on, so the
real interest in Raymond Chandler, to me, were those essays.
We tightened the plot up; I dropped half the characters
probably; then I used that line to hang a bunch of film
essays on. They weren't actually lifted from Raymond Chandler
so much as they were projections of him, because if Raymond
Chandler were alive in 1972 he wouldn't see things the way he
did in 1950 because he would himself have been that much
older. I've kept the story in 1952, but set it in 1972. The
goodbye is people going, not in separate directions, but
going in the same direction at a different pace.'
"This hardly sounds like a lack of respect for Chandler,
quite the opposite. Would someone who hated Chandler make
everyone read a book of his letters? And he shows some
insight into Chandler. Holes in his plots? Remember the
problem with Joe Chill's murder in The Big Sleep? Plugging
holes with further complications? Remember Chandler's line
about sending in a guy with a gun whenever things started to
lag?"
Calling Marlowe a loser than implying that Chandler was a
hypocrite for not seeing what's so almight clear to Altman,
and making a movie that trashes the character, shows a signal
lack of respect.
And bragging about making a movie from Chandler's letters
when the source material was the book sounds like he knew he
was going to take heat for being so untrue to Chandler and
needed to marshal his forces. Altman wasn't being unfaithful;
he was just being faithful "in his own fashion."
Yeah, right.
"Seems to me Altman was trying to honor the spirit of
Chandler, even if he felt he had to streamline the book to do
so."
Streamlining the book is what Hanson did to L.A. CONFIDENTIAL
or Zinneman did to FROM HERE TO ETERNITY.
What Altman did, and did deliberately, was trash the
book.
"As for that loser comment that pisses Jim off so much.
Chandler is a loser, at least according to society's
materialistic standards. A few lines after those Jim likes to
quote, Chandler says of Marlowe, 'He is a relatively poor
man, or he would not be a detective at all. He will take no
man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due
and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride
is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry
you ever saw him.' So he hits someone who calls him a
'cheapie.' Sounds a bit defensive to me, like someone who's
been called a loser a few times too many and is afraid it's
true."
Sounds to me like someone who'll take no man's insolence
without a due and dispassionate revenge. And that's
specifically and deliberately the character Altman refused to
depict in his movie.
"And in Raymond Chandler Speaking, the book Marlowe's
interpreter used as a source, Marlowe's creator said, 'If
being in revolt against a corrupt society consitutes being
immature, then Philip Marlowe is extremely immature. If
seeing dirt where there is dirt constitutes an inadequate
social adjustment, then Philip Marlowe has inadequate social
adjustment. Of course Marlowe is a failure and he knows it.
He's a failure because he hasn't any money. A man who without
any physical handicaps cannot make a decent living is always
a failure and usually a moral failure. But a lot of very good
men have been failures because their particular talents did
not suit their time and place.'
"How is Chandler's calling Marlowe a failure any different
from Altman calling him loser, especially when they're both
referring to society's perspective, not their own? This is
where Altman's career long fascination and sympathy for
society's losers and outsiders that Terrill pointed out comes
in. Like Chandler, Altman was interested in how and why a
loser/failure' s particular talents do not suit his time and
place."
Now who can't recognize irony? Marlowe's being a commercial
failure doesn't make him a loser. He's a commercial failure,
or at least a relative commerical failure, because of his
integrity and pride, not because of his incompetence or lack
of drive, as is clearly the case with Gould's
characterization.
Chandler clearly doesn't regard Marlowe as a loser because
he's a "failure." He regards him as a man of integrity, a
winner in Chandler's view, precisely because he won't sell
out his principles for commercial success.
"So it's easy to disagree with how Altman chose to highlight
Marlowe's alienation, but to say he did not respect Marlowe's
creator is a major stretch. Seems to me Altman studied
Chandler very closely and tried to project his concerns two
decades into the future by showing Marlowe even more out of
place (and far more worn down for his effort to stay a winner
in his own eyes)."
The stretch is asserting that Altman had a single iota of
respect for Chandler, his novel, or his character. He started
out believing that Chandler, who after all did nothing but
create the character, was wrong to depict Marlowe as a "phony
winner" and spent the whole movie trying to prove himself
right.
JIM DOHERTY
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