After years of slowly perverting the hard-boiled 40s purity of Chandler's creation with movies like Marlowe and The Long Goodbye that put Marlowe increasingly at odds with the modern times, the series went back to its 1940s roots in 1974 with Farewell My Lovely and introduced Mitchum as Marlowe, perfectly cast in all of his lantern-jawed, world weariness. So why did the makers of this, its sequel, decide to come back to the present and move the setting from Cal. to England? Chandler's plot, which features such items as drug use and underground pornography, shocked its 1940s readership. Re-located to anything goes, swinging-70s London, none of this stuff seems at all adequate motivation for a murder spree - heck, it would make a tame weekend for David Bowie - and this severely blunts the plot's impact. And if no compelling motivation exists for murder, who cares whodunnit? This is the problem with updating the setting of an older story without proper regard for changing historical context: it can weaken essential story elements that drive the plot. That is what happened here. The script still crackles with remnants of Chandler's tough guy talk and Mitchum is still good as Marlowe, world-weary as all get out, yet willing to pitch in to help a dame, but the rest of it works less well and the lack of a noir visual aesthetic makes it all less interesting to watch, too. London doesn't look gritty, just sooty, and the unsavory thugs floating at the edges of the movie seem less scary than what you would have encountered in a mid- 70s punk rock dive. It's not bad, just lame.
Review of The Big Sleep
