Philip Marlowe on the small screen

POWERS BOOTHE AS PHILIP MARLOWE, CIRCA 1983

Seeing as how I've got a new book coming out in a couple of months, it's probably no surprise that I've got books on the brain. So when I get the chance to talk about both television and books, it's a good day. This usually happens when I'm reading (or writing) a book about television, but on occasion a show will draw me to a non-television book. And that's my inspiration for this week.

For reasons that don't bear repeating at the moment, a viewing of a particularly unsatisfying detective program drove me to our library, where I pulled out my copy of Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder. I found what I was looking for there (something that proved the point I was trying to make to myself), but instead of putting the book back when I was done, I started leafing through it. I've read it before, of course, but there was something so satisfying, so spare and pure about Chandler's prose, that it helped me get the bad taste from the program out of my mouth. And it got me to thinking, not for the first time, how we've never had a really great version of Chandler's most famous character, Phillip Marlowe, on television. There have been many superior versions of him on the big screen, most notably from Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart, but on the small screen, we haven't been quite so successful.

Marlowe is, to my mind, the prototype of the private detective as we have come to see him, a knight both noble and tragic. And so much of the appeal of Marlowe stories lies in Chandler's way with words, from his dingy description of Los Angeles to the utter futility that Marlowe sometimes experiences, and those are moments that simply can't be captured on screen. In fact, the most famous passage from Chandler's classic The Big Sleep, the concluding line that explains the title of the book (and is the only time the title is used in the manuscript) never even appears in the most classic version of that story, the Bogart/Bacall movie.*

*It does, however, make an appearance in voiceover in Robert Mitchum's 1978 version. Mitchum makes for a compelling, older and tired Marlowe, but stick to his first of two Marlowe turns, 1975's Farewell, My Lovely.

Marlowe's made it as a regular on the small screen twice. The first time was a 1959-1960 series on ABC, starring Philip Carey. I liked what I've seen of it, although, as the always-reliable Wikipedia points out, the show wasn't very true to the character.  Check it out for yourself and see what you think.

The more successful version aired on HBO from 1983 to 1986, starring Powers Boothe in the title role. Booth did well; he certainly carried more gravitas than Carey, although he very much lacks the charm of Bogart in The Big Sleep, or especially Powell in Murder, My Sweet (the renamed Farewell, My Lovely).* It's difficult to picture Boothe playing chess or reading the classics, as Marlowe was known to do under the spell of Chandler's typewriter; actually, he might have been better cast as Mike Hammer. Still it's a significant upgrade in both style and substance from the previous effort.

*Powell would play Marlowe again on television a decade after Murder My Sweet, on the dramatic anthology series Climax! in 1954. Nobody seems to have a copy of it, though. Pity; his Marlowe is, in my opinion, the definitive version.

I've written before of my disappointment that the private detective, once a staple of television, has pretty much disappeared from the airwaves. One of the reasons, I suspect, is that procedurals have become so completely reliant on technology, the type that goes far beyond wiretapping in its intrusiveness. Sure, private detectives can (and do) engage in this kind of work as well, and can be very effective doing it, but you have to admit it doesn't quite have the romance of the fog-shrouded, rain-slick streets, the lonely truthseeker with the brim of his fedora worn low and the collar of his trenchcoat pulled high to keep the chill away. After all, he's a knight, not a technician, remember? And as for the detective's traditional antagonism with the police force (every private eye had a frenemy in the department), just make him a rebel within the force itself; all the procedurals are full of quirkbots like that.* Heaven forbid he should show too much individualism, though. We don't seem to like that much.

*They don't come much quirkier than Elliot Gould's big-screen portrayal in The Long Goodbye, a reimagination that calls for much more space in a blog devoted to movies. Like this one.

Another reason might be that detective fiction seems to work best in a period atmosphere. One of the challenges with Stacy Keach's Mike Hammer series was that it tried to tell the story within a contemporary time period (a flaw inherent in James Garner's otherwise perceptive Marlowe, an adaptation of Chandler's The Little Sister), which merely solidified Hammer as a desperate anachronism, a character that was resolutely not of this time. To the extent that it worked, it was due to Keach's ability to see the anachronism, but the detective as we know him—the Marlowe prototype—seems to thrive more in the noir grime of the last century's first half.

The most recent big screen adaptation of Marlowe, 2023's eponymous version starring Liam Neeson, was not successful, possibly in part because it was adapted from a Marlowe novel that wasn't written by Chandler in the first place; both the book and movie suffered from what one critic described as being "irksomely postmodern in its audience pandering," and that sounds about right to me.

At any rate, from Philip Marlowe to Jim Rockford, from Richard Diamond to Peter Gunn, from Darren McGavin's Hammer to Stacy Keach's, the private detective has been a welcome presence on television. You'd think it might be about time for "prestige" television to revisit Marlowe, or some of the other great literary detectives of the past. A revival of The Rockford Files is on the way, and while there's some apprehension from fans, James Garner's daughter is quite excited about it, and that doesn't count for nothing. At any rate, let's hope that's part of a comeback, one that's a little grittier than, say, Moonlighting or Remington Steele, hmm?  TV

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