Pretty Good

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

***SPOILERS*** James Garner plays it cool and nonchalant as private dick Philip Marlowe in trying to find "little Sister"-The original title of the movie-Orfamay Quest's, Sharon Farrell, brother Orrin, Roger Newman,who reportedly left home in Kansas looking for fame & fortune as a blackmailer of the stars in tinsel town Hollywood. Given a $50.00 retainer by Orfamy to track down Orrin Marlow goes to this hippie and homeless hotel to check out if he's, Orin's last reported residence, living there. Things go south from there on with Marlowe knocked out from behind and the hotel manager Grant W. Hicks, Jackie Coogan, the only person who can identify the person who clubbed him later found murdered with an ice-pick stuck in his neck! It turns out that the person who clubbed Marlowe from behind was TV sitcom star and part time fashion model Marvis Wald, Gayle Hunnicutt, whom Orrin had photographed making it by the swimming pool with Tony Stompanato like hood Sonny Steelgrave, H.M Wynant, who as it was soon found out by Marlowe was working together with Hicks in an effort to blackmail Wald. From that point on everything in the movie goes completely downhill and fast with a confused and looking out of it Philip Marlowe getting involved in a number of fresh murders. The killings have something to do with a mysterious Brooklyn based ice-pick killer as well as strip tease artist Dolores Gonzales, Rita Merino, and what turned out to be her lover child psychiatrist quack and doctor Dr. Vincent Lagardie, Paul Stevens. Marlow also has a spat with hit-man and martial arts expert Winslow Wong, Bruce Lee, who came to his office and wrecked it just to intimidate the startled Marlowe who couldn't quite figure out just what Wong wanted from him in having trouble understanding his very pronounced lisps! It's after that bizarre incident that the pumped up Wong overreached himself in trying to droop kick Marlowe as he ended up falling to his death by not realizing-While doing his thing-that he was on the ledge of a 50 story building!****SPOILERS**** The end if you can call it that has a sleepy and not all that with it Marlowe finally getting to the bottom of both his whiskey bottle as well as this slew of murders, mostly off camera, at a strip joint that Dolores, who's so overly made up that for a moment you have trouble recognizing her, doing her act on stage. By then all the loose ends in the movie are now all tied together to who's-As if you really care- behind all these, including that of Orrin's, strange murders and have the movie finally wrapped up-Thank the Lord-and with in both Dolores & Dr. Quack or Legardie's case a bang. Also notable mention is actors Carroll O'Connor and Kenneth Tobey as bumbling L.A detectives and Marlowe's nemeses in the film Let. French & Sgt. Belfus who are anything but helpful in solving the murders but funny as hell, like the Keystone Kops, to watch.

MARLOWE is a curious case of contemporizing a '40s hard-boiled icon into '60s mod style (hotel rooms are pads, cops are fuzz, you get the gist). Some of it works, some doesn't. The story's nothing special, but the casting is the movie's real sales pitch. William Daniels and Carroll O'Connor are highlights, and Bruce Lee's bit part makes a novel entrance from out of nowhere. Let's not forget the gorgeous Rita Moreno.It's James Garner who ably carries the movie on his shoulders, and turns out to be a great Philip Marlowe. He can play tough, he's at ease with the wisecracks, and fits this movie's time period. I really do like his performance, and I wish he'd gotten to play the role again in another entry ... preferably with a tighter story.6/10

Much as I like Robert Altman's 1973 riff on Chandler's The Long Goodbye, I find it strange this James Garner/Paul Bogart take on The Little Sister, made four years earlier, is often overlooked, and that many critics consider Garner miscast as hardboiled Philip Marlowe. There are so many similarities between the two films, it seems impossible to think Altman was not influenced by this earlier effort.As with Chandler's novels, the thread of familial relationships runs strongly in the background of both movies. Marlowe helmer Paul Bogart's daughter Jennifer was married to The Long Goodbye's star Elliot Gould during this period. As if that isn't co-incidence enough, the father and daughter share the same surname as Humphrey Bogart, who is held by many (though not me) to be the ideal Marlowe in the 1946 The Big Sleep.There are further co-incidences of an almost familial nature. Gayle Hunnicut, female star of Marlowe, reappears as a femme fatale in the Powers Boothe Marlowe series of the 1980s, while the apartment Gould uses in The Long Goodbye also makes a guest appearance in the Boothe episodes. Also The Long Goodbye's script writer Leigh Brackett co-wrote the screenplay to the Bogie The Big Sleep almost three decades earlier. The coincidences just keep mounting up...But let's just look at the similarities now between Marlowe and The Long Goodbye.* Both tales are updated from their 1940s settings, but in both Marlowe is obviously a man out of his time. His ethics, dress and moral code are at odds with everyone else around him. In both films, Marlowe could easily be a figure from the '40s instead of the updated setting he finds himself in.* The hippy, drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s is visible it the background of both films. This counterculture only goes to underscore how Marlowe is entirely out of step with the times he finds himself in.* In both films, Marlowe is closer to Chandler's errant knight, going down mean streets while himself being mean, than the two-fisted Humphrey Bogart of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep.* Both films have enigmatic endings, and leave Marlowe walking away from crime scenes in a way he did not in the novels; it is almost as if the 1940s morals make Marlowe so sick to the stomach he can't be bother with clearing the modern messes he finds himself in any more. * Both films have music scores that consist of different versions of the same tune being played over and over, though sadly the score to the 1969 film never seems to have been released.OK, so some of things elements are implicit in the books. Marlowe's morality was as probably as outdated in 1940s Hollywood as it was in the same town 30 years later, and the ending of Chandler's novel The High Window is at least as enigmatic as the endings of these two films, in the fact that the true guilty parties are never punished. Also, both films are in keeping with their era. A trait they share with another underrated Marlowe film, the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep with Robert Mitchum (which for my money is better than the Bogart/Hawks version any day for being much closer to the book, despite being directed by perennial journeyman Michael Winner) is that of being updated to the-then present day. However, Winner goes a step further than Bogart or Altman by moving the action to Britain -- a glossy, glamorous London, unrecognisable as such to those who lived there at the time, to be sure, and as much a fantasy as Bay City in Chandler country -- but this change in locale underscores the universality of the world Chandler had created.The crimes in all these stories would not be out of place today and had their equivalent in the times of that other great Marlowe, Christopher, and his contemporary, Shakespeare. The small, mucky, grubby crimes of the Quests, the Wades/Lennoxes and the Sternwoods, as well as the perpetually corrupt police and double-dealing officials, small-time reporters and shiftless grifters, are as true of the real underworld today as they were when Chandler wrote his stories, or even a thousand years before that.In Marlowe, it is human nature that is on display, and the themes of the story -- family breakdown, blackmail, murder and someone with the courage to stand up against such human excrescence -- would work as well in the internet age as the did in 1969. Perhaps even better.It's true this film has faded more than The Long Goodbye. Its obvious back projection and TV-style photography sometimes let it down and the fashions look more dated than in the other Marlowe films of the same era, despite being only a little older than them. (Indeed, it plays as trail-run for Garner's later TV success, The Rockford Files.) But for all that, it is as entertaining and as thought-provoking as Altman's film, and Garner's performance carries the whole thing effortlessly along. It is an unjustly ignored treasure rather than a guilty pleasure.

Raymond Chandler's 1940s private investigator Philip Marlowe steps into actor James Garner's shoes, which should be a comfortable fit. But, it isn't. This film starts with someone doing an impression of James Bond, poolside, over a swingin' sixties credit sequence. Then, we find Mr. Garner wading through a group of presumably stoned and definitely slumbering hippies. As it turns out, he's looking for the brother of a client in this hippie hotel... Garner finds several ice-picks, usually in the back of bodies. Ice-picks were often used in the 1940s to pick ice. Karate expert Bruce Lee smashes Garner's office and Garner calls him "a little gay" because he's light on his feet. The climax occurs after about 90 minutes of muddling events, when Rita Moreno in a platinum wig does her main strip tease. She must be wearing more than it seems and she sure knows how to move. Then, it's over.*** Marlowe (9/19/69) Paul Bogart ~ James Garner, Gayle Hunnicutt, Carroll O'Connor, Rita Moreno