What would Philip Marlowe do?

I wrote a few weeks ago that I'd chosen classic American crime fiction for my European trip. Here are three bits from The Big Sleep that reveal an interesting side to Philip Marlowe's nobility of spirit:

“Just lie quiet and hold your breath. Hold it until you can’t hold it any longer and then tell yourself that you have to breathe, that you’re black in the face, that your eyeballs are popping out, and that you’re going to breathe right now, but that you’re sitting strapped in the chair in the clean little gas chamber up in San Quentin and when you take that breath you’re fighting with all your soul not to take it, it won’t be air you’ll get, it will be cyanide fumes. And that’s what they call humane execution in our state now.”

*

“`That kind of thinking is police business, Marlowe. If Geiger’s death had been reported last night, the books could never have been moved from the store to Brody’s apartment. The kid wouldn’t have been led to Brody and wouldn’t have killed him. Say Brody was living on borrowed time. His kind usually are. But a life is a life.'

“`Right,' I said. `Tell that to your coppers next time they shoot down some scared petty larceny crook running away up an alley with a stolen spare.'”

*

“Carol Lundgren, the boy killer with the limited vocabulary, was out of circulation for a long, long time, even if they didn’t strap him in a chair over a bucket of acid. They wouldn’t, because he would take a plea and save the county money. They all do when they don’t have the price of a big lawyer.”

I wonder what law-and-order conservatives thought of Chandler then, and what they'd think of him now.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Vintage crime, vintage cars

Yesterday I wrote about Dashiell Hammett. Today some cars from Hammett's time showed up at the DooWop Car Show & Street Festival in my neighborhood, though I heard no doo-wop, just three guys playing Credence Clearwater Revival and Stealers Wheel on acoustic guitar, drum machine and electric keyboard.

Nick and Nora Charles could have waved out of that first car's window to well-wishers in mid-town Manhattan. The Continental Op would have felt at home leaning out the same window firing shots, and Sam Spade might have rifled the interior for registration papers.

(John Huston's 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon has made such a strong impression that some people may forget Hammett wrote almost all his fiction in the 1920s and early '30s. The Ford Model A that I saw today and that you see at the top of this post rolled off the assembly line in 1929, the same year The Maltese Falcon began appearing in serial form in Black Mask.)

This little number at left takes us into late Raymond Chandler territory, and which fictional detective would have driven the humongous licorice-and-strawberry ice cream sundae on wheels that brings this post to a close? Travis McGee? James Garner's Philip Marlowe, perhaps?

Which cars (or other modes of transport) do you associate most closely with a favorite fictional detective, story or movie?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Updates, schmupdates

I wrote two weeks ago about the new Sherlock Holmes movie and why it works. More recently, comments on this week's post about "Jim Thompson's happy ending?" including the following exchange:

If Marlowe is going to remain relevant I think we'll have to let directors update him as they see fit, the way Guy Ritchie plays around with Sherlock Holmes, for example.

and

I'm not really interested in seeing anybody's update of Marlowe or any other period detective. I don't think Marlowe could be made "relevant" to the present. Heck, he was out of place in his own 1940s-50s. Even Chandler himself said many times there would never be a real p.i. the way he wrote Marlowe. There are plenty of contemporary detectives who would make, do make, wonderful novel-to-screen transitions, however.

The floor is now open. Which crime fiction authors, stories and characters are ripe for updates? Why? Why not? Which updates work? Which do not? And why or why not?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The subject is sex

My recent comment about Harper also considered the two filmed versions of The Big Sleep, one of whose characters, the wild, irresponsible Carmen Sternwood, is palely echoed in Harper's Miranda Sampson. (The character is called Camilla in Michael Winner's 1978 Big Sleep remake.) Carmen is the one who pouts at Humphrey Bogart's Marlowe that "You're not very tall, are you?" to which he replies, "Well, I, uh, I try to be."

That's one character, more or less, in three movies from three decades, and, since sex is central to the character, three attitudes toward that interesting subject.

Young Carmen is a drunk, a drug user, and possibly a nymphomaniac and a psychotic, according to some accounts. A pornographer has taken pictures of her, and he uses them to blackmail her father, old General Sternwood. Marlowe finds his way to the pornographer's house, hears gunshots, and bursts in to find Carmen drugged and naked. In Howard Hawks' 1945/46 movie, she is draped in a blanket. In Winner's 1978 version, she is not. That's no surprise; the '70s could show what the '40s hid.

The real eye-opener for me was Harper's version of the character. Miranda Sampson parades around in revealing bikinis, and she drapes herself over any man in sight. So far, nothing exceptional, though she does look good. But it's a hotel-room scene with her and Harper (Paul Newman) that screams "Sixties!!!!!", or at least Hollywood's version of that decade.

Miranda props herself up on the bed, doing her best to seduce Harper as he searches the room. She goes so far as to lie back and slip a cushion under her hips. When Harper, fed up, slams the lights off and suggests that they close the door, though, Miranda springs upright and rolls across the bed in a panic, her virtue intact (to which the knowing Harper replies, "Ha, ha. Mmm, hmm.")

The '40s alluded, the '70s showed, the '60s teased.

And now, readers, your question: What parallel scenes, characters or situations from books or movies of different eras shed light on changing attitudes the way the scenes discussed here do?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007