Philip Marlowe

Philip Carey, James Garner, Bogart and probably more have essayed the role of Raymond Chandler's iconic private investigator but only two have worn the role like a double breasted suit with a .38 in the armpit: Gerald Mohr on radio and Powers Booth in this HBO masterpiece. Cleaving close to the Chandler stories and with exquisite period touches in set design, automobiles and even 1930s fixtures,lamps and streetlights, furniture and wallpaper this is a treat. Perfect? No. Compulsive nitpickers might find the occasional small flaw but seldom has any series been so carefully set in time. So fine writing and great sets but most of all Powers Booth. Oozing "Weltschmertz" Booth never steps across the line to parody or overacting. Like Mohr on radio, Powers Booth is Philip Marlowe. There may never be a better.

I've meant to post a review of this ground-breaking series for some time. The untimely passing of Powers Boothe this week has goaded me into action...

To sum up: this series is not just the best adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, it's the *only* adaptation that really manages to to remain true to the letter and the spirit of the books. Amazing, but true.

Humphrey Bogart was charming as Marlowe, of course... but his Big Sleep (especially the best-known edit) is 99% Howard Hawks, and should have a 'may contain traces of Chandler' warning on the label. What's more, Bogey couldn't have been much less like the character described by Chandler. In fact, Chandler's own ideal Marlowe is said to have been Cary Grant, which gives you some idea of just how far off-track Bogart, the geriatric Mitchum, and others have been. (Let us not even speak of Dick Powell.) Robert Montgomery could have been good, but he loused it up with that stupid first-person camera business, which has never worked and never will. Astoundingly, the best Marlowe prior to Boothe was Elliott Gould, in Altman's modernized, revisionist yet nonetheless evocative Long Goodbye. (EDIT: forgot to mention James Garner, who was very good, though a bit more Rockford than Marlowe.)

But Powers Boothe was an even more appropriate choice. He had just the right age, just the right gravitas - the world-weary toughness of a Bogart or Mitchum, but also the class, the energy and the good looks described by Chandler. He also had the advantage of being less familiar. When you looked at Boothe you didn't see a movie star - you saw Marlowe, a hard-working gumshoe, and nobody else.

The Boothe series also marked a rare attempt to include the *most* significant character from Chandler's stories: the city of Los Angeles. (The best previous attempt was, again, Altman's Long Goodbye.) Hawks' Big Sleep is set-bound, and could be taking place in New York as easily as LA. Mitchum's Marlowe was set in England - a travesty! The Powers Boothe series at least attempted to capture some of the gaudy, steamy, crazy city that Chandler created in his writing. Ironically, the series was not filmed in Hollywooed, but in Toronto, which gives you some idea of what can be done with a bit of creative camera work and a few judiciously-chosen locations.

Another very cool thing about this series is that instead of adapting The Big Sleep - YET AGAIN - it adapts some of Chandler's excellent short stories. We get that flavorful dialog, those evocative descriptions, and the dark noir-ish plots - all of them fresh and barely familiar to even the most devoted Marlowe fans.

Obviously, it's hard to beat Bogey and Hawks for sheer entertainment value. Or Altman for quirky, innovative filmmaking. But when it comes to all-out fidelity to the cherished Chandler stories, Powers Boothe in Philip Marlowe Private Eye has no rival.

As other reviewers have noted, the HBO Marlowe series consists of two different sequences. Shows 1-5 have great music, and a fine supporting cast as well as some novel plots. "The King is Yellow" is perhaps the best. Boothe is an excellent Marlowe and the period cars and sets are top notch.

The second sequence, shows 6-11 lack the music and some of the production values present in the earlier episodes. Too bad. But the scripts and Boothe are still good.

All 11 shows are now out as a 3-DVD boxed set for $20-$30 bucks from Gold Hill Entertainment. Video quality on the first 5 is not up to snuff, but this set is still worth having just to see Powers Boothe as Marlowe.

This rather curious series is a hybrid in more ways than one.

A US-UK co-production, with the UK input coming from LWT, as far as I remember, it looks like a period Dempsey & Makepiece. It seems to have been shot on video stock which has degraded over the years or been damaged in storage. But, thankfully, that doesn't affect the viewing experience very much.

Chandler's stories feature a number of different Private Detectives, of whom Marlowe is the most famous. But many of the original stories, from which these episodes are adapted, actually featured John Dalmas as the shamus, rather than Marlowe. As a reader of Chandler I was always mystified as to why Marlowe eclipsed Dalmas - the latter character seemed witter, surer, with more tragedy about him and less of the throwaway line. What we have in this series is many of the Dalmas stories given over to Marlowe. And, to be frank, it doesn't feel right - Marlowe doesn't have the intellectual equipment of Dalmas, and I think the scriptwriters recognised this and took some severe liberties with the plotting when making their adaptations. One compromise leads to another...

Having said all that, the series is very enjoyable as it stands. Powers Boothe is good as Marlowe, more of the laconic thick-ear than the closet fist. The supporting actors are all fine and there are some very effective action set-pieces scattered throughout.

Recommended. I feel sorry for Dalmas, though I know he'd shrug it off.

Powers Boothe is the quintessential Philip Marlowe; no one can ever best his performance in this series. He is cool, hip, a great wisecracker, and obsessed about the truth while seeming not to care. The next-best aspect of the series was the complete re-creation of the 1930's; sets were perfect, cars were big and bulky, clothes were gorgeous, and art deco abounded. Marlowe's bathroom even had those pastel nile green tiles that were everywhere in the 30's and 40's.

The 1986 series listed here was not the first, though, and not the best. HBO did 5 episodes in 1983 that have never been run since and were all mostly filmed, I believe, in England; these featured the luminous Kathryn Leigh Scott as Annie Rearden. She doesn't show up much in the second set, and that in itself makes the newer series a pale copy of the original.

These original episodes are the ones that should have been released first as they are far superior, and I look forward to them being issued. "The King in Yellow" was a masterpiece about a murdered big-band trumpeteer whom everyone hated so suspects were plentiful; "Smart Aleck Kill" mimicked Wallace Reid's drug-induced death in grand Hollywood style; "The Pencil" found Marlowe vying with a mafia boss to get a stool pigeon out of town alive; "Nevada Gas" featured a corrupt attorney who is targeted by his wife's boyfriend (played with nasty panache by "Hawk the Slayer's" John Terry); "Finger Man" has a femme fatale who takes up with a friend of Marlowe's, who then tries to frame Marlowe for a robbery.

This is a quality production, but can't truly be called a series. Only these 11 episodes were filmed, to my knowledge. I taped them all on their original run, and they weren't treated as an ongoing thing, which was a distinct oversight on HBO's part. Powers Boothe is magnetic as well as truly wonderful in this role, and they could have had a real winner on their hands if they had continued with the team used on the original 5 episodes, and without such a long break between the two sets.