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.

I just recently purchased the DVD edition of these shows, and they are really interesting. The audio quality on the DVD is horrible for the early episodes (1983), but those have the nicer opening credits and generally very good storytelling.

So far I've only seen one of the later episodes, "Pick-up on Noon Street", but it was pretty nice. The audio quality is immensely better than on the earlier episodes, but the acting was a little more hammy over all. Robin Givens was good, and Boothe was great as usual. The actions sequences were pretty poorly filmed, though, in my opinion.

Overall, HBO had their hands on something special here. Power Boothe is (as others have said here) the best Marlowe ever on screen. I love Bogey, and Mitchum is great in Farewell My Lovely, but Boothe feels like he IS the Marlowe, and his delivery of the dialog and voice-overs is superb.

I really wish that HBO or someone else would do another remake of The Long Goodbye with Powers Boothe as an older Marlowe. That'd be the best of Chandler played by the best 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.

Long before Sex in the City or Six Feet Under, HBO proved itself to be at the cutting edge of television when it released several episodes of Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, with Powers Boothe as the best Marlowe in film history (even better, in my view, than Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum). He's so authentic, so dead-on perfect, that I can't read Chandler's Marlowe stories without thinking about him. The episodes that aired in 1983 were, in my view, far superior to the series in 1986. The writing was better, the story lines were tighter, and they had a gritty, noirish atmosphere that made you think of Los Angeles in the early 1940s. Unfortunately, the 1986 episodes did not have the same Chandleresque seedy Los Angeles feel. For years, I watched and re-watched the original episodes on videotape, but--alas--I've long since lost those taped episodes and I haven't been able to find copies of them ever since. Let's hope HBO re-releases them on DVD. This was television at its absolute finest.

post-script: After writing this review, I discovered that the episodes are indeed available on DVD. What a great day I'm having!