Philip Marlowe, détective privé

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 remember watching the first season of this when it came out and absolutely adored it. Powers Boothe's portrayal was just right. It was around the same time that Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes first aired, so we were spoilt for quality detective drama. If I recall correctly, it was part financed by London Weekend Television (part of the ITV network at the time) and shown on ITV in prime time. I recall them announcing that, even though the show was popular, they would not be making any more after the initial five due to it being so expensive. Nearly every item in the show was a genuine period piece, with very little being reproduced. This, and the fact that it was shot in the UK, made it extremely costly. The second series was never shown properly in the UK. Odd episodes would turn up in the early hours of the morning and, although the production values were not as good, the shows were still enjoyable. Hopefully someone will produce a restored version of the shows on DVD (previous comments claim that the quality is not too good). I also think it's time for Marlowe to appear again. James Caan's version in "Poodle Springs" didn't quite work as I thought he was a little too old for the role. Ideally, Marlowe should be in his late thirties/early forties: young enough to take (or throw) a punch, but old enough to have "been around the block" a few times. Ten years ago, Harrison Ford would have been ideal, but now I'm not sure. Any ideas .... ?

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!

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.

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.