Marlowe **** (1969, James Garner, Gayle Hunnicutt, Carroll O’Connor, Rita Moreno, Bruce Lee, Sharon Farrell, Jackie Coogan) – Classic Movie Review 1880

The slick and complex 1969 neo-noir thriller film Marlowe stars James Garner as Raymond Chandler’s all-time great LA private eye Philip Marlowe. It also stars Gayle Hunnicutt, Carroll O’Connor, Rita Moreno, Bruce Lee, Sharon Farrell and Jackie Coogan. 

Director Paul Bogart’s complex, slick and satisfying 1969 American neo-noir thriller film Marlowe stars James Garner as Raymond Chandler’s all-time great LA private detective Philip Marlowe, who is hired by quiet young Kansas blonde Orfamay Quest (Sharon Farrell) to find her vanished brother Orrin (Roger Newman).

The film also co-stars Gayle Hunnicutt, Carroll O’Connor, Rita Moreno, Bruce Lee, and Jackie Coogan.

Two guys get ice picks stuck in them, and soon there are bodies everywhere. Then Marlowe is harassed both by the cops (led by police lieutenant Christy French, played by Carroll O’Connor, and his assistant Sgt Fred Beifus, played by Kenneth Tobey) and the robbers when a mobster called Sonny Steelgrave (H M Wynant) despatches his boys (including Bruce Lee as Winslow Wong!) to give Marlowe a forceful warning. Steelgrave is the gangster boyfriend of beloved TV star Mavis Wald (Gayle Hunnicutt), who rejects Marlowe’s help after he finds blackmail photos of her.

Garner, showing that when he wasn’t a charming cowboy he was born to play hardboiled private eyes, is an appealing Marlowe in this busy B-movie thriller based on Raymond Chandler’s 1949 novel The Little Sister, updated to the late Sixties. The book is the fifth Marlowe novel.

Maybe Garner finally simply seems a bit too nice for the part of Marlowe, but he does laconic well and is great with the wisecracks, and he does manage a steely, world-weary glint in his eyes, while Farrell, O’Connor and Rita Moreno as the strip dancer Dolores Gonzáles are exactly right. Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay and Bogart’s direction capture the true flavour of Chandler and LA’s mean streets too. This dynamic movie is driven by lots of pace and tension – and just watch Lee demolish Marlowe’s office, and later try to demolish him too.

The Little Sister was first published in the UK in June 1949.

Only two Marlowe novels had not been filmed, The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye, and in March 1967 the film rights to Little Sister were bought by producers Gabriel Katzka and Sidney Beckerman. After a while, it fell to Robert Altman to film The Long Goodbye (1973).

Despite stage, radio and graphic novels versions, it remains the only film of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Little Sister. The book was first published in the UK in June 1949 and then in the US three months later. Chandler was enjoying his revenge on the people he encountered in the film industry while working as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

Silliphant won an Oscar for the screenplay of In the Heat of the Night (1967). Sillipant said he was pleased to get ‘a chance to write the classic quest story’ but ‘had to create ’90 per cent of the dialogue’ because he felt Chandler’s original was dated. Okay, that sounds like an insult, but maybe he just meant Chandler’s dialogue didn’t fit into the updated Sixties setting, or fit Garner. The wisecracking dialogue is really cracking, giving Garner a good time, and some of the more serious dialogue crackles too, giving O’Connor a useful role.

There’s an unfortunate rather rancid air of misogyny and homophobia that spoils things. Marlowe shares office space with a stereotype gay hairdresser, and taunts Bruce Lee with being ‘a little bit gay’ during their life or death conflict. Lee might be a nimble little kicker, but Garner is a big man, who actually looks like a worthy adversary for him. He looks chivalrous and charming, but physically he looks like a man who could handle himself if needs be. That’s good for Marlowe. All three women – Gayle Hunnicutt as Mavis Wald, Rita Moreno as Dolores Gonzáles, Sharon Farrell as Orfamay Quest – are portrayed as devious and deceptive at best, and murderous at worst. Three femmes fatales – that’s really pushing it! Are these women worth saving? Not really. But Garner does his best to save them anyway, if he can.

Talking updated, it is dated, with its swinging Sixties titles and theme song, ‘Little Sister’, and jazz-type score. But it has dated well as a period piece of its era, apart from a few obvious studio sets and blue screens.

The film entertains strongly, but leaves a sour aftertaste. You feel you want to gargle and shower immediately afterwards. Chandler would probably have hated the film, but would have like this idea very much.

Director Paul Bogart is no relation of Humphrey Bogart who played Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946). Paul Bogart’s daughter Jennifer Bogart was married twice to actor Elliott Gould, who played Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (1973).

Bruce Lee went on to star in Enter the Dragon (1973).

James Garner

James Garner died on July 19 2014, aged 86.

He famously played another detective, Jim Rockford, on Seventies TV, starting with the 1974 pilot Backlash of the Hunter.

Gayle Hunnicutt

American film, TV and stage actress Gayle Hunnicutt (Lady Jenkins) died on 31 August 2023, aged 80. She appeared in more than 30 films, including Marlowe (1969), Fragment of Fear (1970), Voices (1973) and The Legend of Hell House (1973). Hunnicutt married David Hemmings on 16 November 1968 and divorced in 1975, and married journalist Simon Jenkins in 1978 and divorced in 2009.

Rita Moreno

Rita Moreno (born on 11 December 1931) is one of the few performers to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony and a Grammy. She won the 1962 Oscar as Best Actress in a Supporting Role for West Side Story (1961) and reappears in its 2021 remake West Side Story.

The cast

The cast are James Garner as Philip Marlowe, Gayle Hunnicutt as Mavis Wald, Carroll O’Connor as Lt. Christy French, Rita Moreno as Dolores Gonzáles, Sharon Farrell as Orfamay Quest, William Daniels as Mr Crowell, H M Wynant as Sonny Steelgrave, Jackie Coogan as Grant W Hicks, Kenneth Tobey as Sgt Fred Beifus, Bruce Lee as Winslow Wong, Christopher Cary as Chuck, George Tyne as Oliver Hady, Corinne Camacho as Julie, Paul Stevens as Dr Vincent Lagardie, Roger Newman as Orrin Quest, Anna Lee Carroll as Mona, and  Read Morgan as Gumpshaw.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1, 880

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