More Raymond Chandler Thoughts I 5-2010

 Seems my keeper has all the Raymond Chandler novels from The Lady in the Lake to Playback in an Everyman Library collection.

Reading them all now, after The High Window, does not really change my opinion of The High Window. It still seems musty.

I think The Lady in the Lake was the last time that Philip Marlowe was a private detective in the same way as Hammett's Continental Op or Sam Spade were detectives making a living, working stiffs. Marlowe becomes even less of a working stiff in The Little Sister.

I still like reading The Little Sister, but it is a nasty bit of work. No convenient mental health issues obscuring what is wrong with this family. Nor does Kansas offer a refuge from California's venality. Therein lies an interesting counterpoint to The High Window.   

Back to something I wrote in my earlier Chandler post -   how much do the movies influence our opinion of the books? I have seen Marlowe (the film adaption of The Little Sister) in years (decades?), I can hear James Garner while I read the novel. Powers Booth seems too cool for these latter-day novels. Bogart is just too resolute (also he thinks hard in all his best roles, sizing everything up and looking for the winning angle, and may be why like him better as Sam Spade.) Yes, he could do the comedy of Playback, just as he handled the comedy in The Big Sleep. Same thing for Dick Powell being able to do Playback, but only that one - too talky, for all I think his Murder, My Sweet loses nothing in comparison to Robert Mitchum's Farewell, My Lovely. I can see Mitchum doing The Long Goodbye - back in the Fifties, not as Elliott Gould portrayed him.

(Why do the miserable remake of The Big Sleep when The High Window and Playback had not been filmed and when The Lady in the Lake had been done in such a strange way? Is this why the remake has disappeared as much as has Elliott Gould's?)

sch

[Correction: I had read somewhere, long before 2010, that The High Window had not been filmed. I learned while typing this I was wrong and the proof from Wikipedia. Continued in More Raymond Chandler Thoughts II 5-2010. sch 10/29/22.]