Favorite Phillip Marlowe Portrayal

[APzombie]

The king of noir cool chain smoking detective...

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Film/Pix/pictures/2007/01/31/marlowe460.jpg

Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet (1944) — Adaptation of Farewell My Lovely

Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946)

Robert Montgomery in Lady in the Lake (1947)

George Montgomery in The Brasher Doubloon (1947)— Adaptation of (and released in the UK as) The High Window

James Garner in Marlowe (1969) — Adaptation of The Little Sister

Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye (1973)

Robert Mitchum in Farewell My Lovely (1975) and The Big Sleep (1978)

---------------------------------

My personal favorite is Elliott Gould's portrayal in The Long Goodbye

http://filmtracks.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/the-long-goodbye.jpg

though admittingly i haven't seen Marlowe, The Big Sleep remake and The Brasher Doubloon

[Buck Turgidson]

Powell and both Montgomerys are stiffs.

Bogart is good, but he's basically the same guy as he was when he played Spade in The Maltese Falcon. (Chandler liked his portrayal.)

Mitchum's pretty good, but he's a touch too old and the story in The Big Sleep suffers from being moved from postwar LA to 70's Britain. If Bob had played the character sometime between @ 1950 and 1965...he would have utterly owned it.

Garner is really quite good. He's got the sardonic wit and the physical size to play the role. He's probably my favorite.

Gould is also terrific. A lot of people who thought of themselves as purists hated Altman's wry update of the story, but it works brilliantly, for me. Marlowe is actually nastier here than in the novel and Leigh Brackett, who cowrote the script for the Hawks-Bogart version of The Big Sleep, wrote it.

You missed James Caan, who played the older, Kennedy-era Marlowe in Poodle Springs, opposite Dina Meyer. That was a novel written by Robert Parker (working on, I think, an extant manuscript of Chandler's) and Tom Stoppard wrote the script, so...lots of quality scribes there, just by way of recommendation. It's worth looking for.

Chandler always wanted Cary Grant to play the role and although that seems incongruous at first, I've seen Grant grub it up in some films and he was the right physical type. I can easily see that working.

I'd like to see Clooney give it a shot.

[APzombie]

fuck buck you're right i forgot James Caan in Poodle Springs!

Thanks for the recommendation, I need to see that one too.

Clooney would make a pretty great Marlowe.