Movies

Liam Neeson as Classic Gumshoe in Neil Jordan Directed Film – Deadline

September 25, 2022

World-weary gumshoe Philip Marlowe has been played most famously by Humphrey Bogart but also by James Garner, Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum and many others. Enter Liam Neeson, 70 this year but still seemingly able to disable five attackers at once with the right small arms and breakable furniture in Marlowe, The dashing pastiche of Neil Jordan’s film noir. He is in bad company. It also has a difficult audience – film noir purists, of whom there are many – to please.

The year is 1939; the setting is Old Hollywood, although the film was shot as an Irish-Spanish co-production in Barcelona. Marlowe is tasked by Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), a lady who could cut diamonds with her teeth, to find her missing lover. Nico Petersen (Francois Arnaud) is – or was – a prop man at a movie studio, making regular trips to Mexico to buy cheap adornments that are literal cover for the drugs he sells in the bowels of a ostensibly casino. chic. Police say Petersen was murdered. Ms. Cavendish thinks not. Not that far, anyway.

Everyone wants something on someone else, Marlowe says at some point. There are a lot of people here, trading Mickey Finns and barbed one-liners; just try to follow. Mrs. Cavendish’s mother, Dorothy (Jessica Lange), a former movie star, may or may not be her daughter’s love rival – not just for the missing man but for her own business partner and for Marlowe too, if the one of these girls can swing a date. In the meantime, she also tries to commission him. And she’s not the only schemer trying to get Marlowe on the payroll; there’s a lot of money in this town, most of it dirty.

So what about this Marlowe? Lines like “I’m too old for this,” gasping in the middle of a fight, draw grateful laughter from the audience, but Neeson is doing pretty well. He can still run convincingly and has a neat way of hitting glass with his elbow that tells you he’s done this sort of thing before. Obviously, Neeson is also his own kind. Inevitably, he brings with him the attributes of this genre, right in the heart of film noir: even in Bogie’s raincoat, he is recognizable as the man of action of Takenimpassive of face and firm of fist.

So he’s not Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, much to the chagrin of some viewers, but Jordan’s film isn’t Chandler either; it’s based on The blonde with black eyes by Benjamin Black, the thriller writer who in real life is Irish literary author John Banville. Read it as a commentary on the genre — a kind of reference-strewn meta text that most moviegoers will pick up easily — and it all falls into place. The pace, the use of light and the characters are illustrative: it’s a film about film noir rather than the thing itself.

It’s not Marlowe’s first film in color, but Jordan pushes his color to the limit, saturating it with golden light – the sun outside and the glow of the lamps inside – then playing with that light, the reflecting from several mirrors, modeling everything from scenes with bands of shadow cast by Venetian blinds and sometimes looking through the refractions created by two aligned windows. Similarly, the costumes could come from a “black” costume box. Neeson has the raincoat; Kruger has curly bleached hair which, at the very least, marked her out as a Bad Egg; Arnaud sports the dodgy pencil mustache of a matinee idol.

Much of the writing on film noir of the 1930s and 1940s explores its resonances in a world ravaged by economic depression and the threat – followed by the horrific reality – of war; it is seen as a theater of anguish. Modern parallels to these saber times are easy enough to draw, but no one should take Marlowe too seriously. Any film starring Alan Cumming as a gangster, so decadent and fabulously campy that he seems destined to die in a glaze of pink balls, hardly aims for street realism.

It doesn’t bear comparison with classic cinema either, but does it matter? Marlowe isn’t perfectly hard, but it isn’t scrambled either. It’s fun and it’s fast: information and tips are crammed into every minute of every scene to the point of dizziness. The cast is inspired all the way, including the actors whose accents veer dangerously towards Dublin – because what could be more evocative of old Hollywood than echoes of exile? The sun is shining, the palm trees reach for the sky, the ice cubes clink in the crystal glasses, and anyone – in fact, in this story, just about anyone – can walk away as murder. You might as well enjoy it.