Farewell, My Lovely A 1975 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel by the same name.
Just like with
The Big Sleep, I read that novel some 20 yrs ago. I've watched (and own in physical format) the 1944 movie that was originally titled
Murder, My Sweet. That movie starred Dick Powell and Claire Trevor.
Out of the two versions, the 1944 adaptation is the more faithful one to the novel. So, when compared to the 1975 film, there are some differences, but the overall storyline remained mostly the same. Acting and plot are good in both.
In this movie, Philip Marlowe (played by Robert Mitchum here and Dick Powell in the 1944 movie) is a private detective in 1941. He's not doing great, but he's deffo busy. The bulk of his cases tend to be abt cheating spouses or (like it happens at the start of the movie) finding missing people.
As soon as he returns a teenage runaway girl to her parents, he gets 'hired' by Moose Malloy (a thug who has just been released from prison for robbing $80k from a bank 7 yrs prior.) Malloy orders Marlowe to find his sweetheart, a woman named Velma, who was a dancer at a seedy bar. So Marlowe starts snooping around. The more he works the case, the wilder the search becomes until he senses that there's a bigger thing happening he hasn't quite connected the dots yet.
This is a REALLY GOOD movie. Extremely classic noir featuring Mitchum's Marlowe who has a frenemies situation with the police chief and Charlotte Rampling--who, at that time, was 29 y.o.--as Helen. She's a v. sensual, rich, and bored housewife. It's interesting that everything from her styling to her affectation and her voice is v., reminiscent of 1940s Lauren Baccall. Rampling does a good job as the femme fatale. (For context, the fabulous Claire Trevor, who played the same role in the 1944 movie, was slightly better, but I digress.) Rampling and Mitchum have a slow-burning intensity that works well considering Rampling's doing the most she can to embody the 1940s vamp and Mitchum (who was in his late 50s) starred in a lot of those 1940s noirs. I liked their interactions. Even though Helen was a little too much at times. Girl was horny, lordy lorde. XD
There are 2 differences between the 1944 and 1975 versions.
1. Because this movie was filmed after the Code was struck down, ppl curse, there are plenty of boobs (such as a scene in which Marlowe opens doors while searching for someone and finds different groups of ppl in which all of the women are topless), and the violence is more graphic (again, bullet wounds, blood, ppl getting punched and slapped.).
2. Also certain details: a character got genderswapped, two characters never show up (they were main characters), and two new characters were created for the movie. It was a bit confusing, but it worked for me. Oh, and out of nowhere, a v., v. young Sylvester Stallone shows up as a secondary character that's a thug dude. It was hilarious to see baby!Stallone, IDK.
It's not a perfect movie. There was one character that had a connection to the Big Bad, but I didn't quite understand how this partnership worked.
Do I recommend it? YES! If you're a fan of film noir or crime movies in general, this one will be a treat for sure. Content Warning for a lot of racial slurs in some scenes, on-screen violence against women, and some graphic stuff. I'm giving it
a 4.5 out of 5.
Queerness levelThere's a female character who is v. explicitly a lesbian. However, she's also an abuser and overall terrible person.
P.S.: One funny thing abt this movie being filmed in 1975 but depicting 1941 is that it'd be as if a movie coming out in 2025 that was set in 1990.
I was a teenager in 1991! WHAT IS TIME?! O__o
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