Much easier to follow if you read the book

I actually think this movie becomes terrible if you've read the book, and not much better if you have. The narrative form of the film is interesting, of course, but it gets old fast; when the discovery of the title chaacter occurs (or doesn't occur, rather) I, like you, became furious. The movie at this point breaks the cardinal rule of cinema and rubs in yer face. The gimmick therefore becomes more obviously a gimmick and a boring one at that. There's a few interesting scenes that follow (something about being followed), but I honestly think I stopped payiong attention.

Lady in the Lake was the last of the Chandler novels I read and I wasn't expecting much from it, but it really surprised me. I would hazard to say that it was amongst the best, and, after Farewell My Lovely, the best of the more plot-centric ones (The Long Goodbye, which of course is the best one, exists on a whole other level but doesn't really have that many major plot points considering its length). It's superior to The High Window and The Little Sister anyway. Of course, Playback is the only Chandler novel one could actually call bad, or even less than good.

The Big Sleep, the novel, interests me, but it always seems so rough. Marlowe, Hamlet-like, often talks when he should be working, and in The Big Sleep he talks too much, lavishing wordy desciptions on the minutiae of his world. (Ever notice Marlowe's interest in clothes? He's more interested in clothes than in anything else, and men's clothes more than women's. That never goes away, throughout the books. I've seen this used as evidence that Marlowe is a closeted homosexual, with an emphasis on the closet.) Sometimes description is used to brilliant effect, like when Marlowe comes across Carmen Sternwood at Geiger's house: "She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. She wasn't wearing anything else." But sometimes he goes too far. The wordiness of Lady in the Lake the film brings me into mind of this, and while the dialogue, especially that lifted straight from the book, stings, Montgomery's narration is flat (and anyway I think his performance is a bit off base). Less talk more rock I say.

There are exceptions to this of course. There's a page-long soliloquy in The Long Goodbye about blondes that's one of Chandler's most brilliant moments.

Anyway I like the movie Big Sleep a little better. The plot is indecipherable either way, but it's nice to see Marlowe caught up in humanity rather than caught up in the L.A. landscape. By the same token, Hawks's film is not an accurate realization of the text. But who cares? The Dmytryk film, which has less personality, probably is more faithful, although the production code sort of throws it (and then there's that ending).

Have you seen Altman's The Long Goodbye? Oddly, although it changes nearly every detail imaginable and has a very sharp satirical edge, it is very accurate in its distillation of the theme and feel of the book, and of Marlowe's personal anachronism. Altman's abilities as a world-builder are in full effect (I wrote a long, pretentious post here once upon a time about Altman's use of sound montage in the development of a realistic and/or enveloping fictional world, at least I think that's what it was about. It was just erased though, and I might have to put it back up*), and Elliot Gould is sort of brilliant as Marlowe. No replacement for the book, though: I really think the book should be thought of a great classic.

*I've reposted it, because it's the one thing I have set down on this whole site that makes me seem somewhat observant and insightful. You should read it. You should all read it!

"Young people are scum. They didn't invent the cigarette, or the jeans. Nothing."