This 1947 adaptation of the Philip Marlowe novel, The High Window is an illustration both of how not to adapt a book and how not to do a detective movie.
As soon as I saw the Mustached George Montgomery, I knew I’d had trouble buying him in the role of Philip Marlowe. Philip Marlowe with a mustache? He couldn’t carry it off and it was more than the facial hair.
To be clear, Montgomery does give the best performance in this movie, but that’s not saying much. Every performance in this movie is either extremely wooden or hammy.
The movie was also incredibly inconsistent with Marlowe narrating, with it being present at the early part of the film and then disappearing later on. In addition, the voice overs he did were pointless. A good voice over should communicate something we didn’t or show off the hard boiled nature of the private eye or the setting. The narration here did nothing other than say things that we could see on the screen or were just plain bland. In addition, while this is supposed to be a hard boiled private eye movie, it ends with a gathering of the suspects and Marlowe revealing whodunit like it’s Charlie Chan or the Thin Man.
The biggest problem with this movie is that it’s a story of the greatest hard boiled eye of them all, Philip Marlowe and the “romance” angle in this movie is so hard to swallow. In the novel High Window, Marlowe recognizes that the timid secretary of his client is emotionally wounded and needs helped. He gallantly works to help her with no idea of doing anything romantic with her. Here, George Montgomery’s Marlowe is downright creepy in his attempts to seduce Merle Davis (Nancy Guild). It just felt icky and my feeling has nothing to do with our politically correct times. Chandler recognized this was not the way a hero should act and that a man who has to hit on an emotionally traumatized woman is not only a cad, but a loser.
The movie does have a chase scene that’s half way decent. In some way screenwriter Dorothy Bennett did manage to pare down Chandler’s more convoluted story line and eliminate character like Leslie Murdoch’s wife. The story features a young Conrad Janis who looks a lot like Leonardo DiCaprio in this film. Finally, the DVD release is long overdue, and it’s worth watching once for Philip Marlowe completists.
In the end, this is just a poor film, and it’s poor for a B-film. It’d be understandable if this came from a studio like Monogram, but Fox made this and they showed in both Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto that they could make entertaining B detective movies, for whatever reason, they didn’t here.
Rating: 3.0 out of 10
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