Category: Philip Marlowe

EP1313: Philip Marlowe: The Old Acquaintance

Gerald Mohr
Marlowe is hired on New Year’s Eve to a locate a missing fiancée who disappeared at the same day a dangerous convict broke out of prison.

Original Air Date: December 26, 1948

 

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EP1307: Philip Marlowe: The Hard Way Out

Gerald Mohr
Marlowe is hired by the owner of a business to find an embezzling general manager in hopes of straightening him out before he throws his future away.

Original Air Date: November 28 ,1948

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EP1301: Philip Marlowe: The Heart of Gold

Gerald Mohr
A woman hires Marlowe with a $50 bill and he finds her dead when he goes to visit it.

Original Air Date: October 24, 1948

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EP1295: Philip Marlowe: Where There’s a Will

Gerald Mohr
Marlowe is hired to help four people find jewels left to them by a woman who hated them.

Original Air Date: October 17, 1948

 

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EP1289: Philip Marlowe: The Panama Hat

Gerald Mohr
A woman hires Marlowe to investigate  anonymous threats against her husband by a man in a Panama hat.

Original Air Date: October 10, 1948

 

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EP1283: Philip Marlowe: Persian Slippers


Gerald Mohr

The only clue Marlowe has to the disappearance of a wealthy woman is the name of a skid row fortune teller.

Original Air Date: October 3, 1948

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EP1277: Philip Marlowe: Red Wind

Gerald Mohr

Marlowe witnesses a murder and is drawn in the problems of a woman being blackmailed.

Original Air Date: September 26, 1948

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EP1271: Lux Radio Theater: The Lady in the Lake

Robert Montgomery
Philip Marlowe looks for a missing wife  at the behest of the missing woman’s husband’s secretary who wants to break up the marriage to marry her boss.

Original Air Date: February 9, 1948

 

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EP1265: Philip Marlowe: Trouble is My Business

Van Heflin

 

Philip Marlowe is hired to look into the wedding of a wealthy young man to a woman with dubious motives.

Original Air Date: August 5, 1947

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EP1259: Philip Marlowe: The King in Yellow

Van Heflin

Marlowe substitutes for house detective and kicks a raucous musician out of the hotel only to later find him dead.

Original Air Date: July 8, 1947

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EP1253: Philip Marlowe: The Red Wind

Van Heflin

Philip Marlowe witnesses a murder in a bar and becomes involved in the sad case of a married young woman.

Original Air Date: June 17, 1947

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EP1241: Lux Radio Theatre: Murder My Sweet

Dick Powell

Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) becomes involved in a mixed up case of stolen jade, a missing girlfriend,  blackmail, and narcotics.

Original Air Date: June 11, 1945

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Movie Review: The Brasher Doubloon

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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Book Review: The High Window

Philip Marlowe is hired to recover a lost coin for a crotchety widow. She suspects her daughter-in-law and wants Marlowe to arrange for her daughter-in-law to divorce her son.

Marlowe, of course, encounters a ton of obstacles and a mounting body count. In addition, to the official side of the business, he suspects something is really wrong with the old woman’s secretary, who is being mistreated.

The case is somewhat average fare. It’s by no means a bad story but it’s also not The Big Sleep and it’s not Farewell, My Lovely. It has its moments such as when Marlowe is justifying non-cooperation with the police on the basis of a case they mishandled through corruption, and then later he admits the story was made up and later on, says maybe it wasn’t. However, the characters aren’t as good and the dialogue isn’t either. In addition to this, there are few less threads that are left hanging and there are a few more, we really don’t care about.

On the positive side Marlowe’s noble actions towards the secretary and the purity of his motives really live up to his Knight in Tarnished Armor Rep. In the end, it’s a great story but not a classic.

Rating: 3.75 out of 5.0

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Book Review: Farewell, My Lovely

Raymond Chandler’s  second novel begins on two seemingly unrelated tracks. A man named Moose Malloy walks into a Black establishment and kills the owner because he’s looking for his girl Velma who used to sing at the place when it was a white club. Marlowe does a favor for a police detective because he doesn’t have anything else to do and because it can be handy in his line of work for a police detective to owe you a favor. Then when he hits a dead end, he takes a job for a man named Marriott to help him deliver ransom money for a stolen jade necklace and Marriott ends up murdered.

Marlowe goes on a wild ride, gets beat up, knocked out a couple times, drugged all leading to the conclusion of the case. If anything, the book is more cynical than The Big Sleep with crooked cops abounding and a de facto 1940s open marriage. The attitude portrayed towards blacks in the book was sadly stereotypical and if not hostile, was at least indifferent to their plight. In addition, while the dialogue was good, I don’t think it was quite as good as the The Big Sleep.

However, even with its faults, it’s one of the best detective stories ever written.  If it didn’t have a a clever mystery, if it didn’t have Marlowe on a scary trip while drugged as a sleazy sanitarium, it would be a great book because of  its characters. They’re on every page.  They had depth and nuance, even corrupt Bay City cops, a gambling magnate, a drunk widow, and of course Moose Malloy. You add all the elements together and you have a masterpiece.  Whether it’s as good as the Big Sleep, we can argue about, but its a masterpiece none the less.

And of course, Philip Marlowe remains the honest man, the knight who’s courage and incorruptibility  make the book work.  In this book, he doesn’t do anything near as dramatic as ripping apart his bed when he rebuffed Carmen Sternwood. Here, it’s more subtle. In a classic scene, Marlowe is being questioned by a police lieutenant and helps a fly out of the police office and lets it go. At the end of the book, he asks the Lieutenant about the fly and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

It subtly paints a picture of a Marlowe who doesn’t quite see the world the same way his contemporaries (even good men) do as they accept corruption as just a matter of course. While Marlowe isn’t a crusader, his sense of honor compels him to challenge the corruption that’s in front of him.

Except for some offensive racial language, the book really stands the test of time. While Philip Marlowe books are not recommended for kids or very sensitive adult readers, for fans of hard boiled fiction, the book is a must.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.0

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