The Invisibles

Hiding in plain sight: The Invisibles

Claus Rafle's The Invisibles, released in Germany in 2017 as The Invisibles: We Want to Live, tells the stories of four German Jews who survived the Holocaust by hiding out in wartime Berlin. Reenactments of the four narratives are interlaced with period documentary footage of Berlin and the reminiscences of the four actual protagonists. That we know the four survived does nothing to lessen the tension or sense of paranoia. The Invisibles stands partly as a portrait of indomitable courage, but also one of a wartime Berlin where the Nazi elite wined and dined while most starved and dodged bombs. Like Errol Morris' The Pigeon Tunnel, The Invisibles sometimes suffers from redundancy due to its intermingling of survivors' testimony with the visual recreations. In its favor, the characterizations are largely vigorous and the social scope of the narrative is impressively broad. Rafle allows enough subjective feeling to bleed into the narrative that the film never feels like a history lesson.

The Orphanage

         
J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage was roundly praised when it was released in 2007. I found it well-crafted, but dull. Sergio Sanchez's script situates the film in the sick house genre which includes The Fall of the House of Usher, The Shining, and many others. A medium (Geraldine Chaplin) baldly states the film's credo that structures carry traces of past trauma. The protagonist, Laura (Belen Rueda), spent some of her youth at the orphanage and, in a fit of misplaced nostalgia, wants to turn the shuttered building into a home for the disabled. She and her husband are parents to an HIV+ adoptee named Milo who has a penchant for acquiring imaginary friends in a film is overladen with significance, Of course, the ghostly inhabitants of the house start communicating with Milo who disappears, leading to Laura discovering the abode's deadly secrets.

The cast is fine and the visual, sound and  production design are so expert that it is not surprising that Hollywood came calling for Mr. Bayona soon after. However, the script is derivative, not only of the above films, but also The Haunting, The Innocents, and the work of The Orphanage's producer, Guillermo del Toro. Also, like The Haunting and The Innocents, two horror classics I'm not crazy nuts about, The Orphanage is overly tasteful and reserved. There is very little sense of palpable horror even when the scarecrow boy attacks and bodies are uncovered. A suitable horror film when one is entertaining an elderly Aunt Sadie and Uncle Mort on Halloween, then. 

EO

Jerzy Skolimowski and friend

Jerzy Skolimowski's EO, by my measure the best feature film of 2022, is a remarkable capstone to a magnificent career. The film illustrate vignettes from the life of a donkey, starting with his stint in a circus to his ultimate end in an abattoir. The vivacity and freshness of the director's approach would be impressive in a tyro much less an octogenarian. EO is an ornery and unpredictable film that exposes human folly and cruelty.

The obvious inspiration for Skolimowski and his co-scenarist Ewa Piaskowska is Robert Bresson's sublime masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar. EO is an interesting counterpoint to the work of that peculiar French Catholic Marxist. In contrast to Armond White calling Skolimowski a nihilist in National Review, I would type him as a secular humanist. Balthazar the donkey in Bresson's film is a symbol of Christian suffering and humility. EO the donkey is more of a tabula rasa providing the director an opportunity to offer a heartfelt and sardonic look at his homeland of Poland in the 21st century. Stylistically, the two directors are chalk and cheese. Bresson is an austere director who largely eschews stylistic flourishes. His camera almost always remains fixed, with lots of close-ups of hands. Skolimowski uses all the tricks of the trade to offer a dizzying array of points of view: Steadicam tracks, strobe effects, drone shots. I doubt Bresson would have used a drone shot if a gun was put to his head.

Au Hasard Balthazar

The craft of Michal Dymek's cinematography and Pawl Mykietyn's score help unify the disparate elements that make up EO. Skolimowski has always been an unruly talent with his share of duds, but EO is up there with his masterworks which include Deep End (1971), The Shout(1978), Moonlighting(1982), and 11 Minutes (2016). 

The Round-Up

Janos Gorbe, in black hat, and fellow detainees 

Miklos Jancso's The Round-Up, from 1966, is a pitiless depiction of ethnic cleansing in the Austro-Hungarian empire circa 1870. Jancso's fourth film was the first to bring him widespread acclaim in the West. Magyar peasants undergo torture and humiliation under the knouts of the largely Austrian military. The army, reeling after their defeat by Prussia, are forcibly taking new recruits for their depleted regiments, but they have other motives. They use the detainment of the men to weed out and eliminate veterans of the 1848 Hungarian rebellion which was led by Lajos Kossuth. Some sources, including the Kanopy website where the film is streaming, have indicated that this film takes place in the immediate aftermath of the 1848-9 uprising, but this is not so. The veterans of the rebellion served as young men and are now in late middle age. However, the fact that they are still facing reprisals twenty years after the fact, bears witness to the depth and bitterness of the enmity that lingers. 

Janos Gorbe as Janos Gajdor, a wheedling and desperate informant, is the de facto protagonist of the first half of the film. His frantic and futile attempts to save his skin make up the majority of the drama and give the film a sense of the era's paranoia and cruelty. Despite positioning his film as a Marxist critique of Hungarian history in the prologue, Jancso eventually admitted he wanted the film to reflect the fallout from the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956. After Gajdor meets his just desserts, the film eschews psychological characterizations for the Cinemascope pageantry and allegory that was to become Jancso's distinctive style in the next decade. Multiple fields of movement, usually infantry and cavalry units drilling, fill the widescreen frame. I find The Round-Up to be a bit dour compared to what was to follow, but if you've never seen a Jancso film, this is the place to start. 

 

Dark Victory

Death awaits for Bette Davis in Dark Victory

Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory, from 1939, is one of Bette Davis' better melodramas from when she ruled as queen of the Warner Brothers lot. The scenario, an adaptation of a play that opened on Broadway in 1934 with Tallulah Bankhead as the lead, requires Davis to play a Long Island heiress dying of a vaguely specified brain ailment. Robert Benchley described the play as "Camille without all the coughing." The film is total hooey, yet redeemed by Goulding's graceful direction and a superior cast. Goulding's graceful pans of the many party scenes nimbly introduce characters and pivots us to the dramatic crux of each scene. Davis gets to play a gamut of emotions and delivers. Playing a full of beans rich kid, she takes on the pose of a madcap hellion after learning the diagnosis that has been hidden from her. Of course, she see the light and weds the stolid doctor (George Brent) who loves her. She withdraws with him to Vermont for a few blissful months before accepting death with dignity and gaining the dark victory of the title.

Davis and George Brent

As a person, Davis was a piece of work, but no one can deny her facility as an actress. Dark Victory gives her a chance to do a few variations on her usual brittle bitch schtick. Audiences and critics lapped it up and so did I. Davis was coming off her first divorce and, during filming, co-star Brent fell into her romantic clutches. This probably accounts for the warmth (not heat) between the two which far outstrips anything generated in their other films together. Brent was a fairly wooden presence, but his casting in Dark Victory suits him. His character is a decent, one dimensional sort lacking either sex appeal or neuroses.

For sexual and neurotic appeal, we get Humphrey Bogart as Davis' stable groom. The groom has the hots for the heiress and the insolent banter between Bogart and Davis is fun. Bogart had not yet reached the top rung of stardom. This role was a godsend after playing villainous gangsters for the studio or worse: like his cowboy in The Oklahoma Kid or his vampire in the dire The Return of Doctor X. Another suitor for Davis in the film is played by an actor who never reached the top rung of movie stardom, but overachieved in another field, Ronald Reagan. Reagan plays a drunken playboy. Reportedly, Goulding wanted to give the role a dash of sexual ambivalence, but ambivalence was foreign to Reagan in all aspects of his life. The role must have given him pause because he was the son of an alcoholic, but he acquits himself well.

Davis and Bogart

I usually hurl brickbats at him, but Max Steiner's score is quite good. Best of all is a young Irish actress making her American film debut, Geraldine Fitzgerald. Hal Wallis had signed her after seeing her in New York in the Mercury Theater production of Heartbreak Hotel with Orson Welles. She plays the thankless role of Davis' secretary and confidante with amiable aplomb. Life imitated art, as Fitzgerald was mentored by Davis in how to navigate the hazardous byways of Hollywood. Despite acclaim for this picture and her performance in Wuthering Heights, Fitzgerald floundered at Warners and was released from her contract in 1946. Davis, who had tangled with Jack Warner and many others during the course of her career, met the same fate in 1949.

 

Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl adaptations

Ralph Fiennes as Roald Dahl in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Currently streaming on Netflix are four films (The Ratcatcher, The Swan, Poison, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) that Wes Anderson has adapted from Roald Dahl short stories. They are a near perfect merger of Dahl's very English salt and vinegar with Anderson's very American pastel Easter egg sweetness. The English cast bites into the pungent dialogue and narration more entertainingly than the American ones in Anderson's previous Dahl adaptation, Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The usual Anderson preoccupations are present,  but Dahl's prose has freed Anderson's imagination to concentrate on what really busts his buttons: the artifices designed to frame his cinematic fables. Anderson uses both theatrical effects (spotlights, actors addressing the audience, visible stagehands and set changes, scrims) and cinematic ones (tracking shots, CGI, split screens, odd camera angles) at the service of Dahl's words and vision. The narration of each film is foregrounded. Sometimes Ralph Fiennes as Dahl himself , ensconced in his work office, narrates the action, but all members of the ensemble chime in, capturing the crackling vitality of Dahl's language. 

Dahl's darkly ironic view of life prevents Anderson from falling into the traps of his own fussiness and bloodlessness. Even Tim Burton has more Dionysus in him than Anderson, our most Apollonian filmmaker. The moments of death and loss in Anderson's films tend to end in the communal hug he thinks we all need. There is a short sharp shock of life and death in Dahl's work that strengthens Anderson's often anemic worldview. The characters in these short films seem to spring to life more than the caricatures in Asteroid City; and I enjoyed Asteroid City. I hope for more Dahl adaptations from Anderson, but I won't hold my breath for his version of Switch Bitch. 

  

Angst

Erwin Leder and friend in Angst

Gerald Kargl's Angst, from 1983, is a splatter filled home invasion film that is a chilling portrait of the mind of a psychotic killer. The film is wholly nihilistic without even a trace of humanistic uplift. Erwin Leder (Das Boot) plays the protagonist who we meet in jail on the day he is sprung. Leder's voiceovers give us a glimpse into the miscreant's messed up and murderous past while he searches for new victims. Leder's antic and full-bodied performance is remarkable, but the film belongs to Kargl's mise-en-scene. His camera work, with swooping crane shots and gyroscopic dolly shots, evokes the protagonist's unhinged mind.

Ultimately, Angst has third act problems. Still, it is a tight and elegantly constructed 78 minutes; Kargl's only feature film. Angst didn't generate much goodwill despite Kargl's obvious talent. It was banned in most of Europe and bankrupted the director. Klaus Schulze of Tangerine Dream provides the serviceable techno score though Kargl uses silence and repetitive sounds, like water dripping, to further give a sense of psychic dislocation. The missing link between Stanley Kubrick and Gaspar Noe, Angst will entrance fans of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Golden Glove, and Sam Raimi. Mom, you should skip this one.

Secret Beyond the Door

Michael Redgrave and Joan Bennett

Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door, from 1947, is the last and least of Lang's collaborations with Joan Bennett and her husband, producer Walter Wanger. At the time, the film was a commercial and critical disaster, but its critical defenders were one day to include Tom Milne, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Fernando C. Croce. Lang wrangled not only with Bennett during the course of the shoot, but also with distinguished cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Andersons, The Night of the Hunter, Shock Corridor).Despite these travails, the film looks pretty rich. Lang could conjure a cinematic nightmare even with the leftover sets on the Universal lot. Natalie Schafer (Lovey on Gilligan's Island) provides adept and welcome comic relief while Ann Revere is always a sturdy presence even if she is underused here. The theme of homicidal compulsion should be right up Lang's alley, but there is a large impediment and that would be the script. 

If Citizen Kane is, as Orson Welles put it, dime book Freud than Secret Behind the Door is comic book Freud. Now I am married to a psychiatrist and am favorably inclined to the father of psychoanalysis, but the script is so baldly and self-trumpetingly Freudian that the end effect is ridiculous. Architect Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave) is so hung up on his Oedipal issues that lady love Celia (Miss Bennett) has to bring his repressed trauma, the secret behind the door, to light in the final reel in order to cure her man. The film was made at the height of Hollywood's fascination with psychoanalysis in films such as Lady in the Dark and Spellbound. The film's reliance on Freud would not have been fatal to this project if the screenplay had a sound structure. Unfortunately, the screenplay, concocted by Silvia Richards from Rufus King's novel Museum Piece No 13, is a slipshod affair overly beholden to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. We have a widower who lives in a spooky mansion where his first wife died a mysterious death. We also have an embittered member of the household staff who, in a fit of jealous fury, endeavors to torch the mansion at the film's end.

Amidst this leftover hash, there is little Bennett can do to make her character believable. The script is overly reliant on her voiceovers. Bennett looks alternately glazed over or beset with indigestion while her offscreen voice narrates her character's tale of woe. Michael Redgrave's performance is even more problematic. Redgrave's success in Dead of Night briefly gave him leading man status, but here he is so one dimensionally creepy it is hard to see what Celia sees in him. The role required the broodingly Romantic fatalism Olivier carries off in Rebecca. The score is by Miklos Rozsa who is at his string pounding worst.

If you are a card carrying auteurist like me, Fritz Lang's name on the credits of Secret Beyond the Door will be sufficient to pique your interest. Indeed, Lang's eye almost redeems the second hand nature of the screenplay. Almost. 

The Tragedy of Macbeth

            

I respected and admired Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth, from 2021, but didn't love, love, love it. Most, but not all, of Coen's choices seem reasonable to me. The Scottish play is the Bard of Avon's most dour and dire effort, so the choice to film in black and white is apt. The simple sets give the film the feel of a German Expressionist work as does the boxy aspect ratio. Macbeth and his lady walk the labyrinthine corridors and steps of his castle, usually alone with their thoughts, and lose their moral moorings and minds. The elisions from the text, like the Hecate scene, are sensible. Because of this, the film has a sense of momentum and never bogs down.

There are no lousy performances and all the players seem at ease with the text, something you cannot say for many Hollywood version of Shakespeare. I particularly enjoyed Henry Melling, Corey Hawkins, Moses Ingram, Susan Berger, Alex Hassell, and Stephen Root. Kathryn Hunter's performance as the three weird sisters has been justly praised. For those seeking more of this special performer, I would urge them to track down the disc of Julie Taymor's production of A Midsummer's Night Dream from 2014. 

Both Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are fine leads. Macbeth, like Othello, is a warrior more at home planning battle strategy than palace intrigue. Washington is always good at macho swagger and gangster menace, but he is also good at portraying his character's confusion when confronted with forces he does not understand. McDormand has always struck me as flinty rather than fiery, so she is not ideally cast. She does, however, sink her teeth into the text to good effect. I would say she is probably the finest Lady Macbeth yet on screen, but that is damning with faint praise.

Overall, I have my niggles. The finest onscreen versions of Macbeth are Throne of Blood, the second season of Slings and Arrows, and the Orson Welles film from 1948. For a point of comparison I'm going to use the Welles version. It has a subpar Lady Macbeth and raggedy ass production values, but it has a primal spark and pagan passion that the Coen version lacks. Take the scene when Macbeth hires on Banquo's assassins. The killers in the Welles version are skeezy ragamuffins who seem subhuman. I want to take a bath after looking at them. The murderers in the Coen version seem anonymous in comparison.

I also think Coen has bungled the scene of Macbeth spying Banquo's ghost, one of the most powerful scenes in the play. Coen doesn't have Banquo come to the banquet table, but he has Macbeth spy him going down a corridor and then Macbeth pursues him. This ties in with the film's notion of the castle's hallways resembling the haunted corridors of the protagonists' mind, but something is lost. Having the ghost attend the banquet is a symbol of a pagan defilement of the Christian ritual of communion. This is a reflection of Macbeth's devil's bargain with the supernatural and his committing the mortal sin of regicide, a sin very much on the mind of Shakespeare's contemporaries who had just experienced Guy Fawkes attempt to blow up King James I. Ultimately, this is a somewhat bloodless and respectable Macbeth that never captures the pagan furies lurking in the text. 

The Scoundrel

Noel Coward meets a watery end in The Scoundrel

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Scoundrel, from 1935, is a stagey Manhattan melodrama that morphs into a supernatural tale of redemption about two thirds of the way through. Private Lives turning into A Christmas Carol. Noel Coward, exhausted with appearing onstage in London and New York after the long run of Design for Living, plays Anthony Mallare, a New York publisher with a heart of stone. The name Mallare is redolent of a "bad odor" and is a self-reference to one of Hecht's earliest books, the peculiar Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath. We first see the film's Mallare at his officer where a retinue of resentful flunkies offer a chorus of backbiting commentary on the man. Mallare meets an aspiring poet named Cora Moore (Julie Haydon) who he romances and summarily dumps. As Mallare puts it, love for him is "one month of diversion and six months of farewells."

Pursuing his next romantic conquest, Mallare dies in a plane crash, but his ghost is fated to limbo unless he can find one soul shedding tears over his demise. That soul would be Cora and her tears cap a singularly unconvincing finale. Hecht and MacArthur have little feel for the supernatural, though Coward makes an appropriately pallid ghost. It is the early section featuring dollops of bitchy, sophisticated patter that is more in the wheelhouse of the authors of The Front Page. The misanthropic Mallare is a part tailor made for Coward. His snobby diction and mien suit the part perfectly. However, I don't think Coward was an ideal match for film work, he has the animal grace of a praying mantis and the pedestrian direction of the film does him few favors. 

The film is most effective when Mallare and members of his retinue spout the droll dialogue. The cast is mostly made up of Broadway veterans who acquit themselves well. I particularly enjoyed the clash of Coward's posh delivery with that of Lionel Stander, playing a bard of the working class, who employs his usual Bronx honk. Ms. Haydon struggles vainly in a part that requires her to recite half-baked Millay imitations. Film buffs will spy familiar faces such as Burgess Meredith, O.Z. Whitehead, and Harry Davenport in small roles before they became Hollywood regulars.

The central problem with the film is that Hecht and MacArthur's talents did not extend to the craft of filmmaking, The flick, confined to the Astoria studios in Queens, feels like a filmed play. I could count the number of cinematic flourishes employed on one hand. Lee Garmes' cinematography is a plus, but he is often photographing shoddily painted sets that would look cheap on a Monogram Pictures release. The camera set-ups add little to the picture. One wonder what the results would have been if Hecht and MacArthur had been able to entice a George Cukor or Howard Hawks. Still, there are precious few chances to gauge the appeal of Noel Coward in his heyday and this is one of them. 

Decasia, Lady Snowblood, Into the Inferno

Decasia

Bill Morrison's Decasia, from 2003, is an arresting avant-garde featurette. Morrison reassembles deteriorating silent film into an abstract and musical collage that resembles the work of Harry Smith and Stan Brakhage. As if to signal his film is more of a fugue or dance than a narrative, Morrison utilizes shots that display repetitive movement: whirling dervishes, factory machinery in action, men and women working looms. There is an element of exotica as a sweetener. A treat. 

Toshiya Fujita's Lady Snowblood, from 1973, chronicles the titular character's revenge story with vivid color and intensity. Essentially a B samurai flick, Lady Snowblood displays how a good director can elevate even the most hackneyed scenario if he regards the material seriously and directs with verve. Revenge dramas are morality plays, the revenger's trauma must be portrayed with sobriety and empathy. Fujita constructs the film so that the action of revenge provides catharsis because the suffering of his heroine has been emphasized. Quentin Tarantino heisted a good deal of the film, including a cartoon flashback, for his Kill Bill saga.

Werner Herzog's Into the Inferno displays how one of our better fictional filmmakers has, through determination and vision, become one of our greatest documentarians. This film about volcanos puts his obsessions to the forefront: man versus nature, the terrifying beauty of nature, the camaraderie of scientists. The film also shows off his discursive side. A foray into North Korea holds for Herzog a beauty as ultimately horrifying as his gaze into the core of the earth. (10/31/16)  

Killers of the Flower Moon

I found Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon to be the most engrossing film I've seen this year. I had read David Grann's book and was a little leery of the casting of DiCaprio and De Niro in their roles, but came away surprised and impressed by their performances. As Ernest Burkhart, DiCaprio quashes his charisma to expertly portray a dim bumpkin caught up in the venal machinations of his uncle, William "King" Hale. De Niro, who I feared would seem too urban and contemporary for the role, portrays Hale as a glad-handing, confidence man who charms the Osage while endeavoring to murder and rob them. He turns Hale into a prairie Iago. 

The rest of the cast is equally exemplary. Lily Gladstone and Jesse Plemons are well cast and deliver superb performances. Even the smaller supporting roles offer intricately crafted dramatic vignettes from Barry Corbin, Ty Mitchell, Tatanka Means, Gene Jones, John Lithgow, Louis Cancelmi, Brendon Fraser, Janae Collins, and Tantoo Cardinal. I also want to note how well Scorsese utilizes musical performers in the cast, something he has done his whole career (note how he employs the Wainwright clan in The Aviator), but never as fruitfully as he does here. A performer is a performer after all, but music stars, even Elvis, often seem awkward onscreen. None seem awkward here. Jason Isbell, Jack White, Sturgill Simpson, Pete Yorn, Terry Allen, and most especially, Charlie Musselwhite offer performances as effective as the ones by more established veterans.

The music in the film is used as another layer of commentary on this narrative of woe. This is par for the course for Scorsese who is known for using pop tunes of the era on the soundtrack. To take one film as an example, in The Departed, the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter is used to underline the rootlessness of his main characters. Excerpts from Gounod's Faust play up the Mephistophelian  attributes of Jack Nicholson's character. Sometimes Scorsese will use a song as ironic counterpoint: a brutal murder is juxtaposed in Goodfellas with Donovan trilling his hippy-dippy "Atlantis". The Twenties tunes in ...Killer Moon are used to give the film period flavor and add a darkly ironic tone. To cite one example, the Carter Family's "Single Girl, Married Girl" is a song extolling the joy of being a free and disengaged women as opposed to one being snared by the tender trap of marriage. I have to think Scorsese was being very mindful in using this particular song in a film in which white men are shown marrying Osage women for their oil rights riches.

All through the film, Scorsese shows how American history is transmogrified into cultural artifacts: songs, photographs, newsreels, blankets, books, newspapers, and, of course, films.  Ernest tries to bone up on Osage culture by reading a picture book aimed at ten year olds. This notion of the dislocation of history and the cultural artifacts that represent it is brought home by the radio play near the end of the film. That Scorsese himself delivers Mollie Burkhart's obituary in the radio displays more than a modicum of self-knowledge. He is implicating himself as an author of false narratives in American cinema, a field in which many have been all too eager to print the legend.

This mea culpa should have forestalled criticism of the film as racist, but, given our current cultural climate, it has not. Martin Scorsese has made another Martin Scorsese film outlining the dark side of our national psyche. He has not attempted to create a portrait of the Osage nation because he knows that is a story for another teller. In my brief remarks on The Irishmen, I wrote "America's facade of democratic civility is shown to mask a murderer's row" and this is equally true of ...Flower Moon. The intimations of mortality that haunt The Irishmen have morphed into a clear eyed portrait of how Americans vivisect, exhume, plunder, bury, and honor their dead. Death has become hidden away in present day America, but ...Flower Moon presents an America in which the 19th century notion of the dead as a felt and living presence still lingers. Scorsese presents the multiple corpses in the film not for the sake of gore, but as a memento mori.

The film has been labeled slow going, but I found it to be so packed with visual and auditory details as to be endlessly fascinating. A director like Christopher Nolan spoon-feeds the audience with expository dialogue in Oppenheimer whereas the information is mostly displayed onscreen in ...Flower Moon. Now I enjoyed Oppenheimer well enough, but Scorsese is in another league as a filmmaker. He has fashioned a personal epic out of an interesting, yet badly structured historical tome. Killers of the Flower Moon is another masterpiece from the greatest American director since John Ford. 

Farewell, My Lovely

Richard Mitchum

Dick Richards' Farewell, My Lovely, from 1975, is an unsuccessful rendition of the Raymond Chandler novel. The whole affair has a waxworks feel to it. In a contemporary review, Time's Jay Cocks put it best:

Watching the movie has approximately the same effect as being locked overnight in a secondhand clothing store in Pasadena. There is an awful lot of dust and, after a while, the dummies look as if they are moving.

Richards' direction lacks energy and the movie proceeds listlessly, even during its violent episodes. The film's set pieces, a fracas in a brothel and a swank soiree in a nightclub, lack immediacy. The film is handsomely appointed, mostly due to John Alonzo's photography and Dean Tavoularis' production design, but it never springs to life.

David Zelag Goodman's screenplay attempts to streamline Chandler's typically knotty plot. Key incidents and characters, most notably Anne Riordan, are eliminated. Psychic Jules Anthor is turned into a brothel madam. Now such changes are not necessarily fatal to the project. Indeed, Chandler's novel, as written, cannot fit into the form of a feature length film. Goodman was probably wise to largely eliminate the racist attitudes and invectives contained in the novel. However, the net effect is to soften the hard boiled Philip Marlowe. Goodman gives the character a sweet fondness for children and baseball that doesn't jibe with the cynical detective Chandler created. 

Charlotte Rampling

The performances in the film are all over the map. Harry Dean Stanton is surprisingly dull as a corrupt policeman. John Ireland seems mummified. Sylvia Miles descends to type as the blousy Mrs. Florian. Jack O'Halloran is an ineffective cartoon as Moose Malloy. Charlotte Rampling is well cast as a chilly femme fatale, but her romantic scenes with Robert Mitchum beggar belief. Pulp great Jim Thompson has an effective cameo as Rampling's husband. Sylvester Stallone is also good in a wordless role as a goon.

Despite being too old to be the character, Robert Mitchum as Marlowe nearly redeems the picture. When picturing his weathered visage as his voiceover intones Chandler's pungent narration, the film is on firm ground. Mitchum was made for such a role, but it was a pity he couldn't have tackled it twenty years before.