domino harvey wrote:
Traditional to/of what?
Leigh Brackett was firmly convinced that the film has a lot more in common with
The Big Sleep than seemed apparent on the surface. She was in the unique position of having worked with Hawks/Bogart and Altman/Gould in the same capacity, and felt that there were far more similarities than differences.
For instance, one thing she stressed was that the "Altman touches", the more satirical elements, actually had nothing to do with the structure or the basic characters: they were just little ornaments and curlicues on top. At base, to quote Brackett herself, Marlowe is:
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an innocent man, he’s a decent man, he’s an honest man. He’s the honest man who always gets screwed because he believes everybody else is honest, and he trusts his friends, and he got taken for a ride, and he got mad.
And she elaborated:
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We knew we were going to get flak, we knew we were, especially on the... Marlowe killing Terry because this was out of character for Marlowe. But it was out of character for the time when Marlowe was written: you couldn’t do that on the screen. No matter how right it might have been, you couldn’t do that. If you remember, he always had to sucker somebody else into doing the shooting. He’d get somebody to walk out a door knowing that somebody was out there ready to kill him and he’d get somebody else to walk out. You could do that, but you couldn’t do it - bang! And I thought it was... you know, here is a decent man who has trusted a friend and done him a favour and gotten himself... gotten his neck in the grease. He’s fallen in love with a woman who didn’t even know he was alive. She didn’t really betray him, she didn’t even know he was there. As he says, “I lost everything - I even lost my cat”. And you’re just not gonna get away with it! Which I thought would... well, it satisfied me. A lot of people thought we had taken undue liberties with the thing, because it wasn’t The Big Sleep over again.
Another challenge was that she knew upfront that Elliott Gould would be playing the lead, which demanded a different stylistic approach, even while trying to retain Marlowe's core virtues:
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I like Elliott Gould, I think Elliott Gould is one hell of an actor. But he is not Humphrey Bogart, and nothing under the sun you are going to do with him is going to make him look like Humphrey Bogart or act like him. And so you had to do a whole new character, which was the mumbling and the... we tried to keep as much as we could of the businesses with the cops and so on, we tried to keep as much as we could of either the original Chandler or what we thought Chandler might have done if he had been writing it now.
She's also very interesting on the character of Roger Wade, which was substantially altered simply because Sterling Hayden was cast at the last minute - the shooting script had been written with Dan Blocker in mind, but Altman sensed that Hayden would give a fundamentally different interpretation, and encouraged him and Gould to improvise:
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The suicide itself was in the script. It was in the... it was the way it was done in the book, behind the closed door, the bang, the guy blows his head off. Of course, I didn’t know at the time we were going to have the Malibu set, or I might have thought of it. I don’t say I would have thought of it, but I might have thought of it. It was pure Altman and it was purely magnificent. It was absolutely beautiful - just superb. But in those scenes between Marlowe and Roger I tried to build up the fact that [Roger] was suicidal and that he was sadistically punishing his wife, taking everything out on her, and that he was suicidal as well as alcoholic. And some of the... [Sterling Hayden] doesn’t speak the same language that Dan Blocker spoke, you know, the rhythm, everything’s all different, so a lot of the dialogue got changed just out of necessity. And Altman... I saw the full rough cut, and he put Gould and Hayden down in those chairs on the beach and just let them say whatever came into their heads. And part of it was fascinating, but it went on far too long, I thought. Now of course it was muchly cut in the theatre print, but I could have wished some of the scenes were a little tighter.
(The source for all the above was
this lengthy audio interview.)