November 2, 2007
The Genius of Raymond Chandler: An Interview with Judith Freeman (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 01:00 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. So many fine actors have played Philip Marlowe over the years—Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Powers Boothe, and James Caan in TV productions, even Elliott Gould. Chandler, who died in 1959, lived long enough to see Powell, Bogey, and Montgomery play the part. Which was his favorite, and who else would he liked to have seen play Marlowe? And—I presume you’ve seen most of the Marlowes—who is your own favorite? Chandler initially had Cary Grant in mind as the actor he felt was suited to the role of Marlowe, but that was probably Chandler projecting his own image of himself as the well-dressed, good-looking debonair guy—and as a young man Chandler was that. He looks incredibly elegant and handsome in a picture taken in L.A. in the twenties showing him standing under a tree in profile. Cary Grant never played Marlowe, and given the Marlowes we’ve seen, it’s kind of hard to imagine him in the role of hard-boiled dick. As far as I know, Chandler never weighed in on Robert Montgomery’s performance for the record. He is on record as saying that he thought Dick Powell (in Murder My Sweet, an adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely) made the best Marlowe, but I’m a little uncertain about when exactly he made that comment—before or after he saw Bogart in The Big Sleep. (The Big Sleep came out in 1946, two years after Murder, My Sweet.) He definitely appreciated Bogart’s performance, though to my knowledge he never actually said he thought Bogart was the best Marlowe. What he said was that Bogart was “the genuine article”—so much better than any other tough-guy actors that he made bums of the Ladds and the Powells, and perhaps that can be interpreted as crowning him as the ultimate Marlowe. Or it could be an indication of Chandler’s appreciation of a film performance. Bogart, he said, could be tough without a gun, which Powell never could. But I think Chandler was really talking about Bogart’s acting ability, that he was the genuine article as an actor. He recognized that Bogart was a great, better than Powell, and he brought a charged quality to the role, even though he was quite wrong physically for the part. It was the quality of Bogart’s performance, that sense of humor that contained a grating, rather misogynistic undertone of contempt, especially for the women in the story, that Chandler found compelling. All that Bogart had to do to dominate a scene, he said, was to enter it. In contrast, Dick Powell was a much softer guy, more ordinary, a less cynical, less harsh and jaded Marlowe. He seems more human in many ways, more vulnerable, and you see this in his scenes with women. He doesn’t snarl at Claire Trevor, who plays Mrs. Grayle (alias Velma), or try to outwit her with force, but sort of bats the ball around with her, sometimes uncertainly plays cat and mouse, and he almost gets a naughty schoolboy-caught-in-the-act look on his face when he’s caught staring at her legs. He was closer, I think, to the true Marlowe, to the spirit of the man that Chandler created on the page and who arose out of his own fantasies. But I can understand how he’d be seduced by the brilliant Marlowe that Bogart created. It’s a tough call for me as to which Marlowe I prefer, but I’d have to say that the Dick Powell Marlowe is my favorite because I feel he’s the truest, closest incarnation of the literary Marlowe, though I loved Bogart in The Big Sleep and laughed out loud in scene after scene and was mesmerized by his acting. I also loved Robert Mitchum in a later adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, not because he convinced me he was Marlowe but because he was Robert Mitchum, filling the screen with his great brooding presence. The Marlowe I least liked was Robert Montgomery, in Lady in the Lake, who, even though he may have been the father of that perky Bewitched Elizabeth Montgomery, made a really nasty Marlowe, so snarling and misogynistic I could hardly watch him. I thought Elliott Gould was great, the first actor to capture that sense of Marlowe’s sexual ambivalence, but he never became Marlowe for me, he was always Elliott Gould, and the completely changed ending of the movie had him behaving in ways Marlowe never would. It’ll be interesting to see what Clive Owen does with the role, in an adaptation of Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business, to be directed by Frank Miller. In any case, it’s clear that Marlowe will never die, and that he provides a very malleable suit of armor for an actor to slip into. Chandler once wrote a letter to the effect that “Over there [England] I’m an author, over here just a writer of mysteries.” Why do you suppose it was that British critics discovered Chandler so much earlier than their America counterparts? The rest of that quote in the letter is “Don’t know why,” meaning Chandler himself couldn’t figure out why he was viewed so differently in England from America. And I don’t know why either. He knew a lot more about England than I do, and he couldn’t figure it out. But it’s possible that Americans felt defensive about how their society was being portrayed, didn’t like the fact that those early Chandler novels depicted a pretty corrupt culture, from cops to politicians, whereas the British were fascinated by the sordidness of that sun-filled world that had been so hyped. It could also be the puritanical streak coming out: Some American critics talked about the “nastiness” of the characters, how no one except Marlowe was decent, and the language was so bad. Even the critic for The New York Times complained that the publisher had to resort to the dash in The Big Sleep, so degenerate was the language, and complained that Chandler had created a world of moral defectives—pornographers and blackmailers and homosexuals and gangsters. This sounds so prudish now, but then Americans are kind of prudish compared with Europeans. Can you imagine a European politician draping a nude statue before he’d stand in front of it for a press conference? Could be the British were just so much more curious about these remarkable books, so uninvested in a self-serving image, more interested in the otherness of the settings, and more willing to be amused by a really brilliant writer.
You introduce an idea about Chandler that few have ever dared to investigate, namely the possibility that he was homosexual. No doubt this is going to enrage a great many of his long-time fans, but I think your case is well made. Can you summarize? Actually I’m not the first to raise the question of homosexuality in connection with both Chandler and his work, and specifically Philip Marlowe. The subject came up in both Frank McShane’s and Tom Hiney’s biographies, and also in essays written before and after Chandler’s death, including a very moving one by his close friend Natasha Spender, wife of the poet Stephen Spender, who knew him very well at the end of his life and whom I interviewed for my book. But you are right in saying that I look at the subject more closely than others have, because I felt it had a place in the discussion of his marriage. The truth is we’ll never know if Chandler harbored homosexual inclinations. I found nothing in my research to indicate he ever had a relationship with a man. What is clearer is that both Chandler and his creation Marlowe harbored very complex feelings when it came to women (and men) and their sexuality. There’s an anxiety, a feeling they are sliding along a slippery slope of attraction and repulsion, mistrust and anxiety, a kind of boyish prurience as well as an impossibly strict code of morality, in a world where women are the villains and men long for friendship. I’m not going to repeat all the arguments I make in the book, or the discoveries that came from my readings and interviews; they’re there for the reader to discover. Any discussion of an iconic hard-boiled writer, and an iconic male literary figure, that even dares to bring up the question of homosexuality is bound to raise certain hackles, but I like to believe that I handle the subject with a certain sensitivity and respect, and I stress that there’s no clear answer to the question.
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