I love pulp stories and Film Noir. My favorite being the works of Raymond Chandler, specifically Philip Marlowe.
Of course the best film adaptation is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep
Of course Chandler’s hard-knuckled, hard-drinking, tough talking private eye, and the wild women, and corrupt millionaires has been an inspiration to many films, but another favorite of mine might be a surprise to you.
Yep, the Big Lebowski is based heavily on Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe stories, just remember in this story “Marlowe” is too damn drunk and stoned to realize he’s a private detective.
So this week I was hanging out over at my Mother-in-Law’s place, and while the ladies were doing some dreadful nonsense my uncle and I listened to the old Philip Marlowe radio broadcasts on her Roku. Not having a Roku I decided to see if there was an other way to enjoy these broadcasts. I succeeded with flying colors!
(Full player found here)
Not only can I enjoy them, but we all can! yay! So have a drink, light an unfiltered cigaret and wait for some big goon to come out of an ally to tune you up with a sap!
We watched The Lady in the Lake over Christmas. Done as a first-person movie. Pretty neat. 🙂 It was not highly rated, however, by fans of Robert Montgomery, since they didn’t actually see the man much in the film…
Neat I may have to look it up.
Even ‘Marlowe’ with Jim Garner was good (the one with Bruce Lee). After all, it WAS Garner.
And, I’m partial for noir, as I’m a child of the 50’s and a former P.I.
SiriusXM has the “Radio Classics” channel, which is all the old radio shows – The Shadow, Phillip Marlowe, Dragnet, Allen and Burns (aka “George and Gracie”), etc. Sadly, it’s one of the channels that’s not available for online listening, but it’s nice in the car.
I’m partial to The Shadow, Dragnet, and the Johnny Dollar shows, myself. The Saint wasn’t too bad, either.
Just watched Casablanca for the first time. Yeah… I know….what took me so long.
But…I’m glad I waited. I got to watch it with my 11 year old daughter and she loved it. Getting to watch an old movie classic for the first time WITH my daughter was awesome. We caught the tail end of The Maltese Falcon and that made her want to watch Casablanca.
That’s awesome! I’m glad she liked it, and I’m not surprised you liked it too.
BTW interesting food for thought. Did you know that Ronald Reagan was the first considered for the role of Rick? The studios weren’t too keen on Bogart as a romantic lead because he was short, bald, and ugly. Also until Casablanca he had always played tough-guy villain roles. They couldn’t picture him as Rick, and wanted somebody more traditional, such as Ronnie.
Of course both men were relative nobodies in the Hollywood world, and Bogart became the biggest name in Hollywood after that role. Can you imagine how different the world would look if we had Ronald Reagan’s face painted on the Casablanca movie posters?