Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

RAYMOND CHANDLER
b. Chicago, Illinois, 23 July 1888, d. La Jolla, California, 26 March 1959
Educated in England, Raymond Chandler worked as an
accountant and in a bank on returning to America before
turning to writing pulp fiction in the 1930s. The success
of his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), brought him an
invitation to Hollywood. His involvement with film had
two aspects: as screenwriter and as author of six novels
adapted for the screen, some of them more than once.
After a rewarding experience collaborating with Billy
Wilder on the script of Double Indemnity (1944),
Chandler became increasingly disillusioned with
Hollywood and attacked it as a soul-destroying
environment in articles written for Atlantic Monthly. Apart
from receiving cowriting credit on two minor films in 1944
and 1945, his only further completed work for the screen
was an original script for The Blue Dahlia (1946). He
received only cowriter credit on Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers
on a Train (1951) after disagreements with the director.
The first two film versions of his novels, The Falcon
Takes Over (1942), loosely based on Farewell, My Lovely,
and Time to Kill (1942), based on The High Window,
retained only aspects of the plots and created a Philip
Marlowe character very different from Chandler’s original.
A more serious attempt at adapting Chandler’s work came
in Murder, My Sweet (1944), again from Farewell, My
Lovely, with Marlowe played by Dick Powell. This was
followed by what is considered to be the finest Chandler
adaptation, The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard
Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart as the definitive Marlowe,
even though he played the role only once. The Lady in the
Lake (1947) made a largely unsuccessful attempt to use the
camera as first-person narrator, with Marlowe seen only in
mirrors until the very end of the film. The Brasher
Doubloon (1947), a weak adaptation of The High Window,
starred George Montgomery as an unconvincing Marlowe.
THEATRICAL ADAPTATIONS
Film historians have noted the close links between theatrical
melodrama of the late nineteenth century and the
techniques and narrative structure of early film—in content
and elaborate lighting and stage effects. The obvious
similarities between a play and a film—in overall length,
use of sets, the apparent realism of character and
Adaptation
Twenty years passed before further adaptations were
made, creating problems with attempts to re-create the
very specific 1940s settings, themes, and ethos of the
novels. Marlowe (1969), based on The Little Sister and
starring James Garner, updated the story to the 1960s and
presented the hero as a figure of integrity who was out of
step with the times. Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye
(1973) went even further by presenting Elliot Gould as a
bewildered and largely ineffectual figure in 1970s Los
Angeles—and treated as a figure of fun by most of the
other characters. Although the film was disliked by many
Chandler admirers, it remains a brilliant piece of
filmmaking. The two most recent versions both starred an
ageing Robert Mitchum. Farewell, My Lovely (1975) took
great pains to re-create the settings and atmosphere of the
book, and a Big Sleep (1978), directed by Michael Winner
and set bizarrely in contemporary London, suffered fatally
by comparison with Hawks’s film.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Double Indemnity (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), The Big
Sleep (1946), The Blue Dahlia (1946), The Lady in the
Lake (1947), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Long
Goodbye (1973), Farewell, My Lovely (1975)
FURTHER READING
Clark, Al. Raymond Chandler in Hollywood. London and New
York: Proteus, 1982.
Gardiner, Dorothy, and Kathrine Sorley Walker, eds.
Raymond Chandler Speaking. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1977.
Luhr, William. Raymond Chandler and Film. New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1982.
Pendo, Stephen. Raymond Chandler on Screen: His Novels into
Film. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1976.
Graham Petrie
dialogue—have obscured the very real differences. Stage
dialogue can sound artificial and tedious when transferred
directly to the more naturalistic medium of film,
and, as with fiction, a successful adaptation has to be
thoroughly rethought in terms of the new, primarily
visual, medium of cinema. While the faults of mechanically
adapted ‘‘filmed theater’’ are usually obvious, there
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