☆ ☆ ☆
The Brasher Doubloon (1947) – J. Brahm
George Montgomery
is probably the least good Philip Marlowe (as compared to Bogart, Dick Powell,
or even Robert Montgomery, not to mention Elliott Gould and James Garner) – he
tosses off the cynical lines (drawn from Raymond Chandler’s novel, The High
Window, but not scripted by him) without enough bile. Perhaps too, the plot is a little too
compressed here (in only 86 minutes), as it does have some complications
(though is by no means as unfathomable as The Big Sleep by Howard Hawks which no
one can quite figure out). Marlowe is
asked to find the titular stolen coin by an elderly matriarch with a beautiful
secretary and a spoiled no-good son. After
he stumbles upon a few corpses (and gets the police after himself), Marlowe
starts to piece things together. Not
unlike, the plots of the various mystery series of the 30s and 40s (Charlie
Chan, Sherlock Holmes, etc.), he gets all the suspects together in a room at
the end – and the villain is outed. This
should never be your first stop if you’re interested in film noir or detective
films, but it is passable for genre fans.
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