In the next program section, the spotlight is on Philip Marlowe

Philip Marlowe is arguably the most iconic figure in American crime fiction. In his novels and short stories, Raymond Chandler created a world in which a modern-day knight – who, though flawed, stands on the side of honor and justice – serves as a counterweight to pervasive corruption. As the author wrote in his famous 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” In film, Marlowe was most memorably portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946), although Chandler himself preferred the 1944 version of the character played by Dick Powell in the early noir Murder, My Sweet. Marlowe, however, has many more film and television incarnations, and it is precisely these that we will focus on in this year’s Noir Film Festival program. In 1947, two men with the same last name played the private eye: George Montgomery appeared in the adaptation of the novel The High Window (released as The Brasher Doubloon) directed by the underrated John Brahm, while actor and director Robert Montgomery transformed The Lady in the Lake into one of the boldest experiments with subjective camerawork in the history of cinema. Almost thirty years later, Robert Mitchum, a man who seemed born for the role, portrayed Marlowe twice. The first time was in a new adaptation of Chandler’s second novel, Farewell, My Lovely, released in 1975. (mh)