Farewell, My Lovely

After reading Kent Jones' appreciation in the latest Film Comment, I watched the 1975 version of Farewell, My Lovely starring Robert Mitchum, something I've been wanting to do since I saw this as an adolescent. Not exactly a must see, it still has enough of a pessimistic streak, attention to period detail and odd but interesting casting characteristic of the 70s to make it worth a look. Mitchum as Philip Marlowe is kind of fun at first, but then it gets weird and sort of sad, particularly when he's kissing a woman half his age, diving behind cars to avoid being shot or stumbling around in a heroin daze. Part of the problem is Mitchum was 54 at the time, and I guess I never expected Marlowe to live that long. I assumed he'd eventually mouth off to the wrong person or his past would catch up with him. He was supposed to be in his mid 40s around the time of Playback, the last Chandler novel in which he appears, so I suppose mid 50s isn't that far fetched. It didn't help matters that this guy basically reinvented Marlowe for the 70s two years earlier, in a completely opposite direction that Mitchum took him. Altman's The Long Goodbye and Dick Richards' Farewell make for interesting genre contrasts, with Altman's film being very American New Wave and Richards' stuck in a more or less old fashioned studio mode. And though Jerry Goldsmith's score for Farewell seems to be a bit more successful as a self-consciously hommage than the other elements of the film, to my ears it borrows a bit too much from John Williams' excellent Long Goodbye score.
The most interesting thing in the film for me was Charlotte Rampling as the femme fatale. She does a pretty amazing Bacall impersonation early on in the film, getting Bacall's tone and inflection just right. She continues in this playful manner until it's time to start shooting people, atwhich point she gets that look in her eye and becomes the complex, emotionally troubled woman she seems to enjoy playing so much. Can't wait to see what Todd Solondz's got in store for her, Pee Wee and Omar.