The Big Sleep (1946)

Even Humphrey Bogart said he didn't know what was happening scene-to-scene in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled private eye crime story, and having just read the book, I can attest that the film is faithful to its sprawling mess of a plot - sprawling because Chandler in fact wrote it by fusing two previously published short stories, merging characters, renaming others, caring less about resolving plot threads and more about building not so much a mystery as a noir character study of criminal California circa 1940, delivered in hilarious deadpan and steeped in worldweary immorality.

★★★★☆

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Marlowe (2022)

Tricky dicky dialogue at the start that has characters answering questions with questions in a fast prattle and repetitive circle ("What would you say, Mr Marlowe, if I said you said I said...?" sort of talk) makes Neil Jordan's adaptation of John Banville's book start out feeling like a spoof of the hard-boiled detective novel, but it's not and is in fact, eventually, a beautiful-to-look-at period crime story featuring Raymond Chandler's flatfoot Philip Marlowe, played by a perfectly hangdog, trenchcoated, fedora-ed Liam Neeson, investigating a case of a missing Lothario in 1920s Los Angeles, but some problems along the way take you out of the drama - Alan Cunmmings' overacting, for one, and a nebulous mystery that keeps going around and around on the spot, much like that fast Neil Jordan prattle.

★★★★☆

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