Poodle Springs (1998) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

"Poodle Springs" was the last Philip Marlowe story Raymond Chandler ever wrote. In fact, it came so late in Chandler's life that he only finished part of it before dying in 1959. It was not completed until thirty years later, when Chandler's estate hired Robert B. Parker, the creator of Spenser, to finish the novel. Chandler had written four chapters and a plot outline; Parker fleshed out the rest.

The story occurs late in the character's life as well. The Marlowe we are most familiar with is a lonely P.I., somewhere between 30 and 45 years old, usually pictured walking by himself through the seediest parts of L.A. in the 1930s and 1940s, wearing a cheap suit, cherishing nothing but his own integrity, and dangling a cigarette perpetually from his lips. That was the Marlowe of "The Big Sleep" and "Farewell, My Lovely." Compared to that familiar icon, the Marlowe of "Poodle Springs" is barely recognizable. The story takes place in 1963, and Marlowe appears to be nearly 60. He's married to a rich young woman, and is living in a ritzy house in Palm Springs (aka Poodle Springs).

Marlowe (James Caan) doesn't want to spend his life feeling useless and sponging off his wife, so he gets himself a local office and hangs out his P.I. shingle. His case load begins with missing purses but, as you can probably guess if you love this genre, he will eventually be involved with the Nevada mob, the California land swindlers, blackmailers, junkies, rich men with insane daughters (a favorite Chandler motif), pimps, gigolos, hookers, junkies, and a trail of dead bodies. As is typical in the noir genre, the plot is so labyrinthine that I'm not even sure I can describe it, but the key fact is that the trail leads eventually to a high level conspiracy - involving Marlowe's own father-in-law and President John F Kennedy himself!

Needless to say, the ever honorable Marlowe wants no part of high-powered swindles in which powerful men agree to suspend the rules of law and wash each other's backs. By the time the dust has cleared and the murder case has been closed, our intrepid P.I. has slipped back into his gum-encrusted shoes, squeezed back into his cheap suit, snapped the brim of his dusty fedora, and made his way back to the lowlifes and crooked cops in L.A., where he can at least understand the rules.

Poodle Springs is a little heavy on plot and a little light on the noir atmosphere which genre fans love, but I guess that can be explained by our hero's move to the air-conditioned upper class suburbs of the 1960s. I was interested and fascinated for a while by the "fish out of water" elements of the story. It's fun at first to see a married, suburban Marlowe doing the "yes, dear" thing with his wife, wearing a tacky floral print shirt, and picking up his cigarette butts from the squeaky-clean sidewalks of a rich community. That novelty gets old fast, however, and I was soon reacting to the whole situation the same way Marlowe himself did. I was sick of the bright sunlight, the pastel colors, the elegant swimming pools, the clean sidewalks, and the wide open spaces. It just didn't feel like a real noir. I missed the grungy city streets, the long nighttime shadows, and the familiar wail of melancholy saxophone music.

As always, HBO did a first class job with the project. They hired Oscar-nominated Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces) to direct the film, and they hired the brilliant Oscar-winning playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Brazil) to adapt the Chandler/Parker novel into a teleplay. I'm really not convinced that those two guys were the right men for the job, but one cannot fault HBO for bad faith. They definitely pulled in some high powered talent to work on the project.

Production values aside, this is a Movie House classic in at least one respect. It features two things we prize: celebrity nudity (from Dina Meyer who looks beautiful and pampered) and Joe Don Baker. What more does a movie really need?