Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Another example of the evolution of the gumshoe is to be found in Raymond
Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, who was often portrayed by different actors, each of whom
brought out dissimilar, sometimes unexpected, aspects of the sleuth, giving us a chance to
see how the character was inflected across time. Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet stars as
the down-and-out private investigator in this tangled story of intrigue; Humphrey Bogart
assumes the role of hard-boiled private detective Marlowe character in the puzzling and
complex Howard Hawks’ classic, The Big Sleep. 54 In this film, the spectator is not forced to
identify with the hero, and the noir convention of the world-weary hero’s voiceover is
effectively avoided here. This allows the viewer to speculate about what the detective is up
to rather than Marlowe, through voiceover, guiding us subjectively through what he is
indeed thinking. In stark contrast to this, director and star Robert Montgomery was Philip
Marlowe in Lady in the Lake, experimentally filmed from the protagonist’s first-person
point of view. As already mentioned, this was the most revolutionary version of Chandler
at that time, in which the camera becomes an active participant so that the viewer follows
the story through the eyes of the private detective. Yet, this time, the Marlowe detective
plays a relatively more predictable role revolving round the resolution of a mystery story
very similar to many other films from the period.
Although usually emasculated as in the case of Bart Tare in Gun Crazy or
Christopher Cross in Scarlet Street, or rendered vulnerable (Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past
or Eddie Rice in The Crooked Way), the ambiguous man functioning as detective can also
be the malefactor or the problem, not just the victim. The male protagonist in film noir can
be an homme fatal and just like his counterpart, the femme fatale, they both have to pay for
their excessive desires with their own lives or freedom. In Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal
(1948), Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe), an escaped con, inverts the usual sequence of a
woman drawing an innocent man into her web. In this film Joe exists as an homme fatal,
seducing Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt) into his world of violence and murder (fig. 36),
“enticing her with the promise of sexual fulfilment that goes beyond the realm of normal
relationships. She surrenders completely to Joe, committing murder as the ultimate
expression of her love” (Silver & Ward 1992:238-9). The film follows a love triangle,
marked straight from the beginning when both Pat (Claire Trevor) and Ann go and visit Joe
54 Robert Mitchum again starred as Philip Marlowe in the 1978-version of The Big Sleep – a remake of
Howard Hawks’ 1946 film, casting Candy Clark and Sarah Miles as the two Sternwood daughters and Oliver
Reed as corrupt gangster Eddie Mars.
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