I’m currently reading this for the book club and spotted that this was available for streaming, so I picked it for Saturday night viewing.
It’s a classic tale of hard boiled detectives, blackmail, betrayal, vice and murder from 1946 starring Humphrey Bogart as private eye Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Mrs Rutledge, the object of both his investigation and affections.
Plotwise Marlowe is employed by the elderly Colonel Sternwood to investigate a letter from a rare book dealer called Geiger asking for money to cover gambling supposedly incurred by his younger daughter, the flirtatious and unpredictable Carmen. After accepting the job, Marlowe also encounters Sternwood’s elder daughter, the married but separated Mrs Rutledge who seems keen to know what her father is up to.
Marlowe soon discovers that Geiger’s bookshop is not quite what it seems and tracks him to his house in the Hollywood hills. As he keeps watch, a shot rings out and he breaks in to discover a drugged Carmen in a compromising position, a very dead Geiger and a secret camera with the film missing. Shenanigans ensue.
From this point, things get steadily more confusing and complicated with multiple murders and murky mysteries, explained with a hefty amount of dialogue and people pointing guns at each other. At some points I wished for a detective’s notebook or a murder board with pictures and bits of red string to keep track of who was double crossing who.
The sparky scenes with Bogart and Bacall keep things moving though with some unexpectedly funny bits of business thrown in to lighten the tone. Bogart was 25 years senior to Bacall, but that didn’t stop him from carrying on a very public affair with her whilst divorcing his third wife. The pair married in 1945 and were reportedly happy together until Bogart’s death some 12 years later.
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