Marlowe (1969) BQ exhaustively covered MGM's brief miserable reign by ex CBS reptile James Aubrey)........no sense beating a dead horse's ass......
This rickety update of a Raymond Chandler mystery is typical of the cheapjack fish-nor-fowl oddities that oozed out of the Aubrey meatgrinder.....
It aspires to the snappy wise-ass Private Eye-wash that we all loved in "The Big Sleep", even if nobody (including Chandler) could make any sense of the plot.......with world-weary gumshoe Philip Marlowe (a game enough James Garner) stumbling over dead bodies, lethal gangsters and devious but delectable femme fatales.(Gayle Hunnicut, Rita Moreno)
But the film lacks any atmosphere whatsoever, photographed like a bottom-of-the-barrel TV movie......it wobbles between its 1940's roots and 1969 California......without ever looking definitively like one era or the other.......it mostly takes unfolds on leftover sets from other movies......
Its one and only claim to fame......the sequence where young Bruce Lee kung fu's Garner's office furniture to smithereens........Bruce later attempts to do the same to Garner, but in the film's most ludicrous scene, Garner's supposedly quick enough to avoid those famous flying feet......
A few snappy gags and a fine supporting cast........but Aubrey never wanted MGM films to anything more that quick packaged sausage. 2 stars (**)
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