Clive Owen to Play Private Eye Philip Marlowe
I generally don’t judge whether or not I want to see a movie based on its stars, but Clive Owen is quickly becoming one of the few names out there that can make me take notice of a project before I know anything else about it. When I heard news this week that Clive Owen had signed on to star as the iconic detective Philip Marlowe in an upcoming movie at Universal, it sounded like a good match to me.
Marlowe is one of the classic hard-boiled private eyes in British fiction; the books were written by Raymond Chandler in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, and have since been adapted to a few noteworthy films including The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep. However, it’s been quite a while since we’ve seen Marlowe on the screen (The Big Sleep was in 1978), and I think the time is right to revive the noir genre now after the success of movies like Brick. I only hope they don’t try to modernize it too much. Owen was apparently selected mainly because of his narration style in Sin City, which I agree was fantastic. It’s one of the reasons I still wish Owen had landed the James Bond gig over Daniel Craig. But Craig did win me over in the end, so all in all I suppose things worked out nicely. No word yet on which Marlowe novel will be adapted (if any), but I’m looking forward to hearing more about this project.
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Comments (3)
British? Philip Marlowe was an American character written by an American writer. Not that it matters much, but atleast get the facts right in your headline.
Posted by menomena on January 26th, 2007My bad. I thought I had read that Chandler lived most of his life in England… which he apparently did until he ran into income tax problems.
Posted by Sean on January 26th, 2007More hardboiled detective movies is a good thing. The only problem is to craft them into workable neo-noir without becoming parody of the ones made in the 30’s and 40’s. Either they can be shot as period pieces like Chinatown or maybe they could work in a dark nondescript environment or world like in Sin City and Dark City but without the sci-fi/fantasy.
Posted by Ian on January 26th, 2007Leave a Reply