Blondes, Bottles, & Brass Knuckles: The Legacy of Phillip Marlowe
With Liam Neeson reportedly playing the legendary anti-hero gumshoe in Marlowe, I take a look at some of the others who have done the same over the years…
You are walking down a dank, dark, and dangerous New York City alley in 1944. It’s June and the city is hot as hell: your shirt sticks to you as you hear stiletto heels tap, tap, tapping against the stones in the alleyway behind you. You glance over your shoulder, slightly tipping your black fedora to hide your glance as you do, when what catches your eye but a redhead with a coke bottle figure, a black dress, and a look of pure fatal terror on her face; a couple of thugs are racing after her, guns in hand, looking, it seems, to grab her.
A man in a brown fedora, black tie, and white shirt appears behind them. He pulls out a snub nose .38 revolver and, like the noir pied piper, he somehow manages to get the thugs off the mystery woman’s back. This seemingly random and flawed hero is the private detective in film noir.
Film noir has certain giants in its history who are very much considered to be the founding fathers of hard-boiled as a genre, most if not all contributing to the shaping of certain character archetypes like the private detective or the femme fatale. Basically all of the noir founding fathers did something in the…
