Farewell, My Lovely

Farewell, My Lovely is a remake of a film noir classic, but although it recreates the 1940s quite convincingly, it did not grab me. The colour print I saw was, moreover, in wretched condition.

Robert Mitchum plays the ageing private detective Philip Marlowe, a weary and disillusioned figure who, without much enthusiasm, gets mixed up in a complicated crime story when he is approached by the good-natured giant Moose Malloy. After a long prison stretch, Moose wants Marlowe to find his beloved Velma, who has vanished without a trace. It sounds like a fairly straightforward case, but suddenly it is also about murder, and the question is whether Velma really is the sweet, naive tart with a heart of gold that Moose remembers.