Farewell, My Lovely

Farewell, My Lovely is a great entertainment and a celebration of Robert Mitchum's absolute originality.

Elegant neo-noir with a perfectly cast Robert Mitchum, at 58 the oldest actor to play Marlowe.

The film's triumph is Mitchum's definitive Marlowe, which captures perfectly the character's down-at-heel integrity and erratic emotional involvement with his cases.

By simply rack-focusing Mitchum in an occasional close-up, Richards evokes an entire biography, a sense of weariness and reflection. [25 Aug 1975, p.66]

It's as if someone had put pillow springs, power-steering and a tape deck into a classic racing-car. It is still handsome and it still goes, but it is a handsome mediocrity.

Perversely, it is a reverence for langauge - the most exciting aspect of Chandler's novels - that does the movie in. With a face like an old catcher's mitt, a beat-up bulk anesthetized by booze, Mitchum as Marlowe doesn't have to tell us a thing about himself. But tell us he does - in gumshoe-ese that echoes Chandler's language without its hallucinatory sparkle. [18 Aug 1975, p.73]

This is the sort of private-eye period piece that means to do honor to the traditions of Raymond Chandler and the hard-boiled melodrama. But through its own dim eagerness it ends up making a mockery of them.