The richly hard-boiled terrain of detective Philip Marlowe has always been, to quote Raymond Chandler, “a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”
Chandler’s Los Angeles gumshoe has stretched across some of the most fertile decades of American cinema, from Howard Hawks’ seductively cryptic “The Big Sleep” (1946) to Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” (1973). Having been played by Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum and Elliot Gould, among others, he’s less a character than a legacy to be passed down, like a cherished dark fedora.
But it’s been a long time, almost half a century, since Marlowe was notably portrayed on the big screen. “Marlowe,” with Liam Neeson as the private eye, is a reclamation project, a bid to recapture some old-school, tough-talking movie magic. And, intriguingly, “Marlowe” is…
