“Marlowe” is an adaptation of the 2014 book “The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel” by Irish novelist and Booker Award winner John Banville (“Doctor Copernicus”), writing as his pseudonymous other self Benjamin Black. It is a detective story set in 1939 Los Angeles, featuring Raymond Chandler’s immortal modern-day knight errant of hard-boiled crime fiction Philip Marlowe, played by Irish actor Liam Neeson.
As he has before, Marlowe gets mixed up with a femme fatale in this case one Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), an unhappily married heiress, who assigns Marlowe to find her dead lover Nico Peterson (Francois Arnaud). Her lover was run over in front of the ultra-posh Corbata Club, where the rich ride horses, rent back rooms and the obvious scoundrel Floyd Hanson (Danny Huston) runs things. Peterson’s head was, we are told, crushed “like a pumpkin.”
But Clare believes she has recently seen Peterson on the street in Tijuana, where he sometimes went to collect things to stock the prop house at Pacific Pictures, where he works. Clare has a mother named Dorothy Cavendish (Jessica Lange), who is even richer and more femme fatale-like than her daughter. Even though he is a gumshoe, Marlowe is friendly terms with L.A. cops like Joe Green (Ian Hart) and Bernie Ohls (Colm Meaney). One of Marlowe’s problems, besides Clare and her mother, is a two-man Mexican death squad, who are also after Peterson and a harbinger of murderous cartels to come.
