ClassyWas Excellent, smart action film.

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Martin Bradley Robert Mitchum was a bit long in the tooth when he played Philip Marlowe in this deliberately artificial remake of "Farewell, My Lovely" which, by the mid-seventies, seemed incongruously like a fish out of water. Despite an excellent cast that included Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Harry Dean Stanton, an Oscar-nominated Sylvia Miles and, in his only acting role, the novelist Jim Thompson the film looked and sounded like something of a museum piece. Maybe it needed someone other than the merely workmanlike Dick Richards to breathe some life into it in the way Altman did with the vastly superior "The Long Goodbye". When set beside Polanski's "Chinatown", which appeared the following year, or even the original 1944 version of the same story, this is decidedly second-rate; a fancy dress parade of character actors in search of a story.

inspectors71 If it weren't for the always watchable Robert Mitchum, the cool clothes, the lumbering Detroitmobiles, and the smoke and booze flowing like a river, Dick Richards' Farewell, My Lovely would collapse from the clichés, the incoherences, and the feeling that the movie is visually dark to add atmosphere while hiding the fact that the movie was made 30+ years after the book was published.I tried to get mad at this mess, but I just couldn't. It felt cheap, but paying attention to that basset hound of a man, Robert Mitchum, make Charlotte Rampling's greedy whore laugh, a nice touch indeed.I saw FML when it came out in the summer of 1975, and I lucked on it when a senior of mine said she had a couple boxes of VHS tapes that her mom wanted gone. I took 'em, and there was Mitchum on the box cover, looking tough, with a curl of smoke pooling under the brim of his fedora. Look at that! The movie--or Raymond Chandler--brings out the turn of phrase in the hacks among us.

Mickey-2 "Farewell, My Lovely" is another film version of the Raymond Chandler novel, "Murder, My Sweet," and thrusts Robert Mitchum in the role of the overly tired, beat-up but willing to take on a case private detective known as Philip Marlowe. As the film opens in 1941 Los Angeles, Marlowe has just tracked down a runaway girl, returned her to the parents, and gotten a good slug to the midsection for his troubles. Out of the shadows of a nightclub steps Moose Malloy, freshly released from prison, who tells Marlowe that he wants him to find his missing Velma. At first glance, it seems like a simple case, but it drags Mitchum, (Marlowe) through several shootings, muggings, an injection of a narcotic, and other mishaps before Marlowe can wrap up the matter of the missing showgirl, Velma. Mitchum manages to provide a great voice-over to move the film along, but it goes at a good pace on its own. The supporting cast includes John Ireland, Charlotte Rampling, Sylvia Miles, and introduces Jack O'Halloran as the Moose. Also, catch a young Sylvester Stallone in some work prior to his Rocky Balboa films. A great film noir for fans to enjoy.

cluciano63 I am a fan of Mitchum's acting, although I wish they had put him in a Chandler movie earlier in his career. He is kind of set into his image by the time this film was made; he had the cowboy down, and then the slightly seedy offbeat character like this one.One funny thing I read in a bio on RM; the suit he wears in the film (the only costume he wears) is an original from the costume department from the 1940's and had Victor Buono's name in it; RM complained it stunk the whole time he was in it. Also the scene when he sings with Jessie (Sylvia Miles) the former saloon singer, was an ad-lib scene, the song chosen on the spot since he knew the words. They got the rights to use it cleared later.I'm not quite sure if it was filmed in color, or if the version I saw this week was a colorized one; seems like it should have been done in black and white, and I was almost sure it was. It loses a lot of atmosphere in color, in any case.In any case, it is a decent piece of entertainment with pretty good acting by all, though some of the characters seem to hardly be acting at all. Of course that is Robert Mitchum's style and claim to fame.