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| Leslie Caron as Katherine Creighton |
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| Warren Oates as Chandler |
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| Charles McGraw as Bernie Oakman |
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| Gloria Grahame as Selma |
This has been possibly the third time I've watched Chandler. The first time I caught it somewhere in progress while it was playing on TCM. The second go round I paid more attention to the plot, it still had some big plot holes, i.e., references to occurrences that are mentioned but never filmed or edited out. The result is weird jumps in locations with no explanations. The third go round I keyed on the visuals which were there in some sequences but not exploited. The visual stylistics would have worked if the editors had just held the shots longer. I have captured some of them, and as stills you can gaze on them long enough to drink them in. In the film they are a blink of eye and gone. Too bad. Doing a bit of research on this, reveals that the studio monkeyed around with it enough for the director to take out a full page add claiming he had nothing to do with the film. Royal Dano's is credited but all his scenes were cut, Scatman Crothers has a few seconds of nonsensical screen time. Gloria Grahame is also grossly under used. The director and writer said new scenes were filmed and inserted. The plot is murky and doesn't make a lot sense at all as a result.
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| Warren basically telling his supervisor to take this job and shove it |
The setup - So, Chandler is an ex-private eye. Working a boring shift in a factory machine shop for a private security company.
I guess if you didn't build your P.I. biz into a big agency with many ops you weren't gonna make it in the late 1960s-early 70s. There is a humorous book BTW by Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 where the desperate detective is basically starving waiting for a case to break and can't afford bullets for his gun.
Things ain't going to well for Chandler. The job sucks. His supervisor is a real dick. Chandler gets into it with him and walks off the job during the middle of his shift and quits. He heads home to his L.A. bungalow and goes on a drunk.
Meanwhile, an old law enforcement buddy of Chandler's, Bernie Oakman (McGraw) stops by his flop for a visit. Bernie got tagged by a shady Government Agent named Carmody. Basically he gets called in on a favor owed, to hire some patsy who just wants to collect a paycheck, to shadow a government witness Katherine Creighton (Caron).
The job is just to make a rival faction think that Creighton is important enough to distract them from their real operation. Which isn't ineptly revealed until the end (this could be because of the studios meddling, we'll never know). Oakman figures Chandler needs a job anyway so why not offer it to him.
Candler takes it seriously and accepts, he gets his Smith & Wesson out of hock, a dead mans suit from an old gal pal Selma (Grahame). Selma runs some type of tinsel town health club. Whether she would have had a bigger part, again, well never know.
Chandler waits for Creighton and the train that's bringing her. Her arrival is at L.A.'s Union Station, an old Noir location. Of course one of the twists is predictable Chandler falls for Creighton, the other is he's not a patsy. Anyway here are some visual highlights. Again I ant stress enough that we'll never know if the original vision of the film would have been an improvement over what we got now.
The Screencaps
The ne plus ultra Warren Oates Neo Noir is Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, watch that and see what a director with total control over his film by can achieve.
Unfortunately Chandler is the kind of film with all the right components that should have worked and that you'd want to love but it is a real mess. For Oates fans only 5/10
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