The ending.
Does anyone else think the ending was kind of rushed, or blatently off the wall. I don't know, something just didn't feel right about the ending.
share*SPOILER*
People in various threads will say "this is not faithful to Chandler's Marlowe," which really is besides the point since this is Altman's Marlowe. However. This ending wasn't even faithful to Altman's Marlowe, nor to the character Gould had created. Throughout the movie, Marlowe's dealing with, and evading, violent people, without using violence of any kind. But then, after he tracks down Lennox and gets him to confess to his wife's murder, he shoots him down in cold blood. Not to be litigious, but that's first-degree murder. Right before he shot him, I was curious where the plot would lead: Is Lennox going to threaten him? What if Marlowe is the only one who knows his secret? It added a degree of tension if Lennox was sociopathic enough to think of rubbing out Marlowe too. But it never gets that far. *boom* Marlowe blows away Lennox.
The dancing down the street, I just took to be a slice of Altman-esque surreal, inconsistent, of course, with someone who had just murdered the friend he tracked down. Or, more likely, a bit of inappropriate Gould-improvisation that Altman left in.
Marlowe's killing him just made no sense. Lennox is a cold-blooded murderer and a betrayer. He deserves to be brought to justice, not rubbed out gangland-style. Everything Altman built up in the first 111 minutes of the film would have led us to believe Gould would not commit murder in that final minute. It's a flaw.
I did enjoy the movie and any problems I have with it have nothing to do with "purism" that some Chandler aficionados seem to be expressing. It's just that the ending that does not make any sense. "Oh, I'm going to go commit murder, make no attempt to conceal it, and then dance my leisurely way down the street." That's a Tony Montana move, not Marlowe or Gould.
After having clawed his way around a world that has seemingly lost all morals and been screwed over for the duration of the film, Marlowe finally takes action in a manner that serves this world right. And I don´t think it was inconceivable or completely out of character anyway - if there´s one thing "not okay with him", this was it. As Slant Magazine´s Eric Henderson puts it: "For all the film´s revisionism, one tenet of the film noir genre remains a holdover, existing in Altman´s film without revision or irony. For a man to be betrayed by another man when the two held a previously honorable agreement is a moral crime, punishable by death. However, when a man is betrayed by a woman, it´s so taken for granted and upsets his world view so little, it´s hardly worth a whisteling tune on the harmonica".
And I don´t think he had to worry about any legal consequences - above all because, after having paid one last visit, he was on his way back to Forties anyway.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
Lennox was already dead, in the eyes of the law, so Marlowe didn't have to worry about any legal trouble. What were the police and the coroner going to do? Find the body, confess that their original report that Lennox had died was a fraud, and that this time he was dead for real? No, they'd go out of their way to make sure that his real death disappeared without a trace of documentation.
shareExactly.
share1 Marlowe would not be able to take Terry back to the U.S. to face trial because the corrupt Mexican officials would absolutely not allow that to happen, because it'd be the end of their careers and that little scam of theirs.
Terry dying again in Mexico probably wasn't something the federales were expecting, but it's much less of a problem for them.
2 Maybe Marlowe was still angry at Lennox for murdering his wife (who also seemed to be a friend of Marlowe's) ?