‘Shred of Chandler, Dash of Hammett’: It’s Debatable

“City of Angels,” the hit New York musical playing at the Shubert, is haunted by the ghost of Raymond Chandler.

It is two plays in one--one centered around a screenwriter who is writing a private-eye movie in the genre of Chandler’s “The Big Sleep,” the other is the movie itself.

Before the curtain rises, several of the landmarks Chandler wrote about are outlined in lights around the proscenium--City Hall, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. For one who lived in Los Angeles in the 1930s, the show is powerfully nostalgic.

In his program notes, Larry Gelbart, author of the book, says its scenes are “straight out of a 1940s Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe film--a shred of Chandler, a dash of Hammett . . . “ But I saw more of Chandler’s Marlowe in it than Dashiell Hammett’s Spade.

True, the Spade of Hammett’s “Maltese Falcon” is the double of Chandler’s Marlowe, both as played by Humphrey Bogart, but Spade’s turf was San Francisco; Marlowe’s was Los Angeles.

Stone, the private detective, wears the traditional trench coat and fedora tilted over one eye in the Marlowe manner; he works in a shabby office in Hollywood, dependent on a faithful secretary (Marlowe had none) and drinks out of a bottle in his desk. As expected, he is badly beaten by two thugs in the employ of his enemies. While lacking the realism of the screen, the beating is a delightful piece of ballet, though it leaves Stone bloodied.

As in “The Big Sleep,” Stone’s quarry is the nymphomaniac daughter of a rich old man. When Stone calls on the father, who lies supine in an iron lung in his solarium, the set almost smells like the solarium in which Marlowe found the dying Gen. Sternwood in his wheelchair.

As Chandler described the scene, “The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. . . . The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. . . .”

Like Marlowe, Stone has a kind of hard integrity; there are, after all, things he won’t do for money; nor will he take advantage of a helpless female.

“City of Angels” is one of several recent works that pay tribute to Chandler by mocking him. Robert B. Parker, successful in his own right as the creator of Spencer, his own private eye, finished an unfinished Chandler novel, “Poodle Springs,” of which Chandler had completed only one-fourth.

Encouraged by the success of this presumptuous enterprise, Parker then wrote “Perchance to Dream,” a sequel to “The Big Sleep,” in which Marlowe continues to be exasperated and endangered by Sternwood’s ding-a-ling daughter.

Most of the private-eye movies that now proliferate on the TV screen owe something to Chandler, the fastidious British poet who graduated from pulp crime stories to literary novels about the dark side of Los Angeles.

A more suitable theater for “City of Angels” might have been the Pantages on Hollywood Boulevard, which was built in 1930 in the exuberant movie-palace style of that era. The Pantages, however, is appropriatedly booked for the New York musical “Grand Hotel.” Nothing could be more fitting.

“Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles” (Overlook Press) by Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver is an illustrated collection of Chandler passages describing scenes and buildings that caught his eye and turned up in his books, along with insights about the nature of the city.

He wrote scornfully of the Hollywood dream: “Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver’s shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunch box. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blase and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture mover in a sweaty undershirt. . . .”

In his program notes, Gelbart recalls that he collaborated in the late 1940s on a production of the revue “My L.A.” It lasted four days. “But it demonstrated for me . . . just how theatrically marvelous this marvelously theatrical city is. . . . The flamboyant flora, the exotic folk, each tinged by some degree of sunstroke; qualities that made the town that made the movies seem like a movie itself. . . .”

“My L.A.” was based on columns written by the late Matt Weinstock for the old downtown Daily News.

Nobody knew L.A. better than Matt. Not even Raymond Chandler.