Rita Moreno – thong and pasties in Marlowe (1969)

Rita Moreno did very little screen nudity in her lengthy career. Her only nipple exposure, for example, was accidental. That’s a shame because these near-nude captures from the closing scene of Marlowe demonstrate that she really had an impressive figure.

(Well, at least her legs were great. In a previous post from this film. Some of the commenters noted that her breasts appear to be prosthetics.)


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I love the stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and most of the movies made from them, but I did not love this film. It’s not because the plot is confusing and riddled with holes. That’s true of almost all of the Hammett and Chandler works. They are all about the atmosphere and characterization, not the actual cases being solved. The problem with this version of Chandler’s “The Little Sister” is the re-imagining of Philip Marlowe to suit the skill set of Jim Garner. As opposed to Bogart or Mitchum, who were laconic cynics, Jim Garner just wouldn’t stop babbling, bantering and conning. He was basically Jim Rockford and/or Bret Maverick. Garner was to Marlowe as Roger Moore was to James Bond – too flippant, too jokey.

I also would have preferred to leave the story in the 1940s instead of having Marlowe deal with hippies in the late 60s. I suppose that was a cost-saving move, since no sets had to be altered or created to turn 1969 LA into 1969 LA.

One of the surreal aspects of the film was Bruce Lee as an colorfully dressed mob enforcer who threatens heavily armed men with his martial arts expertise, ala the famous scene in Raiders. At least the guy in Raiders brought a sword to the gunfight. Lee doesn’t even have a throwing star, or anything else that can work from more than six feet away. Needless to say, this peacock is only useful for doing a bunch of fancy kicks and chops before he is eliminated. Jim Garner actually taunts him by telling him that he looks kind of gay, and I had just been thinking, “Is this character supposed to be a gay stereotype, or is he supposed to be so clueless that he doesn’t realize he is ridiculous?” I never did get it.

5 thoughts on “Rita Moreno – thong and pasties in Marlowe (1969)

  1. I confuse this movie with “Harper” starring Paul Newman, roughly the same era. This was during the period when Newman was contractually obligated to only act in films starting with the letter H. After filming “Hud”, “The Hustler”, “Hombre” & “Harper”, he put his foot down and made them change the title of “Hool Hand Luke”. Probably for the best.

  2. When I was a kid, my Dad loved going to see movies, but he couldn’t be bothered to show up for the beginning of the film. Instead, we would often go in to the film in the middle, watch the double feature, then stay to see the part of the first movie we missed. The first time I saw Raiders, we had come in during that scene, just before Indy drew his gun and shot the swordsman. Most of the time when we got to the part of the movie where we came in, we would leave. But we stayed to watch the rest of Raiders for a second time just because it was so good. I don’t actually recall what the double feature was, but if I had to put money on it I’d say the Richard Pryor film Silver Streak because that was frequently the double feature.

    Of course going to the movies in the middle and staying to see the part you missed kind of disappeared along with double features when all the theaters became multiplexes. Our neighborhood theater ended up sealing off the balcony and putting in a small screen so they could offer 2 different (separate admission) films. My TV might actually be bigger than that screen actually. It wasn’t enough to save the theater unfortunately and it closed about a year later. I miss double features, but I don’t miss entering the theater in the middle of a movie.

    1. A common cliche is “This is where we came in.” Figuratively, it is used to mean “we’re repeating ourselves unnecessarily,” but that trope was based on the literal use of the words in the precise situation you described.

      The figurative use of the words still pops up, the equivalent of “We’re just going around in circles,” but people don’t show up for movies at random times any more, so younger people probably don’t get the connection between those words and movie theaters.

      One of Roger Ebert’s proteges wrote an interesting article about this.

      1. That was an interesting article, but he is definitely wrong about the practice of entering a film in the middle ending with Psycho in 1960. Raiders was in 1981 and we were still doing it then. I very much prefered seeing a movie from the beginning, but my dad was going to do what he wanted to do. Premium cable created a situation where a movie might be in progress when you turn to a certain channel. If it was a movie I hadn’t already seen and cared about, I would turn it off. But if I had seen it before, I might watch it in progress. If I ever came across the Godfather in progress, I would always watch the rest of it.
        But now that everything is transitioning to on demand streaming, the next generation won’t have that experience. Ironically, even though I have access to the Godfather on demand, I haven’t watched it like that. There was just something different about coming across it playing on TV.

  3. Totally agree. I think I have seen “Marlowe” twice, and I cannot remember 10 seconds of it. Rita Moreno was in it? I could not have told you that.

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