Raymond Chandler's Unknown Thriller: The Screenplay of Playback

by Raymond Chandler

Chandler, master of the hard-boiled detective mystery and screenwriter of "Double Indemnity," "The Blue Dahlia," and "Strangers on a Train," envisioned this never-produced screenplay as one of his most important works

Genres: Crime, Mystery

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.

The Big Sleep placed second on the Crime Writers Association poll of the 100 best crime novels; Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943) and The Long Goodbye (1953) also made the list. The latter novel was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field. In it he wrote: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
Parker wrote that, with Marlowe, "Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held."

Reviews

[Michael P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a privilege to read Chandler's screenplay about a woman in trouble. Of course, it lacks Chandler's amazing narrative for screenplays do not accommodate this. It lacks the hardboiled edge on the page, but that might have been supplied by the actors, director, and director of photography had the screenplay been filmed. It may not be Chandler's best plot, but it is unusual and so worthwhile. In some ways it is more satisfying then Chandler's novel PLAYBACK, for the author added Philip Marlowe to the story and it is a story that does not naturally accommodate him. It is, however, fascinating to compare the two. Robert B. Parker's introduction is excellent, which was a nice surprise.

[Jay Amari · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an intelligent feature script, too far ahead of its time for 1940s Hollywood. It would be great to see Jane Campion, Sarah Polly, or Kathryn Bigelow, or even Mira Sorvino makes this script into a film. With the right touch, the shifting elements in the script, and the faceted characters, and social pressures of the time period could be developed into a hit.

“Raymond Chandler's Unknown Thriller: The Screenplay of Playback” is part doomed love story triangle, part murder mystery, part police procedural, this screenplay has a natural feel for contemporary cultural role models and the changing archetypes of film fiction.

Betty and Brandon and their magnetic attraction has a too-good-to-be-real feel, and this element pays off at the end of the story. Betty and Killaine, as the opposite side of the love triangle certainly feels right within an accepted Hollywood paradigm and the tentative nature of their relationship gives the script a quality that would have appealed well to an auteur like Howard Hawks, or even Alfred Hitchcock.

The character of Betty is the main issue in that she is damaged. She is too tough to love by our good cop Killaine, and too good to mate with our bad local hero Brandon, so in contemporary attitudes, she makes a perfect female lead character.

[Aki Umemoto · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an unusual Chandler story, it didn't feature Philip Marlowe, wasn't hard-boiled, there is a murder but not really a whodunnit, it's more melodrama than anything else. So, I originally was going to give it *** but then I started thinking about the characters and the title. At first, it wasn't evident what the title referred to, but then knowing that Chandler was a literary writer, that there had to be more to this story.

Betty Mayfield aka Elizabeth Kinsolving was convicted of murdering her husband but the judge overrode the verdict and acquitted her. On a train trip to Vancouver, she meets smarmy gigolo Larry Mitchell who later turns out dead in her hotel room. She again is suspected of murder which she is innocent of, ergo 'Playback' in the title.

Instead of becoming a thriller of who actually murdered Larry, it becomes a character story of dealing with fate and overcoming being a victim. Almost all the characters are victims of one sort of another, dealing with their previous failures or not achieving their goals. This screenplay needed a polish to flesh out the characters more and possibly a few more scenes of the detective with Betty to solidify their budding romance.

With an 'A' director and producer, this could've been an interesting film of lost characters trying to find a way out.

[Ted Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was another book I had sitting in my bookcase for decades -- decades during which I did little reading. Now that I am an author, I am reading constantly, and getting tired of spending money on Amazon, so I troll my bookcase and got to the library.

This was the screenplay for Playback by a guy who wrote The Blue Dahlia and Double Indemnity, to name two. Being a big classic film buff, I was anxious to check this one out. Chandler wrote it while under contract to Universal in 1947 and, for various reasons, it was shelved and never made.

Screenplays are not nearly as dense as novels, so I just tore through it in a matter of a few hours. Definately worth the time. It could have been a vehicle for Bogart and Bacall -- except that the physical description of the girl was nothing like Bacall. She was, however, named Betty. Everyone who knew Bacall called her Betty.

Anyway, it was all you'd expect from a high-quality film noir script. I'm really sorry it never got made, as I'd love to see it on TCM.

[Roberto Lagos Figueroa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guión de una película nunca realizada. No tiene una trama original, pero es atrapante. Tiene personajes que encajan bien en la trama, aunque de escazo desarrollo. La acción es rápida, así como los diálogos. La anécdota es que Chandler la transformó en una novela de Marlowe, sin que este personaje estuviese presente en el guión, y no estuviese redactado en primera persona, por lo que la novela resultante del mismo título, difiere mucho del presente guión. Recomendable como curiosidad cinéfila y fans de Chandler.

[Ken French · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not RC's best, but interesting to read this one before he shoehorned Marlowe into the plot (when he turned it into a novel).