MGM films come to YouTube

YouTube has cut a deal with MGM to bring a number of the latter's films to the online video service.

Nice!

Hope it includes my fave, The Long Goodbye.

Listen...

I went through a period, several years back, when I listened to audiobooks and podcasts (burned onto CDs) on a regular basis. Of course, spending three hours or more in the car every day might've had something to do with that. But it was a good thing, as it turned me on to the late, great Ed McBain (a/k/a Evan Hunter) who read several abridgements of his 87th Precinct novels. After that, I made a point of reading every new McBain book until his death in 2005, and we exchanged a few e-mails, too.

During a trip to London, I grabbed a couple of audio versions of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, and recently acquired a set of unabridged readings by Elliot Gould, who played Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye."

I'd had several of "The Adventures of Philip Marlowe" radio shows on tape. None were written by Chandler, though he allegedly "approved" each script, which probably meant that he endorsed the checks sent to him.

I recently discovered that almost all of the existing Marlowe radio shows are online and can be downloaded free here or streamed here.

The photo above is of Gerald Mohr, who portrayed Marlowe in the CBS radio shows.

Raymond Chandler

I love Chicago. I first visited that great city one winter with my college pal Mark Brown on a visit to his parents, who'd just moved there in the early 70s.

We had a short but terrific stay, packing a lot of things into our brief visit: Muddy Waters at a blues club, getting stopped by a crooked traffic cop (paid him off, as I recall), and some great food. The trip was slightly marred by the fact that I was coming down with mono (I thought I was lovesick at the time).

The city is currently doing one of those "everybody reads the same book" deals, and chose a novel by a writer who essentially ignored Chicago and wrote extensively about another place: Los Angeles.

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago but is the leading chronicler of L.A. in the 30s and 40s. He's been in and out of style but his books have never gone out of print, and may be the most imitated American writer of all time, surpassing even Hemingway (whom Chandler tried to copy as a way of learning the craft).

(While poking around the site and links from the Chicago Chandler thing, I came upon a superb article by another old pal, Mike Valerio, on Chandler's Los Angeles. Mike's ex, Rosie Taravella, is a wonderful actress and terrific person who's the director of the Rochester High Falls Film Festival, btw.)

The Chandler novel selected by Chicago is the story my favorite movie, The Long Goodbye, is based on.

Elliot Gould, a highly controversial choice at the time, played Chandler's private eye protagonist, Philip Marlowe. The ending of the film, which differed from the novel, was also provocative (but so was the beginning).

The film is quite well known for its soundtrack (which was released years after the movie in a limited edition that's out of print) featuring the title song performed by a diversity of musicians in a variety styles (jazz vocal, instrumental, mariachi et al) in different scenes. It also features David Carradine, Jim Bouton, Henry Gibson, Sterling Harden and a young Arnold Schwarzenegger as a thug in the gang of Marty Angelo, played by the journeyman film director Mark Rydell.