The popularity of these figures must say something about the culture that produces them, and in the thirties, we loved seeing a self-avowed “working stiff,” a functional alcoholic who was “just doing his job” get caught up in the various plots and schemes of rich folks, femmes fatale, and shadowy cabals (the 1930s being a particularly hot time for shadowy cabals). Hence why Key & Peele never used “Bryan Mills” in their valet sketches (“Don’t even try and be Russian around Liam Neesons!”).
I write Liam Neeson here and not “Bryan Mills,” Neeson’s character in Taken, because the larger universe of ex-operator fiction encompassed far more movies, and was connected more by Neeson the actor than any character he was playing.
If early 20th century fiction gave us the “hard-boiled detective,” as personified by Marlowe and a handful of other detectives, the aughts gave us “the shadowy (ex-)operator,” as personified by Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne, and arguably most of all, Liam Neeson. Yet in another, and I imagine Marlowe director Neil Jordan ( The Crying Game) knew what he was doing here, Marlowe is a weirdly perfect synthesis of American antiheroes. In bringing Neeson’s Taken baggage to an adaptation of Marlowe fan-fiction, in one sense, Marlowe is kind of a knockoff of a knockoff, pop culture simply metastasizing reflexively from era to era as it tends to do. The pulp novelist Raymond Chandler created Marlowe back in the 1920s, but Neeson is playing him in Marlowe, an adaptation of The Black-Eyed Blonde, a nouveau Marlowe homage written in 2014 by John Banville under the pen name “Benjamin Black” (“noir” means “black,” get it?). This week, Liam Neeson picks up where Humphrey Bogart, Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, and few others left off, playing one of the original hard-boiled noir detectives, Philip Marlowe.
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