THE LITTLE SISTER
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The Chicago-born, British-bred author of such detective novels as Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep was an advocate of gritty realism who sought to shake the mystery genre free of the calculated gentility it had acquired at the hands of writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. But with the passage of time his books have come to seem as old-fashioned and mannered as those he was rebelling against–especially to people who’ve never read them, but know them only from the film adaptations. Chandler’s hard-boiled yet secretly softhearted private eye Philip Marlowe, who makes his way down the mean streets of post-World War II LA to ferret out the dirty truths behind even dirtier lies, can seem as much an anachronistic oddball as Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes if one pays attention only to dated surface elements like slang (“Anybody ever tell you you’re a cute little trick?”) and the expressionistic visual style defined to the point of cliche by 40s film noir. But delve into the original and you’ll find lean, taut, introspective character development and psychological and sociological observation that hasn’t aged a whit.
Aiming to shake off the dust Chandler’s image has acquired over the years, Lifeline Theatre has turned to The Little Sister, a 1949 novel that doesn’t have the cinematic familiarity of some of Chandler’s other works. The Little Sister actually was made into a movie–the 1969 Marlowe, a James Garner vehicle that reset the action to the hippie milieu of 60s California–and the Organic Theater did it here as a play in 1979 (designed by director Stuart Gordon as a vehicle for his wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, who played all three female leads). But neither of these adaptations made an impact comparable to Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet or Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, leaving Lifeline room to put its own stamp on the material.
The women are especially crucial. There are three of them: Orfamay Quest (Catherine O’Connor), a sanctimonious small-towner who hires Marlowe to find her missing brother, and movie starlets Dolores Gonzalez (Suzanne Friedline) and Mavis Weld (Peggy Lee look-alike Laurie Dawn, the most interesting of the three). The actresses’ loose life-styles, at first a jarring contrast to Orfamay’s propriety, eventually serve as a gauge by which Chandler measures America’s moral hypocrisy. The women frequently appear as a 40s “girl trio,” lipsynching to pop songs like “Dream” (whose message that “things are not as they seem” becomes the show’s theme). It’s a lovely image the first time around–but repeated over the production’s two acts it becomes as much a cliche as anything Hollywood ever did.
