American author Raymond Chandler created the character of Marlowe in the 1930s as a private detective who went about solving cases in Depression-era USA. Numerous popular actors have played the role of Marlowe over the decades, and the latest installment in the franchise was directed by Neil Jordan, who cast Irish action star Liam Neeson in the titular role. In the movie, the detective Marlowe is employed by a wealthy woman named Clare Cavendish to look into the disappearance of her lover, Nico Peterson, but once Marlowe accepts the case, he learns the grim reality of Hollywood life and the secrets that the entertainment sections of newspapers don’t report about. Full of sudden twists and a surprising ending, here’s a detailed breakdown of Liam Neeson’s 100th movie.
Spoilers Ahead
A Missing Persons Case
In 1939 Los Angeles, a man wakes up in his bed, all alone, and heads to his office, where he works as a private detective. The titular character of the movie, Phillip Marlowe, receives a client called Clare Cavendish, the daughter of a wealthy oil tycoon father and a film star mother, and she appoints him to look for her lover Nico Peterson, who has disappeared. She adds that she met the Pacific Film Studio prop manager at a private club called the Corbata Club, and they continued their affair behind the back of Clare’s husband until Nico went missing. She headed to his house when he didn’t answer her calls, but she didn’t find him there, which led her to believe that he had disappeared. His sudden disappearance has her worried, and she wants Marlowe to look into the matter. The private investigator accepts the job and heads to Nico’s house but doesn’t find many clues, and it’s only Nico’s old-timer neighbor who informs Marlowe that a few men came searching for the props manager a few days ago, but it’s been a month since Nico has been missing. Although he no longer is a part of the police force, given his cordial relations with the police, he learns that Nico was killed in a hit-and-run case a few days back outside the Corbata Club, rather brutally—his head was squashed like a grapefruit under the tires, leaving his face too damaged to identify.
Wanting to learn more about the matter, Marlowe tries entering the club but is denied entry, so he visits Clare in her family’s sprawling mansion. On his way to the entrance, he finds an important-looking man arguing with her about finances before quoting Christopher Marlowe to the protagonist and leaving. Clare introduces the man as the Ambassador to England and also the family’s financial advisor. Marlowe also meets Clare’s less-than-polite husband, who throws a few vulgarities at him before heading out. Marlowe learns from his employer that she knew about Nico being presumed dead but didn’t believe the rumors because she saw him drive away in a hoodless car when she was in Mexico recently. He was apparently driving away with several props in his car, but before she could stop him, he was gone. On his way out, Marlowe meets Dorothy Quincannon, a famed actress and Clare’s mother, who gives him a detailed list of all that she has learned about him and asks what her daughter wants from him, but Marlowe declines.
While visiting the mausoleum to learn more about Nico, Marlowe spots a woman grieving outside the space Nico’s corpse was assigned, and he tries chasing her, but she escapes. He meets his friend in the police, Joe, and insists that this was a homicide because Nico is alive and well, while another person who looked like Nico that had his head crushed. Upon confirmation from the police, Marlowe is allowed entry into the Corbata Club, where the manager Floyd Hanson tries extracting information from Marlowe about Nico, and upon realizing the detective won’t divulge any information, he shows him the front door. On his way out, a woman introduces herself as Lynn and asks him to look for her at the Cabana in Venice Beach. He realizes it’s Nico’s sister, but by then, Hanson’s men have led him out. At night, Marlowe looks for Lynn at the Cabana, but instead, he meets Hanson’s henchmen, who inform him that Lynn Peterson was unable to meet and instead, they’ll be teaching him a lesson. Having fought off kidnappers and criminals throughout the “Taken” franchise, Liam Neeson’s practically an old hand at taking down paid thugs, and it shows, although he comments that he’s getting too old for these action sequences.
Marlowe later visits Nico’s place again, but this time he meets Lynn, a sex worker who works at the Cabana nightclub, and informs her that her brother might still be alive. Before they can exchange more information, two Mexican men attack her and demand to know about Serena, and although Marlowe tries to fight them off, he’s hit in the back of the head and knocked out while Lynn is captured. He wakes up facing the Tommy Gun of the black chauffeur named Cedric, who takes him to the manager of the Cabana, Lou Hendricks. Notorious for his shady dealings, Hendricks is quite well-known in the police circle, and he offers to drop Marlowe off at his place, although the man is rather coarse with his chauffeur. He asks about Nico and adds that he might be in possession of certain items that are of interest to Hendricks, which is why Marlowe has to come to him if he finds out anything about the elusive man. He even offers to throw in $1000 to make Marlowe accept the offer, but the detective refuses it and gets off at his stop—the police station.
Clare comes to Marlowe’s place, and he lets her know that her mother wants to employ him, and Clare starts making sexual advances at the aged detective, given her attraction to older men. Marlowe acts exactly appropriately and turns down her advances, and the two proceed to dance before she has to leave. He follows her and sees Clare meet the Ambassador, and she pulls the blinds down while Dorothy stands next to Marlowe and comments how the Ambassador is of her father’s age, and yet here they are. The next morning, Detective Bernie Ohls warns Marlowe against tailing powerful people like the Ambassador and his mistress and then informs him that the LAPD has found Lynn Peterson in Encino. When they arrive at the scene of the crime, it’s a rather brutal event—Lynn was tortured, sexually assaulted, beaten, and then had her throat slit. At night, Marlowe sneaks into the Corbata Club through the backdoor, picks up a cap that was on the staircase, and barges in on Hanson doing coke. Marlowe demands to know who’s running this entire operation, and the manager offers the detective a drink—of course, laced with something. The detective empties the whole glass into a potted plant and pretends to drink the empty glass, only to be dizzy soon after. Hanson has his men drag Marlowe into the backroom, where a lot of people who got into Hanson’s bad books ended up there, including Lou Hendricks. Marlowe finds the chauffeur, Cedric, in chains, and he takes down a guard to take away his keys and free Cedric. Meanwhile, Hanson is torturing Hendricks to learn about the location of Serena when the nightclub manager finally spills the truth that Serena is a plastic model of a mermaid, loaded with “Mexican powder,” that Nico had placed inside an aquarium. Immediately, Marlowe and Cedric barge in and blast Hanson with the guns they took, ending up destroying the aquarium and the model inside. Hendricks starts throwing a tantrum and blaming Cedric, and the moment the man attacks his chauffeur’s race, the frustrated Cedric empties the Tommy gun magazine in his employer’s chest. The two men head out just as the detectives are entering, and Cedric agrees to be Marlowe’s driver in the meantime.
Shootout At The Props House
When Marlowe returns home, he finds Nico waiting for him, and the detective alerts the smuggler that his sister is dead, but Nico isn’t very affected by the death of his half-sister. He says that the man who died in Nico’s stead was a musician at the Corbata who happened to look a lot like Nico. He then asks Marlowe to pass a message to Clare: “Arrive at the prop house of the Pacific Studios at 7:30. Marlowe meets the mother and daughter duo, and after Clare makes a scene and leaves, he follows the daughter and lets her know of Nico’s wish. That evening, Marlowe is driven to the prop house by Cedric, who lets him in on the entire drug business and how Nico used the prop house to move Hendricks’ drugs for several years. He also informs the detective how the whole chase for Nico was really about a briefcase whose contents were quite capable of destroying the entire studio. Inside the prop house, Clare walks in to find Nico waiting, and he hands her the entire ledger of all the transactions and the heroin that was delivered through the Ambassador’s Pacific Studio. While Clare is going through the entire record that can ruin the reputation of Pacific Pictures as well as ruin the Ambassador, Marlowe walks in, and Nico fires at him, only to be shot at by Clare. As he falls to the floor, she throws a lantern on him, and as the smuggler catches fire, she dumps all the incriminating paper evidence on Nico’s pyre. She proceeds to escape as Marlowe takes away her gun, and he keeps mum about the whole incident.
A few days later, Clare is running operations in the Pacific Studios, and she invites Marlowe and offers him a job as the head of security, but the detective respectfully declines. He, however, recommends Cedric for the job, knowing he’d be ideal for handling the business dealings that the studio engages in. Marlowe meets Cedric and informs him that the chauffeur can use Marlowe as his reference, and before leaving, he hands him Clare’s gun to serve as a constant reminder that Marlowe knows what she did.
‘Marlowe’ Ending Explained – Why Did Clare Kill Nico?
Neil Jordan’s neo-noir thriller “Marlowe” is wrought with multiple twists and a surprise ending that can leave many scratching their heads. Perhaps the greatest question is Clare’s motives behind killing Nico and who stole the briefcase that could help her overthrow the Ambassador. So it can be surprising why she decided to kill Nico himself. However, as it turns out, Clare never really cared about the fact that the Ambassador was wooing both the mother and daughter, and she was only concerned with the money and security that the Ambassador’s blessings brought. She killed Nico and destroyed all the evidence because that way, she could have the Ambassador cleared of all blame, keep earning a percentage of his goodwill, and also win a respectable position at the studio. Hanson, Hendricks, and the Mexican men who kidnapped Lynn—all of them were looking for Nico because he had stolen the briefcase that could destroy the Ambassador, and after Marlowe took out the two managers, Clare could safely keep conducting business with the studio owner without getting any heat for the same.
Marlowe refused to be a part of Clare’s studio because he didn’t want to stay under the manipulative woman’s thumb and have to carry out her dirty work, but he knew the man who’d be perfect for the job: Cedric. Marlowe didn’t want to willingly be a part of a drug business, and he didn’t know too much about the trade either. Cedric, on the other hand, had learned everything about the trade by sitting in the front seat of Lou Hendricks’ car for years, and he was also quite capable of handling himself with the Tommy gun, so he’d be the ideal security. Lastly, at his advanced age, a life of fighting and killing really wasn’t it for Phillip Marlowe, so he decided to walk away into the night, leaving the corruption of tinsel town behind.
“Marlowe” is a 2023 crime thriller film directed by Neil Jordan.
