Farewell, My Lovely is a 1975 neo-noir[4] mystery film directed by Dick Richards and featuring Robert Mitchum as private detective Philip Marlowe.

The picture is based on Raymond Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely (1940), which had previously been adapted for film as Murder, My Sweet in 1944.

[5] The cast also features Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Sylvia Miles, Harry Dean Stanton, Joe Spinell, Sylvester Stallone, Jack O'Halloran in his film debut, and hardcore crime novelist Jim Thompson in his only acting role.

In 1941 Los Angeles, private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by recently-paroled felon "Moose" Malloy to find his old girlfriend Velma, whom he has not seen in seven years while he has been in prison.

Meanwhile, a man named Marriott hires Marlowe to accompany him to a rendezvous where he is to pay $15,000 ransom for the return of a valuable fei tsui jade necklace stolen from an unnamed female friend.

Deciding to investigate Marriott's death, Marlowe is given a lead on a collector of fei tsui jade named Baxter Grayle, who is a judge and a powerful figure in Los Angeles.

After waking from his drug-induced stupor and discovering the body of Tommy Ray, Marlowe overpowers a guard and confronts Amthor, but she is uncooperative.

Marlowe suggests to his police friend Nulty that whoever used Florian to set up Malloy at the motel also got Tommy Ray to supply the fake photograph to send him off on a wild goose chase.

Producer Elliot Kastner had made a series of films based on detective novels, including Harper and The Long Goodbye.

They set the movie in 1941, so that they could stamp the film "with a time mark" by turning Marlowe into a baseball fan who followed Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak of that year.

The producer approached him to invest in Farewell, My Lovely and Grade agreed, knowing the movie could be easily pre-sold to television.

[7] The movie would be part of Grade's initial slate of ten feature films, including The Return of the Pink Panther, Man Friday and The Tamarind Seed.

He was accustomed to, you know, start the camera, expose 120 feet of film and tell somebody to move the beer bottle half an inch clockwise.

"[9] Richards originally considered shooting the film in Florida, but due to budgetary constraints the setting was returned to Los Angeles.

"[9] An original motion picture vinyl soundtrack album composed by David Shire was released in 1975 by United Artists Records.

"[13] A review in Variety was more critical, calling it "a lethargic, vaguely campy tribute to Hollywood's private eye mellers of the 1940s and to writer Raymond Chandler, whose Philip Marlowe character has inspired a number of features.

"[14] Richard Eder of The New York Times described the film as "a handsome mediocrity" with an ending that "may produce some confusion," though he praised "the high quality of a lot of the acting".

[15] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the score by David Shire and the casting of Mitchum as Marlowe both seemed "exactly right", but criticized the voice-over narrative, finding that "the effect undercuts the visual splendors and reveals the plot complications at their most preposterous.

Too bad, because it breaks the fine mood Richards & Company establish and makes Farewell, My Lovely an interesting but mixed blessing instead of the unmitigated triumph it almost was.

Los Angeles looms as a nighttime playground for hoods, beautiful women and suckers ready to be taken by all the glitzy signs leading them astray.

[18] Won Nomination Mitchum reprised his role for The Big Sleep, an adaptation of Chandler's 1939 novel, which premiered on 13 March 1978.