Aren't you thinking of 'The Lady In The Lake' with Robert Montgomery as Philip Marlowe?

It's a simple truism: great literature rarely makes great films very simply because, most often, great literature does not depend on great stories.

No, he wrote the script.

Welles insisted that he actually wrote the whole script except for the gallows' scene which was Chaplin's own invention. He loved those deathbed speeches. The one at the end of The Great Dictator was especially sugary and irrelevant.

Because he's so high he needs three guess to tell whether it's day or night.

I don't know why so many famous directors keep on insisting on trying to make a film out a notoriously turgid - and essentially non-visual - book. Bunuel and Orson Welles both famously spent years throwing money at what became aborted projects for Don Quixote.

Ummm, 'Tories' are anti-EU.

And yet we hanged Tojo.

It's worse than that: it's bad writing.

Nathan, describing Lana Clarkson as variously "a b-movie actress on the wrong side of 40", "at best a c-lister" and her death as "second-rate" is not hard-boiled reportage as you think it is. It's just tacky.

It's a good film but the book by Nicholas Shakespeare is much better.

Now *that's* a reference.

If you were great, no one would notice and be embarrassed by it.

Not a Newfoundland?

But, in all fairness, you're a horrible sycophant.

I see it more as exasperated beyond the extend of normal exasperation. Suicidally exasperated.

I will not let you go!

Apparently so. Just read some of the comments in this thread. Every American seems to have seen it and loved it. Clue is in fact a very bad movie - and made worse because every now and then it comes close to being very good indeed.

Guess again, Col. Alphonse Dore Cliburn CBE, you creepy stalker.

Craig J. Clark