Did you hear the news? The Rockford Files television reboot is not going forward. After a pilot was filmed, NBC has decided not to proceed meaning James Garner’s iconic private investigator will not be revamped… for now. While part of me is glad that a classic TV show won’t suffer the nearly unavoidable indignities of a remake, I’m a bit disappointed that what could’ve been a solid show under a different name, is being curbed.
Garner himself has been party to a couple of those classic private investigator reboots. The more successful and sorely under-appreciated was Twilight where he starred opposite Paul Newman as a pair of aging detectives. Co-written by one of my favorite novelists, Richard Russo and director Robert Benton, (a collaboration that’s also produced adaptations of Russo’s own Nobody's Fool and Scott Phillips’ Ice Harvest), it seemed like an obvious real time aging of Newman’s Lew Harper role, (is it just me?), taken from the Ross Macdonald novels The Moving Target and The Drowning Pool. Incidentally, Macdonald’s character’s name was changed from Archer to Harper in an effort to continue the string of films with a single H-word as the title—Hustler, Hud, Hombre. (That’s the legend anyway.) I guess you could add that they were all based novels too—by The Hustler, Larry McMurtry and Elmore Leonard.
Another Garner PI rehash found him stepping into the very large shoes of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, in an adaptation of The Little Sister simply titled Marlowe in 1969. While Garner would probably have made a decent Marlowe in a 1930s set film, updating the character to the swinging sixties didn’t work so well. In the end, this take is memorable only as a “what not to do” cautionary tale when monkeying with such revered source material, (Bruce Lee in a supporting role does make me smile).
Marlowe has proven to be a tricky cat to copy. I found Robert Mitchum, who seems like a natural, to be just awful in the unfortunate adaptations of Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep, while Elliot Gould, the unlikeliest actor working with Robert Altman, the least likely director for a hardboiled detective film made my favorite screen Marlowe in The Long Goodbye. It really shouldn’t have worked. But it did. Really, really did. (Not to take anything away from Howard Hawkes and Humphrey Bogart, or Dick Powell in Murder My Sweet for that matter.)
Am I wrong? Is a Rockford reboot a bad idea? Is the best onscreen Marlowe really Ross and Monica’s dad?
Yeah. I think he is.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
