The Long Goodbye Reviews

(OK) Altman made with this relaxed Chandler´s story what Hawks made with Hemingway in "To have and have not". It has so much flavor, and charm, and details as happy as the halfnaked yoga girls, or the psycho Mark Rydell, or Hayden amusing himself as a hemingwayesque character....

Leave it to Robert Altman to take his sarcasm to film noir and emerge with a brilliant take that marries a 40s hardboiled detective to the paranoia and malaise of the 70s. Part of the reason that the film works so well is that it doesn’t treat the source material as a hallowed text, instead chopping and skewering it, rearranging and reassigning various plot strands, emerging with something that looks and talks like noir on the outside, but is subtly taking pot shots at it.

Here Philip Marlowe isn’t the suave, witty private detective of The Big Sleep, but rather an oddly innocent Marlowe. He’s like a man out of time, mumbling to himself and chain-smoking like the 40s aesthetic never ended while all around him in sunny Los Angeles everyone else is wearing boho chic and eating green. It creates a distance between us and the rest of the characters, as Marlowe is the prism through which we view all of these events. And he is pitched at a comedic tone in comparison to all of the serious events around him, it’s a strange combination, but it works beautifully.

Nothing can be trusted as he doesn’t seem part of this world. He is a distinct foreigner despite living in the same neighborhood. And the most slippery and elusive of figures of the rich, beach goddess Eileen (Nina Van Pallandt), who hires Marlowe originally to find her alcoholic writer husband (Sterling Hayden). Prior to these events, Marlowe’s friend Terry (Jim Bouton) apparently killed his wife before committing suicide. These events will eventually dovetail in a way which is not clear at first, but eventually begins to make more sense. The Long Goodbye, like many film noirs, is a labyrinthine, needlessly complicated plot more concerned with mood and crafting a unique voice.

To give away how and why these events collide would diminish much of the fun and joy of experiencing The Long Goodbye unfold before your eyes. And Elliot Gould gives an endearing and complicated performance in a tricky role. The film asks that he eventually gets to a dark enough place to shoot someone at point-blank range, but to begin the film as a mumbling softie feeding his cat and dimly drawn into a vast conspiracy. Gould must play a character from noir’s heyday in an era that had washed away such antiquated tropes, and he does it beautifully. His quick wit as Marlowe is mostly used to hurl zingers at the proceedings, as if Marlowe was a one-man Greek chorus commenting upon the strange twists and turns, the never-ending double crosses and violent encounters.

Gould and Altman working together created a perfect film noir by lovingly poking holes at it. One must come to The Long Goodbye having watched and studied many of the classics in the genre to understand how it pushes against these story outlines and repeated conventions.

I decided today to get into Robert Altman after realising I’d only seen McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Popeye by him. So I looked to see which films I had access to and this was the oldest film I could find by him.

Probably a bad start as I absolutely adored this movie, like loved it beyond all reasonable measure. I’m familiar with Marlowe as a character but only as played by Bogart and I never really got a feel for the character largely due to Bogart’s own personality sort of absorbing the role. Whilst Elliot Gould isn’t a direct match for the print Marlowe he feels a lot more authentic within the confines of this movie. He feels both a man completely out of time, he’s far more amiable and moral than any of the other characters, and also completely of his time, and how snarky and amiably disruptive he is. He’s essentially got the morality of a man from the 40s with the mischievous spirit of a counter-culture hero and it works perfectly.

I kind of love how brow-beaten Gould plays Marlowe, like life is just sort of collapsing in in him and it gives a nice through line to the various set-pieces and encounters which have a multitude of tones from the comic to the suddenly violent. Having Marlowe as essentially a straight man to the more offbeat and oddball supporting cast is just inspired because it anchors the film and sort of reinforces the notion of Marlowe as a permanent outsider.

I’m not a fan of John Williams but I love what he does with the score in this, just using the singular refrain and re-appropriating it throughout the film from radio-songs, to shopping muzak, to hippie chanting, to a mariachi band. It gives the film a sense of balance and stability and it allows the different off-kilter set-pieces to retain a sense of thematic cohesion. The film is full of so many great moments, but I kind of love the opening ten minutes as Marlowe sort of talks to his cat and goes out to get food. It’s a perfect microcosm of the film, presenting our amiable hero, the shifting style of the film, and introducing one of the major players and plot points.

It’s kind of amazing seeing Altman just completely control the tone of the film, balancing the general kooky field of the majority of Marlowe’s encounters with punctuated violence which reminds you that this really isn’t Marlowe’s world anymore and it all leads up to the final confrontation which is just shocking, largely because it’s the first time we really see Marlowe being proactive rather than reacting to a situation.

This is definitely going to become a personal favourite and it’s making me want to go back and start watching some of the more traditional film noir.