Philip Marlowe is a private eye with an outmoded code of honour at odds with the mores of early ‘70s Los Angeles. A visit by an old friend in the night sets in train a series of events in which he’s hired to search for a missing novelist, and finds himself on the wrong side of vicious gangsters.

Is this Altman’s masterpiece? We’d say so. Thoroughly dismantling both the conventions of noir and the ephemerality of the American dream, this smouldering adaptation of the Raymond Chandler thriller stars a never-better Elliot Gould. Its influence spread far, not least on PTA’s Inherent Vice.