Critics reviews

With 1973's The Long Goodbye Robert Altman obviously achieves perfection. It's as accidental and as circumstantial as the successful ignition of a match off any available surface.

According to Altman, the core conceit — if the film has a center, it's this Idea — is the transplanting of Marlowe, preeminent private dick of the original noir cycle, to sunny post-'68 southern California, up to his neck in nudist yogis and conspicuous consumption. It's an amusing concept, but Gould mucks it up with a performance that's less tragic hero and more muttering, Pynchonian weirdo.

Altman may not offer up a period piece in the vein of THIEVES LIKE US, but he faithfully hews to the contours of Chandler's novel. Casting Elliot Gould is a masterstroke, but he further displays his genius for casting by using Henry Gibson and Mark Rydell to manifest two complimentary shades of evil. There's never been a more Chandlerian "old man" than Sterling Hayden. And you know what? The film's ending is better.

Altman's camera is perpetually prowling, scuttling, weaving volatile textures, then it becomes a pretty moll's face and gets a bottle smashed across it. At one point, he languidly zooms through a glassy door in a triangular composition (arguing couple inside the seaside home, Marlowe by the distant surf), changing focus for a Hockney effect.

Altman's film is the perfect antidote to neoclassical fastidiousness: he doesn't merely celebrate genre clichés and conventions, he holds them up to the light of modern life and uses them as a prism to reveal its hidden tones.

Gould's performance in The Long Goodbye is perhaps the era's most remarkable, and entertaining, example of the temporary rejection of traditional movie-star glamour. There's still a jolt to experiencing Gould's lack of electricity here. His lethargy is contagious (it's a great 3 a.m. movie); he doesn't look like he just rolled out of bed so much as he took most of the bed with him.

Plot points are introduced without any hints as to their significance; not until long after their introduction do they form any sort of picture at all. This may seem par for the course, but it's the way Altman allows them to float that fascinates. Details aren't belabored here; they're mentioned in passing and brought back when salient. The result is often a layered confusion on the part of the viewer, doubly so when Marlowe himself can't add up the clues he comes across.

Marlowe is adrift in a Hollywood whose memories have been scrambled a la Godard's loopy LEAR—places, people, and landscapes retain the scars left by films like THE BIG SLEEP, the passing of the old stars, and the iconography of Chandler's mean streets, but the evils of those dim days have been supplanted by a more stubborn brand of corruption than Bogie's Marlowe ever had to face: namely, the familiar stew of self-involvement, apathy, amnesia, and postmodernism that made up American culture.

Gone are subplots and minor characters and, in fact, the story's mystery ends up a great deal simpler in the film version. It's all to make room for Gould's funny, free-associative performance. He mumbles wildly just like Beatty in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, essentially negating what was one of Chandler's most enduring traits: his icy, precise verbiage.

The film is so inventive in its situations and humor that its shortcomings—the blunt ideas at its core—don't become apparent before several viewings. Somewhere deep down inside, there's a screenplay by Leigh Brackett (The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo); Altman has lost it in his improvisation, but it does give this 1973 film a firm, classical shape that eludes his other work.

Despite cries of outrage from hard-line Chandler purists, this is, along with Hawks' The Big Sleep, easily the most intelligent of all screen adaptations of the writer's work... Shot in gloriously steely colours by Vilmos Zsigmond with a continually moving camera, wondrously scripted by Leigh Brackett (who worked on The Big Sleep), and superbly acted all round, it's one of the finest movies of the '70s.