The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye (1973) moves Raymond Chandler's novel to Los Angeles in 1973. Philip Marlowe drives a friend to Mexico, learns the next day that the friend's wife has been murdered, and then that the friend has been found dead in Mexico. Marlowe insists on solving something nobody else cares about. What Altman does is dislodge the character. Chandler's Marlowe belongs to the forties; Altman places him thirty years later and watches him stay the same while everything around him has changed. Elliott Gould's Marlowe mutters constantly, convinces nobody, and is faintly ridiculous in modern Los Angeles. Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay. She had also written Howard Hawks's adaptation of The Big Sleep in 1946, so the same writer handled the same character twice, twenty seven years apart, and took him somewhere entirely different the second time. The score consists of one song. The title tune recurs throughout in different arrangements: on the radio, in a bar, on a piano, as a doorbell. It failed on first release. United Artists changed the campaign and reissued it, and only then did it find an audience. It runs 112 minutes. Good for: Altman, the dismantling of noir, and Los Angeles in the seventies. Less good for: anyone wanting a faithful Chandler adaptation will read the ending in particular as a betrayal. The storytelling is loose and the plot is secondary. Apart from the sequence with the cat, almost nothing happens in the first half hour.