User Reviews

The first and only screen rendering of 'The Long Goodbye' is not Grandma's vision of Philip Marlowe, but it's a break from convention that pays off. Innovative for its time in both direction and cinematography, the film still holds considerable weight in an era when detective stories have dropped off the radar.

Adapted from a screenplay by Leigh Brackett of 'The Big Sleep' fame, Robert Altman's 1973 thriller bases itself on an imaginative premise that succeeds thanks to excellent directing and the versatility of its cast. As Altman has many times explained, the 1940ish Philip Marlowe wakes up one morning to find himself in early 1970s Los Angeles, a city drenched in LSD, yoga, and capitalism gone mad. The hardboiled storytelling of Chandler is stood on its head, becoming a sort of expressionist montage: Marlowe adrift in a society he doesn't understand and can't be bothered trying to figure out.

In this film, as in others inspired by Chandler, character development becomes more important than plot because so much is happening. 'The Long Goodbye' uses the formula of a private detective who is misled and sent full circle. After an early-morning struggle with his cat, Marlowe drives his other 'friend' Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) to the Mexican border and is soon taken into custody by the police, who explain that Lennox's wife had been murdered. Marlowe is released from jail and reads in a newspaper of Terry's apparent suicide in Mexico. While disbelieving either story - it's his 'friend' after all - Marlowe is called on a new case to the Malibu development where Terry lived. The client is Eileen Wade (Nina Van Pallandt), whose drunk author-husband Roger (Sterling Hayden) wandered off to a rehab facility without telling her. Marlowe's investigation hits some potholes when a local drug boss (Mark Rydell) jockeys for several thousand dollars in cash that Lennox toted across the border and Marlowe knew nothing about. Leigh Brackett ties up the loose ends in uncanny fashion, with an ending different from the original novel and quite surprising.

Chandler purists will find this movie hard to swallow, especially the opening half-hour when all detective story conventions are flipped into the trash. Elliott Gould, who paired with Altman in 1970's MASH, is not the dynamic, suave Marlowe of other films. Instead, he is an unkempt crackpot who finds solace in his pet cat and drives around in an old, bulky Lincoln convertible. The Gould version of Marlowe is okay at his work, but only good enough to stay in one piece or as few chunks as humanly possible. He smokes incessantly, is bewildered by those around him, and can't win the respect of anybody. While a Marlowe of this type is hard to imagine, Chandler's novel actually supplies the needed atmosphere for Altman's idea to work. 'The Long Goodbye' is another Chandler tale with a bewildering series of events, where characters brush, collide, and overlap. The L.A. of Chandler is so overloaded with deceit that you have to forget action and start concentrating on motive.

The Long Goodbye's outstanding feature is its look as a pseudo-noir, if such a thing were possible. The visuals by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (including his use of 'post-flash' technique) give this film a subdued tone, reminding us that Marlowe was created in the past but is living and breathing in the present. There is a certain Deco feel to the movie, emphasizing straight lines and pastel colors. The use of Malibu locations helps retain an exotic look for Chandler's story, much like his palm tree-filled backgrounds of the 40s.

Style leads the way in Altman-directed films, which bring strong love or intense hatred from viewers. There are indeed moments when we're begging Altman to step away and let the movie take care of itself. Altman's use of a free-moving camera may be as distracting to an audience as this initially was to the actors. The film's theme song by John Williams and Johnny Mercer is pleasing and fits the mood nicely, but it's just about the only melody heard. It keeps changing form based on the situation - sometimes a jazz theme, sometimes a funeral march, sometimes a doorbell ringing. The soundtrack, which Altman admitted was a 'conceit,' is in need of diversifying itself and reaches a point of overkill. But on the whole, this film is a leader of early 1970s craftsmanship and Chandler's writings never fail to generate sparks.

MGM Home Entertainment outdid itself when releasing its DVD of 'The Long Goodbye' in 2002. The film is nicely presented in widescreen with Dolby enhancement of the original mono track; French 'dubbing' is provided, along with subtitles in English, French, and Spanish. MGM supplies featurette interviews with Altman, Gould, and Vilmos Zsigmond, who first photographed with Altman on 'McCabe and Mrs. Miller' in 1971. Also reprinted is a 1973 American Cinematographer article on Zsigmond's post-flash photography that was revolutionary for its day. Completing this disc are the original theatrical trailer and five radio commercials used during The Long Goodbye's advertising campaign. For fans of Altman and the detective genre, you can't go wrong with an unusually full disc from the MGM penny-pinchers.

*** out of 4

This film is a superb illustration of Altman's skills as a writer and director. Taking Chandler's Long Goodbye into the 1970's, he makes a film which is at the same time an homage to the novel, and a travesty of the film noir conventions. Gould's Marlowe, with his characteristic lazy phrasing (a lot of voice-over is used) intent on feeding his cat falls into a twisted case of missing money, adultery and murder - only it all takes place in Malibu, where everything is fake: the guard at the entrance keeps impersonating movie stars (from James Stewart to Walter Brennan), a nice reminder that the people to be met inside will not be who they pretend to be.

Gould beautifully creates a private eye completely opposite to all the genre's clichés: not interested in seduction (either of the beautiful Nina Van Pallandt or in his pot-smoking naked neighbors), not particularly virile (he takes an awful lot of beating, is scared to death of a dog, while an other dog blocks his car, in a scene that sums up the character), not overly astute in facing the police or understanding the case, he nevertheless stands for certain values: the strength of humor and irony in the face of brutality, faithfulness to his idea of friendship - to the bitter end.

While extremely funny, the film does have some violent reality checks: the psychopathic gangster in a brutal fit of anger smashes a coke bottle into his girlfriend's face, as shocking a scene as I've ever seen in a movie; the portrayal of local corruption in Mexico is humorous but filmed in an unusually realistic way. The photography, and above all the editing is superb throughout. The use of music in the film is stunning: a single musical theme (by John Williams) accompanies all scenes, in a different orchestration each time: as Mexican music, supermarket music, piano-jazz.

This film was clearly an inspiration for the Coen bros' Big Lebowski: same laid-back, lazy, unprofessional investigator tying to figure out the odds an evens of a case that is evidently out of his reach, same ferocious portrayal of a 'beach community', same encounters with strange characters, mad artists (Roger Wade/Maude Lebowski), crooks, doctors, hapless policemen... Some scenes in Long G-B border on the burlesque, as when Marlowe in hospital receives a tiny harmonica as a present from a man all wrapped in bandages.

In short, a masterpiece of irony, beautifully filmed and constructed.

When I first saw this film back in the 70's, I thought it was just too quirky like many movies made at the time. However, 40 years later, I can appreciate it more and I'm glad I gave it another look.

Private eye Philip Marlow lives in Los Angeles with his cat. When a friend asks to be driven to Mexico, it leads into a story of suicide, murder, a scheming woman, a setup, a frame-up, a dodgy doctor and a psychotic gangster.

To be honest, the plot is a bit ordinary as was the story in the original novel, but just as it was on the printed page, the power of the movie was in the telling.

Years ago, I read Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels and if the plots weren't overly convoluted, they were implausible. The success was in the character Chandler created and the way he described his world. Altman got it; the film is different to the novel, but it's all about Marlowe and the way he reacts to what is happening around him.

Altman didn't set his film in the late 40's as depicted in the novel, otherwise it would have been more like "Farewell My Lovely" with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe made a couple of years later.

Altman places Marlowe in 1970's Los Angeles. Bogart and Mitchum gave us classic Marlowe, but Elliott Gould gives us something different. He's a man who sticks to a personal set of principles despite seeming out of place. Elliott Gould plays him as pretty chilled-out, and the film captures a sense of disillusionment with just about everything – it was the 70's after all.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has a non-speaking part as a heavy, and an aging Sterling Hayden plays an author with issues. Perfect casting really as the imposing Hayden was apparently drunk or stoned most of the time on this film.

The movie has a different ending to the novel and it's not a totally satisfying one; the final scene even pays a little homage to the final scene in "The Third Man". One thing the film does is highlight the unique vision of Robert Altman who gave a new twist to an almost dead genre.

Dear Robert Altman,

I have not read The Long Goodbye. But I have read a couple of other novels with the Philip Marlowe character. Elliot Gould's portrayal of Marlowe was not what I expected. But it is OK, it was an interesting interpretation of the character. I enjoyed your film. It really isn't a crime film. If I were to make a crime film, I would never make it the way you made The Long Goodbye. Your film is laid-back (the constant sound of waves) and also quite shocking. It has one of the most violent scenes ever captured on film. It is a film of place. You obviously did not care about the plot or the actual crime. Like Thieves Like Us, you seem to be concerned with invoking nostalgia for a certain era and a way of life or a place. The film is full of eccentric characters like the writer played by Sterling Hayden and the nude yoga enthusiasts. The Coens might have been inspired by this film when they made The Big Lebowski. Fans of that film might want to check out The Long Goodbye. After all, both films feature a laid back protagonist who hilariously breezes through tricky situations. Though I guess Marlowe might be a lot more motivated than Lebowski.

Best Regards, Pimpin.

(7/10)

Altman drags Leigh Brackett from the Warner attic, ties her to a wheelchair and flings her downstairs to write a delightful present for movie lovers, instead of the creaker it might have been (see Philip Marlowe attempts by Michael Winner and Dick Richards).

This movie is completely uninterested in Raymond Chandler and is only barely coaxed into coherent storytelling. Instead we get a delirious funhouse mirror, a riff on Studio Era anachronisms that would have been impossible under Studio Era constraints. Altman is at his most dangerous here, with lots of silly sight gags, much obviously improvised dialog, and actors sometimes visibly intoxicated. The highwire act should fall, but keeps its feet because, as much as any film of that bizarro time and place (early seventies Hollywood), it captures the free spirit of "why not?" go-for-broke artistry.

Many of this period's experimental films, though, like EASY RIDER and all those revisionist Westerns, and even a lot of Altman's own seventies work (CALIFORNIA SPLIT, NASHVILLE), have a cheap, rushed look; yet in the midst of what might have seemed chaos, Vilmos Zsigmond quietly pulls off visual tricks nobody would attempt today without CG effects. He invests bright sunlight with the gravity of murky night. He uses windows as mirrors and walls and prisms, and windows, simultaneously. The photography of this movie is probably its biggest homage to the technical excellence of Warner's golden age.

You won't forget Dick Powell or Humphrey Bogart, but only because Elliot Gould isn't attempting any of the same stuff. This movie is a joke, a very good joke difficult to tell and told well. Gould somehow makes this buffoonish version of an archetype work, though subverting his swagger at every turn - like a lonely fat girl, he's a slave to his cat; he orders CC and ginger, the faggiest drink a tough guy ever threw a lip over; he evinces no physical bravado; he smokes so incessantly the joke should get old in the first reel - but he and Altman are comedians of the first stripe, and everything plays because they want it to. The usual Altman ensemble elements are in place, plus the inspired casting of Sterling Hayden as Hemingway and Mark Rydell as the scariest Jew since Jesus Christ.

A couple of years later, as if in indignant rebuke to Altman's irreverence, Robert Mitchum was disconnected from his bong to star in the two worst Marlowe movies ever made, by-the-numbers yawners reinforcing the fact that every genre is mostly garbage. Let us not forget that Mitchum starred in OUT OF THE PAST, at least as good a detective movie as any '40s Chandler effort with the possible exception of DOUBLE INDEMNITY. So these two late-seventies entries do a double service by reminding us not to try and repeat ourselves, a mistake THE LONG GOODBYE did not make.

I remember seeing the DVD cover for this film a few times, with the leading actor walking on a beach, I assumed it was some kind of domestic drama, but it was in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die so it didn't really matter, from director Robert Altman (MASH, Nashville, The Player). Basically Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould), the chain- smoking, wisecracking private investigator is visited late on night by his close friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) who wants to get a lift from Los Angeles to the California–Mexico border at Tijuana. After doing this Marlowe is greeted by two cops who tell him that Lennox is accused of murdering his wealthy wife Sylvia, and he is arrested when he refuses to give them any information, but he is released three days when Lennox is found in Mexico to have committed suicide. The case seems pretty open and shut, but Marlowe suspects more is going on, but in the meantime platinum-blonde Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt), wife of alcoholic and writers' block suffering novelist Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden), has hired him to find her husband who has gone missing, he has binged on alcohol and disappeared before, but never longer than a day or two. While investigating, visiting "private" rich detoxification alcoholics and drug addiction clinics, Marlowe finds out the Wades knew the Lennoxes, so he believes there was something else to the murder of Sylvia and the suicide of Terry. He also crosses paths with Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell), the ruthless gangster who Lennox took money from which he wants back, he does manage to recover the money and travels back to Mexico, and there Marlowe finally uncovers the truth and solves the case. Also starring Henry Gibson as Dr. Verringer, David Arkin as Harry, Warren Berlinger as Morgan, Jo Ann Brody as Jo Ann Eggenweiler, Stephen 'Steve' Coit as Detective Farmer and Jack Knight as Mabel. Elliott is odd casting but certainly likable with his alternative approach to the character played previously by the likes of Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart, I can see why it might be considered semi-spoof because of the amusing nature about it, I confess I was confused most of the time, but I could just about follow the investigative stuff, and it worked alright as a thriller-esque story, so its a worthwhile detective drama. Good!

The movies got around to adapting Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels fairly early. The first in the series, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939 followed fairly quickly by Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window and The Lady In The Lake and by 1947 all four had been filmed - twice each in the case of the latter two. By common consensus George Montgomery was the worst Marlowe and the film in which he took the role, The High Window the worst adaptation. That held good until Robert Altman decided he was qualified to reinvent Chandler and Boy! did he get a wrong number. I can't name one single aspect that says 'Chandler' in this piece of crap. Elliot Gould resembles Chandler's Philip Marlowe a tad less than Tom Cruise resembles Shakespeare's King Lear. Not that this is necessarily Gould's fault. Presumably he played the role as directed just as equally presumably Leigh Brackett - who had, of course, co-written the screenplay for the Bogie/Hawks version of The Big Sleep - wrote this Marlowe as instructed by Altman. I don't object to any director for whatever reason making a travesty of an accepted genre but I do object when a director acquires the rights of a well-known, well-loved novel and throws out virtually everything that made it great in the first place. Why not simply write and/or commission an Original Screenplay and have done with it. This Marlowe is phony from shot #1. Clearly inspired by Paul Newman's Harper, who was shown as a slob from the off, this Marlowe is portrayed hungover, chain-smoking and living in something one level up from a rat hole. Chandler's Marlowe on the other hand always maintained a tidy apartment and cooked real meals. It's a small point I agree but, as John O'Hara once said if you get the small things right you'll get the big things right. The very first line of the novel reads: The first time I saw Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce outside the Players restaurant. From this Chandler explores the growing friendship between the two men. Here, Lennox turns up at Marlowe's apartment out of the blue about two reels in, displaying nothing of the breeding and raffish charm that made Marlowe invest time in him. The link between Lennox and the Wades is clumsy and inept here where it was subtle in the novel. Lennox' military past in which he was one of three men on a wartime mission is omitted and a gangster who wasn't in the book is substituted for the two that were. Neither is there any mention of Lennox' father-in-law, Harlan Potter, to say nothing of his other daughter who Marlowe would actually marry in a later novel. The final insult is, of course, to have Marlowe, conceived and written as a modern day knight, doing his best to right the world's wrongs, kill Lennox in cold blood. The sooner this is turned into banjo pics the better.

Honestly, if you were to take a shot each time Eliot Gould lights up or says "it's okay with me," you'll be hammered in the first 10 minutes.

On a more serious note, this movie's got it all: a comedically apathetic and disoriented lead, dark comedy, and brilliant acting, particularly from Gould, Hayden, and Rydell. Gould plays the aforementioned comic lead and smoker, Private Investigator Phillip Marlowe, who spends the first 10 minutes stumbling around his apartment and muttering to himself, which immediately got me into the movie. Thank God this movie remains relatively unseen and Marlowe's not an anti-hero, lest he become part of the "Literally Me"/Sigma Male collection. As the noir gets going, Gould's performance is what drives the whole thing forward, I took joy in watch his odyssey spanning from gangster dens to Mexican beaches and interact with the bizarre occupants of these settings with snarky remarks.

Among these are Hayden and Rydell. Rydell's Marty Augustine is like if Tommy DeVito's "funny like a clown?" routine were taken to an extreme, as Rydell's aggressive coked out gangster continuously tries to intimidate the P. I. and only receives Marlowe's trademark sass in response. Marlowe's sarcasm remains a constant, but here results in the most shocking scene of the film, Augustine nonchalantly disfiguring his own girlfriend with a coke bottle. Playing a self destructive and alcoholic Hemingway knockoff, Hayden's dialogue perfectly captures the poetry of a drunk, fitting as Hayden himself improvised all his lines drunk and stoned. In much of their scenes together, Marlowe's bizarre sense of humor dissipates as he seems to pity the man he believed framed his friend for murder.

Ultimately, as the noir plot unravels more and more, Gould's Marlowe and the friends he makes along the way, or perhaps loses along the way, weave together a perfect satirical mystery.