Review of The Long Goodbye (1973) by David L — 20 Sep 2014

I'm a huge Robert Altman fan and this is one of my favorite of his films. It's a film that often divides Altman fans, but I'm in the supporter camp. I think my favorite rumination on this film is wether Altman made his parody of the detective film out of a love for the genre or holds it in utter contempt.

I tent to think he does have a fondness for the genre, but finds it obsolete and past it's time. However, I'm still not totally confident about that. In this film version of Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel of the same name, Elliott Gould plays private detective Philip Marlowe.

Outside of the ending, the general story follows the novel. Marlowe is also fairly true to his forbearers characterizations of Marlow, but what's different here is that the film is set in the 1970s and Marlowe is painfully out of place and out of time.

Altman also mocks the genre by endlessly repeating the film's Johnny Mercer theme song in elevators, supermarkets, or wherever possible, ALA "Laura". The screenplay was written by Leigh Brackett, who cowrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep in 1946.

The film also has great and nicely varied supporting cast,which includes Sterling Hayden, Nina Van Pallandt, Jim Bouton, Mark Rydell, David Carradine, Carl Gottlieb and Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of Rydell's heavies.

However, it's really Gould who hold the film together, much like The Dude in "The Big Lebowski", Gould's Marlowe is sucked into a mystery, but he really just wants to be a nice guy and he mostly seems to just wants to be left alone.

I find this film an endlessly interesting meditation on the detective genre and genre in general. One of my favorite Altman films!