Review of The Long Goodbye (1973) by Trevor E — 10 Feb 2008

[size=2]This was a decent movie, kind of trying to be different but only partially succeeding. Basically a detective has a friend who is accused of murder and the plot involves his possible mistress and ganster associations. Or something like that, it is purposefully confusing a la [i]Big Sleep[/i]. Gould does well as Marlowe but he doesn't have much to work with, which is Altman's fault. The director tries to make this movie into an art-film version of [i]The Maltese Falcon[/i], so instead of being driven by say, dialouge, it is driven by a desire: a desire to be different. Of course if you make a movie that is [u]trying too hard[/u], it fails ultimately. This kind of makes fun of the whole film noir genre but not convincingly enough to advance it. I don't like this movie very much, though it was fairly interesting in its camerawork, which counts for something. Someone asked me what I thought after I saw it and I could sum it up in one word, "Different".

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