Private detective stories have never really gone out of style, and why would they? Since the days of Edgar Allen Poe’s crime fiction, the genre has proven to be endlessly adaptable, reflecting the values and vices of different eras. When Robert Altman made The Long Goodbye in 1973, the early decades of film noir had left a lingering mark on cinema with a particular grammar of stark shadows and canted camera angles. In these films from the ’30s and ’40s, tough-guy protagonists remained ciphers even as they swaggered and two-fisted their way through thickets of clues to outsmart both the cops and the bad guys, saving the dame and solving the mystery. Drawn from the source material of one of Raymond Chandler’s most celebrated novels, Altman’s take on The Long Goodbye subverts each of these elements. It’s a breezy film of pastel colors that centers on a private eye who wanders around muttering to himself, never quite catching onto what the mystery actually is. Everyone seems to know more than he does, but that doesn’t stop him from gumshoeing, because he’s the only one who actually seems to care about what happens in the end. With his constant refrain, “It’s okay with me,” he attempts to smooth over every conflict he stumbles into rather than shooting his way out. It’s an anti-detective story in many ways, wrenched from the genre’s black-and-white past and reimagined for the “I’m OK, You’re OK” vibe of southern California at the tail end of the Nixon years. With a fascinating performance from Elliott Gould in the principal role, it’s an essential entry in the evolution of detective stories and well worth a revisit or a first watch.
The mold for the role of Phillip Marlowe was arguably set by Humphrey Bogart in the 1946 masterpiece The Big Sleep. Gould’s take on the character plucks that template out of the past and drops it into a different world while still retaining some of the signifiers. He shuffles around sunny L.A. in a rumpled black suit and drives a ’40s-era jalopy like he’s stuck in time while the world has rushed on past him. The women in the neighboring apartment conduct naked yoga sessions on their balcony right outside his front door but he scarcely notices them, as if he’s a time traveler being careful about not interacting with anyone lest he upset the cosmos. He’s never without a smoke in his mouth while no one else in the film even touches a cigarette. It all adds up to a portrait of a man out of time, baffled by the world he occupies but content enough to try to help in any way he can.
The script, written by Leigh Brackett (one of the writers of The Big Sleep), nods towards the novel’s storyline, but Altman takes a liberal approach to the adaptation, swapping out murders and plot twists to better suit the affect of Gould’s befuddled Marlowe. The plot only makes sense in an impressionistic way, all dots but few connections. When Marlowe’s friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) is accused of killing his own wife, the detective helps him escape to Mexico and then pays for it by getting locked up as a suspect himself for a few days. Terry’s neighbor, Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt), then hires Marlowe to track down her husband Roger (Sterling Hayden), a Hemingwayesque writer who’s cooling off in rehab. The two story strands might be related, but it takes Marlowe a long while to puzzle out how. In the meantime, the story twists into some dark places, exploring the violent shadows of L.A.’s crime scene where Marlowe seems particularly ill at ease and out of his depth.
In an interview, Altman referred to his and Gould’s conception of the protagonist as “Rip Van Marlowe,” a walking anachronism in an alien world. There’s great pleasure in just watching Gould wander around, cigarette dangling from his lip and narrating to himself as he paces his apartment or the grocery store looking for cat food for his exceptionally finicky cat. (No joke: Morris the Cat, the celebrated “spokescat” of 9Lives cat food, nails the role in his debut performance.) Vilmos Zsigmond’s gorgeous cinematography makes watercolors of the SoCal landscape which Marlowe drifts across like an ink blot. In a slightly bizarre touch, the film’s score by John Williams recasts the original title song he co-wrote with Johnny Mercer to fit the mood of a variety of scenes, from a pop song on the radio to a symphonic motif to, late in the film, a marching band performing at a Mexican funeral. No other music plays, only variations on this same theme. It creates a dreamlike sense that someone is trying to tell you something, but Marlowe will be the last to catch on.
Two of the most popular films of 2022 fall solidly within the detective genre–Glass Onion and The Batman–and plenty of other productions attest to the enduring appeal of stories about dudes (almost always dudes) sleuthing out the mysteries that no one else can crack. There’s something comforting about the idea that someone might be able to find the answers that elude the rest of us, and these stories often reflect the tenor of the times in which they’re made. The Long Goodbye is not only a beautifully made and strangely charming film, it’s also a time capsule of the early Seventies: disillusioned, hedonistic and nostalgic for a moral world order that had only recently gone extinct. Among the many crimes of the Watergate era is the fact that The Long Goodbye never got a sequel. Gould has said that, if the opportunity ever comes along to reprise the role, it’s okay with him. Morris the Cat, alas, is unavailable.
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