The Long Goodbye

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  September 29, 2009

  SirPant

  I love Gould's Marlowe, this is probably the coolest he's ever been! Sterling Hayden & Mark Rydell also do great in supporting roles in what is one of my favourite films ever!

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  June 8, 2009

  DrZeek

  Philip Marlowe: Nobody cares but me.
  Terry Lennox: Well that's you, Marlowe. You'll never learn, you're a born loser.
  Philip Marlowe: Yeah, I even lost my cat.
  
  An ingenious deconstruction of the noir detective. Made and set in the contemporary 1970s within a washed out Los Ange...( read more)les, director Robert Altman places switches Bogart with Elliot Gould to fill the shoes of author Raymond Chandler's noir anti-hero Philip Marlowe.
  
  The story, if it matters, involves the seemingly drifter like version of the more effective 50s version of P.I. Philip Marlowe getting caught up in a web of plots involving the murder of his friend, the disappearance of an author, and some missing money. These are all elements that one does not to be too concerned with.
  
  The real joy is watching Gould. The tone of this film has him perfectly set up as a foil for the genre itself. This is very much a 70s noir, but everything about the Marlowe character is much more subdued than he would be, were he still in the 40s/50s. He may still be clever and underplaying his strengths, but many things do not go his way. As he strolls in and out of each scene, lighting up a cigarette every time, women don't immediately fall for him, business is terrible, and he even has troubles pleasing his own cat.
  
  There is solid work from the supporting cast as well, including Sterling Hayden as an alcoholic author and a wordless small role from the governator Schwarzenegger.
  
  Roger Wade aka Billy Joe Smith: Do you ever think about suicide, Marlboro?
  Philip Marlowe: Me, I don't believe in it.
  
  The look and feel of this film is absolutely wonderful as well. LA looks drab, as much of the tone sets out to give you a satire of the noir genre, it also provides a satirical look at LA culture. Add to that the score/main theme from John Williams and Johnny Mercer, who's title song runs throughout in various form.
  
  Det. Green: My, my, you are a pretty asshole.
  Philip Marlowe: Yeah, my mother always tells me that.
  
  Finally, if this hasn't been clear, the film is frequently funny. Mainly due to Gould's performance and dialog. The way this film moves along, establishing a number of nefarious characters and actually providing some good tension, is easily balanced by how hilarious Marlowe's character reacts to these various situations. This film certainly isn't an all out parody, its just smartly handled at going against the grain.
  
  Roger Wade aka Billy Joe Smith: I tell you what we're gonna do, Marlboro. You're gonna take that goddamn J.C. Penney tie off and we're gonna have an old fashioned man to man drinking party.
  Philip Marlowe: Well, that's okay but I'm not taking off the tie.

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  June 5, 2009

  FangsFirst

  Robert Altman usually inspires a lot of confidence in more "independent" movie-watchers, and is often a bit off-putting for many "regular" movie-watchers. I know my father was in the group of people who cannot stand Altman's habit of over-lapping dialogue. As someone who is often...( read more) filtering conversations in and out (one might call it eavesdropping in some circumstances, but never anywhere but in public places), this is very natural and lacks distraction for me most of the time. I'd also heard many times that this film was, yes, a Raymond Chandler adaptation, but not in the spirit of any of the other adaptations around, and a more unusual interpretation of them, modern and unusual. So, I did know this going in (thankfully, it seems).
  
  Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is a private eye in Hollywood, living alone with a cat that refuses to touch any food that is not a specific brand. When a substitute fails, Marlowe goes out to buy more cat food (and brownie mix for his often half-nude neighbors) and returns to find his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) coming to ask him for a favour--a quick trip to Tijuana. Lennox is scratched up, but Marlowe notes that this is just a result of Lennox getting in a fight with his wife Sylvia again. Two cops wake Marlowe up the next day, though, and arrest him, asking him where he took Lennox. When he refuses, he finds out Sylvia is dead, but knowing his friend could not have done this, refuses to speak against him or otherwise cooperate. Let free after three days, he finds out Lennox apparently committed suicide in Mexico and so the cops are disinterested in continuing any investigation. Marlowe takes on a case listlessly anyway, because of course there's no funding to pursue the investigation on his own. The case, however, is that of Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt), who wants him to find her husband, famous writer Robert Wade (Sterling Hayden)--a couple who happens to live in "The Malibu Colony"--the same complex that the Lennoxes lived in. Marlowe takes on the job for itself, but doesn't resist the urge to poke around and see if these two know anything of Terry and Sylvia. Wade is discovered under the care of Doctor Verringer (Henry Gibson), but entwined in all of this is Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell), a gangster who has unresolved money issues with Wade and lost $350k in Terry's disappearance, leading him to threaten Marlowe's well-being.
  
  Much has been made of the changes and liberties Leigh Brackett (who of course scripted Bogie/Hawks' The Big Sleep, which is also a Chandler adaptation) and Robert Altman took when making this adaptation, some of it appreciative, much of it damning. Many are most displeased with Gould's performance as Marlowe. This Marlowe is not a snappy wit, a sharp dresser or particularly suave. He mumbles and makes smart-ass remarks without regard for who hears them, shambles and stumbles from place to place, though he still seems to know his business well enough to work most people and situations to his advantage--within reason. It's not the Marlowe we know, and that's a given, really. It's not a bad one though; he's an anachronism in one sense, always wearing a two piece suit, smoking constantly and driving a car straight out of the fifties, but modern in his manner and sense of humour. As long as you can deal with these changes, the film ought to do well for you. Why should it do well? A good question, of course, and one I intend to answer as best I can.
  
  Marlowe is, in this transition that traps him firmly in the modern age but leaves his morals, principles and approach to life mired in decades lost, an every day guy. He's not smoother, quicker or better than everyone else, but he's not a total chump, either. He is still the everyman of noir, but without the hard-boiled edge that most of those protagonists had in a decent scrape, even if the best could be gotten of them on occasion. This edge of believability is necessary for the world Altman is putting together (helped by the always able-bodied DP Vilmos Zsigmond and his constantly-in-motion camera chosen for the film by Altman), because it's a world more readily identifiable as "real" for its modernity.We can accept Gould's Marlowe in the real world, whereas we could not accept the Bogart one because it is too pat--it's fun pat, mind you, and not a kind I'm at all opposed to, but one that simply wouldn't fit in a world portrayed as "real." He does have a quickness to his sense of humour that strengthens him into a slightly elevated place where we accept him simultaneously as "a protagonist," though, but in a way that only makes him seem like one of those funny people you might know--or at least one of those people you might know who sure thinks they're funny. It's a strong character and a fun one--as long as you aren't constantly thinking of it as "not the Marlowe I know!" (which is the same approach I take to the upcoming Robert Downey Jr./Guy Ritchie version of Sherlock Holmes--though that doesn't guarantee it will turn out well, it at least gives it the opportunity to).
  
  Surrounding Gould we have a strong cast, from Nina van Pallandt's first English-language role to Sterling Hayden's brilliantly outrageous but tender frustrated writer, storming and ranting with the best of them, but easily showing it's all to make up for an easily wounded sense of pride and easily tarnished sense of self-worth. Mark Rydell, first off, shocked me in his performance. I saw his name in the credits and thought, "Really?! The director of The Cowboys and On Golden Pond?!" and then forgot about it, only to discover he had the role of the psychotic Marty Augustine. The role is commanding and scene-stealing, vicious and cold, but with that demented sense of egocentric humour that makes him all the more scary, and all in a role that sort of made me think of Harlan Ellison (which I mean in a good way to both of them). Henry Gibson starts out the film with the kind of quiet mouseyness that seems to define most of his work, but that turns into a sort of Napoleonic manipulation of power later. And let's not forget a fun little cameo from an anti-establishment cellmate--David Carradine. Only appropriate for me to have stumbled across him today, the day of his death.
  
  The tone of the film is what's most fascinating though. John Williams and Johnny Mercer co-wrote the title theme, and simply re-organized and re-recorded it for all appropriate scenes to form almost the entirety of the film's music. Many scenes are not ended by sharp cuts, dissolves or crossfades, but by zooming in on background details--be they waves rolling in, half-naked neighbors, reflections in foreground windows or anything else--and then choosing one of those types of transitions. The effect is that the zoom is the real end of the scene, done in a way that seems to clarify that there is a world beyond the events we are being told about, much like Altman's over-lapping dialogue approach. Things are going on behind and around our characters that have no effect on them, no relation to them and no real importance to the story, but they're still there. It instills a greater sense of reality, as Altman also records sound at equal volume no matter what the circumstances. When filming Marlowe's interrogation through an observation window, the sound is muffled as it would be from behind that window. Sometimes dialogue is completely inaudible, characters seen speaking through a window at a distance, to reflect the fact that the words themselves are not important in this context, so much as their isolation from the spot at which we're seeing them being spoken--at one point to show Marlowe's hidden position and at another to show what the characters speaking are unaware of. This kind of reality is rarely dealt in, because it's difficult to maintain, off-putting to many and somewhat disorienting for its contradiction of expectation. It works very effectively here, though, highlighting the few instances of out and out violence by making them a good bit more disturbing and shocking for their relatively realistic surroundings.
  
  So, no, this isn't a great "Philip Marlowe" movie, but it IS a great Philip Marlowe movie--it's an updating of the character that acknowledges complete cultural changes, in part by mocking and satirizing them, with knocks at clichés and ideas that were once omnipresent, and in other parts by ignoring them completely in favour of this more modern approach. This may now be my favourite Altman.

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  June 24, 2008

  organgrinder136

  ross and monicas dad reprises the role of phillip marlowe only to be undressed at by the terminator while he tries to fathom his mates suicides and wifes murder. it doesn't help that his cat only eats one brand of cat food and that the girls next door walk around topless all the ...( read more)time. directed by robert altman who seems to be generally so so with his projects, he's created another average affair. nice to see phillip marlowe still kicking ass mind. if anyone's seen brick it's quite similar to that only not as smart

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  March 15, 2008

  rubystevens

  altman's great screwy adaptation of raymond chandler's book stars elliot gould as the strangest marlowe ever in a knockout performance. able support from mark rydell as the villain and sterling hayden as a washed-up drunken writer. with cool cameos by former yankee pitcher jim ...( read more)bouton and an unknown arnold schwarzenegger! a terrific artifact of the seventies and a whole lot of fun

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  August 17, 2009

  hossein13

  A noir very well adapted to LA in 70s.

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  June 11, 2009

  zachdiehard

  Gould is spectacular as the dry smartass detective.

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  March 8, 2009

  billfenner1967

  Yet another great Altman-directed character piece, focusing on the famed detective and his general ambivalence to the proper ways and etiquettes of those around him. This film works not just as an entertaining detective story, with much humor mixed in, but also as a time capsule ...( read more)of the mindset of Americans emerging from the tumult of the 60s, as they look back at the recently extinct heroes of the film noir period. Gould plays Marlowe with a sardonic devil may car attitude as if he -- the main player in all this drama -- is merely another helpless onlooker too. Highly recommend this film to fans of the genre and of that special epoch of American cinema, the 1970s.

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  January 11, 2009

  marylanenalyram

  Why don't you stick some sea crabs up your nose and take a leak or somethin'? Yeah, and your lips'll fall off too.

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  January 7, 2009

  Valar7

  Unconventional, for a thriller, easygoing like there is nothing happening, Altman still pulls it through in some style and with a lot of help from Elliott Gould. Brilliant cinematography too.

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  November 30, 2008

  salsita015

  salut je suis salsita de maroc et j'aimerais bien faire ta connaissance si tu m'interrese et te envis voila mon msn salsita_015@hotmail.fr
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  July 12, 2008

  willerror1

  A vivid reimagining of the classic '40s-style private eye and one of the best movies of the 1970s! Offbeat and brilliant, terrific performances from lesser-known character actors, great title song that turns up in various forms throughout the picture, and an ending that wraps everything up. See it!

• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• David Arkin
• Elliott Gould
• Henry Gibson
• Jim Bouton
• Mark Rydell
• Nina Van Pallandt
• Sterling Hayden
• Warren Berlinger

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• In which film does the main character NOT die at the end?  Answer »
• What does Philip Marlowe go to the store in search of at the beginning of The Long Goodbye?  Answer »
• What animal does Elliott Gould live with in The Long Goodbye?  Answer »
• Arnold Schwarzenegger played a deaf and mute hit-man for the mob in which 1973 film?  Answer »

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