When Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye was first released in 1973, its limited opening in Los Angeles was met with a plethora of negative reviews, stymying the film’s appeal to the general public. In short, it wasn’t received well. The notable defenders of Altman’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name were none other than the late great Pauline Kael and, of course, Roger Ebert, who in his review of the film praised Altman’s attempted supplantation of the famous Philip Marlowe character and Elliott Gould’s performance in the role. After a new marketing campaign that shifted the focus from selling The Long Goodbye as a taut, detective thriller, the film picked up some critical traction and has gone on to be considered one of the great films to emerge from the New Hollywood era of the 1970s.
The key to understanding Altman’s version of Chandler’s steely-eyed private investigator lies in its unabashed unfaithfulness to its source material. The plot remains somewhat similar, with Marlowe being tasked to clear the name of his best friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton), who stands accused of murdering his wife and flees to Mexico. However, with each twist in the tale, Marlowe encounters an increasingly sordid coterie of individuals, most notably the washed-up writer Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden) and his wife Eileen (Nina van Pallandt), the sister of the murdered Mrs. Lennox.
Where Chandler’s novel tells yet another story in the legend of Philip Marlowe, focusing on the quick-witted, strong-willed detective and all his righteousness, Altman’s inflection strikes a different note. Gould’s private eye is cut from a different cloth than his predecessors who played the role in the 1940s, Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell — less hard-boiled and more dog-eared. What remains is the same determined, solitary figure whose stubborn morality renders him the perfect tool to explore the seedy underbelly, and perverse upper class, of Hollywood, Los Angeles.
By the time Altman released his version, there had been countless filmic adaptations of hard-boiled crime fiction. Mostly emerging after the second World War, these films established their own genre of sorts called film noir, a style of American filmmaking that fixated on the fatalistic. Employing a variety of aesthetic tropes that included harsh chiaroscuro lighting and morally ambiguous characters, film noir presented post-war disillusionment in a manner that externalized the lingering fears and paranoia of an entire generation.
In transplanting the conventional noir trappings and bringing Marlowe forward into the 1970s, Altman inadvertently created a hazy, washed-out facsimile of what we perceived noir to be. The moralistic Marlowe is immediately at odds with his surroundings: contemporary society entirely wrapped up in its own ego and narcissism; a sentiment that is, albeit jokingly, established in the film’s opening scene. We’re shown Marlowe being woken up by his petulant cat — it’s feeding time — and when the shambling detective cannot provide his pet with a specific type of cat food, trying to dupe the feline into eating a replacement dressed in Coury Cat Food branding, the cat runs away. Marlowe’s shrugged acceptance with the line, “It’s okay with me,” alludes to a resigned indifference with the characters and society that the private eye brushes up against. Despite the myriad noir stylings that have been lost in translation during the adaptation process, the strength of Altman’s reimagining lies in Gould’s performance.
Gould’s lanky frame, mess of curls, and mismatched suit signal a departure from the typical depictions of Marlowe, whose perfectly kept appearance implied a sense of moral restraint to be upheld. In The Long Goodbye, Gould’s marble-mouthed mumbling, the childish manner in which he hides in bushes to spy on suspects, and his disarming, sardonic wit all act to de-romanticize the detective genre. For some, it may lean a little too close to pastiche, but The Long Goodbye is not all charm. One of Altman’s greatest attributes as a filmmaker is his unrelenting ability to deconstruct a genre, trope, or even the audience’s perception of an actor and subvert expectations. His Marlowe may not wear the suit quite like Powell did before him and may not impose a steely toughness like Bogart’s depiction, but Altman’s languid, wise-cracking detective never dilutes the inherent darkness that lingers over The Long Goodbye. The sun may be shining, but Gould’s Marlowe embodies the pessimism and sound moral compass of his predecessors.
It’s this ‘man out of time’ element that allows Altman, along with screenwriter Leigh Brackett, to almost satirize the noir genre rather than transpose a new take on it. The Long Goodbye seemingly becomes a film made entirely from juxtapositions. Long-time Altman collaborator Vilmos Zsigmond’s expert cinematography illustrates some of these jarring parallels. Take, for instance, the scene in which Marlowe visits the Wades’ house after tracking down and rescuing Roger from a detox clinic for the wealthy residents of Malibu Colony. Zsigmond’s camera floats away from the Wades as they begin to argue over Roger’s drinking and pushes into the window where we see Marlowe walking from the beach towards the calm sea ahead of him. Not only is this a visual depiction of the quite literal divide between Marlowe and the self-obsessed Wades, it also mirrors a later scene in the film — Roger’s suicide. This time, Zsigmond’s focus shifts from Marlowe and Eileen’s conversation to Roger drunkenly stumbling towards the crashing waves. These visual references are scattered throughout The Long Goodbye and act as a sort of reminder to the ways in which traditional film noir would illustrate the internal turmoil of its characters.
There is also something to be said for the film’s musical choices. Johnny Mercer, along with legendary composer John Williams, created the eponymous title song for the film, which Altman deftly varies from the crooning hum we first hear to being played by a marching band near The Long Goodbye’s close. This track serves as an anchor for the film, whereas the only other song used, Doris Day’s “Hooray for Hollywood,” is used to bookend The Long Goodbye, which ultimately provides, in typical noir fashion, one final shot of tragic irony for Gould’s Marlowe.
Perhaps the reason The Long Goodbye has continued to maintain a level of cultural relevance lies in its role as a precursor to films that embody a similar wistless questing. Films like Inherent Vice, The Big Lebowski, and Under the SIlver Lake owe a debt to Altman’s tweak of the formula. In a way, The Long Goodbye created its own branch of the sub-genre — the nothing noir — where the environment, atmosphere, and texture of each respective film matters equally, if not more, than the case or crime in question. Marrying these clear acknowledgements of the noir genre with bold, innovative reimaginings, The Long Goodbye sits somewhere between homage and deconstruction. It’s Altman at his revisionist best, bending genres and long-established tropes to his will, all while maintaining a wry grin at the goings-on — one that echoes Marlowe’s rumpled aphorism, “It’s okay with me.”
