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Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” (1973) attacks film noir using three of his most loved techniques. Those are whimsy, improvisation, and narrative inversion. Altman born in Chicago had the most childlike imagination as he had the most free approach to films. Here, he presents us with the most youthful Philip Marlowes, a private investigator as a Hardy Boy. Marlowe spying on a car driven by the sexy heroine, begins to wail “Mrs. Wade! Mrs. Wade!” like a spoiled child who is running after a car. He peeks through windows and lurks in bushes as a child would. The film is more than just light-hearted given the two acts of violence in the film, which are completely different from the novel and even more startling. The two acts of violence are really shocking and are completely McSurrealist. Neither of them is in the original Raymond Chandler novel.
Altman started with a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, the most famous writer of “The Big Sleep” (1946) one of the most produced films based on Marlowe. On that one, her co-writer was William Faulkner. One famous story says they did ask Chandler who killed one of the characters, or was it suicide? “I don’t know.” Someone else was saying Just one quote unseen from horrible “Dungeons and Dragons.” That is one of the things that gradually build a Legend and Trehnzioteunoli side story. In “The Long Goodbye“, a character murdered in the book just “commits” suicide in the movie leaving the dominant unexplained.
Without a doubt, the plotline of “The Long Goodbye” is quite intricate. Marlowe is led into a seemingly arbitrary web of deception by Chandler’s novel that came out in 1953. This book is not about a story but rather the code of a private eye in a degenerate world. The core is mood, personal style, and language. Brackett, on the other hand, infuses her own interpretation by ditching parts of Chandler’s sequences, adding her own, altering the deaths, and complicating the tracking of a suitcase filled with money from a mobster.
Two weeks ago, I was present at the dark screening of the documentary ‘A Shot at’ at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado. We pondered the big question; what is the truth, and how do we know it? Some questions revolve around the vibrant and sexed-up character Eileen Ichon, played by Nina Van Pallandt. Eileen is said to want to kill her husband, Roger Wade, an alcoholic author who is portrayed by the grumpy old bear, Sterling Hayden. The question is, does she really want to off him, or just want him out of her life? What about the inviting dinner she prepares for Marlowe, portrayed by Elliott Gould, on the evening when Wade goes for a dip in the ocean? What are her intentions when it comes to Marlowe? Does she actually sleep with Marlowe? Yes, she does in the novel, But later on becomes a part of her alibi when she kills Wade, and makes it look like he offed himself. But she doesn’t kill Wade here.
What ties together Terry Lennox (the baseball star Jim Bouton), Eileen, and Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell), the gangster? Does Augustine owe Wade money, as he states to Marlowe, or does Wade owe money to Augustine, as is suggested with a Freudian slip? What is the relationship of any obligations of payment to any person with the monetary value of the suitcase? A final, blunt speech by Lennox, Marlowe’s unworthy friend, leaves some of our questions unanswered.
Elliot Gould reveals in the DVD commentary that Altman acknowledged alterations to Brackett’s screenplay, but that her final comments about the film were positive saying that she was “more than satisfied” with it. One is to transform the laconic, honorable Philip Marlowe into what Altman and Gould affectionately referred to as, “Rip Van Marlowe.” At the opening of the movie, Marlowe is shown as an awakening to find himself in 1973, however, he is clearly still in 1953. In the age of flower power and nude yoga, he is clad in a dark suit, white shirt, and a narrow tie. He is a chain smoker in an era where no one else smokes. Marlowe is devoted to Terry Lennox, whom he considers a friend. The movie establishes their friendship solely by depicting them playing Liar’s poker, but Lennox is no friend. During most of the film, Marlowe carries around a five thousand dollar bill, yet does not charge for any of his services. He is a knight errant, similar to Don Quixote, who also walks the fine line of misunderstanding the world around him.
The earlier Marlowes (Humphrey Bogart, James Caan, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell) are terse and unforthcoming. They speak, as Chandler put it, “with a clever and sadistic style, a grotesque touch, a loathing for falsification, and deadening self-important triviality.” And they speak a great deal since they recount the novels. Gould’s Marlowe has these traits but they come out as meandering speech that plays as him talking to himself in a bemused way. In the book, Marlowe owns no pets, but here he has a cat, and in the famous pre-credit opening scene he tries to convince the cat he is feeding its favorite food, but the cat isn’t buying it. In the film that throws large pieces of the story out the window, there is no reason for this scene other than it portrays Marlowe as a man more loyal to his cat than anyone is to him.
It can be summarised in very few words or in long paragraphs. The wealthy playboy Lennox tells Marlowe to drive him to Tijuana. Marlowe does so and is apprehended by the police and thrown into jail after discovering Lennox’s wife was discovered dead and battered. After Lennon’s suicide while abroad in Mexico, Marlowe is confronted by the gangster Marty Augustine and his henchmen, who throw Marlowe into a room. Augustine believes Marlowe has the fortune Lennox lost. In one of cinema’s most striking events, he inflicts words of violence upon Markow and chillingly states, “Now that’s someone I love. Imagine what could happen to you.”
Markow chases after him to The Malibu beach house of writer Roger Wade and his wife Eileen and later gets hired by Eileen to find Roger after he escapes to a dubious re-habilitation boarding house. What is the connection between Lennox, the Wades, and Augustine?
I don’t think that question interests Altman as much as the atmosphere and the style of the film. He is trying to capture the essence of having a noir detective clumsily wandering through a narrative that he is simply too ignorant to get. The film’s visual style accentuates his disorientation.
Altman and his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, treated the color film by ‘flashing’ it with an extra calculated dose of light that made it look faded and pastel. This gives the impression that Marlowe’s world is dull and devoid of vivid colors. Most of the scenery is filmed through obscured panes of glass, trees, shrubbery, and details of architecture which bits and pieces Marlowe’s view( and ours) perspective. The famous Altman overlapping dialogue makes it seem as though Marlowe is not aware of all the surrounding him. Marlowe does not seem to care for the ambiguity of his surroundings and instead, he repeats the catchphrase, “It’s all right with me.” The line was suggested by Gould and he and Altman chose to utilize it throughout the story and in the movie as an ironic refrain.
There is however one more refrain, as it is called, which is also the only one theme of the music that is played in the film. He uses this over and over with different people (even a Mexican band with the sheet music stuck to the front of the man commanding them). Altman always gathered a group of musicians on a sound stage and had them spend an evening trying out different arrangements of the song. At Boulder, the musician Dave Grusin, who worked on the film, told us Altman gathered a group of musicians on a sound stage and had them spend an evening trying out different arrangements of the song. I have heard a lot of theories about ‘why did Altman not use more than one song’ and the most logical one is the one that says that it entertained him.
To the background music there is a change of mood and color after the suicide of Roger Wade. In one of the beach scenes, he is seen bombarding people with questions and accusing them of being dishonest, for which he gets responses one laced with sounding like a child or a drunk, which of course he undoubtedly is. In the final sequence however, as in the rest of the pieces, color emerges to saturate the washed-out images and the dull lightning, the foregrounds are unobstructed, characters begin to speak one at a time, and finally in the bright light of Mexico, Marlowe can see and hear clearly and decide what actions to take.
Casting is important in film noir, for the reason that the actors must come prepared with their destinies. Allman’s actors exhibit an element of surprise and an inevitability that makes sense. A saying goes, “A ravaged giant roars and thunders on his way to his grave.” this is the embodiment of Sterling Hayden. Allman cast ex-wife Nina Van Pallandt, who was renowned as the mistress of Clifford Irving, the writer of the notorious fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. She was a beach goddess who did not simply act but embodied the role. Mark Rydell, the director, appears to be channeling Martin Scorsese’s verbal style in a performance that is overly polite in the surface, but savage at the core. And Elliot Gould is a Marlowe dropped in a world where everyone else has their predetermined places. He walks in a daze, whining, only to realize suddenly what he has to do and how.
No one’s first film noir experience should be “The Long Goodbye,” nor should it be their first Altman film. A lot of its beauty stems from its juxtaposition with the norm, and how Altman subverts the premise that exists in all private detective films: The hero is capable of walking through rough areas, observing, and distinguishing good from evil. The man of honor in 1953 is now stuck in his self-indulgent fog in 1973, and that doesn’t sit well with him.
In the Great Movies Series on rogerebert.com, you will find Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Nashville,” “3 Women,” as well as Hawks’ “The Big Sleep.”
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