Robert Altman gives Philip Marlowe a funny and quietly painful encounter with the 1970s. Elliott Gould makes the detective’s stubborn decency worth caring about, even when the mystery becomes harder to follow than it needs to be.
Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is a funny, unsettling crime film that gets more from its detective than from the case he is trying to solve. Adapting Raymond Chandler with screenwriter Leigh Brackett, Altman puts Philip Marlowe in 1970s Los Angeles and lets his old-fashioned loyalties become a practical disadvantage. Elliott Gould plays him with so little outward command that it takes a while to notice how firmly he holds his ground. The plotting can wander, but the man is worth following.
Gould’s mumbling matters because it denies Marlowe the pleasure of sounding like the cleverest person present. He seems to be keeping himself company, carrying on even when nobody much cares to listen. We laughed at the opening with the cat: Gould makes a private detective’s lack of authority funny without making him contemptible. That scene gives us a reason to like him before the film asks us to consider how badly his habits fit the city.
Vilmos Zsigmond’s fluid camerawork is particularly well suited to a detective who never quite seems to have caught up with his surroundings. The camera keeps moving, and the sunlit Los Angeles setting denies us the comforting expectation that danger will announce itself with darkness. Earth tones make the place look ordinary enough to inhabit. The images encourage us to look around Marlowe rather than simply concentrate on him, which suits a film in which the detective’s understanding is open to question.
Brackett’s screenplay preserves the attraction of a man who takes loyalty seriously while allowing his judgement to look questionable. It corrects the detective story’s habit of treating stubbornness as proof of intelligence. Marlowe can be decent and still fail to understand the people around him; Gould lets that possibility sit there without making a conspicuous show of confusion. The humour does not require us to regard him as a fool, although Altman sometimes comes close to doing so.
The freedom has a cost. Lou Lombardo’s editing allows the film to keep its rambling pace, and there are passages when the case becomes difficult to follow without becoming more intriguing. Some of that uncertainty belongs to Marlowe’s predicament, but some feels like insufficient attention to how one development leads to another. Altman is so interested in the detective’s awkward presence that the mechanics of his work occasionally seem beneath the film’s notice.
John Williams’s music helps the film remain funny without making it feel safe. Yet Gould’s muttering is the sound that most closely governs our sense of its pace, and Altman gives that odd performance room to settle. There is little pressure to make Marlowe more briskly heroic or more obviously ridiculous. That patience with the performance helps compensate for the loose storytelling: we stay interested in how this particular man will respond.
As a reworking of the private-eye film, this succeeds because we remain concerned about Marlowe after the jokes have exposed his limitations. There is something painful in watching a man continue to behave decently in company that has little use for it. The film gives that persistence enough weight to make its mockery uncomfortable, and Gould never asks for our sympathy outright. See it for him, with the understanding that the investigation will take its time.
