The Long Goodbye might be the most well-known hardboiled detective title if for no other reason than that variations on it have become a shorthand for the genre as a whole. Any time someone is making a pastiche of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, or James M. Cain, the words “long” or “goodbye” are almost guaranteed to turn up in there somewhere. It’s an evocative title for sure, but popularity has to account for some of that too, and as I understand it, fans of the genre often point to this book as one of the best. And yet unlike its’ predecessor, likewise a Philip Marlowe mystery, The Big Sleep, it never got an adaptation during the classic Hollywood era when noir was at its’ peak. Instead, The Long Goodbye didn’t hit the big screen until the 1970s’ New Hollywood boom -which did have a particular reverence for the film noirs of old.
And yet director Robert Altman chose to set it in the present of 1973 -perhaps the biggest of several major departures from the source material that resulted in it being maligned by several critics and lovers of the book. Altman’s whole approach was even antithetical to the perceived tone and themes of the novel, he viewed it as a satire more than a straight crime thriller commenting on the state of society, particularly in southern California at the time -far more interested in the individual episodes than the overarching mystery. However in this, the movie still has the legitimacy of classic noir through its’ script by Leigh Brackett, who of course wrote The Big Sleep thirty years prior (and afterwards would become more famous for penning an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back before her death). Her dialogue may not carry all of the tropes (and there’s no voiceover), but it certainly feels comfortable at home in the gumshoe world.
That’s even with the change in period altering the aesthetic pretty significantly, and the lead character most of all. Philip Marlowe, now played by Elliott Gould, isn’t the smooth, slick, and charming P.I. that Humphrey Bogart was. He’s a little more of a screw-up, still cool and confident and competent, but with neurotic character traits, a more everyman persona, and an inconsistent financial situation. He doesn’t have his own office, operating instead out of his Los Angeles apartment. He meanders about, has quirky attributes, wears the same somewhat shabby suit, and is way more willing to use wit as a defence mechanism. Unlike previous iterations of this character, Gould’s Marlowe enters no romantic relationship with his client -though a sexual tension certainly is there. In short, he is the suave private eye as imagined by the culture and standards of the 70s; and in a way, Gould is perfect casting, as one of those actors whose unique oddball yet attractive screen charisma seemed to define the decade.
But Marlowe is an interesting figure beyond that. He still carries that melancholy seemingly so vital to the film noir protagonist, but there’s a moral character there too. The victims in the case palpably weigh on him, he’s easily emotionally involved in the clearing of a friends’ name and the prevention of further harm. He probably doesn’t have much faith in human nature but he believes and abides by a set of virtues. Gould makes only small efforts to show it, but there is a psychological toll on him that increases through the movie. He’s a relatable character in a way noir protagonists often struggle to be, and it makes him an easier guy to follow through the convolutions of Chandler’s plot.
But Marlowe is an interesting figure beyond that. He still carries that melancholy seemingly so vital to the film noir protagonist, but there’s a moral character there too. The victims in the case palpably weigh on him, he’s easily emotionally involved in the clearing of a friends’ name and the prevention of further harm. He probably doesn’t have much faith in human nature but he believes and abides by a set of virtues. Gould makes only small efforts to show it, but there is a psychological toll on him that increases through the movie. He’s a relatable character in a way noir protagonists often struggle to be, and it makes him an easier guy to follow through the convolutions of Chandler’s plot.
Things kick off with the apparent suicide of Marlowe’s friend Terry Lennox (played by baseball star Jim Bouton in his first acting gig), following the murder of his wife Sylvia in Tijuana where Marlowe had given Lennox a lift to the night of the incident. Lennox is accused of the crime, but Marlowe disbelieves it. At the same time he is hired onto a case involving the Lennox’s social friends, a missing alcoholic novelist Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden) and his wife Eileen (Nina van Pallandt). Evidently of course, these stories link, as does a third thread involving a violent gangster Augustine (Mark Rydell) accosting Marlowe over money owed to him by Lennox.
One of the first places his investigation leads him is a detox clinic where he finds Roger, a mess of a man dependent on and indebted to a quack played by Henry Gibson. These specialized, occasionally shady operations for drug and alcohol addictions were a fairly new thing by the early 1970s, and Altman, whose own Malibu home substituted for that of the Wades, was familiar with their presence and curious post-hippie subculture. The Long Goodbye captures that unique L.A. brand of drug culture primarily in the character of Roger, and possibly due to by Altman’s account, Hayden’s frequently being drunk or stoned on set. He certainly looks it that night when he walks into the sea to drown. Altman makes fun, he draws figures like Roger and Gibson and those girls who live opposite Marlowe engaging in this weird new routine called yoga, with a degree of cynical humour; but there’s also an underpinning sense of dismay at the way such things are trivialized, even glamourized -rehabilitation turned into an industry. And in all of that it doesn’t work -Roger kills himself anyways. Altman’s satire always comes with a level of honest sadness and frustration, and Marlowe epitomizes that as he silently judges this world yet can’t help but be drifted along by it. Foreshadowing Roger, he too wanders that beachfront property somewhat aimlessly as the Wades argue inside.
And then there’s the matter of the gang that Lennox runs afoul of, a gang that in a post Godfather environment almost seems quaint -although I’m not entirely sure that isn’t the point; Mark Rydell -a director, does not at all look the mobster type. There’s a moment of casual misogyny early in their encounter to demonstrate his sadism, to shock the audience, and probably to pay homage to James Cagney in The Public Enemy, where he smashes a bottle across his mistresses’ face. He uses the “that’s what I would do to someone I love” line of intimidation yet it feels like a shallow use of explicitly gendered violence. Of course this kind of scene is undercut later by Augustine having Marlowe and all of his own goons strip their clothes to prove a point of trust somehow -and here you notice that one of his thugs is a pre-breakout Arnold Schwarzeneggar whose body clearly looks like none of the other bodies in the room, it’s actually pretty funny. But this whole storyline dissipates when Augustine just gets the money back from someone else, so Marlowe doesn’t have to worry anymore. But it sets in motion the series of events leading to the ending, because just after this Marlowe so happens to see Eileen driving off.
There’s a harried quality to these last few scenes, at least in terms of narrative information imparted. Yet Altman still makes room for a short hospital stay after Marlowe is struck by a car in his pursuit of Eileen. I like that he pretty much sneaks out of the hospital in his haste to have this finished, he, very much like the audience, picking up on where the case is leading. Eileen had disclosed earlier that Roger had been having an affair with Sylvia, and suspected that he might have killed her under threat of Terry finding out. But then suddenly after Roger’s death her home is being sold and she is nowhere to be seen. Marlowe goes down to Mexico and the truth is revealed.
The book apparently ends on a note of some ambiguity, an unreliable resolution provided by Marlowe. The film offers no such uncertainty in its’ warped version of that ending, concluding with the reveal that the police were right in the first place. Lennox really did kill his wife. And it was he who had been having an affair with Eileen that Sylvia found out about. This is told to Marlowe by Lennox himself, who had faked his suicide as had been suggested by the book, and is now living secretly in Mexico with Eileen to join him. But his being the perpetrator is Altman’s invention, the clandestine affair that prompted the murder an inverse of the book’s –so that Altman can make a statement about disillusionment. The fact that Marlowe’s friend, whose innocence he wholly believed in, actually did commit this crime and has all along been a really shitty dude –it crushes him, and Gould conveys it well. The fact Lennox is proud he fooled Marlowe is just salt in the wound. And so the long goodbye becomes a rather short one, as Marlowe kills his old friend on the spot –the movie ending with a long shot of his strolling up a road in high spirits, passing Eileen on the way to meet her dead lover.
Altman knew he would be pissing off Chandler fans with this movie, and with this ending especially, that directly takes the winds out of the title’s meaning and presents Marlowe in a fairly cold light, subsumed by cynicism. It’s audacious, although his reasoning for this and his new thesis of the story are a bit shallow I find. The message boils down to general societal degradation commentary that satirizes though says little meaningful outside of the rehabilitation material. This was right in the middle of Altman’s peak period between McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville, and next to movies like those it feels notably dated. But then Chandler usually is, and there is a real stylishness to the film nonetheless –most of it radiating off of Elliott Gould. It’s also in the ways where Altman’s satiric tone is underplayed that the movie works most as a neo-noir: the overhanging pessimism, dim atmosphere, the pathos in figures like Marlowe and Roger Wade. Its’ influence can be felt, especially in the genre of L.A. crime movies that came after. The Long Goodbye being poorly received by critics and audiences on release doesn’t surprise me –for reasons beyond its’ betrayal of the source material. But I am also thoroughly unsurprised by its’ later cult acclaim.
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