The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye

Robert Altman was at the top of his craft when he made this revisionist detective gem in 1973 — one of a string of similarly skewed genre masterpieces that included McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville. Elliott Gould stars as an unkempt, mumbling update of Raymond Chandler’s seminal Los Angeles private investigator, Philip Marlowe. This version of the famous gumshoe lives in a dump of an apartment with his finicky cat, across from a group of scantily clad young women who pass their days baking hash brownies and doing tantric yoga. When an old friend (played by former baseball player and author Jim Bouton) drops by needing help, Marlowe is pulled into a slow eddy of deception and betrayal. Altman, Gould and veteran screenwriter Leigh Brackett have created a character who brilliantly suggests how the rigidly moral 1940s detective of Chandler’s fiction might function if he were plopped down into the shallow, transient world of the “me decade.” And the unexpected finale will be as shocking to traditionalists as it is poetically appropriate. Photographed to hazy, sun-soaked perfection by Vilmos Zsigmond, the film also sports a large, distinguished cast, with especially strong turns by a bearded Sterling Hayden and an occasionally topless Mark Rydell. One of the best films of the 1970s. — D.G. (written for Barnes & Noble.com)