Tarzan on a Big Red Scooter
Or: Why Altman’s The Long Goodbye is more than okay with me.
By Zach Mann
The Long Goodbye
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Contents
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I. From Metropolis With Love
A solitary figure looks down on a neon Hollywood Boulevard through dramatic blinds. He’s Superman and James Bond, played by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Montgomery, but not quite as super or suave. A cigarette droops from his bruised lip and a blond bombshell stands in the doorway, harboring secrets. She means trouble, but that’s okay, because trouble is Philip Marlowe’s business. The rate’s twenty-five bucks a day, plus expenses, and he prefers an itemized accounting, so you know exactly how much hero you get for your buck at the end of the week. Fortunately, heroism comes cheap, because Philip Marlowe practically gives it away. There’s a catch, though. Halfway through the story, he’ll probably stop caring who hired him in the first place and start following his own path, because his heart is too golden not to protect the meek or save the girl. He’s a bona fide, good ol’ American dogooder, and fortunately for film studio costume departments, there are no pesky red and blue tights required.
Like Superman and James Bond, Raymond Chandler’s not-so-super-hero is a pop culture icon. Marlowe is the most famous literary figure from early twentieth-century crime fiction, but most memorably, Chandler’s P.I. is Humphrey Bogart, detective cinema, the mascot for B-budget crime flicks, and inseparable in concept from the silver screen of the golden era of Hollywood cinema. United Artists should have known what they were getting into when David Picker convinced Robert Altman to direct the newest Chandler adaptation; they placed a sacred Hollywood staple into the hands of the most revisionist director in film history. Of course 1973′s The Long Goodbye came out of the editing room dyed red with satire. Of course the film opens with Hooray for Hollywood blasting tinnily over the opening credits, every note inundated with sticky, bittersweet irony. Of course the film’s release emblazoned a hostile slew of critics screaming, “That’s not Raymond Chandler! That’s not Philip Marlowe!”
By reputation, Robert Altman was an asshole. Everything he touched turned into a producer’s nightmare. He reneged on promises, developed hatred for his own actors and lorded over his films with a directorial vision that was one quarter genius and three quarters spite. I am a big fan of his work, but it is completely believable to me that Altman would intentionally disrespect Raymond Chandler to make his own movie. He didn’t, though, despite his intentions. Altman did everything he could to avoid making The Big Sleep 2, and yet to this day the Raymond Chandler estate considers The Long Goodbye one of the most accurate representations of Marlowe in film. Those critics crying sacrilege in 1973 were half wrong, because they weren’t Raymond Chandler fans. They were Bogey fans with a pounding Hollywood hangover, and what they meant to say was, “That’s not Humphrey Bogart!”
They were right. Altman’s choice to play Philip Marlowe was not Bogey, Robert Montgomery or even Dick Powell. Elliott Gould was a character actor with a skillset better suited for supporting roles. He didn’t have the shoulders. He didn’t have the cool. Quite frankly, he wasn’t manly enough to be America’s hero, and if trouble was his business, he wouldn’t even be able to handle the tax returns. In other words, revisionist Altman knew exactly who he was casting, and he made sure that his un-Bogart was guaranteed in his contract. Even Picker wanted Elliott Gould to play Marlowe so badly that he turned down the red hot Peter Bogdanovich because The Last Picture Show director wanted Robert Mitchum for the role. The quintessential tough guy private detective became the mumbling, slouching, quintessential seventies anti-hero, and it worked. Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe was a nervous creature, more apt to shrug than shoot, but even though he may not have been as hard-boiled as the early film versions, Gould’s Marlowe was still Superman without the superpowers and James Bond without the suavity – the hero without the means – and that was Chandler’s thing.
Gould, who even shared the exact same height, weight and age as Chandler’s hero, blended into the role. Leigh Brackett, who co-screenwrote The Big Sleep with William Faulkner, applied her familiarity with Chandler’s writing to a conceptually loyal script. Even Robert Altman insisted his cast all read Raymond Chandler Speaking. The Long Goodbye portrayed Chandler’s Marlowe loyally, and it did so for a specific reason. Marlowe’s chivalrous nature and hard-boiled wit are things of fiction, and Altman knew that the best way to satire an unrealistic hero is to show him as exactly that. Elliott Gould is Philip Marlowe as if he were peeled right off the page of a Chandler novel and placed smack dab in the middle of reality. The dramatic blinds and dreamlike neon signs are replaced with lazy apartment complexes and twenty-four hour supermarkets, and the question is asked: what if Marlowe was one of us? Just a slob like one of us?
And what if he lived in the seventies? That’s the premise to a film that Altman referred to as “Rip Van Marlowe.” Philip Marlowe opens the film waking up from the big sleep after a twenty-seven year nap, wearing a crumpled, mismatched blue suit and driving a vintage car (Gould’s own 1948 Lincoln). He takes his messages at a bar, talks politely to everyone who isn’t a cop, and floats through 1973 as a man removed from his time and void of context. Imagine if Sam Spade or any other forties-style private investigator suddenly found himself in Altman’s time, interchanging dialogue with every element of drug-induced free love, hate-induced civil unrest and run-of-the-mill seventies self-interest. He’d be a little flustered, too, mumbling to himself and losing the tough, cool exterior. Maybe Gould’s Marlowe isn’t so different from Bogey’s after all. He’s just out of his element, trying to take time travel in stride with a cigarette drooping on a bruised lip.
- The private eye is admittedly an exaggeration – a fantasy.
But at least he’s an exaggeration of the possible.
- Raymond Chandler - In Hollywood, anything can happen at all.
- Raymond Chandler - [My film] will put Marlowe to rest for good.
-Ernst BlofeldLex LuthorRobert Altman
II. Neverland
Over the course of Chandler’s bibliography, the gallant scoundrel with a sharp vocabulary transcended his pulp mold. Detective Marlowe became more of a literary figure, the proletarian anti-Holmes, whose street smarts and Americanesque distrust of power turned all of his encounters with Los Angeles’s upper crust and criminal element into social commentary. Likewise, Chandler the writer evolved, too, and because so many imitations of his work had been published by the fifties, he was able to reflect upon his creation and in turn write metacritically about his hero. In 1953′s The Long Goodbye, Mendy calls Marlowe “Tarzan on a big red scooter,” because Chandler knew: Marlowe was a relic trying to blend into a new era, and sticking out like a sore thumb. He was Don Quixote without the mental disorder, wearing a suit and tie just like everyone else, except the chilvary shined through and it was about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food (otherwise known as the best line from Farewell, My Lovely). In other words, Marlowe’s that guy wearing almost nothing, swinging from tree to tree, who is so earnestly good in his heart that saving the day/Jane is the only thing he really knows how to do. And he’s sitting on a big red scooter, looking like a fool.
This is an exaggeration, of course. The questionable realities of Marlowe’s character are a lot more inconspicuous than Tarzan or Moose Malloy. Like Chandler said, he’s an exaggeration of the possible. In books his not-so-impossible dream barely registers as romantic, and in films like The Big Sleep and Murder, My Sweet, Philip Marlowe and friends look about as real as anyone else in the movies. In the world of forties cinema, in the facades and pleasantvilles of America, where even the dark alleys of Los Angeles are controlled fantasy, Marlowe fits right in. In the world of seventies cinema, however, especially films made in the naturalist style, Marlowe looks less and less possible, even if it’s only by a subtle margin. It’s that subtle difference between forties and seventies cinema that Altman really focuses on with his Rip Van Marlowe-inspired satire, using every chance he can find to shout: Look how silly Marlowe is! Look how silly Hollywood was! Altman wants to put the idea of Marlowe to rest for good, to show everyone that he’s a mythical creature, a concept of pure make-believe that simply cannot exist outside of old black and white movies. Likewise, The Long Goodbye’s Marlowe comes off as a fool as he floats through the seventies, laughing nervously whenever he encounters something unfamiliar, mumbling “It’s okay with me” like little prayers to fend off reality.
Gould’s Marlowe seems to be aware of his own dilemma, and embarrassed, like everyone is watching him drive a big red scooter. The film becomes a tug-of-war between the hero of pulpdom and a director trying to tear him down, sitting behind the camera, sinisterly petting a white cat and/or Eve Teschmacher. The conflict is reflected in the final seconds of the film, as Marlowe approaches his vanishing point. As he walks farther and farther into the distance, “Hooray for Hollywood” returns and ironically hits home Altman’s thesis as Marlowe seems to phase out of the seventies and back into that office with the dramatic blinds, neon lights and swanky jazz. The winner, however, is ambiguous, because Marlowe dances to his bitter anthem. He dances upon his grave, because maybe Marlowe wasn’t kidding with all those it’s-okay-with-mes. As Don Quixote believed, some lies are worth choosing over reality. That was okay with Chandler. And it’s definitely okay with me.
III. Marlowe in Trust
I love The Long Goodbye for many reasons, but I think the film’s most significant asset is simply that it was made, that to this day Altman directed the one and only film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel (Climax! had a one-hour television version with Dick Powell). Chandler isn’t Cervantes, or Dostoevsky, but The Long Goodbye is his Don Quixote, his The Idiot. It’s the only Chandler novel that I would ever consider to be literature, and the only one that I would ever recommend. That The Long Goodbye was the first Marlowe novel that was not cannibalized from previously published pulp stories allowed Chandler to write something new, from scratch. In a year when his wife was dying, when he no longer lived in Los Angeles, Chandler turned inward. He wrote more contemplatively and more autobiographically. He allowed Marlowe to grow as a person and not just pinball from goon to dame, solving cases. He dealt with Marlowe as a complex figure, a man with a code, and what happens when that balance is compromised.
He dealt with something entirely new in the fantastical world of Philip Marlowe: friendship. I’m not talking about the newspaper guy in Farewell, My Lovely, the elevator man in Murder, My Sweet, the bartender in The Long Goodbye, or any other of Marlowe’s various superficial relationships. I’m talking about the kind of full on friendship between two guys that makes literary critics go horny for the term homoeroticism. In The Long Goodbye, Chandler introduces the character Terry Lennox, an accidental acquaintance of Marlowe’s with whom Marlowe shares many a gimlet and develops real trust. Lennox is Marlowe’s first friend and his presence in the storyline complicates the usual Chandleresque storyline. How can Marlowe simply do the right thing, when doing the right thing might compromise his bond with the one and only person he trusts? In other words, for the first time in the psychology of Marlowe, it’s complicated, and I’m not talking about the femme fatale’s web of lies.
- You’re cheap all over. You pal around with a guy, eat a few drinks, talk a few gags, slip him a little dough when he’s strapped, and you’re sold out to him.
- - the ever-critical Mendy Menendez
Altman and Brackett take Chandler’s idea of “Marlowe in trust” and thrust a magnifying glass over it. His relationships in the film are one-sided to the point of comedy. The cat leaves him when the food runs out, even after Marlowe goes to exaggerated lengths to please the animal, an elongated opening scene that, as Roger Ebert describes, “Establishes Marlowe as a man who is more loyal to his cat than anyone is to him.” Altman’s prologue lays out the premise to the film and serves as the perfect precursor to Terry Lennox’s arrival. Marlowe has a one-track mind in regards to lofty terms like chivalry, and friendship is no different. Terry Lennox knows that, and in both film and novel, he uses Marlowe’s misplaced faith to get what he wants. In the film, Lennox shows up on Marlowe’s door in the middle of the night, with blood on his hands, and asks Marlowe to drive him to Mexico. Marlowe consents, of course, because, as Lennox says at the end of the film, “That’s what friends are for.” Then Marlowe sits in prison for three days because he won’t rat on a friend, and you have to wonder, why does Lennox deserve Marlowe’s lofty friendship? As the cops ask, “How come you know so little about your friend, Marlowe?” Marlowe doesn’t think it matters, because he’s known his friend “for a very long time,” and he’s sold out to him. That’s it. Does that dictate friendship? For Tarzan on a big red scooter, definitely.
Terry Lennox used Marlowe’s screwed up idea of friendship to make him an accessory after the fact, to get away with murdering his own wife. He used Marlowe, the hero in metaphorical blue and red tights with the Don Quixote complex, to brutally end the life of a poor damsel in distress. He turned the hero of the Los Angeles meek into that which he stands against in dependable, comic-book consistency, a fact which seems very easy to forget at the end of Raymond Chandler’s novel, when Marlowe runs into this man again, shares another gimlet with him, and lets him go after he committed the worst possible crime against Marlowe’s character. Then again, that ending is exactly what makes Chandler’s novel his version of Don Quixote. In that moment, when he must choose to abandon either loyalty or justice, the fantasy of the private investigator crumbles, leaving a broken man and one of Chandler’s greatest passages:
- …You bought a lot of me, Terry. For a smile and a nod and a wave
of the hand and a few quiet drinks in a quiet bar here and there.
It was nice while it lasted. So long, amigo. I won’t say goodbye.
I said it to you when it meant something. I said it when it was sad,
and lonely, and final. - - Philip Marlowe
Raymond Chandler knew that “to say goodbye is to die a little,” and you really feel that at the end of the novel. The poetic thought captures a slice of the human condition. The phrase, “the long goodbye,” is consistently misused to this day as a reference to death or sentimental farewells, but Chandler’s long goodbye is neither figurative nor friendly. Marlowe isn’t a sentimental guy; his friend died and he made his peace with the notion like so many times before. It’s when the death of his friend kept popping back into relevancy that the grieving process become elongated. It’s when the validity of his friendship came into question that the original goodbye’s meaning became stretched and warped like a funhouse mirror. By the time Marlowe shares that congenial gimlet with his old friend Terry Lennox, the matter of forgiveness no longer applies. Like the poor knight on his death bed, this P.I. loses faith… and eventually elopes with some rich broad in Palm Springs.
IV. Nobody Cares But Me
Haruki Murakami is a big fan of Raymond Chandler’s, especially of The Long Goodbye, a fact that is evident to anyone who has read The Wild Sheep Chase, or anyone who knows that Murakami translated The Long Goodbye to Japanese himself. Murakami is a big fan of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, too, which seems clear in the beginning of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, when a cat goes missing ala Gould’s El Gato. I find it fitting that Murakami, in Kafka on the Shore, wrote that “…if a pistol appears in a story, eventually it’s got to be fired,” because the followup question seems to be asked in Altman’s film: if no gun ever appears in a story, can you ever expect one to be fired?
The same goes for violence in general. When the gangster Marty Augustine appears in the story with his multi-cultural merry men, the audience has seen nothing in the film but goofy, Hollywood-esque interchanges of witty dialogue. That’s why the coke bottle incident is so damn shocking. Marty suddenly smashes his innocent mistress’ face and says, “Now that’s someone I love. Think what could happen to you,” in a moment that the peerless Pauline Kael suggests might be the most violent scene in movie history. Even Marty’s henchmen all gawk in surprise in the background, stolen from the Hollywood fantasy. Then, as if it never happened, the film goes right back to being goofy, until the end, when we’re surprised all over again. In a film where no gun is ever revealed, where the only death is a suicidal drowning, where the one person who doesn’t seem to care about anything says, “Yah, nobody cares but me,” suddenly pulls out a gun and shoots his only friend in the world.
The ending, which is loosely ripped off from The Third Man, surprises you because the entire film is designed for you not to see it coming. Altman knew what he had in the ending (he made sure Leigh Brackett’s ending was guaranteed in his contract, too), and he used it to the fullest extent of the laws of fiction. The unsuspecting audience thinks that Marlowe is following up on a detective hunch, but really he’d solved the case long before and he’s going to see his friend with every intent to kill him. Altman intended to put Marlowe to rest for good and Leigh Brackett’s ending was his finishing move. He believed that Marlowe’s shooting of Lennox was completely outside of his character, that Chandler’s hero could never shoot in cold blood, or throw away his loyalty to a friend even in the face of betrayal. If you agree with Altman, that’s your perogative. It’s a drastic ending, and one that polarizes audiences of all intelligences.
I, however, think Altman was wrong, and that’s why I love this ending. The key detail here is that it wasn’t Altman’s ending; it was Leigh Brackett’s. Brackett, who was a science fiction writer with her own solar system, already wrote one Chandler screenplay and also wrote hard-boiled stories in the style of Chandler (with such amazing titles as “No Good from a Corpse”). Leigh Brackett may have had some radical ideas regarding Chandler’s hero, but they weren’t misinformed ideas. She knew Chandler, and she knew Marlowe. Despite Altman’s liberties with her script, Brackett said that The Long Goodbye honored her screenplay, that it kept her ideas on Marlowe intact. In other words, she believed that Philip Marlowe would shoot Terry Lennox, that it is completely inside his character. And I agree.
- The guy has a life whether there’s a book or not.
- - Elliott Gould
1999′s The World is Not Enough is not a good film, and maybe bringing it up now has just discredited my opinion completely, but I feel like the Bond-Marlowe comparison is apropos in this case (which it usually is, and if you don’t agree with that, you should listen to Fleming and Chandler discuss the differences and similarities of their heroes at the end of this audio book). I like The World is Not Enough solely because of one scene with Bond and Elektra King, and not only because Sophie Marceau looks like Sophie Marceau. Elektra tells Bond, who is holding a gun to her, that he can never kill in cold blood, as if she were some metacritic commenting on his character, and 007, in a moment of exaggerated inner turmoil, kills her in cold blood.
My response: Yes, James Bond would kill in cold blood. He’s a spy with a license to kill. The character isn’t limited to pulp fiction anymore. All of these film adaptations and pop culture commentaries have released characters like Bond and Marlowe from their authors, something to which even Chandler would attest. Marlowe, the hard-boiled P.I. of maverick justice, would shoot Lennox. Terry was a murderer who killed an innocent woman and he showed absolutely no remorse when confronted. Marlowe was sworn to protect people like Sylvia Lennox and Terry put him in a situation where he had to clean up after the mess. The cops thought he was dead. Marlowe was the only person in the world who could punish him, he had an obligation to do so, and he could do so without consequences, or as Donald Sutherland hilariously said in monotone when he first saw the film’s finale: “Oh, I see. It’s all about morality.”
In my opinion, the ending of Altman’s film is Marlowe’s last stand, his last comment to the world, the ultimate expression of his beliefs. Philip Marlowe does it in spite of Altman, as if Brackett’s creation became sentient and resiliently shoved a middle finger at the camera, at his archnemesis the director. Only then does he accept his fate and disappear into fictional history, dancing away from the camera victoriously, laughing at a new Hollywood that thought he was less than he was. As he disappears from the screen, I can imagine Philip Marlowe singing cheerfully, “It’s okay with me,” as he steps back into his Cahuenga office and waits for the next case.
- Harry, don’t you know you’re never gonna be a first-grade hood?
- Gould as Marlowe - I remember when people just had jobs.
- Harry
V. The Big Nap
El Gato jumps on Elliott Gould’s chest, waking him. Gould is already dressed, sprawled across his bed as if he’d been placed there after a nasty blackjack and Philip Marlowe figuratively wakes for the first time since 1953. Rip Van Marlowe emerges from The Big Nap, but he’s not the only one anachronistically roaming The Long Goodbye. The youngest member of Marty Augustine’s posse, Harry admits to idolizing George Raft and other classic cinema gangsters. He pops up occasionally in the film, dressed head to toe in silver screen swank, and serves as the bumbling comedy relief. Harry is probably the more obvious tarzan on a big red scooter in the movie, to the point of Three Stooges slapstick.
Little throwbacks to older Hollywood can be found throughout The Long Goodbye. Per the impressionist who works security at the Malibu Colony, these golden era personas are caricatures. Just like the film’s second poster, they should be drawn by the artists of Mad Magazine. Even Asta is merely a stray dog, blocking a car, as out-of-place as Nick and Nora Charles would be in 1973, and Altman purposefully juxtaposes each throwback archtype alongside contemporary personalities. Hippies practice yoga naked next door to Marlowe. A seen-it-all black policeman arrests an angry black youth for throwing a brick at a cop. A party at the Wade residence is jampacked with yuppies and fellow Malibu Colony resident Terry Lennox is the epitome of his decade with long blond hair, peacock-loud clothing and an outrageous convertible.
- Ronald Reagan? The Actor!?
- - Dr. Emmett Brown
The cast of The Long Goodbye is unabashedly contemporary, chosen as much for the buzz of their names and lack of relationship with Hollywood as their acting. David Carradine shows up in a throwaway cameo as Marlowe’s cellmate, raving madly about the crime of possession. Jim Bouton, who plays Lennox, is an ex-Yankee baseball pitcher who gained fame for publishing Ball Four, a tell-all book about immoral activity in Major League Baseball. Meanwhile, Eileen Wade is played by Nina Van Pallandt, a model famous mostly for being the mistress of Clifford Irving, author of his own tell-all book, the fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. The unforgivable nowness of the casting had to be an accident, but it also works beautifully in the fabric of the film. Nina’s proficiency at playing a Chandler temptress seems like an unintentional bonus.
The best performance of the supporting bunch is probably that of Mark Rydell, future director and underrated character actor. His execution as the polite and logical crimelord Marty Augustine exists somewhere between the charmingly witty Kirk Douglas in Out of the Past, and Javier Bardem’s coin-flip psychopath of No Country For Old Men. The audience is unsure in every scene which of the two personas to expect and either result fills the screen with exciting presence and an off-beat relationship with the camera that reminds me more of monologues in Scorsese and Tarantino movies than Altman’s. The worst performance goes to future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who can only manage to stand around awkwardly in a funny mustache, flexing his pecs in a lineless role. Current audiences cherish the cameo, of course, especially when the drunkenly improvising Elliott Gould mentions 1973′s ex-actor governor, Ronald Reagan. As another time traveler once emphasized to Michael J. Fox, the differences between old America and new America are even more topsy-turvy than Gould’s theme-understating American flag tie.
Altman and his cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond extend the expectation game to filmmaking. Of course the spiteful Altman made a detective film with (almost) no guns, no shootouts, no sex and no chase scenes besides one absurd sequence where Gould tries to run down a car with a cigarette in his mouth. The film’s pace is casual and organic instead of the twisty thrill ride expected from the crime genre, a crucial difference that caused box office disaster until the original gun-toting strategy was replaced by a comedy-driven marketing package. Vilmos Zsigmond flashed the film, which Barry Sonnenfeld suggests “…adds a bit of milkiness to the blacks, desaturates the colors and uncrisps everything,” creating unfamiliar contrasts and dreamy, washed out colors like an old postcard. It’s as if The Long Goodbye exists in both decades at once. Forties gangsters join sides with petty thugs, doped up ex-baseball players are best friends with hard-boiled private investigators, and Chandler’s Los Angeles overlaps Robert Altman’s like a parallel dimension.
VI. Sterling vs Hemingway
One of the biggest forties implants was yet another accident. Robert Altman’s first choice to play Roger Wade was Dan Blocker, and when Blocker died on the even of pre-production, the film barely survived. The only reason The Long Goodbye survived was the name of the next guy on the list to play Wade, a name famous for top billings in Kubrik films and a face almost as associated with film noir as the character of Philip Marlowe. Sterling Hayden was a classical leading man in all the ways that Gould wasn’t. He was imposing, manly, handsome and he commanded the fill attention of the adience when he stepped into a scene.
In transitioning from that man to a supporting role in a naturalist film, Hayden strruggled. The classic leading man in a cast fill of fresh tabloid faces didn’t know how to work without marks and he rebelled against Altman’s new style of filmmaking. He was an old-fashioned actor, an old dog being forced to learn new tricks, and while it could have ended in disaster, something happened in the interim. Hayden did learn new tricks. In the end he came to Vilmos Zsigmond and personally thanked him for opening him up as an actor.
“Open up” might be the best phrase to describe the performance. Roger Wade exploded into each frame, swinging his arms about wildly as Gould’s tame Marlowe kept his folded. Whereas Mark Rydell’s character bubbled with potential energy, Sterling Hayden left no amount of energy untapped. Both characters seemed capable of anything, but in the end it was Rydell’s that seemed the most frightening. Hayden’s Roger Wade used himself up in every scene until he’d exhausted all he had to give. What was left was a pathetic creature, an empty vessel that, unlike most performance of alcoholics on screen, actually appeared empty.
- I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?
- - Ernest Hemingway
In 1953, Ernest Hemingway was at the end of his career. The press had made him a running joke in the media, a burnt out writer that might have found his way on a dignity-destroying reality television series if he were around in this era. Raymond Chandler, like many writers, was sympathic to the situation. Chandler had his own fears of following in Hemingway’s footsteps, and those insecurities found their way into his novel. The Long Goodbye had become a study in the character of Philip Marlowe, but it was also a book about the author himself. Chandler fleshed out the parts of Marlowe that most resembled his personality and with the rest he created the autobiographical Roger Wade. He was Chandler’s portrait of what it’s like when a writer is an emotional corpse.
Sure, maybe Sterling Hayden was opened up a little too much as an actor. Maybe he was drunk and high in every scene and went a little too crazy on camera, pushing the word “overacting” to its critical limit. In the context of The Long Goodbye, it worked, because Roger Wade is Chandler’s monster, part self-loathing genre author and part self-destructive Hemingway. Hayden, yet again, came through with a command performance; he very memorably became Chandler’s monster.
- That picture would have been more successful if you had been quiet.
- - Nina Foch
VII. Shadowboxing
Probably the most superficial parody of forties cinema in The Long Goodbye is Elliott Gould’s comically exaggerated chainsmoking. He lights strike-anywheres off random mise-en-scene like Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet and does an awful impression of real nicotine addicts. It’s a gag, and it’s part stupid, part harmless fun. It’s a lot more innocuous than the incessant mumbling of Gould’s character in the movie, of which Nina Foch is only one critic. The strategy is used both to mimic the hard-boiled narrator and lampoon Hollywood voiceovers. If it were for only that purpose, I’d agree with the harshest critics, but I believe Gould’s not-so-inner-monologue serves a second, more stylistically pertinant role. Just as Hawkeye in Altman’s M*A*S*H whistles his way out of scenes, and just as Rocky Balboa shadowboxes his way down the street, Elliott Gould’s Marlowe is always moving. He tap dances through the film, a feat that Broadway-tested Gould can probably do, and assists each transition in the movie.
Zsigmond’s cameras seem to have the same restless energy, to the same end. The camera moves in The Long Goodbye 99% of the time, a fact that few people are aware of at the time of viewing. Via gliding zooms and slow pans, the vague sense of constant motion emulates the experience of the voyeuristic Marlowe as he floats passively through the film like a female protagonist in a nineteenth century novel. Actors have no marks and most shots are obscured by foregrounds like shrubbery or windows, requiring the camera to record organically, adding ambient focus to the already uncrisp visuals of Zsigmond’s overflashing. The result is stylistically fascinating, but lacking for visual wow moments. Instead, Altman uses hard cuts and close-ups sparingly, for key moments, and doesn’t rely on the crutch of cut-to-close-up-shot that so many directors depend on nowadays.
These slow pans and zooms blend across scenes. With the constant movement of the actors, scenes blend together fluidly. A big part of this effect is the sound, which overlaps scenes almost carelessly, and the guiltiest audio in this regard is the use of the soundtrack. The theme song by Johnny Williams and Mercer, who aptly wrote “Hooray for Hollywood” as well, is utilized in different ways throughout the film, ranging from a Mexican funeral march to swinging jazz to a doorbell. Often times the song is synched up so that when scenes change and styles change, the song stays the same, an ambient sequence of tones that seems to care more about impressing the audience with its versatility than anticipate plot points. Playing games with the song might have been Altman’s main intent, but the means are justified by a soundtrack that weaves itself into the film instead of merely existing as accompaniment.
- Altman’s lazy, haphazard putdown is without affection or understanding, a nose-thumb not only at the idea of Philip Marlowe but at the genre that his tough-guy-soft-heart character epitomized. It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire.
- - Jay Cocks, Time Magazine
These overlapping sounds and camera movements weren’t done with pinpoint accuracy. The Long Goodbye is almost sloppy, and while some critics feel the film gets away with the looseness of Altman’s directing, plenty others couldn’t stand it. One contingent never could forgive Altman for his director-comes-first style of filmmaking and others seemed to only forgive him when his film turned out successful enough (M*A*S*H, Nashville). In The Long Goodbye, some important scenes are too short, some transitions are too long, and watching the film without captions is a challenge. Altman’s negligence to ensure that the audience can hear the film might have worked in M*A*S*H, but it dragged down The Long Goodbye’s watchability, and hurt his career almost everywhere else. It made an enemy out of Warren Beatty after McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and it stayed in the negative column of most critics’ opinions of Altman until he streamlined his style in films such as Short Cuts.
The film found a mixed bag of reactions. Some contemporary critics, like Vincent Canby, were enamored by the film, and even thriller-famed director Alfred Hitchcock counted himself as a fan. Since then other directors have worshipped The Long Goodbye, most publically being the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. Modern audiences disagree as well. Some find the molasses pace excrutiating while others have welcomed The Long Goodbye as some kind of hidden treasure. The internet has found it placed at #1 in Peter and Rob’s most underrated movies list, and near the hearts of film students like Accelerated Decrepitude and another blog called It’s Okay With Me. The fact is, if everyone liked The Long Goodbye, it wouldn’t be an Altman film, and that wouldn’t be okay with me.
The Long Goodbye shadowboxes classic Hollywood for two hours. That might be my favorite thing about the film. As much as Altman wants to attack normative standards of film, The Long Goodbye doesn’t simply lampoon old Marlowe flicks. It wages debate with thoughtful rebuttals and it lets Chandler, Marlowe, Sterling Hayden and pals fight back. It creates a fantastical plane of existence where literature meets film and the forties meets the seventies, and it lets the audience decide for themselves as the two sides jab at each other with ironic dialogue. When the curtain closes and that sappy version of Hooray For Hollywood plays again, some people fall in love with the turn of meta-events immediately and some are appalled by the realization that they’d just been screwed with, but most people don’t know what to think until hours or days later. Then there’s me, who went to bed that first night unable to think about anything else, and woke up early the next morning with a nagging desire to rewatch it.
Nearly a decade later, I still haven’t lost that itch.
I reserve the right to update content when discovering new information. Last update: July 1, 2011.
- Zach Mann