The Long Goodbye (1973)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Long Goodbye (1973) – R. Altman

Now that I’ve read Raymond Chandler’s original novel, I can see the liberties that screenwriter Leigh Brackett (who also adapted Chandler’s The Big Sleep in the 1940s) took with the material.  Naturally, she had to reduce the plot and eliminate secondary characters, not to mention adapting everything to fit director Robert Altman’s conceptualization of the film as showing a 1950s Philip Marlowe trying to operate in early 1970s L. A.. But she also changed the ending, giving it more of a punchline.  Having seen the film many times over the years, I wasn’t prepared for how much richer the novel would actually be (and I anticipated an ending that wasn’t really there).  Yet, for all that, Altman’s film functions as a work of art all on its own.  For one, he applies his “high concept” to create a disjunction between the P. I.’s no nonsense behaviour and expectations and the actions of the me generation all around him.  Altman also uses his usual idiosyncratic techniques (improvisation by the actors, overlapping dialogue, a restless camera that often zooms) to further disconnect this version of Chandler from the films noir of the 1940s.  Vilmos Zsigmond’s colour cinematography, utilising his “flashing” technique to reduce contrast, also takes the look of the film away from that earlier canon – it feels 70s (and a muscle-bound Schwarzenegger cameo adds to the effect).  Despite all this, Elliott Gould’s Marlowe rings true.  In the book, he’s also a smartass, unafraid to use sarcasm with all the wrong people, quick with the one-liner; he doesn’t avoid trouble and he always plays it straight up.  Sterling Hayden (with his excellent noir pedigree) is also note perfect as raging alcoholic novelist Roger Wade; however, his role is much diminished compared to the book.  But leaving the book aside (regardless of the fresh insights it provides into the movie), another highlight of Altman’s telling is the music.  He takes a schmaltzy song written by John Williams and Johnny Mercer (“The Long Goodbye”) and fills the soundtrack with it, having it played by every diegetic device (car radio, lounge bar pianist, Mexican marching band, even a doorbell) and all over the soundtrack in different versions by different singers/musicians.  This adds to the “experimental” feeling of the film.  But the overall effect is “loose” and a swell homage to noir and to sunny California.