The Long Goodbye
NOBODY did hard boiled crime fiction quite like Raymond Chandler. Tough and moralistic with a gift for wise-cracking, straight-talking dialogue that lifted his books from the pulp world they frequented into a more rarefied stratosphere, it was inevitable his work would find a home in Hollywood.
The Long Goodbye is a great example of how the film world tackled that potent prose and how it portrayed perhaps his greatest creation, private investigator Philip Marlowe, on the big screen.
Watching Robert Altman's 1973 directorial interpretation of Chandler's 1953 novel today it remains a masterful slice of mean, lean storytelling. We first meet Marlowe (played with a glorious world-weary charm by the great Elliott Gould) in his LA apartment, where he receives a visit from a friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) who asks him for a lift to the Mexican border where he plans to cross into Tijuana.
Marlowe agrees to make the journey, but on his way home is stopped by cops who inform him that Lennox is on the run after murdering his wealthy wife Sylvia. When the private investigator can't help them with their inquiries, they throw him in jail, but release him when they find out Lennox has killed himself. The authorities consider the case closed, but Marlowe has other ideas.
Back on the streets, he is approached by Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt) who hires him to find out what happened to her husband Roger (Sterling Hayden), a booze-addled writer who's gone missing. As Marlowe digs into the story, he discovers Roger and Eileen were close to the deceased Lennox and his mysterious but very wealthy wife, Sylvia.
It's not long before the mob, in the shape of gangster Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell), get involved and things start getting really strange and pretty dangerous into the bargain.
The Long Goodbye is a classic Chandler crime fable effectively told by Altman, and Gould is predictably brilliant as the much put-upon private eye who's dragged into a moral-free criminal underbelly be can't abide.
Bogart might be the big screen actor most famous for playing Marlowe – the sheer iconic class of his performance in The Big Sleep (1946) certainly justifies that status – but Gould nails the tired, jaded persona of the man with real class, and his turn here is quite beautifully judged.
The relocation of the action to 1970s LA works well, with the whole thing beautifully shot by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. A memorable soundtrack from John Williams and Johnny Mercer only adds to the magic.
The unfolding mystery at the core of Chandler's tightly wound story is teased out slowly by Altman, always a director who likes to take his time, but the strong visuals, crackling dialogue and intense central performances pull you in and make the running time of almost two hours pass by in a flash.
The dark satirical humour and wise guy one-liners that the author delivered in all his work are all present and correct here, making The Long Goodbye a superb adaptation of a very special American novel.
