Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of pulp legend Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye is simultaneously an act of revisionism as well as a parody of the then-nascent neo-noir revival. It’s also, perhaps, the director’s most audacious act of genre deconstruction in a career filled with contenders, most of which are accompanied by ampersands: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, O.C. & Stiggs, and Vincent & Theo.
There’s no “and” to pair off with Elliot Gould’s interpretation of Philip Marlowe. Though the film opens on a note of camaraderie and trust between Marlowe and his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton), who appears to be in a major pinch but who Marlowe whisks to Tijuana with no questions asked, the rest of the film punctuates the complete dislocation of traditional noir masculinity from the cultural snooze button that was post-1960s California.
In Chandler’s seven novels, Marlowe’s composure in rat-a-tat-tat surroundings was cool and disarming. But in Altman’s Los Angeles of Hemingway wannabes, thousand-dollar-a-day psychiatric playground retreats, Barbara Stanwyck-impersonating parking attendants, cats with gourmet tastes, and aficionados of naked yoga with a penchant for pot brownies, Marlowe’s persona isn’t only a relic, it’s practically uncool.
Altman’s “Rip Van Marlowe” is said to reveal just how much had changed in the two decades between Chandler’s novel and Altman’s film, and the casting of Gould (over producers Jerry Bick and Elliott Kastner’s preferred choice of Robert Mitchum) works in spite of the notion that a Jewish Marlowe might seem as much a sign of the times as one seedy character’s reference to then Governor Ronald Reagan. (Bick and Kastner would have the chance to go back to their original intentions when they cast Mitchum in 1975’s Farewell, My Lovely.)
The screenplay by Leigh Brackett, who also scripted Howard Hawks’s adaptation of Chandler’s The Big Sleep, streamlines a lot of detail out of what might be the author’s densest tome, and not only the material that would draw attention away from the anachronism of a ’70s Marlowe. Gone are subplots and minor characters and, in fact, the story’s mystery ends up a great deal simpler in the film version. It’s all to make room for Gould’s funny, free-associative performance. He mumbles wildly just like Beatty in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, essentially negating what was one of Chandler’s most enduring traits: his icy, precise verbiage.
Still, for all the film’s revisionism, one tenet of the noir genre remains a holdover, existing in Altman’s film without revision or irony. For a man to be betrayed by another man when the two held a previously honorable agreement is a moral crime, punishable by death. However, when a man is betrayed by a woman—in Marlowe’s case, when he’s played for a patsy by the woman he thought was as sweet and soft as the dried apricots she served him—it’s so taken for granted and upsets his worldview so little, it’s hardly worth a whistling tune on the harmonica.
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