Robert Altman Study Part 18: The Long Goodbye

From the western, Altman moved on to film noir with similar intent: subverting expectations. Not so much subverting genre; though his cinematic reinventions and their timing aligned him with the film school brat generation, he's not exactly of them. He's almost a generation older, for one; for another, he's less interested in meta explorations than in using generic conventions to disregard storytelling. The Long Goodbye, despite its undermining of Bogart's Marlowe ideal, isn't about undermining noir. It's about twisting the expectations of noir to comment on the shifting mores of the day.

Altman referred to Elliott Gould's portrayal of Raymond Chandler's iconic private eye as "Rip Van Marlowe." The idea was to take the '50s-era detective and drop him into the world of 1973. And Gould's Marlowe does feel like a man out of time: he wears a suit and tie, however rumpled, while his neighbors practice topless yoga. He's the only character who smokes in this health-conscious era, striking his matches on whatever available surface. And he has a firm sense of morality and justice at a time when such notions feel quaint and outdated.

All of which makes him a sucker rather than a hero, a notion that offended Chandler devotees. But it also gets paid off in his killing of Terry Lennox, a drastic departure from the source novel that originated not with Altman but with screenwriter Leigh Brackett but which Altman made a contractual obligation of his taking on the film. Everyone in the film except for Marlowe is absorbed in their own self-interest, down to his picky cat, who disappears when Marlowe attempts to pass off a non-approved brand of cat food.

Once again Altman thrives when he can push story to the background and focus on details. The big reveal of Lennox's betrayal is relegated to a mumbled voiceover running against sunset shots of Mexican cityscapes. There is an utter disregard for the "mystery" at the heart of the story, which is fundamentally changed from Chandler's book, though Chandler himself preferred language to narrative sense. Brackett's final scene, leading up to Lennox's shooting, is a fairly typical sum-up of the details. In Altman's hands, most of this dialogue is jettisoned - just enough remains to make some sense of the plot, but what's important is Gould's sense of resigned indignation.

Altman reportedly insisted that key cast and crew read Raymond Chandler Speaking, a collection of correspondence and essays in which the author propounds on the detective story, writing, and cats - a clue to where that opening scene comes from. Much of the film's attitude can be found in these pages; even if Chandler might not have approved of the changes made, as he rarely did in the adaptations of his books, he'd have to admit to a shared philosophy. Even an offhand description of Marlowe striking his matches on any convenient surface emerges in the film's depiction of the character, a trait not mentioned explicitly in any of the novels or stories.