Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is one of the best loved and most enduring of private eyes. Chandler’s plots can sometimes be confusing. Howard Hawks recounts that when making The Big Sleep (1946), they contacted Chandler to determine who was the murderer and even he wasn’t sure! What makes the Chandler books so endearing is not their plots but Chandler / Marlowe’s dialogues, full of whimsical observations and wisecracks, and unique description of people and places. Take this introduction about a new visitor to Marlowe’s house in The Long Goodbye:
You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young man in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other. From his voice and articulation you wouldn’t have known he had had anything stronger than orange juice to drink.
One way to retain the Chandler/ Marlowe observations is to use voiceover by the actor playing Marlowe. A good example of this is the 1975 Farewell, My Lovely with Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, which opens with the following voiceover by Mitchum:
This past spring was the first that I felt tired and realized I was growing old. Maybe it was the rotten weather we’d had in L.A. Maybe the rotten cases I’d had. Mostly chasing a few missing husbands and then chasing their wives once I found them, in order to get paid. Or maybe it was just the plain fact that I am tired and growing old.
In addition to being a novelist, Raymond Chandler was also a scriptwriter. His screenplays include Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Strangers on a Train (1950). The Long Goodbye was written in 1953, after the aforementioned scripts. Perhaps for whenever the book was turned to a movie and for whoever was going to write and direct it, Chandler provides a clear self-description of Marlowe in The Long Goodbye:
I’m a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I’m a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I’ve been in jail more than once and I don’t do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don’t like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I’m a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.
In his 1973 Marlowe movie, The Long Goodbye, maverick director Robert Altman shakes up this particular genre and, in the process, reinvents Philip Marlow. Altman dispenses with voiceovers, relocates the story from the fifties to the seventies and Marlowe is no longer the tough, no-nonsense character. Altman’s Marlowe, as played by Elliot Gould, is a wisecracking guy who uses words, rather than punches, to strike those unfriendly to him. He always has a tie around his neck and a cigarette in his hand. He lives with an Indian cat who only eats curry flavoured cat food. His neighbours are a group of young girls who like to dance in the nude and for whom Marlowe does errands.
The Long Goodbye has a theme song of the same title, very much in tune with the film noir genre. This song can be heard throughout the film in various forms, a singer singing it in a lounge, being played on the radio, a character humming it or played on the soundtrack. However, Altman opens and closes the movie with the thirties song Hooray for Hollywood to emphasize the camp and Hollywood nature of the film’s atmosphere. There are other pointers highlighting the closeness of the locality of the picture to Hollywood. A security guard for a private residence greets visitors with imitations of actors such as James Cagney and Barbara Stanwyck.
The plot is a standard private eye story. Marlowe is hired by a femme fatal (Nina van Pallandt) to find her missing husband, an author (Sterling Hayden, a veteran of the classic film noirs such as The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing). This leads to a web of intrigue, deception and murder involving the disappearance of an old friend (Jim Bouton), a mob boss (Mark Rydell, himself a director of films such as On Golden Pond), a suspicious psychiatrist (Altman regular, Henry Gibson), and the cops. The Long Goodbye’s script was written by Leigh Bracket, who also wrote the script for The Big Sleep. For Altman though the plot is secondary. He is more interested in form rather than content. Typically, there are overlapping conversations or, if Altman is not that interested in the dialogue, it is drowned by external noise or in one case he cuts away from a conversation to a funeral procession.
Altman’s most influential collaborator in this film is cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. In some of the shots, we see two characters having a conversation in the foreground and another character far away in the background, typically seen through a window. Altman and Zsigmond make LA one of the film’s main characters. Shots have the sea in the background, reflections in the glass and creative use of the zoom and wide-angle lenses. These further highlight the complications of the plot and add to the noir atmosphere.
Film buffs can spot Robert Altman as an ambulance driver and Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the heavies. The Long Goodbye is a film for which the saying “there’s more than meets the eye” is quite apt and it repays repeat viewings. The ending is reminiscent of another noir classic, The Third Man. It is neither happy nor sad and perfectly in tune with the book’s theme and title. As Chandler/ Marlowe notes in the book:
To say goodbye is to die a little.
