The Long Goodbye

The introductory view of the slumbering shamus points up the oneiric state (cf. Godard's Made in USA), Robert Altman orchestrates the rest as a jangly genre autopsy. "Rip Van Marlowe" and "Marlboro Man," the shaggy private eye (Elliott Gould), pushed around in his bungalow by his own cat. Modern Los Angeles is an overlit sarcophagus for whatever the Sixties stood for, the old Hollywood system is now a gated Malibu community lamely guarded by a vaudevillian specializing in impressions. Hiding his honor behind a shrugging byword ("It's okay with me"), Marlowe takes the case of the absconding friend (Jim Bouton) and the spray-tanned Contessa (Nina van Pallandt). The windy novelist (Sterling Hayden) is Neptune beached, a totem of sloshed machismo toppled by a runty quack (Henry Gibson). The hopped-up gangster (Mark Rydell) orders beatings, lives proudly next to Nixon, and might be a movie producer. The gumshoe endures it all, but draws the line at betrayal. "Case closed. All zipped up like a big bag of shit." Altman's camera prowls, scuttles, weaves volatile texture, becomes a pretty moll's face and gets a bottle smashed across it. At one point, he languidly zooms through a glassy door in a triangular composition (arguing couple within seaside home, Marlowe by the distant surf), changing focus for a Hockney effect. At another, he dissolves from a closeup of a five-thousand-dollar bill to a tracking shot south of the border, capping the Hustonian feint with a view of a pair of humping mutts. Rumpled honor in the face of irrelevance, maladies papered over with fads ("Freudian analysis, primal scream... I need a cigarette myself"), a hammer brought down hard on the crust of noir veneration. John Williams' ballad—a barkeep's tune, a doorbell chime, a Mexican marche funèbre—is the filmmaker's sardonic chortle. The ending quotes The Third Man, and skips over to The Big Lebowski. Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. With David Arkin, Warren Berlinger, Jo Ann Brody, Rutanya Alda, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.