Cheap The Long Goodbye (DVD) (Elliott Gould, Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden) (Robert Altman) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Long Goodbye

The cinematography, the story line, the quality of the acting, and above all the brilliant direction make this to be a haunting, unforgettable and totally fascinating film. You'll love it! I saw this movie 28 years ago, and it just gets better with time.

And Elliott Gould is awesome!

Gould is a surprisingly good Marlowe
Director Robert Altman can find a sublimely goofy sort of humor in almost any setting, and he does so here. For one thing, the musical score consists of a single tune played over and over by different performers.

What's amazing is how well this self-conscious jokiness fits with the bleak motivations of the flick's traditionally noir characters.

Gould's Everyman-ish anti-Marlowe is one you'd actually like to hang out with. He's just as good with cats as with comebacks, for instance.

If you've ever wondered how someone like Elliott Gould could be the top box-office draw in America for a short period in the 1970s, you should give "The Long Goodbye" a look. For a brief, shining moment, the man was king.

As Marlowe says, "It's OK with me."

Gumshoe, '60's Style
The screenplay (Leigh Brackett) of The Long Good-bye is unusually well thought out and coherent. For a private-eye movie, that's an exception, and I suspect it's that very tightness which forced the famously anarchic Altman into a disciplined groove. It also helped produce this, his most accomplished, film. Then too, only an audacious film-maker of Altman's calibre could have brought such an irreverent approach to the screen.

Small wonder Chandler purists detest this 1960's version of Phillip Marlowe. Like others of that period, the film sets about subverting an icon of the popular culture. Elliot Gould's Marlowe is anything but the hard-boiled professional audiences have come to admire and expect. Instead, he's grubby, feckless, and seemingly too disengaged to care about Chandler's prized passion: chasing after truth despite an uncaring corrupt society. Worse, one suspects Gould's Marlowe is a hippie at heart, ready to chuck it all and head for the woods with his beloved cat, a load of pot, and a world-weary "Its OK with me". Moreover, he's tossed about by most every event that comes his way, too burned-out to complete a thought and too bummed-out to press an investigation. He can't even find his cat. The slouching gait and hang-dog expression have all the assurance and verve of a man headed for a hanging. Bogart's classic impersonation, it ain't.

But Altman has laid a trap, one that only comes into focus at film's end. It's a startling yet oddly believable turn of events. Head doctors term this type of reconfiguration Gestalt Shift, and here the shift is a rewarding one, causing us to go back and re-examine the Gould character and his passage through what has gone before. It's also a brilliant stroke which at last links the counter-cultural Marlowe to the classic version. There are many fine touches in the film, including a highly effective use of sudden violence, particularly runty Henry Gibson's slam-bang humbling of lordly Sterling Hayden (he knows about drunks). And, for once, Altman's penchant for non-actors like Jim Bouton does little damage, although I wish the ending had skipped the ill-advised "Hooray for Hollywood". Nonetheless, this is one of the half dozen or so films that define counter-cultural film-making from the 60's. However, Its key Southern California ambience is best viewed, as other reviewers point out, in wide-screen. So catch up with that mode if you can.