The Long Goodbye

Featuring an Enzian Film Club discussion with Paul Reich, Ph.D. from Rollins College!

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye stands as one of the most unique cinematic interpretations of Raymond Chandler’s iconic detective, Phillip Marlow (Elliot Gould), who is transplanted from the Los Angeles of the 1940s to 1970s Hollywood. When Marlowe’s friend Terry Lennox suddenly disappears after the murder of his wife, Marlowe becomes entangled in a case involving gangsters, crooked cops, wealthy eccentrics, and a mysterious writer.

At the center of the film, Marlowe is rumpled, distracted, loyal to a fault, and seemingly incapable of adjusting to a world that has left him behind. Altman and screenwriter Leigh Brackett (who had penned the script for Chandler’s The Big Sleep back in 1946) surround him with sun-drenched streets, hippies, health-food fanatics, aging movie stars, and oddball Hollywood characters, creating a sharp contrast between Chandler’s classic hard-boiled pragmatism and the cynical free-wheeling atmosphere of the 1970s.

The film also marked one of the most distinctive collaborations between Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), whose drifting camera and deliberately unconventional compositions give The Long Goodbye a dreamlike visual style. John Williams’s score (his second and final for Altman) is equally inventive, reappearing throughout the film in radically different arrangements as Marlowe moves through an increasingly fractured landscape.

Celebrated by auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson (whose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherit Vice stands as a direct homage to Altman and his film), The Long Goodbye has since become one of Altman’s most iconic films and an essential work of 1970s American cinema.

_{1973, 112 Minutes, USA, Directed by Robert Altman, Rated R, Digital}