Well, friends, I am pleased to have made it through the entirety of The Long Goodbye, a Robert Ctrl-Alt-Deleteman travesty based on a novel by Saint Raymond Chandler. And by made it through, I admit it’s not the first time I tried.
You see, here at Honormoor, tradition holds that when Heather leaves town, Brian J:
- Laments the home without the beautiful wife.
- Counts the hours until her return, and decides to soldier on.
- Pours a yummy Guinness Draught.
- Rearranges the den so that the recliner takes its deserved prominence before the television.
- Procures a folding table to hold the remote, the aforementioned yummy Guinness Draught, and the reading material (Barron’s, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and so on).
- Inserts The Long Goodbyeinto the
PlayStation 2DVD player. - Tries to struggle through the lingering close-ups and extraneous emoting Altman demands.
This time, though, I made it through. Last time Heather was AFT (Away From Town), I only made it to the conversation between Wade and his wife describing the impotence of the writer with the innovative use of the reflection of Marlowe on the beach. When I passed that mark this time, though, I startled a cat with a loud “Huzzah!”
So what’s good about the film?
- Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe. Of course, Gould’s done a lot of the audiobook versions of Chandler’s novels, so I am used to his narration.
- Speaking of which, Marlowe does a lot of talking-to-himself asides (when wandering out of earshot of other characters), and these asides are properly in the voice I would expect from the Chandler detective.
- As a viewer from 30 years in the future, I was interested in the contemporary settings into which Altman placed the (then) 30-year-old Marlowe. The depiction of L.A. in 1973 was interesting in itself.
What’s bad?
- Running a Chandler plot through an Altman prism? Double plus ungood.
- Lingering about six beats too many on plot points or conversations that do not advance the script.
- Marlowe never finds out about his cat.
- The ending, in which Marlowe….well, it would never fly today as it flew then. Not in a blockbuster which appealed to the unwashed masses for whom Chandler was actually writing. It was too abrupt, as though Altman knew he’d expended two hours on irrelevant closeups and repeated renditions of the title song and had to cut something like “plot.”
So if you’re a Chandler fan, I’d recommend viewing it. It’s not The Big Sleep or The Big Sleep, but Gould might make a better Marlowe than Bogart or Mitchum. Until The Blue Dahlia comes out on DVD, we Chandlerites have to choose our battles among those who would dare interpret his work on screen.
