Altman's 'The Long Goodbye'

"What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough." 

--Eugene Delacroix

Synopsis: Washed-up, wise-cracking detective Phillip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) attempts to clear a friend who is accused of murdering his wife, all the while pulling together various scrambled threads and red herrings in the sun-bleached underbelly of a neo-noir Los Angeles. 

1. A writer I used to know once told me: 'Always start your piece with an anecdote. It'll draw your readers in.' I never liked him, but here's one anyway.

Robert Altman, apparently, once tattooed Harry S. Truman's dog. In what sounds like a forgotten excerpt from M*A*S*H, the young Altman found himself prospectless and back in America following a stint in the army during WW2, and was somehow recruited into a primitive canine ID-ing operation with a man named 'Skimmerhorn' (even the name is pure vaudeville, or possibly a Pynchon reject). Says Altman:"We would shave the area on the inside of the right hind leg, up near the groin … then I would write in these numbers. … We got through to someone who knew Truman. Truman had this dog he didn’t even care about, a little dog of some kind. They sent it over to us and we tattooed it."

He was later questioned about it in a 2001 BFI interview. "Do you regret having given that up for filmmaking?" asked the interviewer. Altman, seemingly flippant, simply replied: "Well...they're both about the same."

2. Filmmaking, for Altman, was no great shakes. He knew filmmakers, and he didn't want to be like them. He was once famously asked about the directors who inspired him and replied: "I don’t know their names, because I was mostly influenced when I’d see a film and think, 'Man, I want to be sure to never do anything like that.' So I never learned their names." There were men and women of his era who idolised the filmmakers of yesteryear, pored over them almost shot-for-shot, and recreated their achievements in new and subtle ways. Altman was not one of these (there are exceptions, notably his paean to Bunuel's twisted Last Supper in 1970's M*A*S*H). Instead, Altman took what he saw as the essentials of cinematic Americana, and made them his own. To take his most productive period (1970-1975/6, from M*A*S*H to Nashville) and place it under the critical microscope is to witness a man intent on deconstructing the towering monoliths of the Old Hollywood; the patriotic war film, the western, the 'musical', and, with The Long Goodbye, the original subversive cinematic movement, film noir. All are skewered and refigured under Altman's singular and idiosyncratic vision. Yet each is a palimpsest; each bear visible signs of their original form. The Long Goodbye is, in this vein, pure noir, right down to the femme fatale and the almost unfathomable plot-line. 

3. How much Altman initially intended of this run of astonishingly anatomical pictures, and how much came about during the respective production processes, is pure conjecture. Take McCabe And Mrs. Miller, for example. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind relates the story of the rewriting process, and it offers some insight into the process by which Altman formulated his filmmaking edict: 

"Altman was too unhappy with the script, as he was unhappy with most scripts. 'It was one of the worst Western stories you've ever heard,' he said. 'It had all the cliches. This guy was a gambler, and she was a whore with a heart of gold, the three heavies were the giant, the half-breed and the kid...I said, you really wanna make this film?' Continues Beatty: 'So we started taking it apart scene by scene, and I realized that Altman just wanted us to improvise the movie. I believe in improvising, but I don't believe in improvising from nothing. So we had to write a script'."

At this point. Altman only had M*A*S*H under his belt. The film made him a star, an auteur in a Hollywood system finally taking risks on outside projects. In it, he attacked the Vietnam war with what Roger Ebert called his 'three most cherished tools: whimsy, spontaneity and narrative perversity'. And the same goes for The Long Goodbye. In his films are the great legacies of American cinema, of John Ford, Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder, but also the notions of art cinema, the substitution of story for structure, of concrete narrative for pure kineticism and the dominating effect of the image over everything else. As we shall see, Altman is less concerned with 'who killed who and why' than with the sensation of his film (in this he is more like Chandler than might be imagined. There is the famous story of Hawks calling Chandler in the middle of the night and asking him who killed a character in The Big Sleep, to which the novelist responded that he had no idea. Perhaps if Altman had scripted his own vision of a post-noir, things may have been different. 

4. But, now, lets get it out there and say that Elliot Gould is the quintessential Marlowe. Forget Bogie. Gould is the one. Hawks may have adapted The Big Sleep almost to the letter, and Bogart and Bacall certainly smouldered together, but Elliot Gould, and Altman, capture so much more of the essence of that broken-down, sardonic and neurotically obsessive figure of loneliness and defeat in a world gradually burning itself out around him. “I see Marlowe the way Chandler saw him, a loser. But a real loser, not the false winner that Chandler made out of him. A loser all the way," said Altman, who probes into Marlowe's mind with ease, finding there shadows of his own spirit; a principled man in the wrong time period, surrounded by people and institutions that have lost their values. The aspect of the film that most Chandler-aficionados found issue with was the period setting; Chandler's novel is set around 1949, immediately post-war, and his Marlowe, while an eternal drifter, nonetheless belongs in this time-frame. Altman's adaptation, however, seems to answer a question nobody had ever asked, or really thought about asking: What would happen if Marlowe, a character quintessentially 50's, woke up in the 1970's? The contemporary setting is completely at odds with Gould's Marlowe; his suits, his unkempt mannerisms, his disheveled wisecracks, and his smoking (nobody else smokes, another inversion of all the laws of film noir) are all immediately visible. For a private eye, he's utterly conspicuous. His attitude towards many of the contemporary details, such as the topless hippie girls who live opposite, is almost one of resigned acceptance, reflected in his oft-repeated catchphrase: "It's alright with me." He's also the youngest Marlowe, despite his old-world feel, and his sense of having seen it all; Gould was only thirty-five here, and yet he plays Marlowe with a burst-out-laughing, infectious defeatism.

5. And nowhere is this more evident than the first twenty minutes-or-so of the film. Altman changed much for his version of The Long Goodbye, and the cat is all him. This is a masterclass in mundanity; Marlowe shuffling about, mumbling to himself, trying to one-up his cat and failing completely. He seems utterly out of place in the modern convenience store, and the fact that the whole plot spirals out of control simply because he is awoken by his cat is pure Coen Brothers. Wrong place at the wrong time. Here we are first introduced to Gould's mumbling, scatter-brained voice-over, a quite brilliant inversion of the snappy, well-scripted dialogue in classic noir films; where Bogie would have cracked off a one-liner, and snatched the dame, Gould's shaggy-dog detective almost narrates his movements to himself, wondering aloud how he has come to be in the mess he is in. This is because Marlowe is hopeless to resist the irrationality and debauchery surrounding him. He cannot even resist the mewling urges of his cat. His side-of-the-mouth rambling is something of a coping mechanism with everything around him. And that 'everything' is just simply Los Angeles.

6. Altman's LA has always been a preoccupation, one that would come to flowering maturity in the 90's with both The Player and Short Cuts. In The Long Goodbye, the city is intrinsically bound up with Marlowe himself; he is our reference point to comprehend this strange new world. If the Marlowe of Chandler's novel came up against typical '50's hard-boiled stereotypes (loan-sharks, down-on-their-luck heiresses, casino heavies, debilitated war veterans), Gould's Marlowe confronts their 70's counterparts: hippies, stoners, failed writers and political protesters. The fiber between these two disparate versions of Los Angeles is the same that links many of Lynch's films, and the same thread that would later bind the seemingly incongruous elements of The Player; the spectre of artifice, of pure illusion, that settles over the city like a haze, emanating from that strange pseudo-world, Hollywood. The Long Goodbye is not set in the world of filmmaking, but, just as Chandler's novels could not be set anywhere other than LA, Altman's film would be utterly out-of-place in, say, New York, Chicago or Atlanta. Just take the security guard who offers impressions of old movie stars to his guests. This is a Los Angeles movie, filled with Los Angeles people, and Marlowe, the only honest man, it would seem, in the entire city, must navigate between an endless parade of liars, fools and crooks to haul his principles out of the dusty underbelly. We are introduced to the terrible violence of this world in a notorious scene involving a coke bottle and a woman's face; the antagonist simply turns to Marlowe and says, glibly: "Now that's someone I love. I don't even like you." Far from the invincible hero, Marlowe is very vulnerable, much like Jake Gittes in Polankski's Chinatown. Anythinh could crawl up out of the shadows and hurt him.

7. So what of the plot? Well, it's labyrinthine, like all good noir should be. Most of the crucial action happens off-screen; a less perceptive viewer could come to the end of the film and be taken completely off-guard. Piecing it all together requires a spreadsheet, yet it is deceptively simple. Marlowe is approached by an old 'friend', Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) who it turns out has been accused of murdering his wife, and drives him to the Mexican border. He is questioned by the police, and becomes increasingly convinced that all is not what it seems. The parallel plot concerning the drunken antics of writer Roger Wade (the wonderful Sterling Hayden) is almost a MacGuffin; Marlowe is hired by Roger's wife Eileen (Nina Van Pallandt) to find her husband, who often goes 'missing'; it turns out he is involved in a secretive series of rehabilitation clinics, and has fallen into a self-destructive drinking habit. The focus in this sub-plot must be placed firmly on Eileen Wade  if one is to make head-or-tail of just what is happening; it is she, the femme fatale figure, who keeps this plot ticking, although, bypassing the rules of noir, she does not appear to sleep with, or even advance, upon, Marlowe. This is because Altman's Marlowe is, apparently, utterly sexless; Hawks' Big Sleep centred around the blossoming romance between Bogie and Bacall where the book did not. Altman simply plays Marlowe as the only man in LA unconcerned with the pantomime of sex. The film noir femme fatale has always ensnared the hero in some capacity, yet Marlowe remains aloof. He is simply trying to uncover the truth, from the moment Terry Lennox appears at his apartment. 

8. By the close of the movie, something is finally 'not alright' with Marlowe. His laconic exterior is stripped away and we glimpse the principled man beneath. Roger Wade commits suicide, due to intense external pressure, and Marlowe inevitably discovers the terrible connection between the Wades and the Lennox's. From the moment of Wade's demise, something changes in Marlowe, as in the film. Many Chandler purists have condemned the ending of the film in particular; it's almost a 'Han shoots Greedo' kind of deal. They simply cannot accept that Marlowe would kill Lennox in cold blood; again, if you're not paying attention, the scene is abrupt. But, in reality, Altman leads us to this point with expertise. Marlowe's blundering naivety throughout the entirety of the film is suddenly shattered by a moment of clarity. Roger Wade's suicide brings him to his senses. Almost as if he had snapped awake in the wrong time and place, Marlowe has been carried unwillingly on the current of the plot with little or no resistance. Altman's subdued hue reflects Gould's performance; weakened, dulled, a Los Angeles without the sunshine. Yet, by the close of the film, the colour has brightened, and Marlowe has come back to himself. As soon as he glimpses the true meaning of what he has become embroiled in, he takes action. He shoots Lennox. Some of the old Hollywood rules exist in Altman's world; betrayal, a moral crime, is punishable by death.

"Nobody cares but me," he says, just before he pulls the trigger. Lennox responds: "Well, that's you Marlowe. You never learn. You're a born loser." 

And Marlowe just says, "Yeah. I even lost my cat."




Some random observations:

Altman makes a subtle reference to Chandler's notorious inability to explain a death in The Big Sleep, by forcing a character who was murdered in the book to commit suicide in the movie; Roger Wade was originally murdered by Eileen. 

The idea of Marlowe being awoken in a new existence can almost be taken literally. The movie starts with him suddenly waking up, disorientedly attempting to navigate his apartment, and to feed his cat.

The disorienting hue of the film is supposed to approximate human vision, probably Marlowe's. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond exposed the negative to controlled light, dampening the colours to mimic the affect of the sun on the eyes. The technique is not used in any scenes following Roger's death, as Marlowe has emerged from his obscurity and can finally witness the truth.

It's worth noting that Marlowe's betrayal at the hands of Lennox results in death. His betrayal at the hands of Eileen, however, does not raise an eyebrow, though he trusted her and she played him for the entirety of the film like an accordian. Thus, Altman clings to the old noir holdover that all women are corrupt, and must be treated as such.