Chandler's Marlowe: Gould Vs. Bogart

I always enjoy the tight little film essays in the New Yorker, and Anthony Lane's fond look back at Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, adapted from the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, is another small polished gem of criticism.

Lane, too, made me wish that I'd get a chance to see a nice, clean print of the '73 film, now midway through a weeklong run at Film Forum in Manhattan.

And here's Terrence Rafferty's piece in the New York Times, on the same subject:

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
Published: April 15, 2007
RAYMOND CHANDLER, the creator of the tough-but-honorable Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe, once wrote in a letter to a friend: “The private eye is admittedly an exaggeration — a fantasy. But at least he’s an exaggeration of the possible.”

When Robert Altman made a movie of the novel Chandler considered his best, “The Long Goodbye,” Marlowe, played by Elliott Gould, seemed at first glance almost unrecognizable as the character audiences had seen embodied by, among others, Humphrey Bogart, in Howard Hawks’s “Big Sleep” (1946). But although plenty had changed in the 20 years between the publication of the novel and the release of the movie in 1973, the new Marlowe was in most respects the same as ever: solitary, rumpled, nicotine-dependent, irreverent of power both legitimate (the cops) and illegitimate (the crooks), and weirdly, stubbornly gallant. The only difference — a big one — is that he no longer feels possible.

Altman’s “Long Goodbye,” a fresh print of which begins a weeklong run at Film Forum on Friday, is neither a homage nor a deconstruction, though it contains elements of both. It’s a film about transience, about the awful fragility of the things we want to think are built to last: friendships, marriages, faiths of all kinds — including the faith that pop culture can sometimes makes us feel in powerful fantasy figures like Marlowe and his jaunty, street-smart, superbly incorruptible ilk.

The lone-wolf private eye was in its time — from the heyday of pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s through the film-noir era of the ’40s and ’50s — a pretty unbeatable archetype of modern masculine heroism: more independent than a policeman or a soldier, sexier than a Spencer Tracy priest, more virile than a screwball-comedy playboy and exponentially wittier than a cowboy. It was a myth for an urban society, and it didn’t quite survive the great postwar migration to the suburbs, where the streets just didn’t seem mean enough (then) to need a Marlowe to go down them.

Chandler, who was over 60 when he wrote “The Long Goodbye,” clearly understood that the private eye’s time was passing, along with too much else he cared about: his wife of 30 years was dying, not quickly. “I wrote it in agony, but I wrote it,” he told friends later, and you can feel his agony throughout the book.

The novel is more contemplative, less eventful, less exuberant than early books like “The Big Sleep” and “Farewell, My Lovely,” and although the story supplies a few gangsters and annoying cops for Marlowe to crack wise at, the jokes don’t have their old gleeful snap. That’s probably deliberate to some extent. Chandler was keenly aware that his once-distinctive style had been so widely imitated that, as he put it, “you begin to look as if you were imitating your imitators”; but it’s also plainly a reflection of his mournful mood.

You don’t call a book “The Long Goodbye” unless you’re feeling elegiac. And Altman’s movie, in its eccentric way, keeps faith with Chandler’s melancholy. The mystery, such as it is, has to do with whether the detective’s friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) killed his wife. Marlowe, who has obligingly driven him to Mexico in the middle of the night, doesn’t believe he did; the private eye dummies up when the police come calling and spends a couple of nights in jail rather than betray his murder-suspect friend.

This gesture attracts the attention of a cool blonde named Eileen Wade (Nina Van Pallandt), a Malibu neighbor of the Lennoxes. She hires Marlowe to bring home her wayward husband, Roger (Sterling Hayden), an alcoholic novelist suffering from a spectacular creative block of unknown (perhaps guilty) origin. All the mysteries get resolved, mostly unhappily and mostly no thanks to the investigative acumen of Marlowe, who for the greater part of “The Long Goodbye” looks as if he were so far behind the curve of the truth that he’d actually been lapped a few times.

The idea that the beloved Marlowe could be portrayed as a baffled anachronism wasn’t an especially startling notion in the early ’70s. Movie private eyes hadn’t looked very vigorous for a while, even when they were played by actors as charismatic as Paul Newman in “Harper” (1966) and James Garner in “Marlowe” (1969), an updated adaptation of Chandler’s 1949 novel “The Little Sister.” The stars did their jobs, but the ’60s milieu they moved through in those pictures failed to cooperate; it appeared flattened out, drained of energy, and the private eyes seemed stranded and maybe a little bored, as if the world wasn’t really worth the trouble to make sense of. The verbal style of hard-boiled fiction (Chandler’s in particular) and the high-contrast visual style of film noir added up to an impressively coherent imaginative universe, in which the classic private eye could operate effectively and get to the bottom of things with nothing more than nerve, mother wit and local knowledge.

But what Altman does in “The Long Goodbye” goes way beyond simply stating the idea that the private eye’s day was over. Instead of trying to correct, or ignore, the creeping vagueness of the landscape in which his lonely hero is a figure, he actually emphasizes those qualities. The images captured by his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, are as un-noirish as they can be: sun-bleached, unstable, heat-shimmery as mirages. And the camera moves constantly, always slowly, and just enough to keep every shot from settling into anything fixed or too easily readable.

The movie manages to stylize an absence of style, the bland fluidity of early-’70s Southern California, the very thing that makes Marlowe obsolete. He wears a black suit and a white shirt; he’s a hard-edged line drawing in the middle of a runny watercolor, and he couldn’t look more forlorn.

And Mr. Gould plays Marlowe as if the character knows that he is disappearing. This private eye is so private that he seems always to be talking to himself, mumbling a running commentary on the action in an attempt to convince himself, against the evidence of the world’s near-total indifference to everything he says or does, that he really does exist. That is what it’s like when pop-culture archetypes start to fade in the imagination: They turn inward, they become bewildered and self-aware, and then they just get smaller and smaller, as Marlowe does in the long last shot of “The Long Goodbye,” heading for the vanishing point.

The funny thing is, he’s dancing a little as he recedes from view. He looks magically unburdened of his mythic responsibilities. The surprise of Altman’s “Long Goodbye” isn’t that it’s elegiac — it has to be — but that it’s such a blithe, rambunctious elegy.

Chandler, with a touch of defensiveness, said of his novel, “I wrote this as I wanted to because I can do that now,” and Altman, in that spirit, made his movie as he wanted to, because he could do that in the early ’70s, before the world of Hollywood filmmaking changed on him. Watching “The Long Goodbye” in 1973, you could feel Philip Marlowe dancing on his own grave. Watching it now, you can see Robert Altman dancing with him.