Screening: The Long Goodbye
The Long Goodbye
The real appeal of The Long Goodbye (is) the way it transformed the noir narrative for a more cynical, more ruthlessly capitalistic era.
“At the center of it is the way noir means something fundamentally different in the 1970s because of our collective consciousness about how the economy has shifted,” he said. “The film is at once neo-noir and an elegy for the golden age of noir.”
Working from a screenplay by Leigh Brackett that ruthlessly distilled Chandler’s novel, Altman rendered the streamlined story — Marlowe gives a friend a ride to Tijuana, the friend is accused of killing his wife and then turns up dead himself, Marlowe sets out to prove the friend’s innocence — as a series of mostly comic set pieces. He simultaneously satirized the post-hippie self-absorption of Southern California, registered the narrow-minded brutality of the cops and gangsters, and signaled his fondness for an old Hollywood that was already history in 1973.
Mr. Gould’s Marlowe, always dressed in black suit and tie despite the blinding light and driving a hulking 1940s Lincoln, is the last honest man in this sun-kissed cesspool. He’s an avatar of the midcentury noir hero, out of step but also thoroughly up-to-date, a hipster in the original sense. He rolls with whatever the city and the times throw at him — the blissed-out women next door doing yoga in the nude; the vicious mobster who strips in a fake-sensitive display of honesty — shrugging and repeating the mantra: “It’s O.K. with me.” Until, in the end, he discovers that some things just aren’t O.K.
The director, while moving the mystery plot forward with speed and elliptical precision, added layers of wit around Mr. Gould’s performance. Altman favorites like David Carradine, as a talkative cellmate of Marlowe’s; Henry Gibson, as the frighteningly avaricious proprietor of a rehab clinic; and Jack Riley (of the original Bob Newhart Show) as a lounge pianist, provide piquant cameos. In the film’s best-known twist, the torchy, throwback theme song is heard repeatedly in different versions, emerging from car radios, as supermarket Muzak, in a doorbell’s chime or played as a funeral march by a Mexican street band.
Altman spent much of his career tearing apart and reconstituting Hollywood genres in his own sly, satirical fashion — the war film in MASH, the teen comedy in O.C. and Stiggs. In some cases, as with the western McCabe & Mrs. Miller or the musical protest film Nashville, the results had profound, mythic dimensions. In The Long Goodbye the result is elegiac and entertaining, bittersweet and ceaselessly funny.
“Altman always takes the genre seriously,” said Ron Magliozzi, associate curator of film at MoMA and the curator of the museum’s Altman retrospective. “The Long Goodbye is subverting noir, it is making it comic, but it’s a serious take on the genre. That’s what gives it real body — it’s what makes you feel there’s something serious going on there.”
- Mike Hale, "Altman's Noir Suddenly Gets Plenty of Light," New York Times -
Link
YOUTUBE LINK OF ALEX COX INTRO TLG - Link Here
Alex Cox introduces The Long Goodbye
A very free adaptation
lots of swearing.
Philip Marlowe - Elliot gould
A typical noir hero in that he is:
1)powerless
2)doesn't know what's going on
3)seems at times to be peripheral to the action itself
Marlowe is a man out of the past:
1)He chain smokes
2)He drives a 1948 Lincoln Continental
3)He wears a suit and tie
4)He doesn't carry a gun
5)He refrains from violence
6)He's not only powerless the way Walker was, he's inactive.
Events move around him and at times he's almost a subsidiary
character in the film.
7)this is in the early 70's his neighbors are a bunch of topless hippie girls
The camera style of the film is like that too:
1)The camera doesn't fix on any one thing for very long
2)It doesn't show you what it's all about
3)It drifts pass the action and the focuses on something else it uses reflections
in mirrors a lot.
4)You sometimes see two people talking and the reflection of third person in the glass
that divides you from them and stops you from hearing what they're saying.
(Police interrogation and Beach scenes)
Altman's film not only exists as a movie, it exists kind of as an event. The actor
Sterling Hayden who plays the author roger wade is also in his real life a seaman and
a novelist like the character he plays
There are a couple of film directors in the film
Joan tewksbury (sp?)
and Mark Rydell
Now film directors shouldn't become actors but they do give a good performance.
Nina Van Pallant is an interesting presence
She was part of the singing duo nina and frederick (Puff the magic dragon)
She was also involved in a very famous scandal involving the forging
of Howard Hughe's diaries
It's periphery to the film but interesting
That's the concept of altman
That's what he's trying to do is create a film that's not just a movie but event.
The music is interesting, is always the same, the long goodbye by a mexican band
or a doorbell - in the malibu beach colony.
The Malibu Colony house is Robert Altman's house.
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