Review of The Long Goodbye (1973) by Logan M — 15 Aug 2016

"The long goodbye" is Chandler's longest book and my favourite one. A moody, nostalgic novel about betrayal and the corruptive power of money. Being a Chandler's fan, I felt compelled to watch this movie. Not being an Altman fan, I feared I was going to dislike it.

In fact, I positively hated it. Apparently I am not the only one, since the movie bombed when it came out. But lately opinions changed. According to the "official" story, the whole point was to make a looser of Marlowe and to show how old fashioned his values were in the "modern" world of the 70s. To which I can only say that Altman could have made a movie about any looser whatsoever, without dragging Marlowe into his mess.

Marlowe's friend, Terry Lennox, is the real looser, but not a killer. Beatiful Eileen Wade is the manipulator around whom the plot revolves. In the movie, we have instead a terribly mistcast Gould, playing dumb Marlowe to an equally terrible Van Palland, expressionless and flat as Eileen.

Despite much of the plot having being cut out, the movie drags on for almost two hours with plenty of useless scenes (cat feeding, hippy neighbours) until the denoument. In less than two minutes, we are shown that Marlowe was completely wrong about Lennox but ready to fix the problem, gangster style.

That was definitely not what Chandler's Marlowe would have done. Altman just spoiled a great fictional character for yet another sordid, sad, depressing tale about disgusting humankind. It says a lot about Altman egotism that he blamed the failure of this movie on "wrong marketing" (as a thriller instead of as a satire), just as he blamed politicians for not getting an Oscar. He could not accept the fact that some (many) of his movies are just not good enough.

Unfortunately it is a truth universally acknowledged that no matter how bad a movie, sooner or later it will be "rediscovered" and labelled as a "classic", misunderstood by the audience. This is what is going on here, coupled with the semi-god status of some directors, who apparently cannot get anything wrong and are constantly worshipped by snobbish viewers who think they know better than the average audience.