The Long Goodbye: Altman's Marlowe Out of Time

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The great trick of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is casting a man out of his own decade and letting him drown in it. Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s incorruptible knight of the mean streets, wakes up in 1973 Los Angeles — a city of stoned neighbours doing topless yoga, of health-food gurus and gangsters who quote self-help, of nobody who wants or needs a private detective with a code. Altman keeps Marlowe exactly as Chandler wrote him, a rumpled 1940s man in a dark suit muttering to himself, and drops him into a bright, amoral, sun-blasted present that has no vocabulary for what he is. The film that results is the strangest and most quietly devastating Marlowe ever put on screen, a detective story about a man whose entire operating system has gone obsolete.

Elliott Gould - vo.rs

The Long Goodbye: Altman's Marlowe Out of Time