Just Good Friends, or “It’s OK with me”: Robert Altman and The Long Goodbye

Made in the middle of the extraordinary run of eight features Robert Altman completed between 1970 and 1975, The Long Goodbye (1973) is the first of back-to-back adaptations of key crime/detective novels dating from the classic period of American crime writing (the late 1920s to the mid-1950s). Followed by his extraordinarily grounded and period authentic realisation of Edward Anderson’s 1937 novel Thieves Like Us (1974) – previously filmed by Nicholas Ray as They Live By Night in 1948 – The Long Goodbye is, in some ways, a study in contrast.

Altman expressed some enthusiasm for Raymond Chandler’s work and previous film versions of the author’s books featuring detective Philip Marlowe but claimed he was never able to get through the writer’s dyspeptic 1953 novel (his longest and most digressive, by some distance). Thieves Like Us was a project he had courted for a number of years, but The Long Goodbye was a “package” he was invited to helm relatively late in the day after several other filmmakers, including Howard Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich, had passed it over. Bogdanovich, then the “golden boy” of New Hollywood, on the back of major hits like The Last Picture Show (1971) and What’s Up, Doc? (1972), recommended Altman, but the initial entreaties to those two “classically” minded but also idiosyncratic directors suggest that the producers favoured a more faithful approach to Chandler’s novel, its period, its sense of place and its moral perspective. The choice of Leigh Brackett to write the script also indicated a desire to return to the world of previous adaptations like The Big Sleep (1946), which she co-wrote along with a number of late period Hawks films including Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1967), and that is often seen as the gold standard for Marlowe adaptations. 

Unlike figures such as Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese, Altman was relatively ambivalent about classical Hollywood cinema, having direct and largely negative experience of it during his initial attempt to forge a film career there in the late 1940s. Nevertheless, Hawks was one of the few filmmakers he did cite favourably, less due to the director’s adherence to the forms of genre and style than his willingness to light on the themes of friendship, community and companionship along with his ability to use the frames of mainstream narrative cinema to allow characters – and us, the audience – the space and time to hang out. Although Altman and veteran screenwriter/science-fiction novelist Brackett might seem like an odd pairing, there were actually a number of symmetries and points of connection across their work. The Big Sleep, for example, is often seen as a paradigmatic instance of the classic detective movie and its commonly telescoped focus on the processes of ratiocination, but it is actually a far more dispersive and wilful film than is commonly claimed. It is obviously very different to Altman’s work but doesn’t belong in a different universe.

Although Altman was initially hesitant in taking on the project, he was intrigued by Brackett’s script which distilled and changed some elements of Chandler’s novel, granting it a sensibility more grounded in the 1970s than the early 1950s. In particular, he was taken by Brackett’s new, “out-of-character” ending. This was an element, amongst others, he insisted couldn’t be changed when signing onto the production. Both Brackett and Altman felt it was impossible to make a faithful adaptation of the novel and character in the 1970s that wouldn’t devolve into cliché, pastiche, mannerism or parody.

Altman and Brackett’s approach to this “legacy” material relies on a very different take on the lead character, particularly in terms of performance style and behaviour. In this regard, The Long Goodbye sits at a fascinating juncture between the downbeat sensibility, sense of decay and downright stench of corruption that characterise many 1970s American crime films, and the equal, sometimes nostalgic pull (though less so in a film like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown [1974]) of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Many of the key filmmakers of this era made films that moved across these two approaches to genre and the past. But Altman’s film is more fixated on the disjointed “out-of-time” makeup of is central character, a slovenly, down at heel but fundamentally ethical figure who drives around in an anachronistic 1948 Lincoln Continental, wears a black suit and red tie amongst a sea of casual wear, tie-dye and partial nudity, chain-smokes while everyone else seems to be on a health kick, and sees core value in the bonds forged by traditional forms of friendship in preference to the seeming contemporary predilection for exploitable acquaintance. Altman often referred to this character as “Rip Van Marlowe”, suggesting that he was a vision of Chandler’s detective awoken 20 years into the future and stranded in a familiar but radically foreign, sun kissed, decadent, “Me Generation” California.

For her part, Brackett, unlike many other writers who bristled at the liberties taken by Altman with their scripts, enjoyed working with the director and embraced the riffs, improvisations and idiosyncratic points of emphasis that he brought to the film. What also attracted Altman was the chance to work once again with Elliott Gould, one of the two stars of his breakthrough smash hit MASH (1970), but who had become persona non grata in Hollywood after a couple of failed and abandoned productions. But when looking at the finished film, it is hard to imagine that it wasn’t a project conceived by Altman, as its sensibility, visual style, sound, idiosyncratic choice of “actors” from within the cinema and beyond, exploration of environment, and revisionist approach to a classic genre all seem tailormade for and by the filmmaker. But this also reveals the indelible stamp that Altman placed – as always – on his material during production: stacking the cast with a rogue’s gallery of figures rarely used in or new to the cinema (like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’s Henry Gibson, baseball player Jim Bouton, and Danish folk singer Nina van Pallandt); exploring the cramped and then capacious locations he carefully selected including his own home in the Malibu Colony; experimenting with a relentlessly mobile camera that shifts and zooms in and out of Marlowe’s perspective crafting a diaphanous, fluid and fully dimensional sense of environment (it is one of the great LA films); embracing the possibilities of collaboration; and allowing actors to add bits of business and improvise lines during filming. One of the most memorable and even charming aspects of The Long Goodbye is Marlowe’s “interior” monologue, dreamed-up and delivered by Gould as an almost stream-of-consciousness muttering that displaces and even reverses the common device of the controlling voiceover so central to many examples of the detective film and classic film noir. Gould’s often jazzy and insular line readings rarely communicate a sense of control or superior knowledge – and are almost never heard by anyone but us, him and maybe his cat – but they do draw us closer to his view of the world.

This is a jazz-like film of endless riffs, repetitions, variations and virtuoso solos, particularly in terms of performance, sound, music and image. Teaming up for the third time in a row with the extraordinary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, The Long Goodbye’s motile camerawork acts as a visual anchor and metaphor for the endlessly shifting sympathies, geographies and pictorial attractions that mark the film. Its mirrored and reflected images – just watch the extraordinary layers that are built up during the various character exchanges filmed at the house of novelist Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden) – forge a visual trope that highlights the slipperiness of appearances while also emphasising the film’s more abstract qualities. In Altman’s cinema there is a constant push and pull between engagement and disengagement, fiction and reality, self-consciousness and consciousness, story and whatever the image and soundtrack discover and light upon.

Like many of Altman’s films of the 1970s that were made in the wake of MASH, The Long Goodbye was a financial failure on first release. This can be partly blamed on the initial, somewhat conventional marketing campaign, but it is unsurprising that Altman’s self-conscious, at times cynical though always playful souring of the detective genre didn’t find a popular audience or indeed much love from those wedded to Chandler’s chivalric vision of his beloved character. Although its initial critical reception was mixed, with only a few figures like Pauline Kael fully championing its plainly evident virtues, it has gone on to be regarded as one of the most lauded revisionist genre films of the 1970s and one of a handful of Altman’s greatest works. For a film that plays with the concept of a “fish out water” Marlowe washed up on the bright but polluted shores of 1970s California, it has remained surprisingly resonant and timely, influencing a range of other films including The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998) – where Gould’s “reactive” live-and-let-live detective (his mantra: “It’s OK with me”) is transformed into a lounging casualty of the counterculture who doesn’t even recognise the role he is being asked to play – and Altman acolyte Paul Thomas Anderson’s pungent Thomas Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice (2014).

But much of what I have written here makes The Long Goodbye sound a little too prosaic and overly concerned with reversing and releasing the shackles of genre. Its greatest pleasures lie in its smaller details as well as its combination of self-consciousness, playfulness and realistic detail. One of the most wonderful elements of the film – or maddening, if it gets on your nerves – is its musical soundtrack, consisting of endless variations on the title theme written by John Williams and Johnny Mercer (another productive collaboration between a figure most associated with the ’70s and beyond and one from an earlier era). The recasting and reorchestration of this song by Williams as a sultry modern jazz standard, a doorbell chime, a lush but bland piece of elevator/supermarket music, a mariachi funeral dirge, amongst many other variations, slyly supports The Long Goodbye’s status as an endlessly inventive, surprising, playful, variable and even, at times, faithful series of riffs on various forms, genres, characters and modes of performance. It also places it within a kind of logic of late capitalism where invention is only possible through endless quotation and variation.

As I claimed earlier, The Long Goodbye is also one of Altman’s most acute dissections of the nature of friendship and companionship. Part of the reason for Marlowe’s failure and isolation is due to his fidelity to the concept and practice of friendship, an ethics of behaviour casually abused by his friend Terry Lennox (Bouton). Altman’s vision of The Long Goodbye is marked by wonderfully digressive, often playful and even sometimes brutally violent exchanges between characters – for the former, see the extraordinarily vivid performance by director Mark Rydell as criminal boss Marty Augustine; the gatekeeper of the Malibu Colony who tries to engage visitors with his impressions of Barbara Stanwyck, James Stewart and Walter Brennan for the latter – but each of these also provides a model for the inevitable treacheries and betrayals that are part and parcel of being in the world.

This is all further highlighted in what, for me, is one of the great opening sequences in cinema, where Marlowe attempts to appease his finicky cat by seeking out his favourite brand of food in the middle of the night. This leisurely opening sets up so much about character, story, place and space, as well as how the disparate set of figures it introduces will go on to interact and intersect with one another. But in his benign betrayal of his beloved cat – he can’t find the right food and tries to dupe his feline brother by spooning the contents of another can into that of his cherished brand – Marlowe also puts in motion the patterns and mechanics of behaviour that will frame the narrative. But unlike the film’s other characters, Marlowe continues to search for his cat, undoubtedly feeling a sense of guilt despite his well-intentioned betrayal. In a world of small measures and gestures, this difference speaks volumes. Rip Van Marlowe.

The Long Goodbye (1973 USA 111 mins)

Prod Co: Lion’s Gate Film/United Artists Prod: Jerry Bick Dir: Robert Altman Scr: Leigh Brackett, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler Phot: Vilmos Zsigmond Ed: Lou Lombardo Mus: John Williams

Cast: Elliott Gould, Nina van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, Henry Gibson, David Arkin, Jim Bouton