THE LONG GOODBYE

"The Long Goodbye"is one of several masterpieces from director Robert Altman. It was his contemporaneous take on a Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe novel transposed to the then present day Los Angeles, (it was made in 1973). Marlowe is Elliot Gould in a career-best performance, a louche modern-day cynic who lives alone with his cat and who is drawn into a complex plot of murder, suicide, robbery and adultery by his friend Terry Lennox, (Jim Bouton). Others involved include drunken novelist Sterling Hayden and his enigmatic wife (singer Nina Van Pallandt), vicious hood Mark Rydell and a possibly bogus doctor played by a mincing Henry Gibson. Nothing or no-one are quite as they seem. Of course, this isn't Chandler as we know him, (the brilliant script is by the great Leigh Brackett), and the film certainly isn't a 'thriller', (in the end it hardly matters who did what and to whom), but Altman's riff on an LA theme circa the early seventies. It's stunningly shot in widescreen by Vilmos Zsigmond and is one of the key American movies of its decade. Sadly neglected at the time of its release it is now being rightly reassessed.