The Long Goodbye

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is one of the best-known private dicks in pop culture, but in Robert Altman’s version, no trace of the supremely cool Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum in The Big Sleep (1946/1978) can be found. Mumbling and shaggy, Elliott Gould’s Marlowe seems more at home in a stoner comedy than a hard-boiled crime thriller. Transporting the novel’s original 1950’s setting to 1970’s Los Angeles, Altman’s self-proclaimed ‘satire in melancholy’ retains the novel’s labyrinthic detective plot, but sees his hero as a baffled man trying to make sense of the amorality, decadence and lack of values of his time. Its idiosyncratic pacing and Gould’s hilariously nonchalant performance made it an inspiration for the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice .

USA National Society of Film Critics Awards: Best Cinematography

9/12 (Sat): Film talk with Derek Lam