1970s films

**spoilers***

I was afraid to watch The Long Goodbye. It’s a favorite book, so much so that I starting drinking gimlets for a couple years, even though I hate gin*. It was an odd affectation. Even I knew drinking a grandpa concoction wouldn’t impress anyone, and would only mystify bartenders. But it gave me some secret romantic joy to drink one, even on non-memorable nights (and many nights in my late 20s were just that). With its appreciation for short-lived and missed connections, Raymond Chandler’s masterpiece is great stuff for those in transition, those who are watching peers’ lives move on without them. And what could the film do, but ruin my book? Who could make sense of such a meandering, mood-based affair, with more characters and tangents than any two-hour film could master? And The Long Goodbye (1973) wasn’t exactly produced in my favorite film era.

But I’d heard there was a cool cat scene in the opening of the film, and since Chandler loved cats (which of course, I knew), I thought there might be something there. And with Leigh Brackett listed as a screenwriter, I had hope. For the first half hour, I was grinning. Any cat owner has to love Marlowe’s (Elliott Gould’s) demanding animal, and any cat owner will sympathize with the the way Marlowe tries to fake the cat out with a different brand of cat food than he/she expects with a can switch.

Marlowe’s scene with the cops when he’s refusing to give his friend Terry up is so funny (those fingerprint ink antics!), and the way the story is updated for current viewers wowed me. Something about the dreamy landscape and shots, the way Marlowe doesn’t fit in with the crooks and the hippies (including his gratuitously topless neighbors) around him really captures the loneliness of Chandler’s famous character and the “mean streets” he inhabits. His loyalty to his cat captures his sweetness, his romanticism, and his befuddlement with the world around him. That’s why at first I bought into the film’s characterization, as Marlowe mutters to himself and treats most people around him well in spite of poor treatment. There’s always something sad and noble about him. As Chandler wrote, his PI “must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

In terms of acting, Gould is lovable in this movie. He doesn’t embody Marlowe’s pain, as Humphrey Bogart did. But unlike Dick Powell’s annoyingly slick Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, he’s believable and much more compelling than I expected (even if his toughness in the face of violence isn’t quite convincing).

But my mood toward the movie began to change about a third of the way in. Part of seeing the world through Marlowe’s eyes is finding something redeemable in those others have dismissed–Wade’s honesty, Eileen’s idealism, Mendy’s loyalty, Terry’s quaint good manners. Yet none of these characters are anything but one-notes in the film; none of them are even remotely redeemable. Altman’s violent take on The Big Heat‘s (1955) girlfriend treatment felt like a rip-off rather than a homage, and Marlowe’s lack of sympathy for her was baffling. I understood dispensing with the Linda character, but why not that sweet, yet hopeless tribute to Terry in the bar? Marlowe could have just had a conversation with the bartender. It would have SET UP that ending. Just knowing he was friends with Terry for a long time (a change from the book) wasn’t enough.

As for the plot, well, Chandler was famous for admitting to the convoluted nature of his plotting (though as anyone who reads The Big Sleep knows, censorship is a far greater reason for the plot’s confusing nature in the film.) Perhaps Chandler’s alleged plot aversion is what attracted Altman. As far as I was concerned, Altman could play with the plot all he wanted if he made it interesting. But he didn’t. And turning Mendy into such a loathsome bad guy made the story feel derivative in a boring way.

The ending was undoubtedly shocking and clever, and I liked that the cat became a symbol of Marlowe’s treatment and expectations, but look, if you want Marlowe this resentful about others’ treatment of him, you’re going to have to do more to foreshadow it. Marlowe is pretty much ALWAYS treated poorly in Chandler’s books–by nearly everyone. That isn’t enough to make him crack. And Gould doesn’t seem resentful as Marlowe; he seems naïve and stupid instead.

For Marlowe to betray his knight errant traits (what makes him admirable), and instead focus only on his own resentments, to have him flat out MURDER a former friend, you have to do more to make that betrayal convincing. What’s so lovable about him in the book is that he knows Terry’s pretty worthless, but cares about and defends him anyway, just as the crooks do. Terry’s war record (completely absent here) also makes him more sympathetic. Marlowe is not–as in the movie–shocked to discover Terry’s even more worthless as a friend than he thought–even if he’s not (in the book) a murderer. Marlowe is RESIGNED, expects little of others. In the film, Marlowe is anything but.

There is, of course, something fascinating in Altman essentially killing off the former PI character Chandler (and his peers) made famous. To take away his ethics is truly to murder the man. But I’m not going to believe (as Altman argues in this film) that such a character is unrealistic in today’s world without a better cinematic argument than the character floundering around (as Marlowe always did for a bit). The same year as this film came out, Robert Parker introduced Spenser to the world, a clear homage to Marlowe (so much so that Parker would later complete Chandler’s unfinished novel). And the 80s TV show of the Spenser character was still a decade after Altman’s film. Parker made a Marlowe type a modern man quite successfully (though Spenser was a significantly happier character than his predecessors).

Is it worth it to watch the film? Yes. But how I wish Altman had used that cat like he should have. The cat’s addition was, after all, brilliant. What if Marlowe had shown more love for the cat throughout? Shouldn’t the cat have come up more than a couple times after the beginning, given how crucial Marlowe’s devotion becomes at the end? I felt like Billy Madison as I watched Marlowe in the film. (In that dopey movie, Adam Sandler is outraged that a dog owner would wait for a lost dog’s return rather than making even a cursory effort to find it.)

What if the cat had starved while Marlowe was in jail for Terry, and the detective found out? Then that ending would be not about himself, but about the cat, the only connection he really had—just as Marlowe (in the book) is so lonely that Terry’s chance connection with him means more than anyone understands. Throughout the book and movie, Marlowe insists that Terry could have murdered his wife, but not as brutally as she’d been killed. Like him, I contend that Marlowe wasn’t the type to kill someone over his own hurts. But over his cat’s? Maybe.

*Gimlets symbolize Marlowe’s relationship with Terry.