NOTHING SAYS GOODBYE LIKE A BULLET
When
private eye Philip Marlowe (Elliott
Gould) is visited by an old friend, this sets in train a series of events in which he s hired to search for a missing novelist (Sterling Hayden) and finds himself on the wrong side of vicious gangsters.
So far so faithful to Raymond Chandler, but Robert Altman s inspired adaptation of the writer s most personal novel takes his legendary detective and relocates him to the selfish, hedonistic culture of 1970s Hollywood, where he finds that his old-fashioned notions of honour and loyalty carry little weight, and even his smoking (
universal in film noir) is now frowned upon.
Widely misunderstood at the time, The Long Goodbye is now regarded as one of Altman s best
films and one of the outstanding American
films of its era, with
Gould s shambling, cat-obsessed Marlowe ranking alongside more outwardly faithful interpretations by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.
