Robert Altman (1973)
I never really got the hang of the film – probably because (a congenital defect) I never really engaged with the plot – but it is immediately beguiling. The movement of the images of Los Angeles in the late evening combines with the spaced-out voices of the prostitutes (that’s what I assumed them to be anyway) who share Philip Marlowe’s apartment block to create a texture that’s amusing, alluring and unsettling all at once. Because I don’t much like private eye films anyway and the conventional landscape for Raymond Chandler adaptations has no emotive power for me, I’m easily receptive to the sensory scheme of the film – in which the coloured lights and freeways of LA and beautiful beachscapes replace black-and-white mean streets. A large part of the pleasure of The Long Goodbye is seeing Altman apply his unique talents to a genre picture – and revivify it – yet it still feels ultimately like an exercise. Perhaps this is partly because the film references are so salient and self-aware: the picture begins and ends with ‘Hooray for Hollywood’ on the soundtrack; during police interrogation, Marlowe asks, ‘Is this where I’m supposed to say, “What’s all this about?”?’; the Malibu Colony gatekeeper (Ken Sansom) does lame impressions of Barbara Stanwyck and James Stewart; when the gangster Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) orders his henchmen to strip, one of them mutters, ‘George Raft didn’t have to do this’. (The henchmen include Arnold Schwarzenegger in one of his first roles.)
Even so, the emotional heft and lift of the film are often potent. The lighting, by Vilmos Zsigmond, is manicheistically expressive: patches of sunlight deepen the stripes of shadow with which they’re juxtaposed. The subdued, foolish nobility of Elliott Gould’s Marlowe – and his consciousness of his powerlessness – are touching and make the piece seem genuinely regretful. Although Nina van Pallandt is evidently not a trained actress, the lack of sharpness of her line readings actually gives them a sense of surprise and her portrait of the femme fatale Ellen Wade an unusual freshness. (There are other performers – such as Jim Bouton as the murderous Terry Lennox – whose acting, while different from what you expect, is striking mainly because it’s just bad.) John Williams’s score is highly effective in its insistency.
The conception and look of Roger Wade, the hard-drinking, blocked writer, are so Hemingwayesque as to make it difficult for Sterling Hayden to give him much life outside the idea. Even so, he has a gripping set-to with Henry Gibson, as the unfathomably self-possessed and creepy doctor from Wade’s detox clinic, and Wade’s eventual disappearance under the Pacific Ocean seems mysteriously apt: he has the look of a sea god. There are also several sequences involving animals that are unaccountable and which stay with you. At the start, Marlowe’s cat is hungry and his owner goes to the supermarket. They’re out of the kind of food the cat likes; when Marlowe gets back to his apartment, he transfers the catfood he’s bought into the empty tin that contained the preferred brand. The cat turns up his nose at this feeble attempt at subterfuge. On his arrival at the Wades’ beach house, Marlowe is confronted by their Doberman – who continues to bark threateningly at him whenever they meet. As Roger Wade wanders out to sea, his wife runs into the surf in desperate search of him, with Marlowe and the Doberman in pursuit. The dog’s barking, prancing presence here is very touching, especially when he comes up from the waves with his master’s cane between his teeth.
11 March 2009
