“The Long Goodbye” (1973)
Robert Altman’s Long Goodbye is one of my favorite films by him, and perhaps one of my favorite movies, full stop. Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe is moved in time to 70’s California, where he drifts about pursued by police and a ruthless gangster while trying to find a missing author and figure out what happened to his friend, Terry Lennox. Elliott Gould is Marlowe, and I can’t imagine another in the role. Everything is “OK with me” to Marlowe, even as jaw-dropping things occur around him, like terrible violence and the yogic contortions of a stoned group of young women who live next to him. Look for a non-speaking, uncredited cameo by the future governor of California, who sports a hilarious-looking mustache.
SPOILER: The film’s ending departs from the book, in what seems to be a conscious homage by Altman to Carol Reed’s Third Man. Other similar elements of the two films include a main character who has trouble navigating a strange culture while defending a dead friend of his to the police, and who is shunned by a cat.