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The Long Goodbye brings one of the most iconic private detectives of literature to life in what might be the calmest thriller ever made. The film is directed by Robert Altman, one of the leading figures in the film industry back in the '70s, earning five Oscar nominations for Best Director for timeless classics such as M*A*S*H and Nashville.

In The Long Goodbye, private detective Philip Marlowe finds himself implicated in the murder of his best friend's wife, running against time to find out what really happened. The movie is a great thriller that deserved a sequel, especially because of Elliott Gould's unique portrayal of Marlowe, created by Raymond Chandler, one of the masters of crime fiction. Most notoriously, The Long Goodbye offers a unique approach to an otherwise anxiety-inducing genre.

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Robert Altman is an undisputed cinematic legend, but even he was afraid to tackle another Hollywood icon's cinematic universe.

Perhaps the director's most fondly remembered film is his dreamy adaptation of Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye." The 1973 film tells the continuing story of Philip Marlowe, who first appeared onscreen in the 1946 noir "The Big Sleep," memorably played by Humphrey Bogart. Bogart gave the definitive performance of Marlowe before "The Long Goodbye," although there were some lesser-known adaptations of Chandler's stories about the Los Angeles private eye. Altman knew that he had big shoes to fill when he agreed to take his own stab at the beloved character — and it almost made him turn the project down.

"Originally I didn't want to do it," the director confessed (via Cinephilia & Beyond). "I liked those 1940s movies, but I just didn't want to play around with them. I was sent the script...

Is this show a hatchet job on Raymond Chandler’s confidential agent, or do Robert Altman and Leigh Brackett honestly find a place for Philip Marlowe in the laid-back 1970s? Vilmos Zsigmond’s even more laid-back ‘pushed and pre-flashed’ cinematography made industry news by shooting in places that normally needed three times more artificial light. The characters are vivid, as portrayed by Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, and Mark Rydell. It’s also a terrific Los Angeles film, from Marlowe’s Hollywood apartment to the Malibu Colony, and a dangster’s Sunset Blvd. tower office suite. Elliott Gould’s mellow Marlowe may be unfocused and sloppy, but he still subscribes to the old ethics, particularly where friendship and betrayal are concerned. And darn it, he cares about his pet cat.

The Long Goodbye

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1973 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 112 min. / Street Date December 14, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Elliott Gould,...

Whether they’re peeping on cheating husbands or reeling in runaway daughters, the cinematic detective, popularized in the ’30s and ’40s, can always be relied upon for a witty line or a sock in the jaw. Often, the detective is a man alone, searching through dark alleys for invaluable clues to some labyrinthine mystery. The detective is often the only soul who will do whatever it takes, no matter how hopeless the circumstances may seem. As Raymond Chandler wrote: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” In the ’70s, the culture irrevocably changed, but the detective’s job stayed the same — if not perhaps a bit more complex.

The Nice Guys, the newest film from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang writer-director Shane Black, is out in theaters this week. In the film, a luckless private eye and a grumpy hired thug find themselves an unlikely...

Nouvelle Vague (1990) is not a cinematic treatment of the Young Turks breaking new ground in the sixties but a film about the history of cinema told as a biblical allegory. Old and New Testament; Old and New Wave; the studio system and the post-studio era; Delon as Roger and Richard Lennox who fall in love with the Countess Elena Torlato-Favrini. I must admit that the thought of Godard making a film about the New Wave directors sounds fascinating and the film-geek in me would have ate it up. Like many cinephiles I love films about films like The States of Things (1982) by Wim Wenders which is one of the greatest films in this subgenre or even The Last Movie (1971) by Dennis Hopper which is not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. Alas this is not what Godard made. However, the Nouvelle Vague that Godard did make is immensely...

(Robert Altman, 1973, Arrow Academy, 15)

Like Raymond Chandler, Robert Altman (1925-2006) was a difficult, hard-drinking, self-destructive artist, a brilliant maverick who achieved his first success late in life. In 1973, his career still in the ascendant after the popularity of his first expansive, widescreen movie, Mash, he made a controversial screen version of Chandler's last work of consequence.

Published in 1953, The Long Good-bye was arguably Chandler's best, certainly his most personal novel and turned upon his knight-errant private eye Philip Marlowe going down the mean streets of Los Angeles to defend the reputation of his friend Terry Lennox, who's accused of murdering his wife before apparently committing suicide in Mexico.

Altman brought in Leigh Brackett, co-screenwriter with William Faulkner on the 1946 film of Chandler's The Big Sleep. His big changes were to simplify the plot and, above all, to bring forward the action some two decades from the conformist early 50s to the permissive 70s.

Books and films have been joined at the hip ever since the earliest days of cinema, and adaptations of novels have regularly provided audiences with the classier end of the film spectrum. Here, the Guardian and Observer's critics pick the 10 best

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10. Planet of the Apes

Although the source novel, La Planète des Singes, was written by Frenchman Pierre Boule and originally reached its futureshock climax in Paris, this enduring sci-fi fantasy is profoundly American, putting Charlton Heston's steel-jawed patriotism to incredible use. It also holds up surprisingly well as a jarring allegory for the population's fears over escalating cold war tensions.

Beginning with a spaceship crash-landing on an unknown planet after years of cryogenic sleep, Franklin J Schaffner's film soon gets into gear as Heston's upstanding...

The Long Goodbye

Directed by Robert Altman

Written by Leigh Brackett

USA, 1973

My introduction to classic film was through Humphrey Bogart. I would watch Casablanca (1942) and To Have and Have Not (1944) with my mother, but none of his films had as much of an effect on me as The Big Sleep (1946) and Bogart’s character, Philip Marlowe. Even though I loved the character, I hadn’t sought out Robert Altman’s adaptation of another Raymond Chandler Marlowe mystery, The Long Goodbye (1973), until now.

Updating the time period from the 1950s to the 1970s, The Long Goodbye sees Chandler’s classic private detective Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) try to clear his best friend, Terry Lennox, who is accused of brutally murdering his wife. Marlowe is himself implicated in the plot and accused of aiding a fugitive, having driven Lennox to the Mexican border the day before. Marlowe refuses to divulge any...

After kicking off the 2010 Pajiba Neo-Noir Retrospective with an analysis of Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight (1996), I felt the strong desire to put his film in dialogue with the neo-noir of his mentor Robert Altman: The Long Goodbye (1973). Oddly, this comparison yielded more differences than similarities, as Anderson's film came off as classical in its use of noir tropes: former hood seeks the good life only to find his new life upended by the inescapable past of his horrific deeds. Admittedly, Anderson tells the rather conventional thriller story unconventionally by favoring the minimalist approach of French noir director Jean-Pierre Melville over the direct approach taken by the bulk of Hollywood cinema. Yet, in the end, and I don't intend for this line of thought to be a criticism, Hard Eight feels more like a classical noir than neo-noir, as the themes of the genre remain intact and have...