The Long Goodbye (1973)

Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe was a man with a code in a city that had none, and that was the whole appeal. Altman keeps the code and moves the city forward twenty years, and the joke is that nobody notices Marlowe is there. Elliott Gould plays him rumpled and chain smoking and permanently three seconds behind the conversation, wandering through a Los Angeles of health food, yoga on the balcony next door, and people who would not understand the word loyalty if you wrote it down for them.

The plot is a Chandler plot and it barely matters. A friend needs a ride to Tijuana. A rich alcoholic writer has gone missing. A gangster wants money that Marlowe does not have. What matters is the drift, the way Altman lets scenes run past their point and lets everyone talk over each other, so that you are always half hearing the important thing. It is a detective story shot like a documentary about a man losing his footing.

And then there is the ending, which changed what a Marlowe movie could be and made a lot of people angry in 1973. Altman spends two hours establishing that Marlowe will forgive anything, and then shows you the one thing he will not. It is the most abrupt final thirty seconds in a decade full of them. Whether it is a betrayal of Chandler or the most honest thing anyone ever did with him is the argument, and it is a good one to have with somebody.

Gould's Marlowe mutters the same three words all movie long, it's OK with me, and it is the key to the character. He says it about everything, and it is not calm, it is a man who has decided not to fight the current. He lets the police push him around, lets the neighbours ignore him, lets a gangster threaten him in his own kitchen. The phrase is a shrug he has made into a philosophy.

The Los Angeles here is genuinely strange. Marlowe's neighbours are young women doing candlelit yoga on their balcony who barely register him. The gangster Marty Augustine is casually, shockingly violent in a way that has nothing to do with movie tough guys. Sterling Hayden's writer is a Hemingway figure who has outlived his own myth. Everyone is performing a version of themselves and nobody is doing it well.

Altman called Gould's Marlowe Rip Van Marlowe, a man who fell asleep in 1953 and woke up in 1973 without changing his suit. That is the joke of the wardrobe, the car, the smoking, all of it. But the movie is careful. It never makes him ridiculous. He is the only person in it with a fixed point, and the film respects that even while it shows him how little it buys.

The mystery, when it resolves, is almost beside the point, which is why some people bounce off the movie entirely. The question Altman is actually asking is quieter. What happens to a man whose whole identity is being loyal when the people he is loyal to were never worth it. The last scene is his answer, and it arrives without a word of explanation.