Altman drags Leigh Brackett from the Warner attic, ties her to a wheelchair and flings her downstairs to write a delightful present for movie lovers, instead of the creaker it might have been (see Philip Marlowe attempts by Michael Winner and Dick Richards).
This movie is completely uninterested in Raymond Chandler and is only barely coaxed into coherent storytelling. Instead we get a delirious funhouse mirror, a riff on Studio Era anachronisms that would have been impossible under Studio Era constraints. Altman is at his most dangerous here, with lots of silly sight gags, much obviously improvised dialog, and actors sometimes visibly intoxicated. The highwire act should fall, but keeps its feet because, as much as any film of that bizarro time and place (early seventies Hollywood), it captures the free spirit of "why not?" go-for-broke artistry.
Many of this period's experimental films, though, like EASY RIDER and all those revisionist Westerns, and even a lot of Altman's own seventies work (CALIFORNIA SPLIT, NASHVILLE), have a cheap, rushed look; yet in the midst of what might have seemed chaos, Vilmos Zsigmond quietly pulls off visual tricks nobody would attempt today without CG effects. He invests bright sunlight with the gravity of murky night. He uses windows as mirrors and walls and prisms, and windows, simultaneously. The photography of this movie is probably its biggest homage to the technical excellence of Warner's golden age.
You won't forget Dick Powell or Humphrey Bogart, but only because Elliot Gould isn't attempting any of the same stuff. This movie is a joke, a very good joke difficult to tell and told well. Gould somehow makes this buffoonish version of an archetype work, though subverting his swagger at every turn - like a lonely fat girl, he's a slave to his cat; he orders CC and ginger, the faggiest drink a tough guy ever threw a lip over; he evinces no physical bravado; he smokes so incessantly the joke should get old in the first reel - but he and Altman are comedians of the first stripe, and everything plays because they want it to. The usual Altman ensemble elements are in place, plus the inspired casting of Sterling Hayden as Hemingway and Mark Rydell as the scariest Jew since Jesus Christ.
A couple of years later, as if in indignant rebuke to Altman's irreverence, Robert Mitchum was disconnected from his bong to star in the two worst Marlowe movies ever made, by-the-numbers yawners reinforcing the fact that every genre is mostly garbage. Let us not forget that Mitchum starred in OUT OF THE PAST, at least as good a detective movie as any '40s Chandler effort with the possible exception of DOUBLE INDEMNITY. So these two late-seventies entries do a double service by reminding us not to try and repeat ourselves, a mistake THE LONG GOODBYE did not make.
This movie is completely uninterested in Raymond Chandler and is only barely coaxed into coherent storytelling. Instead we get a delirious funhouse mirror, a riff on Studio Era anachronisms that would have been impossible under Studio Era constraints. Altman is at his most dangerous here, with lots of silly sight gags, much obviously improvised dialog, and actors sometimes visibly intoxicated. The highwire act should fall, but keeps its feet because, as much as any film of that bizarro time and place (early seventies Hollywood), it captures the free spirit of "why not?" go-for-broke artistry.
Many of this period's experimental films, though, like EASY RIDER and all those revisionist Westerns, and even a lot of Altman's own seventies work (CALIFORNIA SPLIT, NASHVILLE), have a cheap, rushed look; yet in the midst of what might have seemed chaos, Vilmos Zsigmond quietly pulls off visual tricks nobody would attempt today without CG effects. He invests bright sunlight with the gravity of murky night. He uses windows as mirrors and walls and prisms, and windows, simultaneously. The photography of this movie is probably its biggest homage to the technical excellence of Warner's golden age.
You won't forget Dick Powell or Humphrey Bogart, but only because Elliot Gould isn't attempting any of the same stuff. This movie is a joke, a very good joke difficult to tell and told well. Gould somehow makes this buffoonish version of an archetype work, though subverting his swagger at every turn - like a lonely fat girl, he's a slave to his cat; he orders CC and ginger, the faggiest drink a tough guy ever threw a lip over; he evinces no physical bravado; he smokes so incessantly the joke should get old in the first reel - but he and Altman are comedians of the first stripe, and everything plays because they want it to. The usual Altman ensemble elements are in place, plus the inspired casting of Sterling Hayden as Hemingway and Mark Rydell as the scariest Jew since Jesus Christ.
A couple of years later, as if in indignant rebuke to Altman's irreverence, Robert Mitchum was disconnected from his bong to star in the two worst Marlowe movies ever made, by-the-numbers yawners reinforcing the fact that every genre is mostly garbage. Let us not forget that Mitchum starred in OUT OF THE PAST, at least as good a detective movie as any '40s Chandler effort with the possible exception of DOUBLE INDEMNITY. So these two late-seventies entries do a double service by reminding us not to try and repeat ourselves, a mistake THE LONG GOODBYE did not make.