Film Notes: The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye (1973) film notes by Tova Gannana for the L.A. Noir: Shadows in Paradise series, presented by Greg Olson Productions. The series runs September to November 2025 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. 

The world is a broken vessel. To heal our bodies, we sleep. Robert Altman begins his 1973 California noir with Philip Marlowe asleep...asleep as he was last played by Humphrey Bogart in 1946. Bogart – not the man in the American sunshine – but the moon man inside his shadows. Is there anything as beautiful as Bogart in a suit and hat, spotting the angle? To his young wife, Lauren, he said, “Talent is no good in the living room. You’ve got to get out and do it.”

Dick Powell played Marlowe in 1944’s Murder My Sweet, the first film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s private eye. Altman’s Marlowe, played by Elliott Gould, was not the studio’s idea of an ideal. For one thing, he didn’t smoke. “All I did generally in the movie was to keep continuity with the cigarette,” said Gould. Gould’s Marlowe stays in a suit and tie patterned in tiny American flags. For Gould, the role was gold: “To play a character that had a history and a history that I had watched and I’d observed, and then also to have this great American maestro Robert Altman take me through it and let me go through it.”

Altman’s Marlowe is the man in the film with the problem; the rest of the characters are doing what comes naturally. Marlowe is the one who is conscious with a conscience. Because we first see him asleep, the film could also be seen as a dream: Marlowe snoring in his room, above his bed an interrogation lamp. He’s awakened by an animal. His cat comes in and meows. Marlowe scratches his head, lights a cigarette. They’re both domestic. His cat has to eat. His kitchen is blue, he leaves the refrigerator open. He wants to feed his cat cottage cheese and raw egg – an improvisation – and adds a pinch of salt. The cat won’t go near it except to fling it to the ground. Marlowe mutters about all the starving tigers in India. The cat doesn’t buy it. And that, according to Altman, is what the film is all about.

It’s Los Angeles in the 1970s, California in its sunset decay. Everything’s crumbling, including relations between people. Altman’s The Long Goodbye is a hand waving to American culture: to structure, to fabrics made without plastic, to combs in back pockets and formal dialogue, to speaking from your diaphragm, to buying other people’s lies.

While Marlowe’s cat did not appear in Chandler’s book, both Altman and Chandler had a love of cats. The first twist that turns into a tangle is when Marlowe drives his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) with a bag of money to Tijuana in the middle of the night. Lennox is all scratched up and says something about trouble with his wife. In Chandler’s language in 1953, Marlowe sees Lennox at the story’s end. In 1973, Marlowe kills him. By 1973, Marlowe no longer wears a hat, and neither does the American president. It’s a decade after Kennedy was assassinated, and the American public no longer believes the official story. “I do believe there is nothing of value but what we have to share,” Gould said in an interview years later. “It’s one thing to share goodness and accomplishments. It’s another thing to share a problem. And this film is about a problem on so many different levels.” The song sung throughout is “The Long Goodbye,” written for the film and sung by many characters and in many voices. It feels like an old American song. The only one in the film not humming is Marlowe. Gould’s Marlowe interpretation speaks on and off camera as though he is a Talmudic commentator adding notes, not in explanation per se, but as in “this is related to that.” “It’s always the same story,” said Altman, which is to say: human nature.

Gould grew up on Bogart films. At Bogart’s funeral, a replica of his boat the Santana represented him, as his request was cremation. The Santana had once belonged to Dick Powell. The script for The Long Goodbye was set in the time period that Chandler had written in. “What he does is show life taking its course,” Gould said of Altman; so Altman carried the 1940s into the 1970s. The one who keeps his hardboiled code is Marlowe. “I’ve got a tin ear,” he says. Is it Marlowe who’s out of tune? Or is it the world? The one who really goes under is Roger Wade, played by the golden Sterling Hayden, stand-in for the American people: alcoholic, owing money, betraying and betrayed.

Jean Paul Belmondo was a Marlowe in Jean Luc Godard’s 1960 film Breathless. To a picture of Bogart at the movies, Belmondo nods. His commentary on human behavior: “Models model, burglars burgle.” In the end Marlowe becomes like his cat: unwilling to eat an imitation: “I’ve come for the truth. You’ve sold me a good story and shown me pretty pictures, but I’ve come for the truth.” Marlowe is our only hope: TV never on. Naive, maybe, but still thinking.