The Long Goodbye is a breath of fresh air

11/16/2009
By Dan Pickles
Staff Writer

The Long Goodbye (1973)

Directed By:                  Robert Altman
Starring:                        Elliot Gould, Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden
Rated:                           R
Run-Time:                     112 Mins.

The biggest danger for genre fans is genre itself. I know that hardly makes sense at first glance, but give it a minute to sink in.

I love zombie movies, but as I scan my DVD shelf I can’t help but notice the fact that I own twenty movies that all have essentially the same plot. You may laugh at my naïveté, but I’d take a look at your own DVD shelf before you start casting stones; chances are you’ve got a few clones hanging around your house, too. 

Now that I’ve knocked you off your high-horse, I’ll get to the point of this whole thing - The Long Goodbye.   

So why, you ask, am I talking about The Long Goodbye, when only a moment ago I was complaining about the state of the genre films and their various plagiarisms? Because The Long Goodbye is representative of the best way to handle genre: by breaking it down and rebuilding it into something new and different, and by using our genre familiarity as a stick with which we can be unexpectedly whacked in the face. 

The set up is the standard, labyrinthine film-noir fare: Private-Eye Philip Marlowe is contacted by an old friend that needs a ride to Tijuana, Mexico to avoid the fallout of a fight with his wife. Marlowe obliges, only to discover upon his return that the wife has been murdered. In a seemingly unrelated incident, he is then hired to recover the missing husband of a local woman. It becomes apparent that there may very well be a connection between the two incidents, if Marlowe could only find it. 

To be sure, I’ve done a significant amount of dumbing-down in that synopsis. The plot is complex, as they always have been in my experience with the film-noir genre. There are villains, pawns, set-ups, double crosses - everything you could ask for in a detective story. 

Despite the fact that this movie bends the genre, it is still eminently recognizable as film-noir. The one big difference is in the main character, Philip Marlowe, and the mould-shattering changes that set him apart from his genre counterparts (some of which, in fact, share his name).  

In The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe is depicted as a human juggernaut of machismo that subsists primarily on smoking, sleuthing, and doling out face-punches. Our new, Long Goodbye Marlowe is a goofball that can’t even intimidate his own cat, which he loves to a fault. Gone is the white-knight Marlowe of yesteryear and his woman-beguiling pheromones; the new, modern Marlowe talks to himself, loses fights, and occasionally gets duped in the line of duty. Somehow, this makes him all the more charming.  

If film affords us a glimpse at culture, the Marlowe character of The Long Goodbye, and the film as a whole, represent the dawning of a less Manichean era in entertainment (which has, sadly, come and gone in the subsequent years). This isn’t a film of absolute good and evil; every character has their own shades of gray, and it’s hard to tell which of them you can trust. One wonders at what point Hollywood decided to start draining their films of this moral complexity. 

So, now that I’ve spent all this time explaining my beliefs about genre films, I’ll get to the business at hand: see this movie. It has a unique texture and life that’s hard to come by in films these days. 

And if you feel like getting some fresh air, it’s playing at the Zinema 2 Theater in Duluth from November 13-19. Get out of the house, enjoy the fall weather, and watch a movie that just might ask you to think a little bit.