Heading for the Vanishing Point

With a spanking-new print of Robert Altman’s 1973 movie, The Long Goodbye, beginning a weeklong run at New York City’s Film Forum, The New York Times’ Terrance Rafferty reassesses this rather controversial film adaptation of what many people consider to be Raymond Chandler’s best novel:

The idea that the beloved [Philip] Marlowe could be portrayed as a baffled anachronism wasn’t an especially startling notion in the early ’70s. Movie private eyes hadn’t looked very vigorous for a while, even when they were played by actors as charismatic as Paul Newman in “Harper” (1966) and James Garner in “Marlowe” (1969), an updated adaptation of Chandler’s 1949 novel “The Little Sister.” The stars did their jobs, but the ’60s milieu they moved through in those pictures failed to cooperate; it appeared flattened out, drained of energy, and the private eyes seemed stranded and maybe a little bored, as if the world wasn’t really worth the trouble to make sense of. The verbal style of hard-boiled fiction (Chandler’s in particular) and the high-contrast visual style of film noir added up to an impressively coherent imaginative universe, in which the classic private eye could operate effectively and get to the bottom of things with nothing more than nerve, mother wit and local knowledge.

But what Altman does in “The Long Goodbye” goes way beyond simply stating the idea that the private eye’s day was over. Instead of trying to correct, or ignore, the creeping vagueness of the landscape in which his lonely hero is a figure, he actually emphasizes those qualities. The images captured by his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, are as un-noirish as they can be: sun-bleached, unstable, heat-shimmery as mirages. And the camera moves constantly, always slowly, and just enough to keep every shot from settling into anything fixed or too easily readable.

The movie manages to stylize an absence of style, the bland fluidity of early-’70s Southern California, the very thing that makes Marlowe obsolete. He wears a black suit and a white shirt; he’s a hard-edged line drawing in the middle of a runny watercolor, and he couldn’t look more forlorn.

And Mr. [Elliott] Gould plays Marlowe as if the character knows that he is disappearing. This private eye is so private that he seems always to be talking to himself, mumbling a running commentary on the action in an attempt to convince himself, against the evidence of the world’s near-total indifference to everything he says or does, that he really does exist. That is what it’s like when pop-culture archetypes start to fade in the imagination: They turn inward, they become bewildered and self-aware, and then they just get smaller and smaller, as Marlowe does in the long last shot of “The Long Goodbye,” heading for the vanishing point.

Read Rafferty’s full commentary here.