Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” (1973) attacks film noir with three of his most cherished tools: Whimsy, spontaneity and narrative perversity. He is always the most youthful of directors, and here he gives us the youngest of Philip Marlowes, the private eye as a Hardy boy. Marlowe hides in the bushes, pokes his nose up against a window, complains like a spoiled child, and runs after a car driven by the sexy heroine, crying out “Mrs. Wade! Mrs. Wade!” As a counterweight, the movie contains two startling acts of violence; both blindside us, and neither is in the original Raymond Chandler novel.
SYNOPSIS:
Private investigator Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is asked by his old pal Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) for a ride to Mexico. He obliges, and when he returns to Los Angeles is questioned by police about the death of Terry’s wife…
The cat. A feature of many memorable moments in cinema.
Alien and
Inside Llewyn Davis immediately come to mind. The tabby-cat seen in
The Long Goodbye joins the ranks of unforgettable feline friends. Our introduction to Elliot Gould’s mumbling, loner Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is, as he’s woken at 3am, by his meowing, hungry, cat. Interestingly, in the source novel, Marlowe has no pets. Roger Ebert explains that this disposable sequence “establishes Marlowe as a man who is more loyal to his cat than anyone is to him”. Clearly,