RIP VAN MARLOWE

By Raymond Benson

(Note: Portions of this review appeared on Cinema Retro in 2014 for an earlier Kino Lorber edition.)

Robert Altman was a very quirky director, sometimes missing the mark, but oftentimes brilliant. His 1973 take on Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye is a case in point. It might take a second viewing to appreciate what’s really going on in the film. Updating what is essentially a 1940s film noir character to the swinging 70s was a risky and challenging prospect—and Altman and his star, Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe (!), pull it off.

It’s one of those pictures that critics hated when it was first released; and yet, by the end of the year, it was being named on several Top Ten lists. I admit that when I first saw it in 1973, I didn’t much care for it. I still wasn’t totally in tune with the kinds of movies Altman made—even after M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud (an underrated gem), and McCabe & Mrs. Miller. But I saw it again a few years later on a college campus and totally dug it. Altman made oddball films, and either you went with the flow or you would be put off by the improvisational, sometimes sloppy mise-en-scène that the director used. And the sound—well, Altman is infamous for his overlapping dialogue (one critic called it “Altman Soup”). If you didn’t “get” what the director was doing with sound, then you would certainly have a hard time with his pictures.

Yes, Elliott Gould plays Philip Marlowe. A very different interpretation than Humphrey Bogart or Dick Powell, obviously. And yet, it works. Gould displays the right amount of bemused cynicism, as if he had been asleep for twenty years and suddenly woken up in the 1970s. And that’s exactly how Altman, screenwriter Leigh Brackett (who co-wrote the 1946 The Big Sleep), and Gould approached the material. Altman, in a documentary extra on the making of the film, called the character “Rip Van Marlowe.” He is an anachronism in a different time. For example, Marlowe can’t help but be bewildered by the quartet of exhibitionist hippie lesbians that live in his apartment complex. And he still drives a car from his original era. And therein lies the point of the picture—this is a comment on the 70s, not the 40s or 50s.

The plot concerns the possible murder of the wife of Marlowe’s good friend, Terry (played by baseball pro Jim Boutin), who is indeed a suspect, as well as a suitcase of missing money belonging to a vicious gangster (extrovertly portrayed by film director Mark Rydell), an Ernest Hemingway-like writer who has gone missing (eccentrically performed by Sterling Hayden), and the author’s hot blonde wife who may know more than she’s telling (honestly played by newcomer Nina van Pallandt). The story twists, turns, hits some bumps in the road, and finally circles back to the initial beginning mystery.

It may not be one of Altman’s best films, but it’s one of the better ones. It’s certainly one of the more interesting experiments he tried in his most prolific period of the 70s.

Kino Lorber already put out a Blu-ray release several years ago, but it didn’t really improve much on the original DVD release prior to that. The company has now re-issued the film in a brand new 4K master that is a vast step-up from the previous release. It looks great. The soft focus cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond is no longer a hazy gaze but is instead a crystal transfer of that distinctive 1970s film stock imagery. The movie now comes with an informative audio commentary by film historian Tim Lucas.

Some of the extras are ported over from the previous Kino Lorber release, such as the aforementioned “making of” documentary, a short piece on Zsigmond, an animated reproduction of a vintage American Cinematographer article, the trailer, and a few radio spots. New to this edition are featurettes with film historian/critic David Thompson on Altman and the film, author Tom Williams on Raymond Chandler, and author/historian Maxim Jakubowski on hard-boiled fiction in general. There is also a “Trailers from Hell” segment with Josh Olson.

If you’re an Altman fan and don’t already own the out of print DVD or previous Blu-ray, you may want to pick up the new, improved The Long Goodbye. It probably won’t be long before this, too, like Philip Marlowe himself, is a rare collector’s item.

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(Note: It has just been announced that "The Long Goodbye" has been named to America's National Film Registry of classic motion pictures.)