The Long Goodbye

Altman holds genre clichés and conventions up to the light of modern life—and uses them as a prism to reveal its hidden tones.

Some of the improvisational scenes don't entirely work, but it's an ambitious and artful reinvention.

A masterpiece of sorts, it digs beneath the surface of the supposedly liberated spirit of the times to expose the ethos that took America into the Vietnam war and produced Watergate.

The film is so inventive in its situations and humor that its shortcomings - the blunt ideas at its core - don't become apparent before several viewings.

A subtle criqiue of the main character that contains some astonishing set pieces.

The result, with some offbeat and thereby excellent casting, with the lagniappe of multi-leveled satire on the genre and its period, is a first-rate suspense melodrama.

Even when The Long Goodbye is ’70s shaggy, director Robert Altman (at the height of his powers) maintains a core tension within Marlowe’s wild goose chase.

It all comes down to the wisecracking Gould – messy and unkept, with a cigarette loosely dangling from the corner of his mouth. He’s the special sauce that makes the whole thing work and a perfect fit for the kind of movie Altman is shooting for.

Robert Altman and Elliott Gould might not be the ideal director/actor for Phillip Marlowe but they really make The Long Goodbye their own with their satirical contribution to the genre.

A logical (if less romantic) extension of Chandler’s vision of Marlowe as the last hurrah for chivalry in a fallen, postwar world.