The Long Goodbye

This week's Weird Wednesday selection is shockingly non-exploitative: Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, adapted from Raymond Chandler by Leigh Brackett. A steal for a mere dollar. Still, we'll go to Lars for the play-by-play:

"Anyone who bought a ticket for THE LONG GOODBYE expecting a leisurely rehash of private-eye movie cliches was certainly disappointed and, I expect, outraged. This is not so much an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel (itself a challenge to the commercially expected norm); it's also a gloss and critique on the whole myth of the sardonic but not quite cynical investigator who makes reluctant swoops from his perch on the margin of society into the corrupt milieux of the criminal classes high and low. The great director Robert Altman is assisted by screenwriter Leigh Brackett, who had written the definitive Raymond Chandler adaptation 27 years earlier: THE BIG SLEEP. This would be among her last screen credits and it's a classic.

"In choosing his leading man, Altman made a characteristically perverse selection: Elliott Gould, who as a Jewish New Yorker could not help but seem an outsider in the classically constrained world of Chandler's LA. The period was also shifted to the contemporary '70s, though some anachronisms remain, not least Marlowe himself. Together, Altman, Brackett and Gould deconstruct, distend, disentangle and reentangle all the archetypal constructs of America's favorite detective. Like the very best adaptations, it dispenses with many of the events of the book but manages to retain the spirit. It's a savagely funny movie with support from Sterling Hayden, Henry Gibson, scandal figure Nina Van Pallandt and baseball player Jim Bouton. Years later THE BIG LEBOSWKI mined much of the same territory, and the two films are of a piece. Hugely, gigantically, unreservedly recommended."