‘The Long Goodbye’ is the Ultimate Anti-Whodunit
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
By Dylan Stuckey
Looking for a little slice of cinematic genre heaven? Start in the 1970s, take equal parts crime caper, detective story, stoner freakout, and hippy-dippy mystery, and mix it all together for a crackerjack of a whodunit.
Voilà! You’ve just made Robert Altman’s crowning achievement: 1973’s The Long Goodbye.
Not your father’s private eye
The Long Goodbye follows the comings and goings of the shaggiest of private detectives, Phillip Marlowe. The source material, created decades earlier by the famed mystery writer Raymond Chandler, relied on the tried and true tropes of the mystery genre. But the thing about the film was that the director, groovy counterculture dude Robert Altman, had no interest in making it. Not as it stood on Chandler’s page anyway.
Altman’s take was that the audience had seen the story before, in the form of the razor-sharp 1946 adaptation The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart. “Who’s going to out Bogey Bogey?” seemed to be Altman’s thinking. So he took a deep breath of salty Malibu air and cracked open the script by noted screenwriter Leigh Bracket, the same writer who had adapted The Big Sleep all those years before.
To Altman’s surprise, the new Phillip Marlowe was the same figure popularized all those years before by Chandler and Bogey—only he was just that: the same. Unchanged. Stagnant. Yet dropped smack-dab into the middle of the Hollywood Hills of the ‘70s. In a city full of half-naked, hash-brownie-eating yoga practitioners and Hollywood tough guys in polyester leisure suits.
It’s that aspect of the film that defines it as a perfect ‘70s counterculture treasure, ready to take a sledgehammer to the vestiges of the modern American man clinging to the idea that good and evil exist in the world and are clearly defined for all to see. It’s the ultimate anti-whodunit, more interested in the journey than the destination.
A cast and crew that’s OK with me
I’ve always been obsessed with this flick, so much so that in my younger years I dreamed of stalking around the Hollywood Hills solving mysteries like Elliot Gould’s hang-dog version of Marlowe, who ambles from encounter to encounter more like he is stumbling out of a barroom into the stark heat of the mid-day sun than he is investigating a crime with Scandinavian precision.
He’s all mumbled witticisms and catchphrases, his signature line “It’s OK with me” ringing out as a comedic reminder of Ernest Hemingway’s assertion that “the world is a fine place, and worth fighting for”—but only if you don’t have to work too hard to make it that way. Gould embodies the jittery and unconventional everyman in a way no other Altman stand-in has before or since. Everything about his Marlowe is unexpected, rough around the edges, and feels like it could fall apart at any moment.
Speaking of trainwrecks, the film contains one of the finest pieces of film acting you’re ever likely to lay eyes on. Sterling Hayden (General Jack D. Ripper himself for my Dr. Strangelove fans) appears as the hard-drinking, hard-living, but not hard-loving Ernest Hemingway archetype of Roger Wade. Wade and Marlowe’s paths cross in this bizarre caper so inadvertently, and make us so invested in the strangeness of the relationship the two men form, that we’re hard-pressed to see Roger Wade’s wife as the obvious femme fatale from whodunits of old.
The rest of the cast give the usual Altmanesque zigs in some truly strange and thrilling performances. From Nina Van Pallandt as the aforementioned femme fatale, to Altman regular Henry Gibson as a nervous psychiatrist, all the way down to the freshly crowned Mr. Olympia himself Arnold Schwarzenegger in a blink-and-you-miss-it goon role. Unconventional choices abound, which only serve to cement The Long Goodbye as the ultimate anti-whodunit.
“Gould embodies the jittery and unconventional everyman in a way no other Altman stand-in has before or since.”
Behind the camera, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (along with Altman) used a film-flashing technique, which gave the movie its hazy dreamlike look and pastel hues. When the mystery finally starts to unravel, you’re not entirely sure whether to follow along or stop on the way to spark up a joint.
Likewise, the stellar score by now-legendary composer John Williams only increases the surreal nature of the proceedings, as the movie’s central theme pops up again and again in different renditions: first, as muzak Marlowe hears over the loudspeakers in a grocery store; next, as a whiskey-soaked jingle the lunchtime piano player at the bar Marlowe frequents is practicing; and finally as a mariachi tune on the streets of Mexico once Marlowe finally wises up and decides to really put this mystery to bed.
A cold-blooded conclusion
Altman’s aim was to use the framework of the whodunit genre to his advantage while stuffing the film with unconventional artistic choices. For everything the movie is not, in the end it adds up to a whole lot more than anyone could have bargained for, as we are left with one of the truly great downer endings of all time.
In a final turn that rivals the freeze-frame ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Altman leaves us with a cold-blooded murder that feels just and necessary in order to break the spell that the movie has cast.
What do I really think of The Long Goodbye? “It’s OK with me…”
Dylan Stuckey is a lifelong lover of cinema, photography, and the arts. You can find him on Letterboxd @dylanstuckey and on Instagram @dylanstuckeyphotography.