Altman’s ‘Long Goodbye,’ a ’70s take on Chandler
“The Long Goodbye”: Philip Marlowe had been played by Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery and James Garner, but Elliott Gould broke the template with Robert Altman’s freewheeling 1973 adaptation that is at once a parody of and sly homage to not just film noirs but old Hollywood in general as well as a more recent phenomenon, pop culture.
Later, he came back to Hollywood and worked in television, directing episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Peter Gunn” and “Route 66,” among others, before moving to features.
Looking at his filmography, one gets the sense that he used “The Long Goodbye,” an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s longest and most complex Marlowe novel, as a way not only to right an old wrong — proving he could make a noir on his own terms — but also as a way to hone his visual style while working within the comfort zone of a familiar genre.
The serpentine story begins when Marlowe’s pal Terry Lennox (played by former baseball player Jim Bouton, a pop culture figure for his raunchy tell-all book “Ball Four”) asks Marlowe to drive him to Mexico.
[...] what do a gangster (the film director Mark Rydell in a rare acting role) and a washed-up alcoholic novelist (1950s noir star Sterling Hayden) have to do with it?
The security guard working the gate at Marlowe’s apartment is lost in the past, doing impressions of old Hollywood stars such as Jimmy Stewart and Walter Brennan; his neighbors are lost in the present — women who like to smoke weed in the nude (it is the ’70s).
Felines on Film series at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (702 Mission St., S.F. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org) features the 1961 British chiller “The Shadow of a Cat” (7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 25) in which the title creature gains revenge on her mistress’ killers one-by-one, each revenge killing carried out in “Cat-O-Vision.”
A Gene Kelly MGM musical double feature — “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Cover Girl” — screens Friday-Sunday, May 26-28, at the Stanford Theatre 221 University Ave., Palo Alto.