A funny thing happens to me every time I watch a film based on material by Raymond Chandler. I get caught up in the plot, trying to figure out whodunit. This is of course ridiculous, as chandler himself admitted of his own The Big Sleep that he wasn’t exactly sure who killed a few of the characters. After going over the plots of these films in my head time and again I’m inevitably struck with a thought which I can only assume is what Hitchcock would have concluded. Events in the film unfold the way that they do for the simple reason that they are what are required for the director to tell his story the way that he wants or needs to. Nothing more.
Now this same thing could be said of many bad films, particularly the bulk of those in which Kate Hudson (sigh, what a waste) appears, and it would be correct. But in those films events happen the way that they do simply because the director doesn’t know how to put them together in any other way. Conversely, we could make this same argument of narrative necessity when it comes to the work of David Lynch, whose films could be told no other way. Now I am not a Lynch apologist. I haven’t liked, nor have I seen, all of his movies. But I am confident that David Lynch knows what Mulholland Dr. (2001) means and that that S.O.B. just isn’t telling. On his deathbed he will release a tell-all book which explains each of his weird works, and it will be brilliant!
So when watching and discussing films such as The Big Sleep (1946) and Robert Altman’s take on Chandler’s detective hero Phillip Marlowe, The Long Goodbye (1973), it’s important to note that we see the things we see onscreen because they are what is meant to be seen. The things we don’t see are not meant to be seen, and therefore don’t really matter in the context of the story. What is to be revealed will be, in the director’s own good time. Altman has been described by Elliot Gould, who stars as his Marlowe in this picture, as a director who “shows life taking its course,” and that seems to be just about the best way to put it.
Gould and Altman took a distinct approach to updating this early 1950s story into the early 1970s world. They decided that Marlowe had been asleep for twenty years, and he woke up with his Fifties sensibilities in the world of flower power and yoga. Indeed the film does open with Marlowe being awakened, by his cat, which only uses him as a food source and is picky at that. This so-called “Rip Van Marlowe” approach serves the film well and adds to the iconoclastic nature of the movie. Altman confesses in supplementary material on the DVD that when the film was first released and Gould was panned as “no Phillip Marlowe” it took him time to realize that these criticisms really meant “no Humphrey Bogart,” which was supposed to be the point.
The film wasn’t poorly made, it was poorly marketed, and those who expected to see a tough guy rehash of 40s noir were mislead. Gould’s Marlowe isn’t rubbing up against the world; he’s trying to come to terms with the way it has changed since we last saw him. Gould’s excellent performance is supplemented by an outstanding supporting cast which includes the gruff Sterling Hayden, baseball iconoclast and author Jim Bouton, director Mark Rydell as an unforgettable loan shark, and an unaccredited early performance from a mustachioed Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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