Long Goodbye, The (1973)

Unshaven, unheroic Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is an accommodating chap. For example, living opposite his penthouse-style flat are a bevvy of voluptuous girls – models or ballet dancers, perhaps, who make full use of him to run errands and fetch and carry for them generally.

“Whatever should we do without kind Mr Marlowe?” the girls ask themselves as they go back to their exercises, which are carried out in various stages of dress and undress – usually the latter.

So when Marlowe’s friend Terry Lennox (former pro baseball player Jim Bouton) asks him for a ride across the Mexican border after an exceptionally heated argument with his wife, the obliging Marlowe agrees at once.

Marlowe returns home to learn that Mrs Lennox has been brutally murdered and, naturally, her husband is the number one suspect.

He refuses to believe his friend is a murderer, and his faith still remains unshaken when Lennox commits suicide in a remote Mexican village after writing out a full confession of his guilt.

It’s too neat, too nicely sewn-up and as far as Marlowe is concerned, totally unbelievable.

And so he follows a convoluted trail that leads him to his friend’s mistress, Eileen Wade (Nina Van Pallandt), her alcoholic husband, Roger (Sterling Hayden) and the shrill, ruthless hood Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell), to whom Lennox owed a substantial sum of money.

With his cheap suit and vintage car, Marlowe is a walking anachronism as he moves in a world of wealth and privilege inside the exclusive Malibu Colony.

Watch out for an early, unbilled appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of Augustine’s heavies, and a cameo by David Carradine.

Robert Altman directed this radical adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel.

Philip Marlowe
Elliott Gould
Eileen Wade
Nina Van Pallandt
Roger Wade
Sterling Hayden
Marty Augustine
Mark Rydell
Dr Verringer
Henry Gibson
Harry
David Arkin
Terry Lennox
Jim Bouton
Morgan
Warren Berlinger
Jo Ann Eggenweiler
Jo Ann Brody
Detective Farmer
Steve Coit
Mabel
Jack Knight

Director
Robert Altman

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