The Long Goodbye (1973)
Directed by Robert Altman
In 1970s Hollywood, Detective Philip Marlowe tries to help a friend who is accused of murdering his wife.
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Leign Brackett adapted Chandler's novel, she previously having worked on the author's classic "The Big Sleep" (1946) with William Faulkner.
Counterculture über-schlep Elliot Gould transforms the detective from a tough-talking, fast-acting gumshoe into a sloppy, reactive dreamer, but the brilliance of Altman’s film is that it nonetheless maintains the essential essence of its lead character – as in Chandler’s novels, Gould’s Marlowe is a defiant idealist and altruist (whether it’s helping a pal in need or going out to the store at 3 a.m. to buy his hungry cat some food) disgusted by corruption and convinced that there’s some goodness left in sleazy, lousy L.A. Written by The Big Sleep scribe Leigh Brackett, The Long Goodbye is chockablock with plot twists and turns involving a blustery Ernest Hemmingway-type writer (Sterling Hayden), his alluring young wife (Nina Van Pallandt), a loan shark (Mark Rydell), and Marlowe’s friend Terry Lennox (former major leaguer and Ball Four author Jim Bouton) who’s accused of murdering his wife and then killing himself.
The screenplay by Leigh Brackett, who also scripted the Bogart adaptation of Chandler's The Big Sleep, streamlines a lot of detail out of what might be Chandler's densest tome, and not only the material that would draw attention away from the anachronism of a 1970s Marlowe.
Altman cleverly hired Leigh Brackett, who had co-scripted "The Big Sleep" (still Chandler's definitive screen moment), and she helped Altman layer a picture that is as much a crisp comment on contemporary LA (and its full-on egotism) as a tale delineating Marlowe's crime-busting pursuits.
The feline in question wakes up its owner—Philip Marlowe, formerly embodied by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep but now portrayed by a decidedly less self-assured Elliott Gould—at 3:30 in the morning so that it may be fed.
You just don’t mess with The Big Sleep .
This is hardly Hoagy Carmichael in To Have and Have Not .
The co-stars are a colorful and varied lot: veteran star Sterling Hayden, who replaced the late Dan Blocker in the part of a washed-up writer; Nina van Pallandt, the Danish-born singer who was involved in the Clifford Irving-Howard Hughes affair, here making a promising U.S. film debut; ex-Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton, now a TV sportscaster in New York; actor-director Mark Rydell, who recently directed John Wayne in "The Cowboys"; ex-"Laugh-In" regular Hebry Gibson; David Arkin, Warren Berlinger and, in a cameo, David Carradine.