Robert Altman updated Raymond Chandler's famous story but he forgot to tell Philip Marlowe. As played by Elliott Gould, the once cynical gumshoe is now a bewildered and oddly bereft alien in the psychedelic seventies. Los Angeles is peopled by health nuts and other lifestyle addicts, but even cats, who have no lifestyle to speak of, mystify Marlowe. The tale, full of dark humor, leads him to the Malibu home of sun-dried siren Nina van Pallandt and her washed-out author husband, Sterling Hayden.
“Altman abandons Chandler's immaculate surface in this unusual hand-held CinemaScope adaptation. His love of peripheral sensibility, the off-screen sense of reality actually on the screen, is made more manifest by the expansiveness of the wide format. The sound is often exquisitely related to this vastness, and the film seems to reach its height during the scene of the Malibu suicide-by-drowning, inspired, I imagine, by A Star Is Born, but taking us a few steps further...out.” -- Nathaniel Dorsky