The Long Goodbye

Decades after The Big Sleep, Robert Altman—with the invaluable aid of The Big Sleep screenwriter Leigh Brackett—updated another of Raymond Chandler’s typically convoluted detective thrillers, though he forgot to inform its recurring protagonist, Philip Marlowe. As played by Elliott Gould, the once-cynical gumshoe is now a bewildered and bereft alien in the psychedelic 1970s trying to get to the bottom of his friend’s wife’s untimely demise. “It’s OK with me” is his sometimes cool, sometimes exasperated mantra as he navigates a Los Angeles populated by mystifying health nuts and lifestyle addicts. “Altman’s goodbye to the private-eye hero is comic and melancholy and full of regrets” (Pauline Kael, New Yorker).