“A New Wave anti-noir! If Gould was the American Belmondo, The Long Goodbye is the closest Hollywood ever came to making its Breathless.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice. Click here to read cover story

“You want to call this a masterpiece? Hey, it's okay by me.” – David Fear, Time Out New York

“Watching The Long Goodbye in 1973, you could feel Philip Marlowe dancing on his own grave.
Watching it now, you can see Robert Altman dancing with him.”
- Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times. Click here to read feature

“ALTMAN’S FINEST! The most improbably faithful screen adaptation of Chandler ever made.
One of those rare movies that take the temperature and check the pulse of the times in which they are made. Don’t miss it!”
– Bruce Bennett, The New York Sun

Click here to read Anthony Lane's review in The New Yorker

“DON'T MISS! Robert Altman drops Philip Marlowe into the Me Decade and reinvents the detective movie.” – Time Out New York

(1973) “I have two friends in the world. One is a cat. The other is a murderer.” When the wife of a pal (ex- Yankee pitching ace Jim Bouton) turns up dead, Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe gets hauled in for a grilling by the cops. Then, en route to trying to clear his friend, Marlowe gets a new assignment: find boozy, violent, and suicidal novelist Sterling Hayden, husband of mysterious Nina Van Pallandt (mysterious in real life, too, as mistress of Howard Hughes diaries hoaxer Clifford Irving). Complicated enough, but then Coke-bottle-wielding hood Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell, director of On Golden Pond) shows up demanding his 350 G’s... Wait! Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe?? That’s what outraged, Bogart-on-the-brain critics asked at the time. But this is Raymond Chandler’s private eye hero Altman-style, with a Marlowe for the 70s: okay, he still drives a ’48 Lincoln, but in the opening sequence he battles a finicky cat; eyes the topless sunbathers across the way; and continually remarks “It’s OK with me,” when it isn’t. But when he finally figures things out — in a controversial conclusion scripted by pulp legend Leigh Brackett (who’d also co-written the Bogie/Marlowe Big Sleep) — maybe those special private eye values haven’t changed all that much. Vilmos Zsigmond’s camera continually glides, tracks, pans, and elevates (there are no static shots) past mirrors and reflecting glass, the colors muted due to special overexposure of the negative, with John Williams’ entire musical score — background, TV jingles, door chimes, a bar pianist’s riff — consisting of variations on the same basic theme. “Gould’s Marlowe is a laid-back, shambling slob who actually harbors the same honorable ideals as Chandler’s Marlowe; but those values, Altman implies, just don’t fit in with the neurotic, uncaring, ephemeral lifestyle led by the ‘Me Generation’ of modern L.A. ...Altman constructs not only a comment on the changes in values in America over the last three decades, but a critique of film noir mythology.” – Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London). “Everyone said Elliott’s not Philip Marlowe and I wasn’t being true to Chandler, but what they were really saying was that Elliott Gould wasn’t Humphrey Bogart. I believe we were closer to Chandler’s character than any of the other renditions.” – Altman.
AN MGM RELEASE.
Showtimes: 3:15, 7:35