Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Red Herrings

Film: The Long Goodbye
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

It’s no secret that I really like a good film noir, and so it comes as no surprise that I enjoy neo-noir as well. Hell, I watched Blue Velvet yesterday and I made no bones about the fact that I like that film quite a bit. But it was a film I’d seen before multiple times, so I knew what was coming. One of the real joys of a good film noir is when I don’t know all the twists and turns of it, when what’s coming shows up as a surprise. The Long Goodbye is a film I had heard of, but had never seen before today—and today was the perfect day for it. For an American film fan, there’s no better way to celebrate the 4th of July than by watching a film in the most American of styles.

And this is a noir, based on a book from the mid-1950s by author Raymond Chandler and featuring his great gumshoe Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould). Like most noirs, it starts out as something relatively straightforward, even simple, and adds complexity at every turn. Marlowe, who lives across from an apartment filled with young, mostly nude and nubile women, gets a visit from his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton). Terry says that he’s having trouble with his wife, and needs a ride down to Mexico. Having nothing better to do, Marlowe takes him.

And then things get hairy. It turns out that Terry Lennox’s wife has been murdered, and Terry himself has committed suicide in Mexico. The police are certain that Lennox killed his wife thanks to the suicide note, but Marlowe isn’t buying it. He spends a good three nights in jail to protect his friend until his friend turns up dead, and Marlowe is released. This brings him some press, which gets him embroiled in a few other plots.

The main one is his hire by a woman named Eileen Wade (Nina Van Pallandt) to find her husband, Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden). Roger Wade is a well-known author who (as per tradition) has a severe drinking problem and who frequently needs to dry out. This time, though, he’s left only a cryptic message and he’s not at his typical drying-out spot. Marlowe begins investigating and finds Roger Wade at a private hospital run by Dr. Verringer (Henry Gibson), who seems pretty shady himself and more concerned with getting his fee than with treating his patients. Marlowe also encounters the criminal Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell).

Augustine is his own problem. His claim is that Lennox ran off to Mexico with $355,000 of his money and then killed himself without putting the money where it needed to go. He’s convinced that Marlowe knows where the money is, and emphasizes this point in a surprising and brutal way. So, while Marlowe needs to figure out what’s going on with Roger Wade, he also needs to find the missing money. Things heat up when he discovers a connection between the Wade’s, Terry Lennox, and Marty Augustine.

The Long Goodbye is a fascinating version of film noir because it is a noir only on the surface. It is absolutely convoluted enough for a typical noir, but the complexity of the story is made up of a series of blind alleys and red herrings. The actual crime at the center of the film is, bucking noir tradition, ridiculously simple. The various crimes and problems that crop up throughout the film are all related in that they have the same cast of characters, but each one is completely distinct. This is not so much a Venn diagram as a series of connected points. The straight path from the crime at the start to its resolution at the end would take only about a quarter of the film’s running time, but the side paths and additional problems are necessary for Marlowe to get there.

Elliott Gould is an inspired piece of casting. He looks completely out of place in the film, and since he is a character created 20 years before, he doesn’t belong in early 1970s California. While his neighbors go mostly nude, Marlowe is rarely seen without a tie. In a society of physical beauty, he’s always unshaven. He’s the only character in the entire film who smokes, and he does so constantly, lighting his matches on any available surface. Marlowe walks through the film as a dark blot, mumbling one-liners to himself and getting in the way of everyone else. On its face, Gould doesn’t seem like the type to play a hard-boiled detective, but he works it perfectly. Marlowe is one of those characters who is simply entertaining for who and what he is, and with the wrong emphasis, he’d be ridiculous. Instead, he’s incredibly fun to watch.

Nina Van Pallandt, on the other hand, is pretty in that early 1970s blonde beach baby way, sunburned, freckled, and mildly boyish. Sterling Hayden’s performance is an interesting one, as he plays Wade as the natural son of Ernest Hemingway.

Altman is also a very smart director and lets his camera do a lot of the work for him in this film. Instead of quick cuts and sudden movements, the camera is almost languid, holding position in interesting spots for a long time. We witness an argument between Eileen and Roger Wade from their patio. They are inside, but the camera shows them through the sliding door, allowing us to see Marlowe outside, waiting to be summoned in. Throughout, Altman allows the story to unfold in front of us rather than forcing us into it.

As a final note, one of Marty Augustine’s goons is played by an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger. It doesn’t really look like him until you really look, and then you can’t stop seeing it.

The Long Goodbye is entirely entertaining even if it’s just a long goof. Ultimately, the conclusion we get is a bit unsatisfying, but the path we take to get there is entertaining indeed.

Why to watch The Long Goodbye: It’s film noir updated the way it should be.
Why not to watch: The story is straightforward. Where it’s not, it’s there just to mess with you.

18 comments:

  1. I'm surprised to read that Elliott Gould can carry a picture.

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  2. Love this movie. Glad you did too. Love any sort of incarnation of noir. The performances are so good.

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    1. I cant get over how much I enjoyed Elliott Gould in this role. Watching him smear fingerprint ink on his face to mess with the cops, for instance, is pure brilliance.

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  3. Steve, there are so many things to love about this movie. You're right that Gould's character feels out of place in the '70s, but that tone works surprisingly well like you say. I also watched Gould last year in The Silent Partner, and I'm discovering he's really underrated as a lead actor. That's a fun cat-and-mouse heist movie and also worth seeing.

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    1. Gould always strikes me as a supporting actor and I'm not sure why. I hate what they did with him in the Oceans films. In the first, he was a money guy, sort of a non-performing Wayne Newton. In the follow-ups, they turned him into a comic relief nerd. He's better than that.

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  4. I saw you reviewed this and I knew it was in my Netflix Instant queue, so I watched it last night. I'm afraid I didn't have as much love for it as you did (and I also like noir).

    At about an hour and fifteen minutes in I started getting restless. Up to that point there had only been a couple of scenes that seemed relevant (which turned out to be right), with several others being there for no other reason than to try to be quirky. Quirky is fun if it works - and a few scenes did - but more than half the time they were a miss with me. By the time the movie got done I figured that it could easily have had a half hour cut out of it without losing anything even remotely important. And this doesn't include the scenes with the neighbor women - which are vitally important to the movie. :-)

    I did do a "That guy's got really big arms. Wait, was that Arnold Schwarzengegger?" double take and actually reversed the streaming vid. I still couldn't tell, but a couple minutes later when the guy was having everyone take off their shirts you could see his face well enough to tell it was him. According to IMDB, David Carradine was also in the movie. I didn't notice him. Back in the late 80s or early 90s I swear I saw Schwarzenegger in an early-in-his-career film playing a mute fiddle player, but I have no idea what movie it was.

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    1. I wonder if this review might have biased you, because the fact that half or more of the film is red herrings doesn't reveal itself until the end. In some ways, it's like The Usual Suspects, building up a huge house of cards only to shake the table at the very end. It worked for me.

      I'm wondering if the Schwarzenegger film you're thinking of is Stay Hungry. I don't think he's mute in that, but he does play a fiddle, but it's from the late 1970s.

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    2. I actually didn't read your review until after I saw the film. Since I was going to watch it someday, I figured why not watch it now so I could then read your post and comment while it was recent. I had to smile at your comments on him mumbling and constantly smoking because I had the same thoughts. In fact, the smoking kind of went into parody territory where he's even lighting up when he's supposed to be skulking around in the dark.

      I just now poked around on the Stay Hungry IMDB pages. I think that is it. Someone also called his character a hillbilly and that rang a bell. I skipped over this when trying to identify the movie because it sounded like another Pumping Iron.

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    3. Gould's portrayal of Marlowe is what really makes this film for me. I love the constant commentary and the constant smoking because it feels so out of place, but in a perfect way. Some of those under-the-breath remarks are really funny.

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  5. I've had this in my queue for quite a while, can't wait to finally watch it. My wife hates noir, so I have to watch while she isn't around.

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    1. How can anyone hate film noir? Well, different strokes, I guess.

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    2. She likes her movies to have a happy ending. She's decided that life is unhappy enough!

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    3. There are a few noirs out there with happy endings. Pickup on South Street is one that works great as a noir and still offers a wink and a nod at the end, for instance.

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  6. Your review made me go seek out this film (it's currently on Netflix Instant Watch). Sooooo good. By the end of the opening credits, after watching Marlowe try to feed his cat, I was hooked.

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    1. That's a cute moment. When I finally jumped in with both feet was when Marlowe smears the ink on his face in the interrogation room and starts singing Swanee.

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  7. I like what you wrote about Elliot Gould as Marlowe. For this 73 version of the forties cynical private eye, Gould was indeed an inspired choice. Just watching him going through his antics was enough for me. Even the opening with him trying to feet his cat is entertaining.

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    1. Exactly--it took the right kind of guy to play this role in this year, and Gould was a great choice. I don't know someone else of this era who could have pulled this off as well.

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