At first glance, Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of The Long Goodbye—which screens April 11 at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles as part of American Cinematheque’s Noir City: Hollywood 2026 film festival—couldn’t be more different from the Raymond Chandler novel on which it is based. First, there is that sunlight, the bleary daytime Los Angeles where so much of the movie unfolds. Chandler’s novel, published in 1953, operates (as noir tradition dictates) in the shadows. Then, there is the issue of time, the way the film never quite allows us to settle, to know just where in history we are.
On the one hand, Altman resets The Long Goodbye in what is clearly the early 1970s; the detective hero, Philip Marlowe—played by a shaggy Elliott Gould, who will be in conversation with noir historian Eddie Muller following the screening—lives next to a gaggle of young women often seen practicing yoga in various states of undress. On the other, Marlowe drives a boxy 1930s sedan, and a key plot point (taken from the novel) revolves around a $5,000 bill, a denomination last printed in 1945 and discontinued from use in 1969.
And yet, this is how it should be, for what is noir if not a fluid form? Emerging in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it stood, initially, as a signifier of Depression-era America, in which “the pursuit of happiness,” long our most specious collective come-on, had been revealed to be an empty promise or a lie. By the time Altman began filming The Long Goodbye, a different sort of disillusionment had taken root: the quagmire of Vietnam, the increasing militancy of the radical left, and a conservative backlash that was itself in the process of collapsing beneath the weight of Watergate. How, then, could Altman’s (re)vision of the novel not reflect this circumstance? The film meanders, often feeling aimless. But, this, of course, becomes the point.
In that sense, Altman is seeking an inversion. Think: Chandler rewritten by Eve Babitz, or the other way around. The trick is that it doesn’t matter, that noir is adaptable. Consider the sun again, which, throughout the movie, illuminates nothing. It functions as a weapon, not a balm. Whether day drinking in a bar or driving the endless empty city, Marlowe absorbs its grainy light as an assault. Consider the women next door, who never leave the property. They are a Greek chorus of sorts but more gratuitous, as semiclad women often are in Altman’s work.
Their stasis represents its own expression of ennui.
All of this serves not so much to date the film as to fix it, like a butterfly upon a pin. Marlowe as quasi-countercultural hero—an outsider among outsiders—rather than, as Chandler would have it, a knight-errant of sorts. Gould’s Marlowe is more rumpled, more rough around the edges. He is more adrift—as he seeks to unravel the death of his friend Terry Lennox and the murder of Lennox’s wife, Sylvia—than intentional. Things happen to him; he is caught in the sort of social dynamic the 1960s free speech activist Mario Savio warned against, a “machine” whose “operation…makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part.”
Something similar might be said about the novel, which was Chandler’s last great work and perhaps his finest of all. Written as his wife was declining (she died the year after it was published), the book offers an emotionally vulnerable Marlowe: aging, burned-out, attuned to his failings, his limitations, in a way he hasn’t acknowledged before. “I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars,” the detective tells us. “When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard.… Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him.”
It’s no stretch to suggest that the contemporary crime novel starts here. Without this version of Marlowe, complex and human, there is no Easy Rawlins, no Harry Bosch.
How much of The Long Goodbye reflects Chandler’s own vulnerabilities? Certainly, the book is full of hints. There is the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, convinced he has lost his edge, his acuity, which drives him only further toward the bottle. (Sterling Hayden offers an inspired performance as the character in the Altman film.) There is Marlowe’s longing—ultimately unfulfilled—for the character Linda Loring, with whom he falls into something not unlike love. For these and other reasons, some critics have chided the novel for being soft, which is to say, emotional. Yet this is the very quality, I want to argue, that stands as its most essential strength.
What Chandler reaffirms here, after all, is the flexibility of the genre. Crime novel, social novel, veiled autobiography: Noir encompasses all of them. There is nothing it cannot do. As such, Altman’s The Long Goodbye represents its own expression of this notion, not so much updated as reconstrued. At heart, both book and film are about what happens when the decisions we have made, for good or ill, all come home to roost. Or, as Chandler reminds us early in the novel: “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”•
