The Long Goodbye (1973)

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) is less a traditional adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1953 detective novel than a postmodern riff on it—a revisionist noir, a sun-drenched elegy for the hardboiled genre, and a sly, satirical portrait of 1970s Los Angeles in moral and cultural freefall. The film casts Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe, the iconic private eye previously immortalized by Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, and others. But Gould’s Marlowe is a radical departure: a mumbling, slouching, anachronistic figure drifting through a world that no longer has a place for him.

Altman, at the height of his idiosyncratic powers following MASH* (1970) and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), uses Chandler’s plot more as scaffolding than as a blueprint. What emerges is a noir drenched in sunlight rather than shadow, where the crime is secondary to mood, atmosphere, and irony. The Long Goodbye is both a love letter to and an irreverent dismantling of detective fiction, mixing comedy, tragedy, and cynicism with haunting grace.

Plot Summary

The plot loosely follows Chandler’s original story, albeit filtered through Altman’s oblique, meandering style. Philip Marlowe is woken in the middle of the night by his friend, Terry Lennox, who asks for a ride to the Mexican border. Marlowe complies, no questions asked. But the next day, Lennox’s wife is found dead, and Marlowe is picked up by the police and questioned.

After being released three days later, Marlowe learns that Lennox has supposedly committed suicide in Mexico. Unconvinced, he begins to dig deeper and soon becomes entangled with a variety of eccentric and menacing figures: a washed-up alcoholic novelist (Sterling Hayden) and his enigmatic wife (Nina van Pallandt), a brutal gangster (Mark Rydell), and a smug psychiatrist. The deeper Marlowe investigates, the more he realizes that loyalty, truth, and identity are all deeply ambiguous—perhaps obsolete—in the world he now inhabits.

Themes and Analysis

The Death of the Hero

One of The Long Goodbye’s most provocative ideas is its treatment of the private eye as a man out of time. Gould’s Marlowe is a shambling relic of a vanished moral code—a man who says “it’s okay with me” like a prayer or a shrug. He drives a vintage car, wears a dark suit in blazing L.A. heat, and keeps a tab at a store that hasn’t heard of him. He’s Chandler’s knight-errant detective dropped into a world of health food cults, New Age therapy, and Hollywood narcissism.

Altman uses Marlowe to satirize not just the noir tradition but also the idea of moral certainty in a post-Watergate, post-counterculture America. This is a detective who can’t light a match, who talks to his cat, who seems barely capable of conducting an investigation—and yet who, paradoxically, remains the most decent man in a corrupt world. His loyalty to Lennox, his compassion for the damaged Eileen Wade, and his bemused endurance of abuse all serve to underscore his quiet nobility.

But the film’s closing moments—violent, sudden, and completely out of character for classic Marlowe—suggest that even this stoicism has limits. When truth is finally revealed, Marlowe takes a shocking, decisive action that punctuates the film with a bleak, bitter exclamation point. It’s as if he realizes too late that moral integrity has no place in this new world, and so he destroys the illusion once and for all.

Altman’s Subversion of Genre

Altman deconstructs the detective genre through atmosphere and style as much as narrative. His signature overlapping dialogue, long zooms, and restless camera movement create a sense of observational detachment. Rather than lead the viewer along a tight, clue-driven mystery, he invites us to wander through a bizarre and often comic landscape—where beach houses burn down, gangsters recite Hebrew prayers, and a security guard does Bogart impressions.

The film’s noir elements—murders, femme fatales, betrayals—are all present but destabilized. Everything is undercut by irony, delay, or anticlimax. In many ways, The Long Goodbye anticipates the postmodern pastiches of The Big Lebowski or Inherent Vice, films that pay homage while also puncturing the myths of the hardboiled past.

Altman’s use of light is especially subversive. Where classic noir unfolds in shadow and chiaroscuro, The Long Goodbye is drenched in sunshine. Los Angeles isn’t a city of menace but of banality, filled with yoga instructors, self-absorbed celebrities, and broken dreamers. This ironic brightness serves to highlight the moral rot beneath the surface.

Loyalty and Betrayal

At the heart of the film is Marlowe’s loyalty to Lennox—a loyalty that becomes increasingly futile as he realizes he’s been used. “It’s okay with me,” he keeps saying, even as the world proves again and again that nothing is okay. When the betrayal is finally laid bare, his response is cathartic not just for the character, but for the audience, who has watched him endure indignity after indignity with stoic patience.

This theme also plays out in the subplot involving the Wades. Sterling Hayden, in a powerful performance clearly inspired by Ernest Hemingway, plays Roger Wade as a man wrestling with both creative failure and moral guilt. His relationship with Eileen is filled with manipulation and regret. Marlowe, once again, is drawn into a situation where his trust is misplaced and his sense of decency is ultimately weaponized against him.

Performances

Elliott Gould delivers a career-defining performance as Marlowe. Eschewing the tough-guy persona of Bogart or Mitchum, Gould offers a mumbling, off-kilter, wonderfully vulnerable portrayal. His Marlowe is funny, sad, and strangely compelling—a man who seems half-asleep but whose inner life becomes more vivid with each scene. Gould’s improvisatory style meshes perfectly with Altman’s loose direction.

Sterling Hayden is magnificent as the raging, self-loathing Roger Wade. His scenes of drunken despair and cryptic philosophizing evoke a sense of tragic grandeur. Hayden, himself a damaged and reluctant actor, brings authentic pain to the role.

Nina van Pallandt, as Eileen Wade, offers a cool, restrained performance that plays well against the emotional intensity of the men around her. Her ambiguity is crucial to the film’s mood.

Mark Rydell, better known as a director (The Rose, On Golden Pond), is a revelation as the sadistic gangster Marty Augustine. His mixture of charm and casual brutality is terrifying—particularly in the infamous Coca-Cola bottle scene, which jolts the film into momentary horror.

Visuals and Music

Altman’s cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, creates a hazy, dreamlike look, using diffusion filters and natural light to evoke a world of moral fog. The visuals are simultaneously mundane and surreal—a sun-bleached vision of Los Angeles that feels both real and phantasmal.

The score, by John Williams (in an unusually minimalist mode), centers around a single theme—the song “The Long Goodbye”—which recurs throughout the film in various arrangements: muzak in a grocery store, a Mexican funeral dirge, a piano lounge version. This omnipresent theme acts like a ghost, haunting Marlowe and reinforcing the sense that he is living in a world where the past lingers but never returns.

Legacy and Influence

The Long Goodbye was initially misunderstood by critics and audiences alike. Many found Altman’s irreverence toward Chandler sacrilegious, and the film’s slow pace, tonal ambiguity, and passive protagonist confused genre fans. But over time, it has become recognized as a landmark in American cinema—a daring, elegiac revision of noir that helped open the door for a more self-aware, postmodern approach to crime storytelling.

Its influence is clear in everything from the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice to Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Each of these films echoes The Long Goodbye’s blend of noir and absurdity, nostalgia and cynicism, detective tropes and shaggy-dog surrealism.

Conclusion

The Long Goodbye is a film about endings—of friendships, of eras, of genres, and of illusions. It takes the clean lines of noir and smudges them, refracts them through the lens of 1970s disillusionment, and offers a detective story where the real mystery is whether any kind of justice or loyalty is still possible.

With its layered performances, innovative visuals, haunting music, and richly ironic tone, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye stands not only as a brilliant noir deconstruction, but as one of the most haunting and singular American films of its era.

A melancholy masterpiece of revisionist noir—subtle, strange, and unforgettable. Robert Altman and Elliott Gould reimagine Marlowe for a world that no longer believes in heroes.