Sterling Hayden and Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye.

pet door Marlowe’s made with his kitchen window. So maybe he and this cat aren’t that good of friends. 

In the world of Philip Marlowe, whose big bang dates to 

1939, with The Big Sleep, there is nothing and no one on whom he can depend. (The detective's creator, Raymond Chandler, wrote a total of seven full-length Marlowe novels, with numerous short stories supplementing them.) But

doesn't that come with the territory of being a gumshoe — a role that regularly has happy developments backfire more than they stick? 

Movie adaptations of Chandler’s books came swiftly — the 1940s were full of them — and those adaptations usually took the form of stylish, hard-edged films noirs. The cynical and wise-cracking Marlowe was enlivened with cool and snappiness by actors like Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell. Along with the writer Dashiell Hammett, whose hero was the shamus Sam Spade, Chandler was pivotal in popularizing the hallmarks of the modern detective novel, in which witty, seen-it-all anti-heroes were forced to reckon with a cruel world inhabited by people who wanted to destroy each other for personal gain and, when he threatened that lucrative destruction, him. The novels and the Hollywood Golden Age-era adaptations were labyrinthine (The Big Sleep, especially). But they arguably never felt very expansive or free to extemporize. They had rules to follow. 

Robert Altman’s adaptation of The Long Goodbye, whose source material emerged in 1953, takes place 20 years after the book did. The director, working off a very funny script by Leigh Brackett (she’d co-adapted The Big Sleep for the screen 27 years earlier with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman), also “follows" the rules by way of its narrative, which is foundationally conventional. But Altman’s take on gumshoe fiction feels looser, more ambulatory. Although it never exactly meanders, its action has an incidental rather than carefully contrived quality to it, like everybody is improvising and just so happening to land on all the places detective stories are supposed to.

Marlowe’s job entails he’s treated dirtily in a corrupted world. Not helping matters, he doesn’t have loved ones around to help ease his suffering. In The Long Goodbye, the sad reality is given a dark funniness: even a tabby bribed with a decent meal doesn’t care about Marlowe as much as Marlowe cares about them, and that that example opens the movie is a sneaky establishment of the feature's playfulness. The long-standing characterization of the modern fictional detective was that despite the ubiquitous darkness in his life, he clung onto at least a semblance of sentimentality to cope — the idea that there is good in this world to preserve. This manifests sweetly in that 3 a.m. trip to the minute mart. It might not pay off, but it doesn’t alter the way Marlowe will continue to approach life. 

The premise of The Long Goodbye is simple. After Marlowe’s pointless minute-mart trip, he’s visited by an old friend named Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton). Lennox, aware it’s a big ask with little notice, asks Marlowe if right then and there he would be willing to drive him from Los Angeles to Tijuana. Without asking any real questions, Marlowe says sure — what else does he have going on? What seems like a generous favor soon seems like more of a big mistake. Splashing the front pages of the morning papers is the announcement that Lennox’s wife, Sylvia, has been murdered, probably by her husband. Maybe Marlowe should have been more inquisitive. A little while after the detective has been interrogated by the LAPD for his potential role in abetting Lennox's escape, the latter has supposedly killed himself in a hotel room in a city far from Tijuana. This development shuts the case. Marlowe, though, isn’t having it. This is all too strange to be so tidy. It’s not a surprise when he eventually finds out that the next case he takes on — he’s almost immediately hired by a woman named Eileen Wade (Nina Van Pallandt) to find her missing, Hemingway-like writer husband Roger (Sterling Hayden) — has a more-than-a-little-tenuous connection.

Marlowe is played by Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye, 

and it’s a performance so winningly amused with itself that you can't help but love it. You’re constantly grinning, to an almost embarrassing degree. His Marlowe, who is lanky, frequently unkempt, and shaggy-haired in a way that suggests unusual-for-the-character free-spiritedness, so often puts up a front of insouciance that in certain moments you think of him as a tired jester doing an impression of a private eye. Gould's Marlowe is so persistently throwing out little jokes that when he’s at one point being cross-examined by the police, he dares to smudge the fresh black paint off his thumbs under his eye sockets so he can make a crack about football once his interrogator has finished his sentence. Then he smears more of it on his face and provocatively sings “Swanee” in the Al Jolson style.

The 1973 Marlowe can’t hold himself back even when he ventures out of his apartment, thinks about grabbing the mail, and then decides against it because one of his neighbors is taking too long with her box. He narrates his thought process aloud like he’s generating material for a stand-up routine. He's not narrating to the viewers at home or to the neighbor standing in his way — he’s just amusing himself, and that’s what matters to him. Cracking wise is so much a constant here — it's a subconscious way of comforting oneself — that it can sometimes feel parodic. It's an exaggeration of just how often witticisms constituted the dialogue and narration in Chandler's novels.

When Gould’s Marlowe pretty cannily figures out something in the main investigation he’s conducting, we’re reminded that a self-preserving front of waggishness is not that good an indicator of someone’s actual professional ability. When Bogart and Powell (and less-successful-as-Marlowe actors like the unrelated Robert Montgomery and George Montgomery) were playing the detective, we were never unaware that they were performing, even though Bogart and Powell in particular were wonderful in the part. Comparatively, you almost forget Gould is acting. He’s so comfortable, or at least so convincingly pretends to be, that the performance in the best way mimics total spontaneity. It lacks any sort of constriction, almost contradicting how set in stone the characteristics of a wearied private eye are. 

There are other humorous challenges to convention going on in The Long Goodbye. The only music we hear — whether it’s emanating from a radio, from the lips of singing partygoers crowded around a piano at a party — is some version of John Williams’ titular score, as if to remind us how a film’s music, particularly in a thriller, is another artificial way a movie manipulates us into feeling something. What if it all more or less sounded the same?

One of the tropes accompanying Marlowe is that he pretty easily attracts women. But in The Long Goodbye, no one wants him romantically. Does anyone ever want him for non-self-serving reasons? Intimacy is always out of reach, and that's a reality rendered amusingly: His across-the-balcony neighbors are a harem of always-parading-around-naked young women, but this is established quickly as an unintentional act of provocation. The girls seem to think of him exclusively in the avuncular sense, and the only time they "want" him is when he's going to the store and they wonder if he could grab them some brownie mix while he's there. And then he gets to the store and is again reminded of his unwantedness. “What do I need a cat for — I’ve got a girl,” an employee says with a scoff when Marlowe can't believe he's never heard of the Courry brand.

he conclusion of The Long Goodbye is more decisive than we would anticipate given its feeling of looseness, and ultimately the movie hits the majority of the expectations one has in mind when pressing