Elliott Gould’s portrayal of the private detective Philip Marlowe, in Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye, may be the greatest performance of his career. But don’t bother comparing him to the man who first played the part, in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep.
“Come on,” Gould says. “Nobody was better than Humphrey fucking Bogart!”
No actor seemed to better capture the American Zeitgeist circa 1970 than Gould. His performances in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and M*A*S*H had made him an unlikely leading man and one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. That September, a portrait of Gould by Milton Glaser appeared on the cover of Time under the headline Star for an Uptight Age.
Then, in 1971, Gould abruptly quit A Glimpse of Tiger—a film that he was both starring in and producing—shortly after production began. Suddenly, he was unemployable.
“I almost lost my entire career because I didn’t know how the business worked and how political it is,” Gould says. “I had no work. I’d gone too far.”
Which is why, the following year, Gould went to visit his friend David Picker, production chief at United Artists, looking for work as an actor or producer, anything to get back into the game. Picker handed Gould a script for The Long Goodbye written by Leigh Brackett, who’d collaborated with William Faulkner on the screenplay for The Big Sleep. Gould loved the script. But Peter Bogdanovich, who was attached to direct, was looking for an older, world-weary tough guy like Lee Marvin or Robert Mitchum.
Then, as so often happens in Hollywood, Bogdanovich dropped the project, leading Picker to send it to Altman, who’d directed Gould in M*A*S*H and needed a hit after the box-office failure of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Altman read the script and called Gould from Ireland, where he was wrapping his latest film.
“What do you think?,” Altman asked.
“I always wanted to play this guy,” Gould said.
“You are this guy,” Altman responded.
“And that was it,” Gould says. The pair set off to re-invent the detective movie. The Long Goodbye, which turned 50 this year, is considered the first neo-noir (followed in short order by Chinatown, Night Moves, and The Late Show). Earlier this year, revival screenings were held at the Castro Theatre, in San Francisco, and Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema.
“I always wanted to play this guy,” Gould said. “You are this guy,” Altman responded.
Altman and Gould’s approach to Chandler’s work went against the grain, conceiving Marlowe as a low-key man of honor and loyalty who seems to have fallen asleep in 1953 and woken up in the anything-goes world of 1973 Los Angeles. They referred to their protagonist, who drove Gould’s own 1948 Lincoln Continental convertible, as “Rip Van Marlowe.”
“[He’s] wandering through this landscape of the early 1970s but trying to invoke the morals of a previous era,” Altman said. “I put him in that dark suit, white shirt and tie, while everyone else was smelling incense and smoking pot and going topless.”
In the film, Marlowe’s friend Terry Lennox (played by major-league pitcher Jim Bouton—an example of what one exec described as Altman’s “perverse” casting) has taken off for Mexico to escape arrest after being accused of murdering his wife. As he works to clear his friend of the charges, Marlowe becomes embroiled with a vicious gangster, a rich alcoholic novelist (played like a lion with a thorn in his paw by Sterling Hayden), and his beautiful blonde wife.
“Altman gave me the opportunity to create like nobody else,” Gould said in 2019. “To have played a classic character out of time and place, it was like, in a way, a first movie for me....The Long Goodbye was the perfect vehicle for me to live in.”
In true Altman fashion, the film is a mash-up of genres, filled with Gould’s improvisation (he came up with Marlowe’s mantra of acceptance to this strange new world, “It’s O.K. with me”), overlapping dialogue, and deeper explorations of human nature. The movie’s titular theme song, written by Johnny Mercer and John Williams, appears everywhere throughout the film, performed by everyone from a torch singer and a barroom piano player to a Mexican marching band. You even hear it when Marlowe rings a doorbell.
To create the look, Altman “flashed” the film used to shoot the first two acts by exposing it to light, an effect that makes the final image seem as if it’s from an old photo. Then, for the third act, he brings the film into a clearer, more present focus when the seemingly hapless Marlowe finally decides that everything isn’t O.K. and emerges from his slumber to solve the case and take care of the bad guy in swift, unexpected fashion, before walking away to the strains of “Hooray for Hollywood.”
Though The Long Goodbye has become much admired in the ensuing 50 years, Gould says that Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin “almost single-handedly destroyed” it with a negative review in which he wrote, “[Gould] is not Chandler’s Marlowe, or mine, and I can’t find him interesting, sympathetic, or amusing, and I can’t be sure who will.”
“There were people who were enraged that we would break the mold, that we would go against the grain, and for it not to be the traditional Philip Marlowe,” Gould told Altman biographer Mitchell Zuckoff. “But people came around.”
One of the primary reasons they did was New Yorker critic Pauline Kael’s review, in which she declared The Long Goodbye to be “the best American movie ever made that almost didn’t open in New York.” (Roger Ebert loved it as well.)
Gould and Altman often discussed the idea of making another Marlowe film. With Altman long gone, however, Gould stands alone with his vision and the rights to a book that he bought from the Chandler estate for a buck. And he has the title ready just in case. It’s a play on Marlowe’s being lost in time and Gould’s overall philosophy of life: It’s Always Now.
Josh Karp is the author of A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever and Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind
Marc Freeman is a Seattle-based journalist and the author of Modern Family: The Untold Oral History of One of Television’s Groundbreaking Sitcoms