[photopress:goodbye.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Nothing says goodbye like a bullet…
Elliot Gould turned 70 on 29th August, 2008. Seems a perfectly appropriate time for Picturenose to lay its cards on the table in the long-running debate as to whether Robert Altman’s anachronistic adaptation of possibly the finest hard-boiled gumshoe novel ever written lives up to the book, or lays eggs. Well, which way would you go?
I loved it.
Leigh Brackett’s dazzling screenplay, which updates Raymond Chandler’s original to 1973 LA, depicts P.I. Philip Marlowe (Gould) as a chain-smoking, wisecracking sap – already, we’re at odds with Bogart’s take in The Big Sleep (1946), and it’s going to get ‘worse’ for Chandler purists very quickly.
Marlowe drives his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) from LA to the Tijuana border as a favour, but returns home to his gastronomically picky cat and an apartment full of cops, who arrest him for “abetting the murder of Lennox’s wife”. After Marlowe’s release, following Lennox’s reported suicide in Mexico, a beautiful woman, Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt) hires him to locate her alcoholic and suicidal husband, novelist Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden). Then, a hoodlum and his muscle visit to tell Marlowe that he owes $350,000 – it’s mob money, apparently, that his dead friend took to Mexico. The threads are coming together, and Marlowe’s own principles begin to emerge from behind his cynical, world-weary facade…
The controversial ending is the most talked-about aspect of Altman’s film, so I will only cast my vote in its favour – suffice to say that it hits like a freight train.
Here’s how Chandler’s novel ends: “He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. What for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn and come back and talk me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn’t. That was the last I saw of him. I never saw any of them again — except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.”
And that’s not how the movie finishes.
But there is much else to savour here – not least of which is Gould’s performance, casting Marlowe as a mumbling, murmuring seeming-shadow of a man, at odds with a world that alternately amuses and frustrates him: “I have two friends in the world. One is a cat. The other is a murderer.” There’s also an all-pervasive sense of imminent violence – LA is revealed at once to be a city at the tail-end of the Love Generation, as well as a place in which a psycopathic small-time hood (Mark Rydell, chilling) smashes a Coke bottle into his floozy’s face, a moment of sickening violence (shades of Kiss Me Deadly (1955) in its intensity) that drags the viewer out of the reverie created by the first half of the film.
In fact, Altman’s vision compares very favourably to the mood of Howard Hawk’s 1946 classic, and is infinitely superior to the Mitchum vehicles Farewell My Lovely (1975) and Michael Winner’s remake of The Big Sleep (1978).
One to check out when you’re feeling iconoclastic. Enjoy.
112 mins.
