Kissing Off Chandler

DON'T SEE The Long Goodbye if you have fond and entrenched memories of the Raymond Chandler crime novel. Director Robert Altman has thrown out three-quarters of Chandler's plot, as well as detective Philip Marlowe's hard-boiled mystique--his pithy talk and polish, and his Sir Galahad morality. Altman's film is basically a wallow in the atmosphere of Los Angeles today. Altman's virtues are a good eye and some talent with actors, as well as a healthy distaste for the Hollywood culture which surrounds him. But his flaws are fatal: he doesn't know what makes a plot hold water, and can't give his characters enough of a past to make them interesting. He's not the director I would have picked up for a Chandler outing.

Chandler's Marlowe was a smart man and a smoothie, with brains and a sense of honor; he chose to walk alone down the meaner streets of California in the 40 s and 50's because at heart he was a cop--he only quit the force because he couldn't stand its stupidity and corruption. He certainly didn't leave to get more money; his lack of materialism and his sense of morality are precisely what distinguished him from his fellow Californians. Marlowe's clients--who, in fact, he largely disliked--were the rich and indolent descendants of early pioneers, lying around their acres-wide estates with nothing better to do than fuck and kill each other.

ALTMAN'S MARLOWE is a big-hearted schlemiel who would never have thought of being a cop, or of holding any faith in old-time concepts of personal honor (or America, for that matter). The people he works for are a generation further advanced in their amoralities than Chandler's, and Marlowe's new goal is just to keep alive in their company and enjoy himself. He protects his friends as a side-issue (we have no idea of how his friendships are fashioned) but if his friends double-cross him he shoots. He is so inarticulate that even if he did have an ethical code, it would be hard to decipher. He is actually just as dangerous as his enemies--a flower-child disguised by a curled lip and a gun.

It is always interesting when a director tries to teach an old culture-figure new tricks, but what Altman takes from Chandler doesn't fulfill his new needs. Chandler's Long Goodbye focused on all the obstacles put between Marlowe and the truth about a friend's suspected murder (and later suicide)--the political interests of important businessmen, the links between quack doctors and paid-off police, and the duplicities of crooked accomplices to his friend's "crimes." Altman doesn't want to concentrate on the intelligence and shrewd stratagems which Marlowe uses to overcome denizens of the closed frontier; he doesn't give us in his film any alternative to lifestyles within California society. He wants us to take the evil of the present world as a given, and astound us with American society's mercurial ability to gloss over mercenary treachery and murder. It is a valid view of California, but a cheap apocalypse. Altman simplifies the story so much that the motives of all his characters except Marlowe are mystifying--and this new Marlowe himself is not interesting enough to hold the film together.

HOWEVER, EVEN IF ALTMAN can't rewrite a script (mostly written by a hack, Leigh Brackett), or restrain the mugging of top-billed Elliott Gould, he is such a gifted director that his visuals and tossed-off stage business alone hold our interest. He crams his frames with different people doing interesting things, like gangsters taking off their clothes as a sign of group solidarity, or a Malibu Colony security guard impersonating Hollywood stars. If some of the shtiks misfire, Altman keeps on coming with others that don't. And aside from Gould and a stoned-out Sterling Hayden (Altman's film embarrasses us with this great screen presence's one enormous bust), the director's cast is good enough to follow him. Vilmos Szigmond's neon-tinged photography and Lou Lombardo's understated, rhythmic editing help a lot--as they did in their other Altman collaborations.

For all his stupid pretensions, Altman thus stays in the mind as an unfinished, unruly, but alive and experimenting talent. But until such camera-happy folk start flashing signals of full human relationships, (some of which I thought I caught in McCabe and Mrs. MiHer), my heart will belong to the Chandlers.