More to the point it begins with Gould waking up, fully dressed, in his apartment in the Hollywood Hills. But after all that's my line of work.Ĭhandler's novel begins with Marlowe meeting Terry Lennox, but Altman's film begins with Marlowe and his cat. He looked puzzled and then he started to get mad, but by that time I was in the car and moving. 'I can see you've made a big success out of it,' I said. The way the competition is nowadays a guy has to save his strength to protect hisself in clinches.'

Them booze hounds just make a man a lot of trouble for no fun. If it was me, I'd just drop him in the gutter and keep going. The really bad reviews tend to regard Gould's Marlowe as a 'grotesque parody,' but as Altman himself said years later, 'what they were really saying was that's not Humphrey Bogart.' These are among the raves the film received Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave it a lukewarm three stars but later changed his mind, upgrading it when he put it on his list of Great Movies in 2006.

He's bright, hip, sardonic and, as someone says of him in the film, a born loser.' 'His toughness, which is questionable,' Canby wrote, 'is not born of attempts to survive the Depression, but of an attempt to control feelings, which well could have been ravaged by growing up alternately committed and disappointed by the events of the last 10 years. In a kind review, the Hollywood Reporter described Gould's Marlowe as 'wistfully human' and a 'tolerantly benign anachronism.' In the New York Times, Vincent Canby summed up Gould's Marlowe as 'a child of the sixties and seventies.' Gould wasn't an obvious choice to anyone except Altman. Ultimately, though, what set people off was casting Elliott Gould as Marlowe, even more than Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade or Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer the quintessential hard-boiled gumshoe. (Let's not pretend that M*A*S*H was a period film, though – despite being set during the Korean War, it's plainly about Vietnam, and the setting is a misdirection that nobody who watched it took seriously.) Miller, two years earlier, and would head to the past again with pictures like Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), Vincent & Theo (1990), Kansas City (1996) and Gosford Park (2001). Altman himself was never allergic to period pictures – he'd made his offbeat western, McCabe & Mrs. The movies were in the middle of a major nostalgia trend – American Graffiti opened to huge box office success that year, and two years later Robert Mitchum would star as Marlowe in a period-perfect adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely. It wasn't like setting the film in postwar Los Angeles wasn't an option.

The long goodbye by raymond chandler