After hearing it praised and discussed on the Junkfood Cinema podcast and knowing it was part of the Criterion Channel’s current Neo-Noir I decided to 1973’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye a viewing.

In the film Marlow is awakened in the middle of the night by his friend who needs an emergency car ride to Mexico from Los Angeles following a fight with his wife. Marlow, apparently a very good friend, complies and later when the wife turns up dead finds himself considered a co-conspirator in her murder kicking off the plot.

Sadly, I can’t say the film was an overwhelming success for me. Elliot Gould’s mumbling and seeming distracted take on P.I. Philip Marlow never fully engaged me as a character but only as an affectation. In addition to that Marlow in the script jumps to correct conclusions for the next stage of the mystery but seemingly without have seen or discovered the clues that would actually lead to such a leap of logic. For example, he asks a woman if she knew a particular couple that lives in the same gated community as she. She answers that she vaguely knew them and later he’s asking the woman’s husband if his wife was having an affair with the husband of the pervious couple and nothing in the film established or hinted at such a relationship. Marlow simply knew somehow. The gangster sub-plot, apparently an invention of the screenplay, is jarring both tonally and logically to story. It’s odd and absurdist but never fully explored or explained.

Directed by hailed filmmaker Robert Altman with a screenplay by the legendary Leigh Bracket, The Long Goodbye should have been a film I loved but instead it slots in as a piece of film history I can now say I have watched but I have desire to see again.