‘’Can you recognize the theme?
On some other street
Two people meet as in a dream”
I will be arguing in this essay that Robert Altman’s 1973 film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, written by Leigh Brackett, not only retains enough of the basic plot of the novel so as to be called true, but in adapting its central themes, makes a comparison of the works an interesting case, that sheds light upon the people that made them, the detective story, and the archetypal detective hero, Philip Marlowe, in the different eras in which they were released.
The main themes of both the book and the film are friendship and betrayal. Terry Lennox and his relationship with Marlowe in the film is mysterious. Unlike the book in which we get to know him after Marlowe meets Terry outside a nightclub and helps him because Lennox is drunk. In the film, they are much younger and appear to be old friends. This difference pulls into question the Marlowe and Lennox relationship dynamic.
It’s an interesting plot device, as Marlowe’s status in society is revealed because of his relationship with Lennox. He is arrested, held in custody, and generally treated terribly by the police, for being an accessory to the murder of Sylvia Lennox, which Terry commits at the start of the film. The public presumably would view him in a dubious light when his photo appears in the newspapers after his release. Marlowe acknowledges this and sarcastically remarks, ’’It’s going to do wonders for my trade’’, and then Eileen Wade hires him to find her wayward husband, Roger, who is missing.
The idea that the private eye could fraternise criminals and not be one himself is an idea that is challenged in both the book and film. Marlowe does not cooperate with the police; withholds evidence and finally takes the law into his own hands. Making the decision to kill his old friend in the film’s finale. This is not out of character for the protagonist of a detective thriller or in noir fiction generally (Horsley, 2001, p. 24). But the revenge ending is an example of where the film is not faithful to the character or the ending of the novel.
Gregory (2003, p.292) argues that that the film’s ending does not resolve its story telling elements successfully. That although the killing of Terry Lennox is in the original script written by Leigh Brackett, at the suggestion of Brian G. Hutton (Kass, 1978, p. 138). It is the directing style of Altman and his ”destructive purposes”, that does not do justice to the character and moral tone of the novel.
He compares Marlowe to John ‘’Pudgy’’ McCabe, the titular ‘‘hero’’ of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, except that in this film there are no suggestions of Marlowe’s heroic nature at the beginning of the film and that he never has to prove his reputation before inevitably losing, therefore making his character arc incomplete (Gregory, 2003, p.294).
The Long Goodbye functions in its deconstruction of the detective hero, as it had been seen working for decades, by pointing out that it had become a parody of itself, a comic figure rather than tragic. This version of Marlowe embodies both qualities but also feels like a real person. Thanks in part to the performance of Elliot Gould, but also the vision that Altman and Brackett had for the character. In fact, his characterisation is quite true to the book as MacShane (1976 p. 199) points out that when Chandler was writing the novel he was trying to let Marlowe change, which was criticised by his editors upon submission of his final draft; for making Marlowe too soft, sentimental, and ‘’Christlike’’. (p. 194)
If Altman’s intention was to destroy the idea of Marlowe (Gregory, 2003, p. 291), then he failed because further adaptations have been made with the character. But where he succeeded was in creating something new and interesting which was relevant to the time in which it was made. Altman (2006) defended his portrayal of Chandler’s knight errant:
Some British critics didn’t like Elliott Gould playing Phillip Marlowe, and I was confused about that, because I had read a lot of the books, and what Chandler wrote was really a bunch of thumbnail sketches or thematic essays, all about Los Angeles, and Marlowe was just a device to unite them, and I felt we were really close to that. Everyone said that Elliott’s not Phillip Marlowe and I wasn’t being true to the author, but what they were really saying was that Elliott Gould was not Humphrey Bogart. In fact, I believe we were closer to Chandler’s character than any of the other renditions, where they made him a kind of superhero. (p. 81)
This film’s interpretation of Marlowe has itself gone on to influence other works. Marlowe cannot be killed off but must be reinvented, and if his moral code is outdated in a modern world, then it is just grist for the mills, which can create a space for comments to be made on what ways the world has changed, the trends that seem to come and go, and that there are some things that don’t and some things that probably shouldn’t change.
The themes of friendship and betrayal we initially see at the beginning of the film when Marlowe is trying to feed his cat. Marlowe cares about his cat yet we see that it is his misplaced belief in what friendship means that leads him to doing things he shouldn’t do. He drives across Los Angeles at night to buy gourmet pet food and upon his return from the supermarket tries to fool his friend by placing it in a different can – the only type it will eat. The cat wants something from Marlowe, that he cannot provide, so the cat leaves. Then, Lennox happens to turn up, and they play a game of liar’s poker. In which they both gamble based on the letters and numbers on a dollar bill. Lennox lies, bluffs, and beats Marlowe. He then asks Marlowe to take him to Mexico and appears quite content in leaving Marlowe holding the bag. That Marlowe agrees to this suspicious request so easily appears to be in line with his character, as Chandler (1953) writes in the book, when Marlowe says to Lennox:
Be careful what you tell me. If you really want me to take you to Tijuana, there are two things I must not be told. One—are you listening? One, if you have committed a crime or anything the law calls a crime—a serious crime, I mean—I can’t be told about that either. Not if you want me to drive you to Tijuana. That clear? (p. 22)
The Detective Hero Who Does Not Belong
A key aspect of the detective thriller is that it puts the audience or reader in the shoes of the sleuth, who along with the protagonist must then find clues to solve the mystery (Priestman, 1998, pp. 2-3). The camera zooms, cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, make it feel like we are watching the film through Marlowe’s binoculars. As Karp (1981, p.98) notes, ’’The Long Goodbye uses the zoom as a counterpoint to its laid-back characters and as a device calculated to maintain a high level of audience involvement.’’
Marlowe is almost always present in the film, but often drifts around the periphery, ejected from the action, and thus prevented from knowing what we know. When Terry Lennox puts gloves on his bruised hand before going over to Marlowe’s pad is the first example of this. The scratches on his face should probably have given Marlowe pause for thought; however, he is easily persuaded that it is par for the course in the Lennox household. The second is when Roger and Eileen Wade are arguing in their Malibu home, the spectre of domestic violence hanging over the proceedings. The consistent focus on violence against women is where the film is not just a homage or parody of the novel and of film noir of the past but has something critical to say. For example, the abuse and facial disfigurement of not one, but three women, is I think a criticism of the misogyny that is inherently present at times in both film noir and roman noir. (Priestman, 1998, p.56). A woman at one point has her face disfigured with a coke bottle by the gangster Marty Augustine merely to prove a point to Marlowe. Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat comes to mind, as when she has hot coffee thrown into her face by Lee Marvin’s character.
Following this, Marlowe tails Augustine and his hoods to find them visiting the Wade residence. Marlowe peeps through the window and sees Augustine and Eileen talking but cannot hear what is being said but it appears that he is threatening Eileen. Marlowe is later told by multiple people that money is owed but is given conflicting information about who it is owed to. The Wade/Augustine/Lennox connection, which provides conflict and tension to the film between domestic family life and a threatening criminal element (Priestman, 1998, p.54), is the final coming together of at first seemingly disparate cases, a trope within the detective story, and which Priestman (1998) argues, is a ‘’hallowed device for bringing out the corruption within outwardly respectable society, the stressing of which constitutes one of the form’s main claims to be regarded as social criticism’’ (p.54). Whereas the novel uses Marlowe to characterise and criticise the institutions and strata of society in the Los Angeles of the early 1950s. The film satirises both old Hollywood and the counterculture of 1973. This connection between the cases becomes clear to Marlowe but he can’t accurately deduce what it is.
I would argue, be it intentional or not, that to what extent Altman keeps us and Marlowe in the dark and the central mystery so out of focus, up until the very end of the film, is to imply that there is not really a mystery there to be solved as such or at least it’s not really the point of the film, which is the deconstruction of the character and the genre (Ebert, 2006). If we can’t understand the plot fully then Marlowe can’t either. It is obfuscation which is at the core of the film as it is about Marlowe’s awakening to the truth, which was right under his nose from the beginning but which he could not face. Marlowe tries to convince himself that his friend is not dead, has been framed, and that there has been a cover-up around his supposed suicide which he is mostly right about.
When Roger Wade walks into the ocean—the only actual suicide in the film—Marlowe and Eileen try to save him, and when Eileen tells Marlowe that Sylvia was having an affair with Roger and that he may have committed her murder. Marlowe drunkenly confronts the police, and they tell Marlowe that they already knew this information and that Roger had an alibi for his whereabouts at that time of her death. This undermines Marlowe as he jumps to false conclusions by first trusting that his client is telling him the truth and secondly still presuming Terry’s innocence. Later, we find out that Eileen has been having an affair with Terry and she inadvertently saves Marlowe’s neck from Augustine and his gang by delivering the money that is owed to them by Lennox.
The final theme that needs to be discussed is alcoholism. In the novel, Marlowe begins to drink heavily when supposedly care-taking the self-destructive novelist. In the film, they have an ‘’old fashioned, man to man, drinking party’’. Marlowe tries to gain information from Wade, in which he simply laughs and mocks him for. At one point in the scene Roger asks Marlowe if he has ever thought about suicide and he cryptically replies, ’’I don’t believe in it’’. Chandler’s struggles with alcoholism and attempts at suicide are well documented. Hiney (1998, p. 210) states that, ‘’Wade’s presence in the book is not so much a pretext for Chandler to write about writing, however, as a chance to write about himself.’’ Altman clearly understood this.
The book’s pages are saturated with the love of drinking, and it encourages the idea that alcoholism is romantic. ‘’Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate. The third is routine. Then you just rip the girl’s clothes off.’’ (Chandler, 1953, p. 17). The film challenges this relationship between alcoholism and masculinity, crucially in making the decision to change Wade’s murder into suicide. Sterling Hayden, who played the character, spoke about how he related to his character and that his own use of alcohol was a way of coping with fear and inadequacy as a man (Kass, 1978, p. 151).
In conclusion, I have discussed the themes which the film adapts successfully from the book, to highlight that it is true even where it may be lacking in terms of plot and characterisation. Altman’s film is divisive. The writer and director do radical things, such as changing characters and removing subplots, and then there is the ending. Regardless, the film does have lines and other references taken from the text. For instance, when Marlowe goes to the Wade house for the third time. The camera zooms into a speedboat outside of the window, and in the book, it is a speedboat that covers up the sound of the gunshot that killed Wade. Wade kills himself in the film, but like the book it deals in friendship, betrayal, and the tragic consequences of alcoholism on the writer.
Bibliography
Altman, R. (2006) Altman on Altman, edited by David Thompson, London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Brackett, L. (1972) The Long Goodbye. Screenplay. United Artists. Daily Script. Available at: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/The%20Long%20Goodbye%20%5BLeigh%20Brackett%5D%20%2803_07_72%29%20%281%29.pdf
Chandler, R. (1953) The Long Goodbye. 4th ed. New York: Ballantine Books.
Chandler, R. (1997) Raymond Chandler Speaking. Los Angeles: University of California Press Ltd.
Ebert, R. (2006) ‘A man out of time’. Available at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-long-goodbye-1973. (Accessed: 30 April 2026).
Gregory, C. (1973) ‘The Long Goodbye’, in Moss, R (ed). Raymond Chandler: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf Publisher,. pp. 291-294.
Hiney, T. (1998) Raymond Chandler: A Biography. London: Vintage, Random House.
Horsley, L. (2001) The Noir Thriller. London: Palgrave.
Karp, A. (1981) The Films of Robert Altman. Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press.
Kass, J. (1978) Robert Altman: American Innovator. New York: Popular Library
MacShane, F. (1976) The Life of Raymond Chandler. London: Cape.
McGilligan, P. (1989) Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Priestman, M. (1998) Crime Fiction: From Poe to the Present. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd.
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