The Long Goodbye
The Robert Altman journey continues. This time Elliot Gould is Philip Marlowe, Raymon Chandler’s private detective, who lives on the top of some kind of tower with a collection of mostly nude women across the bridge in the next one. Marlowe spends the first ten minutes of the movie trying, and failing, to feed his cat; first by putting together some unholy concoction that the cat - correctly - bashes off the countertop, and then by changing the label on a can to try and fool the cat into believing he’s eating his preferred brand. It does not work. Marlowe being outsmarted by a cat gives us a good anchor of what we should expect when his friend comes up the lift and asks for a lift to Mexico. Soon after, the police arrive and say that he’s murdered his wife.
There’a a whole convoluted plot, a lot of affairs are either happening or insinuated to be happening, Marlowe smokes in literally every scene other than when he runs into the sea to try and save someone. I gotta say for as many times as I’ve seen The Big Lebowski, I did not realise that it was this, more than anything else, that was being parodied. Marlowe is thrust into a plot that he, and we, don’t fully understand, while various goons and crime lords keep grabbing him up, thinking he’s important. Witness a crime boss getting his whole crew - including a very young, uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger - to strip to prove some kind of point. Behold the alcoholic writer who lives in the same Beach Community as Marlowe’s friend and his murdered wife who walks into the sea. See the five thousand dollar bill that is apparently a real thing. Every piece of music after the opening credits is a different arrangement of the song “The Long Goodbye”, written for this movie.
The above is one of the bits that kind of washed over me and didn’t make sense. Roger Wade, the writer, is pinned early as the guy who really killed the woman at the beginning, but he’s in some kind of therapy with a quack doctor and I’ve no idea why or who sent him there, and I really don’t know why he up and walked into the sea and died. His wife and Marlowe’s friend were the ones in fact having an affair, and he never killed anyone. I read around that it’s loosely adapted from the novel, and is kind of an anti-noir, pushing back at the genre (what this makes Lebowski I can’t tell you), but I can’t help but try and make all the pieces fit together and they don’t really. That and Marlowe’s cat went missing and didn’t turn up again. I presume those stoned naked ladies took him in.