Philip Marlowe is Dead

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Today I witnessed a chilling and violent assassination. The victim was Philip Marlowe, the hard-drinking, hard-thinking private eye created by Raymond Chandler.  The key perpetrators in this terrible crime were director Robert Altman, writer Leigh Bracket and actor Elliot Gould.

It was not a quick and painless end for Marlowe.  It took 112 mins for this sadistic trio to finish him off, delivering blow after excruciating blow, leaving him as an almost unrecognisable mess.  The main weapon of choice was a meandering and aimless script that bears little resemblance to it's superb source material, and our hero was shot on 35mm film, not with a pistol.

I am of course speaking of the 1973 travesty, The Long Goodbye, an adaptation of the Chandler novel of the same name.  I was not expecting it to match up the dizzying heights of Bogart's depiction of Marlowe in The Big Sleep.  This classic and critically acclaimed film was made at a time when the film noir genre was at the top of it's game.

By the 1970s, the landscape had changed, but nothing could prepare me for how bad The Long Goodbye was.

Foolishly I saw this through to the bitter end, when I really ought to have abandoned it much sooner.  Like a man who has been sucker-punched, but gets back up and keeps fighting, refusing to acknowledge the inevitability that awaits, I kept plodding on, even past the bizarre and uncharacteristic opening.

Marlowe is transformed from the wise-crackin' hard-boiled detective, loved by multiple generations of readers, into a pitiful sad-sack, who is bullied even by his pet cat.  He shuffles haphazardly around his apartment, mumbling incessantly about "Courry brand" cat food.  If the opening credits hadn't kept me informed, I'd have never known that this incoherent, sulking shadow of a man was supposed to be Marlowe.

It has been reported that screenwriter, Leigh Brackett, felt that the original plot of the novel was riddled with cliches.  She ended up rewriting the story almost entirely, which ought to have been another warning sign.  But I was so determined to want to enjoy this, that I had my blinkers on and failed to see what a mistake it was for anyone to attempt to do a better job than one of the true masters of the genre.  There's a certain sense of irony that in attempting to avoid the cliches that she felt were present in the novel, that Brackett has succeeded only in creating a cliche of her own: style over substance.

Following this utterly unnecessary revision of Marlowe's character, which I can only assume occurred at all because of Altman's rumoured fondness for lighting up the occasional doobie, the film only retreats further from any potential to redeem itself, the character assassination continuing unimpeded for nearly two hours.  It's enough to make a grown man weep.

So save yourself a couple of hours.  Leave this softboiled version of the great hardboiled detective where it belongs, in the bargain bin.  Treat yourself instead by watching The Big Sleep again.