The Long Goodbye (1973) on Netflix
Private eye Philip Marlowe drives his friend Terry Lennox to the Mexican border late one night. The next morning, Sylvia Lennox is dead and the police come for Marlowe.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.5/1045,021 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
Philip Marlowe, a chain-smoking private investigator in Los Angeles, is loyal to his friends, and that loyalty leads him to drive Terry Lennox to Tijuana when Terry appears at his door late one evening claiming trouble. Back home, Marlowe hears from the police that Terry's wife Sylvia has been murdered and that Terry is the chief suspect. Because he refuses to describe the errand, Marlowe is jailed as an accessory, then released when word arrives that Terry has died in Mexico by apparent suicide. Marlowe doubts both the killing and the suicide. Gangster Marty Augustine and his men then press him for money Terry was carrying, and Eileen Wade hires him to find her missing husband, novelist Roger Wade, a heavy drinker who has vanished for a week.
Cast
- Jo Ann Brodyas Jo Ann Eggenweiler
- Stephen Coitas Detective Farmer (as Steve Coit)
- Pepe Callahanas Pepe
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Long Goodbye (1973)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Gould had not worked for nearly two years after his troubles on A Glimpse of Tiger, where he bickered with Kim Darby and fought with director Anthony Harvey. United Artists made him sit a psychological examination attesting to his mental stability before he could play Marlowe.
- Robert Altman had Elliott Gould and Sterling Hayden improvise most of their dialogue because, by the director's account, Hayden was drunk and stoned on marijuana most of the time. Altman shot the Wade scenes in his own Malibu Colony house.
- Altman never read all of Chandler's novel. Instead he handed the cast and crew copies of Raymond Chandler Speaking, a collection of the writer's letters and essays, and told them to study it.
- Marlowe's tie is patterned with American flags as a nod to Chandler's Americana, but it reads as plain red on screen because of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond's post-flashing of the film.
- Altman's idea was that the title song by John Williams and Johnny Mercer should be heard in a different arrangement every time it turns up, appearing as a hippie chant, as supermarket muzak and as radio music.
- After months of studying the bad reviews, the studio decided the film had failed because it was sold as a detective story, and spent $40,000 on a fresh campaign built around a poster by Mad magazine artist Jack Davis, full of caricatures and comic-book word balloons, to sell it as satire.
