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The Long Goodbye
1973 112 min United States of America R 16+
★7.8
Mystery, Drama, Crime
Director: Robert Altman
🎭 Based on
«The Long Goodbye»
byRaymond Chandler
Trailers
Description
In 1970s Hollywood, Detective Philip Marlowe tries to help a friend who is accused of murdering his wife.
Budget:
$1.7M
Worldwide:
$959,000
Starring
Elliott Gould
Actor
Nina van Pallandt
Actor
Sterling Hayden
Actor
Awards
2 wins & 1 nomination total
Key opinion
Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye is a stylized, surreal reinterpretation of Chandler's hard-boiled classic that prioritizes atmosphere and character study over traditional genre pacing. While it has become a cult classic for its sharp satire and Elliott Gould's idiosyncratic performance, it remains divisive among purists due to its radical departures from the source material.
| Acting | Elliott Gould delivers a uniquely vulnerable and exhausted portrayal of Philip Marlowe that effectively subverts the traditional hard-boiled archetype. | |
| Cinematography | Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography employs bright, saturated colors and sun-drenched imagery to create a distinct, hallucinatory vision of 1970s Los Angeles. | |
| Pacing | The film’s deliberate, meandering tempo rewards viewers engaged by Altman’s improvisational style, but others find the narrative rhythm frustratingly sluggish. | |
| Adaptation | The narrative significantly alters core plot points and character motivations from Chandler’s novel, alienating viewers who demand strict fidelity to the original text. | |
| Originality | The film functions as a meta-commentary on the noir genre, oscillating between genuine mystery and ironic, sometimes surreal, parody of detective conventions. |