THE LONG GOODBYE
d. Robert Altman 1974

12 January 2009

Philip Marlowe is out of place in THE LONG GOODBYE. The world of 1970s Los Angeles is simply not where he belongs. Robert Altman and Elliot Gould were both explicit about this whenever they spoke about the film.

Two evocative moments from THE LONG GOODBYE lingered after this viewing. (I lost track... but I've seen THE LONG GOODBYE at least 20 times.) In the first, Marlowe shops for cat food under the opening credits. I can't recall ever seeing the bright, shadowless fluorescent lighting of a supermarket so accurately rendered on film.

There's no scene in the film where Marlowe is more out of place. Imagine Jake Gittes shopping for groceries, much less for cat food and brownie mix, "fudge kind." The supermarket is the center scene in the sequence in which Marlowe attempts (and fails) to feed his cat, thereby setting the film's comedic tone.

Marlowe has just one scene in which he is where he belongs, sipping a morning drink in a daytime dark bar. Marlowe provides his own smokey ambience. The daylight intruding on the bar interior is perfectly rendered. As with the fluorescence of the supermarket, the quality of light peculiar to daytime dark bars is captured here and in no other film that I can recall.

The supermarket, with its shelves of contemporary branded products, fixes the time of THE LONG GOODBYE. Dark bars exist to annihilate time. Daylight spilling in from the window or open door of a dark bar is swallowed by the comforting gloom. It could be any era outside, it is always the same timeless moment inside.

When Marlowe enters the bar, the bartender calls him by name, but a moment later can't remember Marlowe's usual drink. It is fitting with the film that Marlowe's relationships are so weak that his bartender has to ask, "What is it...?"