The Long Goodbye is our Sunday night classic of June, and is screening every Sunday night at 9PM. The film contains English subtitles.
During the golden years of New Hollywood cinema in the 1970s, director Robert Altman created a series of radical reinterpretations of classic Hollywood genres. The classic film of the month for June, The Long Goodbye is one of the most well-known—and for many, the finest—examples: a neo-noir that walks the line between homage and parody.
Based on Raymond Chandler’s final novel, the film follows private detective Philip Marlowe—iconically portrayed by Elliott Gould—whose attempt to help an old friend drags him into a world of blackmail, suicide, betrayal, and murder. Chain-smoking and mumbling his way through a soulless, disjointed Los Angeles, Marlowe is on a search for truth.
In this iconic and idiosyncratic adaptation, Altman shifts the classic 1950s detective story to the absurdist Los Angeles of the 1970s: a city steeped in moral decay, spiritual emptiness, and cynicism. Gould’s Marlowe is an anachronism—a man out of time, lost in a superficial, amoral society that he observes with a sardonic eye.