The Long Goodbye (1973)

THE LONG GOODBYE  (1973)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Altman
    Elliott Gould, Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden,
    Henry Gibson, Mark Rydell, Jim Bouton,
    David Arkin, David Carradine, Arnold Schwarzenegger
It's 3 a.m. in Los Angeles and all Philip Marlowe wants to do is sleep, but his cat is hungry and he's all out of Courry brand cat food, which is the only kind of cat food his cat will eat. So Marlowe shambles off to the all-night supermarket in search of cat food, plus some brownie mix for the airheads next door, the ones who put the la-la into la-la land. Notice the way Marlowe lights up a smoke as he walks into the supermarket. In this movie, there isn't anywhere Marlowe doesn't smoke. Tragically, the supermarket is all out of Courry brand cat food, and Marlowe's cat knows the difference and runs off. This for sure never happened to Humphrey Bogart, or Dick Powell, or Robert Montgomery, or Robert Mitchum, or James Garner, who all played Marlowe in other films. And it's just the beginning of a shaggy-dog detective story that really kicks in when an old friend of Marlowe's, played by baseball raconteur Jim Bouton, shows up looking drunk and disheveled and asks for a ride to Mexico. There's a countess (Nina Van Pallandt), an alcoholic writer (Sterling Hayden), a quack doctor (Henry Gibson) and a sadistic gangster (Mark Rydell), who could be the twin brother of the punk Roman Polanski played in "Chinatown". Marlowe purists hated this, and probably still do, but it's a loose, funny, throwaway memento from a time when Altman and Gould could do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted to, and did. Leigh Brackett wrote the script (however much of it wasn't improvised), and the setup's a riff on "The Third Man", right up to the whimsical closing shot. John Williams composed the score, which is really just one song played over and over in every musical style imaginable. Spoiler alert: Marlowe never does get his cat back. I hope that's not revealing too much.