Thursday, May 23 at 9PM: The Long Goodbye USA 1973 d. Robert Altman with Elliott Gould, Sterling Hayden, Nina Van Pallandt, Jim Bouton, and Mark Rydell. Colour. 112 m
“The story, or whatever you want to call it, involves a murder, a missing person, and an alcoholic writer with a bewitching blonde wife. There are also some gangsters and a cat. The writer and his wife are played with really fine style by Sterling Hayden and Nina van Pallandt — who not only demonstrates that she can act, but also that a real woman is infinitely more interesting on the screen than some starlet beauty-school graduate who should be leading the pompon team.
The middle of this mess is inhabited by Elliott Gould, as the chain-smoking, mumbling, disorganized Marlowe. It’s a good performance, particularly the virtuoso ten-minute stretch at the beginning of the movie when he goes out to buy food for his cat. Gould has enough of the paranoid in his acting style to really put over Altman’s revised view of the private eye.” [Roger Ebert]
See Also: McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman, 1971), Serpico (Lumet, 1973), Badlands (Malick, 1973)