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Altman was on a roll by 1973 when he chose to film Leigh Brackett's screenplay of Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye", which is considered his last great novel. But Altman decided to transmogrify the novel's serious hard-nosed private eye, Philip Marlowe into a bumbling "Rip Van Winkle" type character who has figuratively been asleep for the last two decades and has missed all the psychedelia of the Sixties and the dark cloud descended in the Seventies. And who better to play such a role, than the great Elliot Gould? Even though the novel's tone and time period have been changed, the highly-complex plot remains, and due attention must be paid.One of the film's greatest strengths, is the cinematography by the great Hungarian DP, Vilmos Zsigmond. He has worked with Altman on "McCabe & Mrs Miller" (1971) and "Images" (1972) and on the former, he used a technique known as "flashing", this was an unpredictable method for eliminating contrast from the negative to give a pastel look to the show and to bring out subtle shadows in the nighttime scenes by exposing the already-exposed negative to more light in the lab during processing. But on "McCabe", it was used in moderation, but on "The Long Goodbye", he, Altman and Skip Nicholson at Technicolor all worked together to more or less use varying degrees of flashing for the WHOLE picture! It was a big risk, but it paid off - the movie has a look all of it's own. The camera constantly keeps moving in this film and gives a the viewer a great sense of voyeurism and keeps you studying the frame for details. This film is a visual marvel, in my opinion.Altman excelled himself here, he took risks and put all he could into the film, and I think that "The Long Goodbye" can now be seen as a pivotal Seventies masterpiece - though those words may be hard to swallow for some people. Thanks for reading.
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