“The most important thing we do in the film”: Robert Altman reveals the “real mystery” of ‘The Long Goodbye
It’s barely conceivable that the reception to The Long Goodbye was hardly overwhelmingly enthusiastic following its initial release in 1973, but at least time has become so kind to the razor-sharp satirical noir that it’s well-established as being in the upper rungs of the Robert Altman back catalogue.
That’s no easy feat in and of itself when the genre-hopping auteur notched five Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Director’, became a key figure in the ‘New Hollywood’ movement, and applied his own distinctive directorial flourishes to a number of movies that ended up as stone-cold classics.
Having already enjoyed a fruitful career in television before he’d even stepped into the world of features, Altman was both inexperienced and vastly experienced at once. He took to movies like a duck to water, though, applying his loose, freewheeling, but carefully composed approach to films that more often than not existed on the fringes of the mainstream.
The Long Goodbye was one of them, with Elliot Gould’s private eye Philip Marlowe being asked for a ride to Mexico by Jim Bouton’s old friend Terry Lennox. However, when his buddy ends up being accused of murdering his wife before turning up dead himself, the dogged detective refuses to believe the accepted version of events and takes on a brand new case with direct ties to his lingering suspicions.
On the surface, that’s clearly the major mystery that propels The Long Goodbye forward, but Altman had the inclination to disagree. Instead, he suggested to Film Comment that the disappearance of another secondary character was key. “You could say that the real mystery of The Long Goodbye is where Marlowe’s cat had gotten to,” he offered before explaining why.
“I shot the film in sequence; and I think that the most important thing we do in the film is to set up the whole cat sequence at the beginning,” Altman said. “That, I think, tells audiences that this isn’t going to be Humphrey Bogart, it isn’t going to be broads and fights. It’s almost obligatory in this sort of film to open up with some very heavy action; we did just the opposite.”
Because Marlowe “had the feeling that he knew he was never going to find that cat again,” Altman saw it as an extension of the protagonist’s personality. Clearly, he was a cat person, and he’d always look for his absent feline friend whenever he returned home. However, “the minute he didn’t give the cat exactly what it wanted, it left him,” which in a way reflects the way the hangdog hero finds himself increasingly isolated in his search for the truth – and the revelations to come – as The Long Goodbye progresses.
It was an impressive film debut for four-legged actor Morris, who was admittedly already a star by that point having been the focus of 9Lives cat food commercials since 1968, but The Long Goodbye still comfortably beats Burt Reynolds’ Shamus as his finest big screen work of 1973.
