Phillip Marlowe comes to the screen yet again and yet again he's played by someone different in 1973's The Long Goodbye.  Here we get Elloitt Gould stepping into the role previously inhabited by Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mongomery, George Montgomery, and James Garner.  Robert Mitchum would play him a couple of year after The Long Goodbye. 

However setting this Marlowe apart is not just the odd casting of Gould, but also the 'contemporary' setting of early 70s California.  It's hard to think of a classic character like Marlowe not running in the 40s or 50s and this update takes full advantage of the time shift.

Marlowe walks around through an LA that seems like a haze of hippies and yoga.  Part of what makes this film work is the atmosphere laid out by director Robert Altman.  Marlowe seems a bit out of his time and that is done by design.  He's always seen in his suit and tie and lights more cigarettes than anyone I've ever seen light in a movie. 

The story concerns Marlowe trying to solve a murder for a friend, Terry Lennox. (baseball pitcher Jim Bouton).  The problem is that it's Lennox' wife that's dead and Marlowe drove him to Mexico the night before under false pretenses.  There's also the matter of $350,000 that is owed by Lennox to gangster Murray Augistine (Mark Rydell) and an entirely different case about a missing husband (Sterling Hayden) that may or may not be connected.

The story does differ from its source material, Raymond Chandler's classic 1953 novel of the same name, but never the less does feel very much like the Marlowe we've seen before.  Gould is surprisingly good in the role, tossing out wisecracks and slowly putting things together just as good as Dick Powell did almost 30 years earlier.  Altman's tendency to take classic genres and turn them on their head is in full effect here but it plays out perfectly.   Altman and Gould called this take on the character 'Rip Van Marlowe' as they had it seem like he'd been sleeping the last 20 years and now awoke out sorts and out of time in the early 70s.  Which is perfect because that's exactly what it seems like.

 The original poster  (on the left) was believed to be misleading and part to do with the film's initial box office failure.  So the producer' went to Mad Magazine's Jack Davis who whipped up the wacky poster on the right for the re-release, which turned out to be more successful.