As I've said in other reviews, many of Robert Altman's films begin by thrusting us into the middle of a complex story and letting us figure out characters and plots and motivations (and even names) as best we can. The Long Goodbye is the opposite of that. From the beginning, it's clear that this will be a story focused primarily on one man. We first see Philip Marlowe asleep, alone, lying on his bed in his clothes (a whole essay could be written about movie characters who sleep in their clothes), being awakened by his cat. The cat is hungry, but it will only eat one specific brand and flavor of cat food.

Marlowe mumbles and grumbles and lights a cigarette by striking a kitchen match on the wall. From the state of the wall, this is obviously not the first time, and throughout the movie Marlowe will light his matches on any available surface. He doesn't have his cat's preferred brand of cat food, and so, talking to himself all the time, he goes out to buy some, even though it's the middle of the night.

As he leaves the building, he talks with the spaced-out girls who live across the way from him, promising to buy them some brownie mix. He knows why they want brownie mix at three in the morning (two boxes), but as he says, "It's okay with me," which is his mantra throughout the film. One of the girls tells him that he's the nicest neighbor they've ever had, and he mutters to himself as he leaves, "I've got to be the nicest neighbor, I'm a private eye. It's okay with me."

So, in a brief (less than four minutes) and desultory scene, we've learned quite a bit. Altman, when he wants to, can convey a lot of information very economically, without that awkward feeling that comes from raw exposition being forced on the audience just to get it out of the way.

The point is made quite a bit, especially early in the movie, how out of step Marlowe is with the times. The movie is set in the 1970s, but Marlowe seems (in some ways) to be living in the 1940s. He wears an old-fashioned black suit, a white shirt and a skinny tie, he smokes unfiltered cigarettes and he drives a 1940s car. This point is frequently overemphasized in reviews and essays, however, as if he has stepped right out of The Big Sleep or Murder My Sweet.

If that was what Altman wanted to do, he would have cast Robert Mitchum. The studio tried to get him to use Mitchum, but Altman resisted. He wanted Elliott Gould, and there was a very good reason. Gould may have the suit, the cigarettes and the car, but he doesn't wear a fedora, or a trench coat, his hair is too long and curly, and his demeanor is anything but grim. In short, he is Elliott Gould, an actor very much of the 1970s, not Bogart or Powell or Mitchum, and that's the point.

Robert Altman has said that he took Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and stripped away all the phony hero attributes, making Marlowe the loser that a guy like that would be in the real world, without the all-powerful author looking out for him. Marlowe does a favor for a friend, driving his old buddy Terry Lennox down to Tijuana in the middle of the night, but there's no reward, not in money or in honor or in gratitude. He acts like he knows what's going on, but everybody else, including the cops, always knows more than he does. He gets the crap beaten out of him and it never does him any good (and he never gets to even the score later on). He never gets the girl (any girl).

Marlowe's sense of honor is contrasted with other characters time and again. They are all either brutal or dishonest, and he is never either. Marlowe is lied to by Dr. Verringer (who denies he even is Dr. Verringer), by his friend Terry Lennox, and by his client Eileen Wade.

Roger Wade, the famous writer that Marlowe has been hired to find, is a sympathetic character, and mostly (though not entirely) honest, but he's also a bully. He uses his size and his thundering voice to intimidate his wife and his friends. He tries to use them to bully the diminutive Dr. Verringer, but when Verringer won't back down (and even slaps him), he gives in meekly, since he doesn't have anything else left but bluster.

The most alarming scene is with Marty Augustine, the hoodlum who thinks Marlowe worked with Terry Lennox to steal his money. Augustine softly praises his girlfriend's beauty in front of Marlowe, only to slash her face a second later with a broken bottle, turning to Marlowe with the grim reminder that, "That's someone I love, and you I don't even like."

This is the most shocking moment in the movie. Marlowe's "It's okay with me" facade slips, and even some of Augustine's goons are stunned. But Marlowe quickly recovers his poise, and it's obvious that his attitude and his clothes and so on are his armor against a very brutal world. When Roger Wade tells him to "take that Goddamn J.C. Penney tie off and let's have a good, old-fashioned man-to-man drinking party," Marlow agrees immediately to the drinks and the conversation, but he won't remove his tie.

It reminded me of Strange Days, where Max teases Lenny Nero about his fancy wardrobe, and Lenny said, "that's all that stands between me and the jungle." And later, when Mase says that, no matter what filth he moves through, Lenny never lets it touch him, that he just remains the same goofball romantic, he replies, "it's my sword and my shield, Masey."

But, ultimately, despite everything, Marlowe does triumph. He does solve the mystery, and in the end he does reassert his value system. By his standards, he wins, though he has to spend $5,000 to do it. The last shot of the movie recalls the end of The Third Man, where Anna rejects pulp writer Holly Martins for allowing Harry Lime (his friend and her lover) to be killed. Harry Lime deserved it, but that's not the point. The point is that Holly put honor above friendship, and that's why she rejects him. Holly, clueless as ever, thought it might be otherwise.

At the end of The Long Goodbye, Marlowe has chosen honor above friendship, but he's not worried about Eileen Wade's reaction as she drives past him on that long, straight road, since he knows he did the right thing. And again, his demeanor is far from the grim detective of the 1940s, as he cavorts down the road playing his tiny harmonica.

Altman's best endings often put a smart spin on traditional Hollywood formulas. In McCabe & Mrs. Miller, John McCabe actually defeats all three hired killers, like a real Western hero, but then he succumbs to his injuries and dies in the snow, alone and unnoticed. At the end of Kansas City, quite a few of our assumptions are overturned pretty abruptly. Who is the dreamer and who is the realist, who has the power of life and death over who, and so on. (In addition, it probably won't ever be possible to take the phrase, "I can't live without you!" completely seriously again.)

I should mention that, perhaps more than any other Robert Altman movie, The Long Goodbye shows the director's ability to get first-rate performances from people who aren't even known as actors. In this movie, the ensemble consists of a good actor, a great actor, a former baseball player, a movie director, a regular from "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," and a woman best known as the mistress of a world-famous scam artist. And still, every performance is good, and most of them are great.

Also, this is one of the two best-looking movies Altman ever made (along with McCabe & Mrs. Miller), probably because those are the two times he worked with award-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.* This is clear on video, but far more so on the big screen, of course.

Two scenes are particularly striking. The first is a conversation between Roger and Eileen Wade, after Marlowe has brought the writer home from Dr. Verringer's clinic. They are talking in Roger's studio and we see them first through the big glass doors, but we also see Marlowe's reflection in the glass, playing tag with the waves on the beach. And then, as the conversation between husband and wife intensifies, the camera moves into the room, and Marlowe is excluded (the only significant sequence in the movie which doesn't include him, as a matter of fact).

This scene is echoed later on in the film when Roger is passed out drunk after throwing all the party guests out of the house. Eileen persuades Marlowe to stay to eat dinner with her (this is the scene where, if this were a conventional detective movie, they'd end up in bed together). We see them eating, and between them is the window through which we can see the white smudge which is Roger Wade wandering out into the ocean. Then, we see Eileen and Marlowe from outside the window, their conversation no longer audible, and we see her reaction as she sees that her husband is drowning himself.

Both scenes are visually stunning, but the whole film is wonderful to look at.

_____________________
* Vilmos Zsigmond has worked on way too many films to list here (the internet movie database lists 65) but it is worth mentioning that he was the cinematographer on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Deliverance, The Sugarland Express, The Last Waltz, The Deer Hunter and The Two Jakes.

Oh, and also on The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1963).

The Long Goodbye
(1973)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Leigh Brackett
 
Cast:
Philip Marlowe : Elliott Gould
Eileen Wade : Nina van Pallandt
Roger Wade : Sterling Hayden
Marty Augustine : Mark Rydell
Dr. Verringer : Henry Gibson
Terry Lennox : Jim Bouton

The movie Gosford Park takes place during a weekend shooting party on an English country estate during the 1930s. The house belongs to Sir William McCordle, who is very wealthy. He owns several sweatshops, and he supports almost all the members of his wife's family. Even with all this, however, he has no control over who he sits next to at dinner in his own home.

He always has to sit next to his wife's aunt Constance, the Countess of Trentham, although he dislikes her, and he never gets to sit next to his sister-in-law Louisa, whom he likes perhaps a little too much. This has nothing to do with Lady Trentham's age or her relationship to him, it's because, as a Countess, she is the highest ranking woman there, according to the table of precedence, so she is always seated to the right of the host.

This strict seating plan extends below stairs as well, so Lady Trentham's maid Mary gets the place of honor at the servants' dinner table, at the butler's right, even though she is the least experienced servant in the house. And, like all the visiting servants, she is called my her mistress' name when she is below stairs, rather than by her own.

Gosford Park uses the form of a 1930s English country house murder mystery, but the movie doesn't care much about the murder and neither do we. The murder is in the center of the picture, but what's happening around the edges is usually a lot more interesting.

We see the machinery of a huge country house like that, and all the procedures and routines that keep it going. Almost everybody knows what they should be doing and how they should be acting, and the few exceptions, like Mary and a visiting American movie producer, allow us to find out exactly how complex and rigid the whole system really is. All of the duties and responsibilities of the different servants are very carefully researched, and it shows.

We also see some very complex family relationships, both above and below stairs, much of which is just hinted at. As in most Altman films, information is given but not emphasized or repeated.

This is a movie which only has its full effect when you see it more than once, in a way that Altman never would have done twenty or thirty years ago. But in the age of video and DVD, people watch movies again and again, and he knows that. Gosford Park is designed to reward repeated viewings, since some scenes will appear to be one thing the first time around, but on a second viewing will reveal themselves to be something very different.

Freddie Nesbitt: Don't worry, it's nobody.

At the beginning of the movie, we see some of the guests arrive in front of the huge house, and as they enter we expect to enter with them, but we don't. Instead, we abruptly find ourselves entering below stairs, with the visiting servants. We're in the engine room of the ship, not on the main deck, and we see the rest of the weekend from the point of view of the servants. We don't see anything above stairs unless at least one servant is present.

This allows us to see, among other things, how invisible the servants are, because extraordinary things are said and done in front of them as if they're just another chair or lamp. I've seen very similar behavior in the corporate world, in fact, but obviously not to this extent, and certainly not this consistently.

What keeps it all going is not only the economics of it, that William McCordle owns enough sweatshops to run a huge country house and to buy his way into an aristocratic family, but the other thing which maintains the whole structure is that the people involved all end up having a stake in it, to some extent, even the servants (especially the senior ones). They maintain their own hierarchies and protocols just as much as the aristocracy, and they are very aware of the respect they get because of their position in the house.

Service was a job, and for a lot of people it was a very good and desirable job, but it was a lot more. It became your home as well, and, especially since there were few married servants, it tended to become your family. Many people went into service in their early teens, like the hallboys who serve the dinner for the servants, so for them it was a vocational school as well. And it was all, as we know but they do not, about to end, since comparatively few people maintained this kind of house after World War II.

And, as in many families or small towns, everybody knows what everybody else is up to, even if they don't talk about it. Everybody knows about Lady Sylvia and her taste for handsome visiting servants, everybody knows that Jennings, the butler, is a drunk, everybody knows about Sir William and Elsie, the head housemaid, everybody knows about Bertha the kitchen maid and her various liaisons, and everybody knows about Arthur, the gay second footman, who is always hoping to be allowed to dress Ivor Novello, a visiting film star (who doesn't have his own valet), but things are always worked out so that he doesn't get the chance.

In this world, for everyone you encounter there is an appropriate form of address, and an appropriate way to act, and for every part of every day there is an appropriate way to dress. The visiting American film producer, who has several strikes against him (he's American, Jewish, vegetarian, gay, and he produces Charlie Chan movies), never succeeds in saying or doing or wearing the correct thing in any situation, but, being an American, he's usually completely unaware of this.

He's an outsider, like "Opal from the BBC" in Nashville, and Altman uses him to show us interesting information along the way, like the fact that breakfast in a house like that was the opposite of dinner. It was served buffet style, everybody sat where they wanted, people read the newspaper and it was all very relaxed.

Many of the major characters (and there are a lot of them) are supplied with quite a bit of back story, but frequently only in a comment or two. Most of it is not essential to the "plot," so you can absorb as much or as little as you like.

For example, at some time in the past, the Earl of Carton (who we never meet) wanted one of his daughters to marry William McCordle. As happened very often (and still does), the Earl had a title but no money. William McCordle had money, but no "class." So, Sylvia and Louisa cut cards, and Sylvia won, so she married him.

Both sisters now regret how this worked out. Louisa flirts with William, and it isn't clear whether it ever went any further than that, but what is clear is that she likes the idea of somebody playing with her, coaxing her into bad behavior. Her husband, Lord Stockbridge, the very stuffy ex-Army officer, certainly isn't about to coax anybody into anything naughty.

Sylvia certainly doesn't need anybody to coax her into bad behavior, she dallies with visiting servants on a regular basis, if they're handsome enough. What Sylvia finds she wants, though, is somebody she can respect, and there's nothing much (as she sees it) to respect about her awful, vulgar, middle class husband.

I remember in the 1970s two players on the NY Yankees decided to trade wives in mid-season. Needless to say, this was not an option in the English aristocracy, especially in the 1930s.

Mrs. Wilson: Didn't you hear me? I'm the perfect servant. I have no life.

Neither group of people above stairs or below, has a monopoly on goodness, or nastiness, or self-involvement, or lust, or any other human characteristic. The servants don't really have much of a life, though. Not because the masters consciously prevent them from having one (the masters are generally oblivious to the whole question, which is in some ways even worse). It's just because of what's demanded of them by the job (or, really, the life).

One of the most delightful scenes in the movie takes place in the evening, as Ivor Novello (who was a real film and music star of that time, his music is used throughout the film) sits down to entertain people at the piano. Despite the fact that this is obviously why he was invited, all of the guests ignore his playing almost completely. A film star is nothing to them, and it seems pretty clear that they like having him there so they can make that point, to him and to each other.

However, many of the servants, entranced by the music, creep up to the doors of the drawing room to try to listen without getting caught.

Constance Trentham: He produces the Charlie Chan movies. Or does he direct them? I never know the difference.

The film is beautifully balanced, all the real unhappiness set off by some wonderful humor. For one thing, there is a theme throughout of jokes about the movie business. Morris Weissman, the American movie producer, is always on the long distance telephone, conducting his business with the studio and fighting about the casting of his latest Charlie Chan movie, much to the disdain of the aristocrats.

The second thread of humor is provided by the bitchy asides of the women of the family about Mabel, among many other topics. Mabel is the middle class wife of the Honorable Freddie Nesbitt. He is there to try to get money and/or a job from William, mostly by blackmailing him with the knowledge that William's daughter is or was pregnant, probably by Freddie himself. Freddie is awful, and everybody knows it, but he is of their class, and he knows how to dress and how to act and conduct himself, so they put up with him.

Mabel is one of the people who changes during the course of the movie (most of them don't, in fact most of them are barely affected by the murder), and it's one of the great subplots, as she realizes that her husband and most of the other people there may look down on her (even some of the servants dismiss her, because she travels without a ladies maid), but she begins to realize that she has a lot of intelligence and strength that most of them don't have.

The third, and most obvious, source of humor is the detective himself, who is a complete ass. He tries, unsuccessfully, to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy, he obviously has no idea how to solve a crime, and he is a constant source of amazement to the constable who works with him. He is probably the only completely one-dimensional character in the movie.

Only one character discovers who committed the crime(s) and why, and she never reveals this knowledge to anybody else. She thinks, quite correctly, that no purpose would be served by doing so. And, though she doesn't say so, she is aware that the murder was only the culmination of many other crimes, none of them ever punished.

Gosford Park
(2002)
Directed by Robert Altman
Screenplay by Julian Fellowes, from an idea by Robert Altman and Bob Balaban
 
Cast:
Constance Trentham : Maggie Smith
William McCordle : Michael Gambon
Sylvia McCordle : Kristin Scott Thomas
Isobel McCordle : Camilla Rutherford
Raymond Stockbridge : Charles Dance
Louisa Stockbridge : Geraldine Somerville
Anthony Meredith : Tom Hollander
Lavinia Meredith : Natasha Wightman
Ivor Novello : Jeremy Northam
Morris Weissman : Bob Balaban
Freddie Nesbitt : James Wilby
Mabel Nesbitt : Claudie Blakley
Rupert Standish : Laurence Fox
Jeremy Blond : Trent Ford
Henry Denton : Ryan Phillippe
Kelly Macdonald : Mary Maceachran
Robert Parks : Clive Owen
Jane Wilson : Helen Mirren
Elizabeth Croft : Eileen Atkins
Elsie : Emily Watson
Mr. Jennings : Alan Bates
Mr. Probert : Derek Jacobi
George : Richard E. Grant
Arthur : Jeremy Swift
Dorothy : Sophie Thompson
Mrs. Lewis : Meg Wynn Owen
Mr. Barnes : Adrian Scarborough
Sarah : Frances Low
Renee : Joanna Maude
Bertha : Teresa Churcher
Inspector Thompson : Stephen Fry
Constable Dexter : Ron Webster

Seldom Seen: You like picture show?

Johnny O'Hara: I can take it or leave it.

Seldom Seen: Well, I recommend you leave it.

Robert Altman is smarter about race and class than most other directors in Hollywood, but since he's not seen as a "political director," (unlike Tim Robbins or John Sayles, for two examples) it's seldom mentioned in reviews of his work.

But watch the beginning of Cookie's Fortune, and see what tricks he plays on the audience, how he gently tweaks our prejudices. Willis Richland is drunk. We see him leaving a bar, and buying a bottle to take with him. He drops that bottle outside the bar when a patrol car cruises by, so he goes back into the bar to steal another bottle to replace the broken one. On his way home, we see him knock on the window of a van where an attractive white girl is sleeping, and we see her turn out the light, pretending she isn't there. Then we see him climb clumsily into the kitchen window of a rich woman's house.

Nothing big is made of it, but none of these events is what it might seem to be, and Altman is chiding us for the assumptions we're making because Willis is played by Charles S. Dutton, a hefty, middle-aged Black man.

Altman tweaks bad screenwriting (here and in other of his recent movies, particularly the beginning of The Gingerbread Man) the same way David Cronenberg does in eXistenZ. But what he's really getting at is not the screenwriters, but us. He's telling us that we need to think about his movies, not just experience them to be distracted, and, in exchange, he'll give us a movie that's worth thinking about.

This intelligence, specifically about race and class, is especially visible in Kansas City, but it's really just a backdrop for the movie's main concern, which is the movies in general, and how dangerous they can be when used as a guide for life.

Seldom Seen: All that "Amos & Andy." White people just sit around all day thinking up that shit. And then they believe it.

Blondie O'Hara lives for the movies, in fact most everything she says, and how she says it, and even how she stands and walks, comes right out of the movies. Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance was criticized in some reviews for being annoying, but that's exactly the point. It's always annoying when somebody goes through their life acting as though they're in a movie that only they can see.

Blondie's husband Johnny, similarly swayed by the movies he's seen, has come up with a ridiculous plan to rob a successful Black businessman, disguised in blackface. The businessman was on his way to lose his money gambling at the Hey Hey Club. Once Seldom Seen, who runs the club, finds out, his men snatch Johnny almost before he has the burnt cork washed off.

When Johnny's wife Blondie learns what has happened, she concocts a scheme to get her husband back by kidnapping Carolyn Stilton, hoping to force her husband, a big-time political power broker, to engineer Johnny's release.

The miracle of Blondie's plan is that it works even as well as it does, but it's definitely the sort of plan that only a dedicated movie-goer would ever invent. Carolyn Stilton is a drug addict and spends the entire movie doped up on laudanum, but in the end she's far less drugged than Blondie. In fact, amusingly, at one point they kill time in a movie theater showing a Jean Harlow film, and even when they step into the lobby to make a critical phone call, Blondie can barely tear herself away from the film, which she's seen several times before.

The movie comes back again and again to a back room in the Hey Hey Club, where Seldom Seen is talking to Johnny O'Hara, trying to figure out what to do with him (and seeing, in the process, if Johnny is capable of learning anything). Seldom Seen knows immediately that Johnny, like his wife, takes both movies and radio far too seriously, saying that Johnny, "comes swinging in here like Tarzan, into a sea of niggers."

Seldom Seen: Come on, let's go hear some music.

But there's a balance to the cautionary view of movies, and that's the jazz. Altman assembled many of the best young jazz musicians in the country and had them play at the Hey Hey Club. Their music runs throughout the film, which takes place in a single night. It starts with the musicians wandering in and unpacking their instruments in the club in the late afternoon, playing idly, sitting out at the tables, greeting old friends, getting ready for a long night.

Then, as the evening progresses, the band plays for real, including what develops into an incredible cutting contest between two tenor sax players.

And finally, as the movie ends, the sky is light outside but it's still dark in the club, Seldom Seen is counting his money, and a couple of bass players are playing a final quiet melody.

Altman clearly loves jazz, and he knows that it tells a lot more truth, about everything, but especially about Black people's lives in this country, than the movies ever have. And, it's clear that he knows clubs, from the casual time before the doors open and the audience comes in, to the incredible feeling when everything is going right, for both musicians and audience, to the way it can still be the end of a dark, wonderful night in a club long after it's already bustling morning outside.

In fact, I've read that it was over a few drinks one night that Altman got Belafonte to agree to play Seldom Seen, and I'd like to think they were hearing some good jazz at the time. Apparently Belafonte was originally reluctant to take the part of a gangster, a murderer and a drug user. He thought his audience wouldn't accept him in that type of role. Altman looked him in the eye and said, "Belafonte, who started the rumor that you were an actor?"

And, of course, that was that. Like musicians in a cutting contest, some challenges you can't back down from.

Kansas City (1996)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt
Cast:
Blondie O'Hara : Jennifer Jason Leigh
Carolyn Stilton : Miranda Richardson
Seldom Seen : Harry Belafonte
Henry Stilton : Michael Murphy
Johnny O'Hara : Dermot Mulroney