Take One (Sep-Oct 1972)

THE LONG GOODBYE A United Artists release of an Elliott Kastner production. Director: Robert Altman. Producer: Elliott Kastner. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Screenplay: Leigh Brackett, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler. Editor: Lou Lombardo. Cast: Elliott Gould, Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell. Colour. Panavision. 112 minutes. When a Hollywood movie can't be neatly categorized it’s in deep trouble. Ask director Robert Altman, whose Long Goodbye (based on the classic hardboiled detective novel by Raymond Chandler) has just been put into general release. When the film was previewed over a year ago, audiences and critics rejected it as being, well, a little too weird. Now it’s being hyped as some kind of zany comedy — a criminal oversimplification. Sure, it’s funny — but so was The Big Sleep, Hawks’ magnificent 1946. version of an earlier Chandler novel. Although The Long Goodbye constitutes an off-center view of Chandler, and his detective Phil Marlowe, it’s a serious view — and deserves to be treated as such. As a film, The Long Goodbye is meticulously crafted. The script (by Leigh Brackett, who shared writing credit on Hawks’ Big Sleep) is tight, coherent and fascinating. It departs drastically from. Chandler’s original plot, but remains true to the essence of the genre. And something more: By transplanting Chandler’s ‘30s detective into the ‘70s, it strips away the nostalgia that has come to surround him. Thus, it allows us to address ourselves to the real mystery: Who js Marlowe, and why does he matter? Elliott Gould’s Marlowe is in perfect keeping with the odd ambience of the film. | must admit that | had grave reservations about his ability to deal with the character (a Jewish Marlowe??), but he comes through with a rich, intelligent and intensely involving performance. Instead of attempting to copy Bogart’s tough, — self-assured characterization, Gould seems to have gone directly to the original novel for his background material; his Marlowe is introverted, only semi-successful, and more than a little sad. In fact, he’s never more than two short steps ahead of the universe, which is after his ass. By playing up Marlowe's internal contradictions, Gould succeeds in making him a wholly believable character; indeed, this version is much closer to the “real” Marlowe (i.e., the one in the book) than Bogart’s. Predictably, Altman’s film is much more like McCabe and Mrs. Miller than The Big Sleep. Where Sleep was epi sodic, Goodbye is tightly structured: everything ties in, even seemingly throw-away plot elements like Marlowe’s cat. The tone of the film is relentlessly modern, artfully _ selfconscious: The scenes with Marty Augustine (an LA-mod gangster, played by director Mark Rydell) and his gang of baddies are typically ambiguous — at once outrageously funny and deeply menacing. And the sequence in the police station is played just this side of total surrealism, for all its neardocumentary detail. What can one say? It's an Altman movie, no doubt ‘about it. Only one detail plays false: a shocker of a scene wherein Marty Augustine slams a woman in the face with a coke bottle, and the bottle smashes. There's a momentary, almost subliminal dislocation — because no matter how hard you hit someone with it, a coke bottle just isn’t gonna smash. Those mothers are stronger than steel — they oughta build bridges out of them. In all, The Long Goodbye is an odd film — thoughtful, disturbing, and strangely moving. It is not a zany comedy. Chandler would have liked it. Michael Goodwin BETWEEN FRIENDS A Clearwater release. Executive Producer: G. Chalmers Adams. Director: Don Shebib. Screenplay: Claude Harz. Cinematography: Richard Leiterman. . Music: Mathew McCauley. Cast: Michael Parks, Bonnie Bedelia, Chuck Shamata, Hugh Webster, Henry Beckman. Eastmancolour. 89 minutes. “The trouble with Canadian films is...” A lot of people start a sentence that way nowadays and there's lots of ways to end it. My own favorite is, “The trouble with Canadian films is that they’re all about character and relationships rather than action.” Try to describe the plot of most Canadian films. What it usually comes down to is “There are these people and they have this relationship.” For a while | thought | had the solution to the trouble with Canadian films. After | sawBarbara Loden’s Wanda | came up with the aphorism “What we need in Canadian films is more armed robberies.” (Wanda was made in Pennsylvania, but it jooks like a Canadian film — except for the bank robbery.) Anyway, Between Friends shoots holes in that theory, because its got two armed robberies and if you try to describe the plot it still comes down to “There are these people and they have this relationship.” That's not necessarily such a bad thing. You could say it about some of the great est films ever made, but to get away with that kind of film you have to be awfully good. Don Shebib is awfully good and Between Friends is a fine film. Shebib doesn’t even need his robberies to sustain interest (though he does handle his action better than it's handled in most films I've seen lately — as Howard Hawks said, “That stuffs harder to do than it looks.”). In fact the robberies aren't any more dramatic than the rest of the film because Shebib really makes you care about these people and their relationship. To some extent he makes up for the lack of action with overdramatic dialogue, editing, music and camerawork (the latter by Richard Leiterman, who proves that not only is he the king of the hand-held 16mm cameramen, but he’s no slouch in 35mm either). At one point Shebib even has a love scene while an operatic duet is heard in the background. Are we really supposed to believe that they just happen to tune to the CBC or something while having drunken parties in Northern Ontario mining towns? Who cares; it works: mocking the characters’ inarticulateness while at the same time speaking for them. And though Shebib doesn't use Eric Satie this time (maybe he figured one short and one feature with Satie was enough), he does use some imitation Satie piano music as background to the saddest scene in the movie. The whole film is tinged with sadness. As usual Shebib’s characters are people who have somehow been left out of the American / Canadian dream. (Even his documentaries were about outsiders: Jesus Freaks, bikers, nostalgic veterans.) In some ways Between Friends is a 50’s / 60’s nostalgia movie and the casting of Michael Parks in the lead was a stroke of genius. Not because he looks like James Dean either, but because he still looks like Bus Riley, or the guy in The Wild Seed. He even dresses the same as he did in those films — no compromises for changing styles here. But the story keeps telling us that he’s ten years older, with an ex-wife and a kid back in California. The guy who found the perfect wave — ten years later. | liked Between Friends when | first saw it and | like it even more in retrospect. Maybe I’m so enthusiastic because it satisfies so many of my _ personal tastes. But isn’t that the best reason to like a film? I’m a sucker for Michael Parks movies, anyway. And, although I’ve Associate Editor/Publisher Medjuck teaches film at the University of Toronto's Innis College. 31