I went through the film a shot at a time two weeks ago at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, sitting in the dark with several hundred others as we asked ourselves, What do we know, how do we know it, and is it true? Many of our questions center on the rich, sex-drenched Eileen ( Nina Van Pallandt). In her adaptation, Brackett dumps sequences from Chandler, adds some of her own (she sends Marlowe to Mexico twice), reassigns killings, and makes it almost impossible to track a suitcase filled with a mobster’s money.
It is all about mood, personal style, and language. The book is not about a story but about the code of a private eye in a corrupt world.
Chandler’s 1953 novel leads Marlowe into a web of deception so complex you could call it arbitrary. Chandler’s reply: “I don’t know.” There is a nod to that in “The Long Goodbye” when a character who was murdered in the book commits suicide in the movie.Ĭertainly the plot of “The Long Goodbye” is a labyrinth not easily negotiated. There is a famous story that they asked Chandler who killed one of the characters (or was it suicide?). On that one her co-writer was William Faulkner. Altman began with a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, the legendary writer of “ The Big Sleep” (1946), the greatest of the many films inspired by Marlowe.
