Going into December, I'd had representatives in this series from every decade from the 1920s onward -- except the 1970s.
There are only three years to draw from in the 1970s if you want to get something from before I was born, but that doesn't mean this decade should be excluded from all the fun.
So I finished with a film from the year I was born, 1973 -- which indeed feels appropriate, since I just celebrated my 50th birthday two months ago.
Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye came out exactly 227 days before I was born, on March 7th of that year. It took me until 2012 to see it, despite an obsession with the films of Robert Altman that was already more than 20 years old at that point, dating back to the release of The Player. I shouldn't suggest to you that I'm an Altman completist -- in fact, there are a staggering 25 films Altman has directed that I haven't seen, compared to 11 that I have seen. Still, The Long Goodbye seemed like my most notable Altman blind spot when I finally got to it 11 years ago.
And loved it.
In fact, the film single-handledly made me question my assumptions about whether I liked noir or not. I am still trying to figure that out today, having just rewatched another instance of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe on film, The Big Sleep, a few weeks ago, after finishing reading the book. You can read about that here if you want.
Now that I've had a year of noir films in 2021, in which I identified probably my new favorite noir (Key Largo), as well as done the whole Big Sleep revisited project, it seemed like a good time to look at where noir's road to recovery began with The Long Goodbye.
Well ...
I'd say that my holiday season exhaustion claims another cinematic victim, except that would be overstating the decrease in my affection for The Long Goodbye on this viewing. I still liked it, maybe even quite a bit, but I was fighting sleep and a tequila on the rocks I'd had before dinner. There were naps and I felt discombobulated for much of the film.
Then again, this is a discombobulated film, which is one of the things I loved about it the first time. It's shaggy as hell, personified by Elliot Gould as Marlowe, always confused about what decade he's in and how the present seems to have left him behind. Marlowe's actual heyday was three decades earlier in Chandler's original incarnation of the character, so Altman specifically confronts this Marlowe with things like beautiful nudist neighbors doing yoga and a cat that will only eat one sort of cat food.
In fact, I'm pretty sure I fell in love with The Long Goodbye's first ten minutes, back in 2012, and never looked back. I was in love with this film's milieu, and once the film grabbed me at the start it would have taken quite a lot to loosen the hold.
The hold was looser this time, in part because I wasn't as surprised by this movie as I was the first time (though the ending is still pretty shocking, a total upending of our understanding of Marlowe as a character from the Chandler books, and completely different from the actual book). The film shambles along with not exactly a plot but a number of individual interludes, which do add up to something interesting, but maybe not something quite as interesting as I thought they did 11 years ago.
One thing I did consider this time is how this film is in conversation with the first Altman film I ever saw. There's a lot of The Player here, in the way this film is directly in conversation with Hollywood. The Long Goodbye features a security guard to a gated Malibu community who does a different celebrity impersonation for each car that passes. Can't you imagine this guy trying to get a job on the same lot where Griffin Mill works as an executive? Then there's the fact that one of this film's suspects is a boozy screenwriter who has to spend his time in detox not to kill himself or someone else.
As much as I do like Altman's films set in and around Los Angeles -- you can add Short Cuts to that list -- another great candidate for this series would have been McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which I also love, and which came out two years before this. I owe that film a second viewing, having started a second viewing sometime in the past five years and having had to abandon it before I finished. Either the movie was due back at the library or I just decided that I'd missed my original window once I didn't finish it that night. Maybe something for early in 2024.
There's probably more I should say about The Long Goodbye, but instead I'll say goodbye to this series. Here's a quick reminder of what I watched:
January: Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)
February: Roman Holiday (1953, William Wyler)
March: The Exterminating Angel (1962, Luis Bunuel)
April: The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
May: The Women (1939, George Cukor)
June: Ace in the Hole (1951, Billy Wilder)
July: Harakiri (1962, Masaki Kobayashi)
August: The Great Dictator (1940, Charles Chaplin)
September: The Virgin Spring (1960, Ingmar Bergman)
October: The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock)
November: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
December: The Long Goodbye (1973, Robert Altman)
The 1960s had the most representatives with four movies.
In addition to varying up the decades, I varied up the other demographic details, never repeating a director and selecting works from a variety of locations around the world, the U.S. being the only one that was repeated.
Of course I can't help but think of all the movies that were on my larger list that I couldn't fit in, as is inevitably the case in a series with only 12 spots. Here are the ten movies I most regret not getting to watch, in alphabetical order, which only means I may know how to direct my "just for pleasure" rewatches in 2024:
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, Frank Capra)
The Battle of Algiers (1967, Gillo Pontecorvo)
The Conformist (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)
Key Largo (1948, John Huston)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936, Frank Capra)
Ordet (1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock)
Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield)
Even picking this list of ten was difficult, so I've got some great viewing ahead of me.
I'll tell you about my 2024 monthly series at some point soon after the calendar changes.
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