'The Long Goodbye' and 'The Big Lebowski': at 50 and 25

 James Burkinshaw celebrates the anniversaries of two great films, Robert Altman's 'The Long Goodbye' (released 50 years ago, on 7th March, 1973) and the Coen Brothers' 'The Big Lebowski' (released 25 years ago, on 6th March, 1998). Warning: SPOILERS.

In his film version of Raymond Chandler's novel, The Long Goodbye, director Robert Altman appalled many fans of the 1950s original by relocating Chandler's hard-boiled private eye, Philip Marlowe (played by Elliot Gould) to the Seventies. However, although Gould's Marlowe lives amidst the moral relativism and cultural decadence of Nixonian America, he himself not only keeps his tie on at all times, but also lives by an extinct code of honour worthy of Chandler’s Marlowe (or any Howard Hawks character from the 1940s come to that). Marlowe cares - however much he may keep saying “It’s OK . . .everything’s OK with me”. His final line in the movie, after he shoots his selfish, manipulative, destructive friend, Terry Lenox, whose wealth and privilege have hitherto allowed him to escape justice, is: “Nobody cares but me.”

However, the very fact that he cares is what makes Marlowe, for all his professed cynicism, easy to manipulate - by almost every other character: Terry, Terry's lover Eileen Wade, vicious gangster Marty Augustine, the brutal LAPD, Marlowe's hippy, trippy next-door neighbours and even his own cat (the film opens with Marlowe desperately searching for the 'right' brand of cat food in his local supermarket). For all of his weary irony, Marlowe is trying to live a life of impossible idealism; ultimately, he is just like the other characters in the movie: “people who believe what they want to believe.”

It is difficult to really do justice to how rich, beautiful, sad and affecting this movie is. Rarely has a theme tune been so integral to the mood and emotion of an entire film. The haunting song “The Long Goodbye” is filtered through so many different arrangements (jazz, blues, sad Mexican guitar, brass band, a piano at a beach party, hummed by a psychopathic gangster as he files his nails, and even in the form of a doorbell chime and supermarket Muzak). It affirms the profound interconnectedness of the various lives presented. The movie itself is a process of peeling away the apparent randomness and inexplicability of events to find that the lives and aspirations of the Wades, Augustine, Terry Lenox and Marlowe himself are irrevocably entangled.

There are some amazing performances. The great Sterling Hayden plays writer Roger Wade: a magnificent ruin of a man—roaring, profane, large-spirited, larger than life, but blustering, terrified, impotent (both sexually and as a writer) and staring into the abyss. He is finally destroyed by the ridiculous but reptilian Dr Verringer (another great performance by Henry Gibson) whose vicious insinuations have permeated Wade’s haunted soul and eaten away at what is left of his spirit. After Verringer humiliates Wade in public, Wade strides purposefully into the deep, endless Pacific Ocean There is a bond between Marlowe and Wade—both are dreamers and romantics, one (Wade) finally escaping the real world altogether, one (Marlowe) fighting it with increasing bitterness and despair. Mark Rydell is brilliant as the wisecracking, socially insecure, philosophical, and even spiritual Jewish hood, Marty Augustine. There is a shattering scene in which the glib and quite charming Augustine suddenly and psychotically smashes a coke bottle into the face of his girlfriend just to make a point to Marlowe (“That’s someone I love. You, I don’t even like). There is also a momentary appearance (but no dialogue) from Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of Augustine's hoods, in his first-ever film role (Conan the Barbarian had yet to beckon).

Nina Van Pallandt's performance as Roger's wife and Terry's lover, Eileen Wade, seems at first bland and insipid, but, eventually, we realise, as Marlowe does (too late), that her mildness is a mask for ruthlessness. Never has selfish cruelty been so icily beautiful. Neither she, nor her lover Terry, care whom they destroy. Even when Eileen and Terry return the money Terry stole from Augustine, saving Marlowe from an agonising death (as he has been fitted up for the theft), it is left unclear whether the motivation is a twinge of remorse on Eileen's part, a residual affection for Marlowe on Terry’s part, a desire to prevent Augustine coming to Mexico to find out the truth, or an amused consciousness of their own control over whether Marlowe lives or dies.

The movie ends (as it begins) with a blast of the 1940s song, “Hooray for Hollywood”, which celebrates (and gently smiles at) “the movies”: their power to mythicise, romanticise and idealise. Other than Wade himself, the only other kindred spirit Marlowe meets in the movie is the ridiculous but rather sweet security guard who performs endless impersonations of the stars of Hollywood's 'Golden Era' (the 1940s and 50s): Cary Grant, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Brennan. In a world dominated by the likes of Terry, Eileen, Marty Augustine, Dr Verringer and the LAPD, who can blame him for his nostalgia? 

There is a kindred sense of nostalgia underlying The Coen Brothers' 1998 'comedy noir', The Big Lebowski. Released almost exactly 25 years later, it offers a clear homage to Altman's Long Goodbye - down to an opening scene in which the protagonist, the Dude (an iconic performance by Jeff Bridges) shambles forlornly around a supermarket in an echo of Marlowe's cat-food odyssey. The film also pays tribute to John Cassavetes’ gritty Killing of a Chinese Bookie (down to the excellent cameo by its star, the great Ben Gazzara, “curdled smile” and all). Even the cut-glass accent of the 'feminist fatale', Maud (played brilliantly by Julianne Moore) seems to imitate that of Claire Trevor in the noir classic, Farewell My Lovely.

The Big Lebowski is not just a tribute to film noir, but a celebration of American culture in all of its weird diversity which the Coens love like no other film-makers: trashy TV shows, the American funeral industry, burgers, bowling, performance art, Korea, Vietnam, 1960s hippy idealism, nihilistic German rock bands, Chandler’s Los Angeles, Busby Berkeley numbers, pompous civic pride and vanity, and the eternal myth of innocent Mid-western, small-town America corrupted by the Big City. The credits open with the haunting 1930s country song by The Sons of the Pioneers, “Drifting Tumbleweed” accompanied by a tracking shot of a lonely piece of tumbleweed, wandering, adrift and purposeless, first through the pure, barren California desert and then through the mean streets of Los Angeles before finally finding rest in the deep, endless Pacific Ocean. The narrator is Sam Elliot's sasparilla-drinking, ten-gallon-hat-wearing “Stranger”, the guardian angel hovering over the movie, the benign spirit of John Ford and Howard Hawks whom the Coens (beneath their surface hip-ness) clearly venerate.

The Big Lebowski offers not only a dizzying immersion in American culture but a portrayal of recognizable human beings trying to survive in an unpredictable and often hostile world. Like many great film noirs, this comedy noir begins with the innocent hero (the Dude) as victim of mistaken identity and mischance, and sucked, through his own integrity and obtuseness and the machinations of more powerful and sophisticated forces, into a web of deceit and exploitation.

However, what takes it to the level of greatness is its depiction of friendship. Central to the movie is the wonderful chemistry between The Dude and his friend and bowling partner, Vietnam vet Walter Sobchak (John Goodman in a scorched-earth performance). Walter's obsession with connecting everything to the war and Dude’s addled attempts to make sense of the mounting indignities visited upon him are bleakly hilarious. And Steve Buscemi’s Donnie (who I don’t think gets to complete a sentence during the entire movie) is the perfect foil as the third partner in the bowling team. The look on Donnie’s face, as he misses one of the pins on his final roll, and thus stares straight into the face of his own death, is one of fear, puzzlement and resignation all at once, lending a tragic, humanising profundity to the ending of the film (quickly ironised by an iconic scene involving an ill-judged scattering of Donnie's ashes).

Comic and tragic, satirical and sentimental, this is the Coens' a masterpiece, a deeply human movie about the deep wonder of friendship.