MovieChat Forums > The Long Goodbye (1973) Discussion > Plot?

Plot?

posted 16 years ago by Mr_McLaurel
3 replies | jump to latest

I just got done rewatching The Long Goodbye. Like all Phillip Marlowe movies, it has a complicated, byzantine plot with lots of characters and names that's almost impossible to follow. The occasion for my viewing of this movie is that I recently finished reading the original novel. In the case of The Big Sleep, Murder My Sweet, and The Lady in the Lake, this helped to clarify the plot massively. In the case of The Long Goodbye, I'm tempted to say it complicates matters - I remember how the Phillip Marlowe of the novel finds out, say, that Roger Wade was having an affair with Sylvia Lennox, but I can't for the life of me figure out how he knows in the movie!

Of course, none of this really matters. This movie is about character and mood more than plot. It's about watching Phillip Marlowe as a man outside time, dealing with a bunch of neurotics and hippies. It's about Sterling Hayden's incredible performance, and the relationship between Augustine and his girlfriend (so sad). Great movie, I just can't make heads or tails of the plot! 10/10.

What's the Spanish for drunken bum?

[–] gnolti 16 years ago

As was true of The Big Sleep, Chandler's plot for LG is nothing more than an elaborate alibi. The point is the characters and the individual vignettes.

There, daddy, do I get a gold star?

[–] romdal 15 years ago

ACtually, the plot is very tight, but subtle.
Marlowe uses his intuition. When Mrs. Wade misspeaks to say "my friend" about Terry Lennox, whom she presumably didnt know well, he gets suspicious. When he asks Roger Wade about Sylvia Lennos, Wades expression tells him all he needs to know. Then finally he fries Eileen after the suicide.

Take a look at yourself - they have a name for faces like that

[–] billymac72 13 years ago

It is important to note that Altman, as a general rule, didn't believe in plot, or scripts for that matter. He reiterated this over the years and was known to literally throw out the script on the first day of shooting, choosing instead to improv with his actors, with mixed results. We can call it "subtle", but I'm not sure that's quite the right term since his stated goal was essentially to undermine plot and diminish its presence altogether. He despised anything that resembled conventional storytelling and was a firm member of the counterculture and its principles. He commonly used the term "natural" to describe the effect he was going for, hence overlapping dialogue and the like.

Funny, that one of most celebrated films, "The Player", which was seen as a huge comeback for him, probably has the strongest plotting of any of his films.