Cats and Dogs

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I wrote the below review a while ago. The film is filled with "cats" and "dogs" references in the dialogue as well.

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Philip Marlowe, the iconic private detective of the 1940s, wakes up to find himself in the 1970s. His first case is to feed his cat, and so he spends the first ten minutes of Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye" scheming to placate his feline. In the apartment next-door several naked women cavort sexually, but Marlowe isn't interested. This is neither the permanently horny Humphrey Bogart of "The Big Sleep" nor a sexless modern update rendered impotent by female empowerment and women's liberation. No, this is a noir hero who suffers modern consciousness. He's long withdrawn from a world he no longer cares about.

Already we see Altman deconstructing both Marlowe and noir, peeling back the layers and undermining the familiar. Altman teases Marlowe, egging his movie with inside jokes, and doing his best to show the adolescent idyll in "Philip Marlowe" pictures. Altman's Marlowe has a cat instead of girlfriends, gives tips to the thugs tailing him and is always being caught up in real-life games, like the gatekeeper at the Malibu Colony who does Hollywood impersonations, or the film's soundtrack, which contains countless variations of the "The Long Goodbye", a mocking tune which plays in clubs, on the radio, in a Mexican band and even on a home doorbell. If, as Camus says, "irony is the force that overwhelms mythical value", then it is the aim of Altman's playful film to destabilize noir tradition. But it is not only "noir myths" that are being undermined, it is Marlowe's very world view that is being challenged.

Two events kick the story into motion. The first is Marlowe losing his cat. The great joke of "The Long Goodbye" is the way Altman populates his streets, landscapes and dialogue with references to cats and dogs. Marlowe sees the world in terms of docile cats and hostile dogs, and so when his feline goes missing, he understandably fears for its safety. Meanwhile, as Marlowe tends to his cat, his best friend Terry Lennox talks to a Malibu security guard with a penchant for mimicking movie stars. "Just remember that you don't understand!" Terry effectively tells the guard. This is Altman's direct instruction to both Marlowe and his audience. Significantly, when Terry later goes missing and is implicated in a crime, Marlowe is the only person in the film who fights for his innocence.

And so Altman mirrors cats and dogs. Note that Jim Bouton (the baseball player who plays Terry Lennox) was famously nicknamed "Bulldog" and that Marlowe's other buddy, his cat, disappears when Bulldog appears. One has not scared the other off. They are one and the same.

The film proceeds along playful lines until a single Coca-Cola bottle, rammed hard into the face of a beautiful young girl, turns parody into the real thing. Like Altman's use of Coca Cola bottles in "Thieves Like Us", this indicates the intrusion of violence. And so Marlowe steps outside of his comfortable bubble and enters the world one last time, his mission to redeem his friend. When he eventually learns that Terry is really guilty of crimes, Marlowe ruthlessly shoots his buddy in the head. Now long past disillusionment, Marlowe skips off down the road, "Hooray for Hollywood" blasting on the soundtrack. He's caught the bad guy, but there's no heroism here, no victory, only a sort of further disregard and total disenchantment.

And so Altman has inverted classic noir alienation. Faced with the greed, insanity, lust, vanity, self-delusion, lies, drunkenness, ineffectuality, ambition, murder, larceny and social climbing of others, Marlowe's mantra throughout the film was a casual: "It's okay with me." He knows the world is scum, but experiences no self-loathing as he isn't a part of it.

But when Terry Lennox is revealed to be a criminal, it's suddenly "not okay" with Marlowe. And so the noir hero now suffers the double helix of modern consciousness. Like the Malibu security guard who does countless impersonations, Marlowe knows everyone disguises their real thoughts and intentions by the roles they take on. Marlowe's flaw is that he refuses to abide by this, and so appears inept to everyone else. Thus, whilst most noirs use the voice-over to let the hero explain his thoughts, Altman's Marlowe never actually speaks to the audience. Instead, as a solitary modern man does, he mumbles to himself constantly. He has his own outdated moral code, his own sealed off world, wearing 40s suits and driving an antique car. Any man adhering to such a code, Altman contends, will experience dysfunction living and working in modern Los Angeles, a place of lies, false personas and cinema itself. Yes, Marlowe's anachronistic personality operates as his moral salvation, but it is also the root cause of his lack of success.

Visually, the film differs from most other noirs in its odd camera work. Altman's restless camera becomes a metaphor for both Marlowe's quest and the audience's confusion, always looking for a solution. There is no safe place to stand, no clear perspective from which to view the mystery.

The film's flaw is its final act. Marlowe wakes up in a hospital next to a goofy patient, chases comically after a car and then finds himself in Mexico where, in a brilliantly brutal scene, he guns down Terry Lennox. The contrasts, the pacing, are a bit unsatisfying. One wishes for a more drawn out showdown, some kind of meatier ending, but of course Altman's immediacy is the film's very point. Marlowe learns the truth and promptly makes a decision. The message is clear: "That ain't fine my me."

8.5/10 – Once subversive, "The Long Goodbye's" revolution has now become canonical. Worth two viewings.



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