The Various Movie Posters for The Long Goodbye

Right next to MASH, I like "The Long Goodbye" best among Robert Altman films.

They were made only three years apart(with Brewster McCloud and McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Images in between; Altman was prolific) and they feel like a matched pair.

The clear connection is Elliott Gould, but it only took him three years to go from a top star in 1970(in MASH and other movies) to "damaged goods" in 1973-- he'd gone a little nuts making too many movies(and getting fired off of one), and Altman nixed him for the lead in "McCabe" as "unbankable." (Altman cast the controlling Beatty to his regret; good as that movie was.)

By the time he made The Long Goodbye, Altman evidently felt a little sorry for Gould and certainly felt that Gould in THIS role (private eye Philip Marlowe transported to the 70's) would be great. Altman was right.

MASH and The Long Goodbye share the look and sound and feel of an Altman picture. Overlapping dialogue, mumbled unintelligible dialogue. A rambling, shambling, improvised and episodic feel. And a directorial camera than seems to constantly wander away from "the main characters and the main action" to something going on in the corner of the frame(like an alcoholic author taking a lethal swim...)

But there was this: MASH was a big hit. Something about the buddy comedy and the sex and the blood and the language and the word-of-mouth, I guess. And the antiwar, anti-military stance. The Long Goodbye just never "clicked." Perhaps it was because it was a "private eye mystery thriller" that didn't really have much of a mystery, and didn't much aim to thrill. It was character stuff in the main.

And nowhere did this problem come to rest more than in the attempts to keep changing the sales pitch on the movie. During its first run in early 1973, the poster was hard-boiled, with Gould in the center of things(its the poster on this page.)

Later, the poster would change to more of an action packed James Bond sort of thing.

But..for a crucial "late 1973 re-release," somebody hit on the idea to sell The Long Goodbye as a COMEDY..using "Mad Magazine" artist Jack Davis to make a poster in the tradition of his work for the posters of "Mad Mad World" and "The Russians Are Coming." No longer was Gould the only character on the poster either. There would be comical drawings of Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, and Jim Boutin. And -- rather amazingly - there would be a "comedy version" of the most shocking scene in the movie -- gangster Marty Valentine's disfigurement of a woman with a coke bottle(she becomes a facially bandaged banshee in the Jack Davis poster.)

The Jack Davis poster didn't work either. I don't think The Long Goodbye was ever a hit. I don't think many Altman films other than MASH and Nashville were hits (maybe he had some hits when he came back in the 90's/00s.)

It didn't matter. The various movie posters may have failed, but The Long Goodbye has attained and retained its cult status. And its a great time capsule of 1973 Los Angeles, and of a time when Elliott Gould was young slender and sexy and commandingly deadpan offbeat.

Its OK by me.