I once found Dashell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon in a used book store for a quarter. It was an old paperback, apparently printed to be distributed to soldiers during World War II. It was a thin book and I read it in a night. It seemed to me to follow the movie really closely. In fact, when I read along with the book while watching Humphrey Bogart, the dialog is almost exactly the same for most of it. A couple of scenes are missing in the movie. It’s really amazing how little they seemed to change.
But I’d never read any Raymond Chandler, though I’d tried sitting thru a different Bogart movie on occasion. The movie didn’t make any sense to me. It must have been The Big Sleep. That’s probably the one that I should have read. There’s another movie version of it starring Robert Mitchum.
But The Long Goodbye was on sale for a dollar ninety-nine. Apparenlty it’s the longest Philip Marlowe book written by Chandler. What a deal! It seemed pretty long to me. It seemed like two different books with Marlowe bounding back and forth from here to there and here again. And then the books collide. Which, since it’s only one book, makes total sense and doesn’t seem contrived at all.
It’s not what I would call noir. It takes place in Southern California, with lots of sunshine, usually in daylight. Things seem clean. Everyone has a car, and there are freeways. There’s a lot of diving around. Seems pretty modern. There’s a bunch of different characters to meet. One doctor is a heroin junky. There’s a rich drunk. Lots of folks are crooked or trying to use other folks. The police chief is a manchild dufus. So it’s not really noir at all; is just modern day.
Robert Altman made a movie from this book, right around the time he made MASH. Elliot Gould plays Marlowe, which is not what you’d expect, but he does a great job making it his own. Altman films usually feel like a carousel that’s spinning too fast, but this one never loses its center, and it gets rid of most of the extra back and forth that goes on in the novel. Ends exactly the same, but completely differently.
One of the great things is that the theme song keeps getting played over and over, each time in a different musical style. Like all the music in this mysterious little world is all the same, only the types of music can change. Joni Mitchell would have been living down the road from Marlowe in this one. I have no idea what her version of the theme song would’ve sounded like.
So it’s a good movie, that captures the hight spots of the book, without the excessive fullness, like too much stuffed grape leaves.
Anyway, none of these movies nor the book makes a whole lot of sense. You’re just supposed to enjoy the individual scenes, and not really worry about how you got there. I mean, there’s a reason for being there, but maybe not the best of reasons. So enjoy the scenery.
And what does it all mean? Life doesn’t make sense, and there are different levels of bad people.
Maybe I need to read the Big Sleep and see how that one fits with the movie…
