An action-packed slog

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Blistering performances.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Private investigator Philip Marlowe is approached by a friend, Terry Lennox, who is in a bit of a jam. Marlowe helps him get to Mexico but the next day his friend's wife turns up dead. The police hold Marlowe but then release him once Terry Lennox is found dead in Mexico - suicide. To the cops it is an open-and-shut case of murder-suicide but Marlowe doesn't believe that to be the case. Marlowe then is hired by the wife of wealthy author Roger Wade to find her husband. The Wades were neighbours of the Lennoxes. A powerful mob boss also leans on him to find the large sum of money Terry Lennox was transporting for him. Could all these events be connected? Robert Altman directs a movie based on a Raymond Chandler novel, and it's a mixed bag. Starts off very well with some humorous scenes and dialogue and a fair amount of intrigue. The middle-to-end sections lack focus, however, and, while it is never dull, the movie feels like it is drifting to a lacklustre conclusion. The intrigue just seems to get sucked out of the movie in that segment. In addition, the theme song gets played in just about every situation and in various forms - it gets very irritating, very quickly.Ends well though, with a good twist and a powerful conclusion.A new take on Philip Marlowe from Elliott Gould - he is hardly Humphrey Bogart and he's not trying to be. Altman's Philip Marlowe is the dishevelled, anti-social chain-smoking anti-hero rather than the suave, confident hero that Bogart portrayed. For the most part, it works, though at times I wished for the coolness and wise-cracks of Bogie. Supporting cast are fine. Sterling Hayden is great as the larger-than-life, Ernest Hemingway/John Huston-esque Roger Wade. Not the Philip Marlowe of the Bogart movies, but it'll do.

I like the hard-to-solve mystery we get here. Actually, they don't even come close to giving us enough clues to solve it, hence the difficulty. But in that we feel we're up against it like the protagonist, detective Phil Marlowe, played by Elliot Gould.Times have really changed for Marlowe since 1946, when he was played by Humphrey Bogart. Then he was cool, implacable, wore a fedora a lot, and wound up with babe Lauren Bacall. That was the only strain of the plot viewers could follow. There were some dead bodies, smoking guns, and tough questions from cops along the way. In this movie it's 1973, and Marlowe still think he's cool but that opinion is not so widespread this time - he's being played for a sucker by at least half the cast, including a longtime friend, and his own cat. He unravels the mystery mostly out of a lack of having anything better to do, which he clearly stood in need of.Director Robert Altman follows his own ideas about how to communicate visually. Like when he changes scene to a hospital, he doesn't do any kind of establishing long shot, he shows a closeup of a light over a patient's bed. His montages create a kind of equivalent of our human experience, where we use our minds to focus on detail. He usually winds up with scenes that feel like we're watching something actually happen. But he does know how to use visuals for dramatic power when he wants, as the ending makes clear. Some of the performances he gets from actors are amazing, like Mark Rydell as psychotically dangerous gangster Marty Augustine. The way he works himself into a rage with his rants changes gears from funny to frightening at high speed, and I can't believe it didn't influence Joe Pesci's performance in "Goodfellas."Not everything works here, like Gould smearing fingerprint ink on his face then breaking into Al Jolson at police headquarters, but on the whole a fairly engrossing take on detective mysteries.

Raymond Chandler purists did not like this film because it was a very comprehensive update from the 1940s to the 1970s. Philip Marlowe became a 1970s person, and so did his ambiance. The director Robert Altman reconceptualised 'the whole Chandler thing', and I believe he pulled it off. The film is based on Chandler's novel of the same title, but with many updated touches added. Marlowe now lives in a penthouse apartment overlooking L.A. and beside him there is an apartment full of what used to be called 'ditsy girls', who are 'spaced-out' (another obsolescent term) on 24 hour drugs. They like parading themselves topless on their balcony and doing somersaults in a semi-naked state. They are merely a backdrop to the film and are never fully explained, except that Marlowe does once say that they own a shop selling special scented candles somewhere (which can hardly explain where the money comes from to pay their rent and the fact that none of them has any kind of job). When one of the girls asks Marlowe to buy her two boxes of brownie mix, we are meant to be aware of Alice B. Toklas's recipe for marijuana brownies and know why she wants to make brownies. Altman must have his little jokes. Another is that a minor character in the film is called Miss Tewkesbury, a tribute to his friend Joan Tewkesbury, who had been a townsperson in Altman's MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971) and was during the filming of THE LONG GOODBYE writing his next film THIEVES LIKE US (1974) and the following year also wrote NASHVILLE (1975). She also acted in both those films. So much for 'in' jokes. For the new model Marlowe, Elliott Gould was the perfect choice. As Altman himself liked to say, 80% of his success was due to his casting. Nina van Pallandt was also perfect as the scheming, glamorous wife of an alcoholic writer who has writer's block, played by Sterling Hayden (another example of perfect casting). The ending of the film differs from that of the book in a significant way which I cannot reveal because of IMDb rules, but I think it works very well. The film reeks of the atmosphere of the now long-vanished 1970s, just as Chandler's books reeked of the atmosphere of his own earlier era. Since so much of Chandler depends on atmosphere, one has a choice either to replicate the original faithfully or do an entire conversion job. Altman chose the latter course. The story of suspicion, betrayal, lies, murder, evasion, flight, and fear transfers perfectly well to a newer era. One could even do it all over again, and place it in the present era, if one were a genius like Robert Altman, that is. If one is not a genius, then watch out. The contemporary issue of the DVD has an excellent 'extra' of a documentary profile of Altman, in which he gives extensive interviews, with clips from his films, and, yes, Miss Tewkesbury is there as well. No escaping her. Alan Rudolph has a lot to saying the documentary about his mentor and master. He was second assistant director on THE LONG GOODBYE. Watch this, and let it all hang out. But don't eat the brownies.

There is nothing to recommend this movie. My wife watched it with me and concurs in that evaluation. I have not read the book on which it is based, so I judge it as a stand-alone effort.The plot is silly in concept and routine in execution (e.g., the PI's oh-so-cool and combative way of talking to the police), the characters are flat, the dialog is trite, the acting is uninspired, the incidentals are distracting (the topless girls, the chain smoking). Even the music is tedious. One description I saw before watching it said it is a "send-up" of the detective genre, implying humor. There is no humor anywhere. If it is intended as a spoof, it fails.A complete waste of two hours.