![]() Director Altman primarily projected his personal cultural vision into the film, which was only tangentially related to the book. Rather than portraying a sensitive man who tries to guard his emotions with toughness and machismo, in Altman’s film Eliot Gould played Marlowe as simply numb. Viewers of the 1971 Robert Altman film version of The Long Goodbye who have not actually read the novel have done themselves a disservice. Chandler fired the agent, and wound up publishing the book in England, where it sold well, before publishing in the United States, where it became a classic. His toughness has always been more or less a surface bluff.” Chandler’s literary agent strongly disagreed, arguing that the hero would actually loathe himself for revealing the feelings he describes in The Long Goodbye. In personal desperation because of his wife’s fatal illness, in 1953 Chandler took Marlowe out of the box of the hard-boiled detective novel, where he had reigned since 1939, and pushed him, by the device of delving into his feelings, into the realm of literature.Īccording to Chandler’s biographer Frank McShane, Chandler stated at the time: “I don’t mind Marlowe being a sentimentalist, because he always has been. ![]() ![]() How many do you meet in a lifetime you can say that about?” This reflection in the mind of world-famous sleuth Philip Marlowe, in Raymond Chandler’s masterpiece The Long Goodbye, sums up the sentiment and the dilemma Marlowe wrestles with in the novel. ![]() “He had been a man it was impossible to dislike. ![]()
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