MichaelB wrote:
Amongst Newman's many observations is the fact that not only was Altman's film not the first Chandler adaptation with a contemporary setting, but just two of nearly 100 pre-1950s Sherlock Holmes adaptations were actually set in Victorian London - something that's easy to forget, since their present-day settings have now become "period" with the passage of time.
It's an interesting and valuable point which is important for realising how Hollywood, even during its Golden Age, would sacrifice period setting, even when it was strongly identified with a character like Sherlock Holmes, for the sake of cost and their essential B-movie status (after the first two Rathbone-starring versions at Fox). More crucial, is that Paul Bogart's
Marlowe (1969), an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's
The Little Sister, is updated to contemporary LA. And reading the reviews, it wasn't critically embraced, but neither was it entirely rejected, and if was, it wasn't due to its contemporising of Philip Marlowe's world. So when it comes to looking back at the response to Altman's
The Long Goodbye, only four years later, it clearly can't just be the updating that triggered the broad panning. It wasn't the mere placing of Chandler's creation in the Los Angeles of the seventies, it was what Altman
did with this change. He used it as critical commentary of both Marlowe and (then) contemporary America. Instead of approaching Chandler in an awe-struck manner, Altman almost deconstructs the character, the process of which reveals more about Marlowe than most "straight" playings of the part. In retrospect, this I think, is the most successful aspect of the film: the ideals of Marlowe are intrinsically timeless, and his enemies (civic corruption, personal corruption, etc., etc.) remain so too, Chandler's novels' criticism being still applicable to the present day, and so by extension does Altman's analysis of it.
What I'm not sure is completely successful is Altman's critical depiction of seventies California, as this is an era so divorced from our own time that making satirical stabs at groupies and their hash brownies dates the film as surely as the references in
The Big Sleep (1946) to war rationing. Relevant as they were at the time, today its the universal applicableness of the Chandlerian part of the film that really works for me; the updating of period helps Altman to achieve this, but the "baggage" that accompanies this isn't necessarily perfect.