This is a vision of the private eye that likely could not exist until after Dennis Hopper’s performance in Easy Rider (1969), or Jack Nicholson’s in Five Easy Pieces (1970). The genius of Gould’s performance was to take the hard-boiled, trench-coated private detective, that wartime symbol of wised-up American manhood, and infuse him with a different and more volatile kind of wisdom, the kind that had been recently modeled by the disaffected drifters at the center of so much “New Hollywood” fare. An idealist, even one as sharp-eyed as any Bogart character, could not have seen a hand in front of his face. This kind of shift was surely necessary in 1973, as Watergate came to light and the war in Vietnam drew itself to a bloodcurdling close.

If he gets the last word, he probably speaks it under his breath. In the contact sport of hard-boiled detection, he’ll take a hit to make a play. Gould, whether to recuperate lost facets of the original character, to escape Bogart’s imposing shadow, or with some other motivation front of mind, gives us Marlowe the chatty punk. We never doubt the toughness of the literary Philip Marlowe, and yet he spends a not inconsiderable portion of each book getting the innermost stuffing knocked out of him. While Bogart’s performance is as fully realized a contribution to world cinema as any that American film can boast, it is also a partial rendering of the rather strange character that Chandler created. This is the Marlowe that most of us have met, if perhaps inadvertently: the grim, fast-talking, tough-as-nails navigator of labyrinthine corruption and lies. Long before gaining ground with literary critics, he was a film star, having been immortalized onscreen by Humphrey Bogart in 1946’s The Big Sleep. Born on pulp paper in the thirties, he has since graduated to the wispy scritta paper of literary anthologies, a newish neighbor of such cultural old money as Ahab and Huck Finn. That punishment includes, but is not limited to, a battle of wills at a creepy clinic, near dismemberment by a truly unhinged mobster (Mark Rydell), a brush with an alcoholic literary giant clearly modeled on Ernest Hemingway (Sterling Hayden, never better), and a dalliance with a deceptively fatal femme (Nina Van Pallandt).Īs a character, Philip Marlowe has led an interesting life. When his old friend Terry Lennox (ably portrayed by former baseball player Jim Bouton) turns up late one night asking for a ride to Tijuana, Marlowe reluctantly performs the good deed for which he’ll spend the balance of the movie getting punished. In The Long Goodbye, Gould plays Philip Marlowe, a perpetually down-on-his-luck private investigator holding his life together with loose thread.

The long goodbye by raymond chandler