The Long Goodbye is a Robert Altman movie released in 1973. It is famous for a violent scene in which a gangster breaks a coke bottle on his girlfriend's face, a woman who he has just praised for her perfect beauty, for the sole purpose of showing how mean he can be. This is startling but the more surprising and shocking scene of violence in the film is when the tiny mannequin, Dr. Verringer (played by Laugh-Ins Henry Gibson), slaps the face of a raging brute of a man played by the volatile and frightening Sterling Hayden; Hayden is twice the size of Henry Gibson, a grizzled ancient mariner with hairy chest and a florid beard, but when the little doctor cracks him across the cheek, the big man is deflated, becomes disoriented (he is very drunk) and a few minutes later commits suicide in the surf pounding the shore at the Malibu Beach Colony where he lives. Eliot Gould plays Philip Marlowe, muttering to himself and chain-smoking as he drives around 1970's LA in a sedan built thirty years earlier. He's a living, walking, anachronism who doesn't fit into the scene at all. The cast is perverse: Jim Bouton, the baseball player whose scandalous Ball Four was once a famous expose of professional sports, has the role of Terry Lennox, a sleazy Hollywood type accused of murdering his wife. Mark Rydell plays Marty Augustine (and apparently imitates the mannerisms Robert Evans, a Hollywood mogul) -- Augustine is the gangster who wrecks the perfect profile of this girlfriend just because he can. (An uncredited Arnold Schwartzenegger is used for comic effect -- he's ridiculously bulked up and doesn't look so much menacing as pillowy and inert.) The film is also notable for an ear-worm score by John Williams, the smoky ballad "The Long Goodbye", a tune that obsessively occurs and reoccurs throughout the picture, performed by a lounge singer, a piano-bar pianist, full orchestra, as elevator Muzak, and, even, played by a Mexican marching band. The effect of the music is to weld the disparate elements of the film into a hazy, languid whole -- an effect also achieved by the smoggy pastel photography of Vilmos Zsigmond; LA looks smoky, as if seen through the clouds of burning tobacco enveloping Marlowe and nothing is really clear; you keep waiting for the picture to come into focus, but it's an oblique, suggestive neo-Noir, elusive with nothing that you can really seize upon or grasp. Zsigmond's blurry landscapes and pervasive haze is the seventies' equivalent of the baffling chiaroscuro that characterizes classic film noir, some of which featured the menacing and intimidating Sterling Hayden, here reduced to an impotent parody of Ernest Hemingway. Gould is good, but indistinct in keeping with the film's nonchalant and casually dismissive attitude about its source material, the novel by Raymond Chandler which Altman admitted that he didn't read. There's an elaborate scene in which the camera uses deep focus to exploit reflections on glass in the suicidal novelist's beach front house -- it's a sort of lazy dope-inflected homage to the mirror scene from Lady from Shanghai. The notion is that we don't really know anything about anyone: our best friends betray us and our wives are all unfaithful; everyone steals from everyone else. Chandler's notion of Marlowe as a kind of knight (or holy fool), the only virtuous man in a world of iniquity, is convincingly demonstrated by the movie -- but the question for the audience is whether Marlowe's anachronistic virtue and loyalty is the result of dope-induced stupidity or, rather, strength of character. I saw the movie in the heater when I was in college -- the scene that has come across the decades for me is the part of the movie in which Sterling Hayden's tough guy writer wanders out into the surf to kill himself; he has a vicious black Doberman that trots back and forth on the beach carrying his master's cane in his jaws: the dog is pleased at performing for his master, but obviously distressed by the thundering surf and the black waves -- it's a superb canine performance. In keeping with its dope-addled ambience, not much seems to be going on in the movie -- but, in fact, the picture's far better than it seems when you're watching it, a film that grows in your imagination.
Dog Day Afternoon is at the opposite end of the film spectrum to Altman's The Long Goodybe. Everything in Lumet's 1975 film is crystal clear, energetically staged with ensembles of sweaty actors trapped in a bank building besieged by Al Pacino as the bisexual Sonny and his moronic sidekick, Sal (John Casale). You can see everything; focus and editing are deployed to make things completely lucid and plausible. Pacino gets impressive harangues that he delivers in extreme close-up and everyone shouts at everyone else in overlapping cascades of insults and threats. The plot, of course, involves Sonny's attempt to rob a Brooklyn bank to snatch money to finance his homosexual "wife's" sex change operation. The robbery goes sideways and a hostage situation develops as Sonny holds the bank president and seven female tellers as prisoners at gunpoint while a volatile mob gathers on the street. The writing is very good and the characters are portrayed in three-dimensions -- even the cops and FBI boss are given distinctive personality traits. The movie is a symphony of sweat -- it's a blazing hot day and, as the film progresses, everyone perspires in buckets, most notably Sal and Sonny whose foreheads ooze and drip with sweat. Of course, there's no way out and the movie ends, more or less, as implied by the situation in the first 15 minutes. Movies of this era channel Tennessee Williams and Sonny's character invokes one of the harried, working class heroes in something like a Streetcar Named Desire -- the roles are equally sweaty: it's either New Orleans or the tropics of Brooklyn on a sweltering day. Pacino's style of acting has always been hyperbolic and here he "outherod's Herod" or "tears a cat" to use Shakespearian parlance for this kind of exaggerated, narcissistic performance. Pacino's overacting fits the part -- at times, he draws energy by stirring up the volatile crowd gathered to watch the hostage standoff at the Bank. In this film, we know exactly what's going on -- it's a strenuous, arduous exercise that exhausts the viewer. on its via dolorosa to the final, abbreviated shoot-out. At its center, however, the film is like Altman's picture in that it features characters who are too complex to be readily understood, figures with a strange, compelling depth, a kind of filmmaking that, perhaps, doesn't exist in the big budget movies produced today.
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