smashes a coke bottle into the face of a beautiful young woman. In other respects, however, The Long Goodbye is faithful to its source. Significantly, its initial script was written by veteran pulp novelist Leigh Brackett, who also worked on Howard Hawks's version of The Big Sleep and who tried to achieve a more or less straightforward adaptation. Much of its commentary on the chaos and soulessness of Southern California is perfectly in keeping with the original novel, and despite the fact that it creates a new ending, it preserves Chandler's basic plot. 36
Although The Long Goodbye has an impressively hallucinatory effect and a good deal of satiric edge, it seems to me to work best at a fairly traditional level. When Altman tries to send up the novel, introducing alienation effects and snide jokes about classic Hollywood, he usually achieves very little; after all, hard-boiled fiction always skirted close to satire or burlesque, and Chandler himself was already a savage critic of the movies. Significantly, Chandler was also far more critical than Altman of the Los Angeles police; the film merely makes a few jokes about the corruption of small-town Mexican cops. Notice, too, that certain of Altman's more freewheeling inventionssuch as the coke-bottle attack and the running gag about the stoned, bare-breasted girls who live in an apartment across from Marloweseem designed to exploit a new style of misogyny and violence under the cover of a smugly superior attitude toward private-eye stories.
These problems are especially evident in the last scenes, when Altman employs a sophomoric trick reminiscent of the football game at the end of MA*SH (1970). Marlowe discovers that his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) has committed murder. Lennox says, 'What the hell, nobody cares,' and Marlowe replies, 'Nobody but me.'
Then, in a gesture that runs completely against the grain of his character, Marlowe shoots Lennox, who falls dead in a lake. Marlowe turns and walks off down a long road lined with trees, passing Eileen Wade, who is riding toward him in a Jeep from the opposite direction. The image is an obvious allusion to The Third Man, but on the soundtrack, instead of romantic music, we hear 'Hooray for Hollywood.' In this shot and at several other junctures, it is difficult to determine exactly what Altman is satirizing. Is his film a Chandleresque attack on L.A.'s gangsters and hippies, or is it a pot-induced attack on Chandler's novel? Audiences at the time were unsure what to think, and the initial advertising campaign did not help, because it made viewers expect a classic thriller. When the film did poor business in Los Angeles and other cities, United Artists withdrew it from circulation and designed a new set of trailers and posters to emphasize its parodic aspects. Surrounded by these cues to interpretation, it was rereleased eight months later in New York, where it received good reviews but continued to perform poorly at the box office.
An almost completely opposite and more successful use of the hardboiled tradition can be seen in Chinatown (1974), a lavishly produced picture that opens with the 1940s Paramount logo and closes with the new logo of the 1970s. The contrast between this film and Altman's is remarkably systematic: The Long Goodbye completely dispenses with an art director, but Chinatown depends heavily on the production designs of Richard Sylbert; The Long Goodbye engages in jokey, New Wave digressions from its central narrative, but Chinatown is an engrossing, classically constructed thriller; The Long Goodbye inhibits identification with the protagonist, but Chinatown encourages it; The Long Goodbye treats old Hollywood derisively, but Chinatown returns wholeheartedly to the past, recreating 1930s Los Angeles in meticulous detail and acknowledging its indebtedness to The Maltese Falcon by casting John Huston in an important role.
Though Chinatown makes use of Panavision and highly mobile camera equipment that enables an operator to walk with characters through doorways and into tight spaces, it cleverly adapts the new technology to the feel of the old studio films; throughout, the framing is tight and restrictive, and the color scheme is relatively muted and monochromatic. Scriptwriter Robert Towne and director Roman Polanski, the chief authors, were obviously devoted to old movies. 'I love the cliches,' Polanski told Newsweek magazine when the film was released. But Towne borrowed more from Hammett than from Chandler, and Polanski went back to even earlier models, bringing Chinatown close to the tale of gothic horror. Ostensibly a nostalgia or retro film, Chinatown is actually a critique of the American past, inflected by Marxist and Freudian themes that were latent in some varieties of classic noir, and inspired to some degree by Bertolucci's Conformist. Its particular qualities arise from a tension between Towne's socially acute, melancholy private-eye story and Polanski's slightly perverse, absurdist tastes. These two attitudes can be sensed in nearly every aspect of the production, even in Jerry Goldsmith's theme music: a low, plaintive trumpet solo counterpointed by an eerie string passage. Between them, they give considerable shading and dimension to the film's protagonist, J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), who is an ethically compromised character, even less conventionally heroic than Sam Spade.
Gittes is a hothead and vulgarian; he overdresses, he horselaughs at dirty jokes (which he thinks his secretary shouldn't hear), and he can't talk to a rich lady client without accidentally falling into profanity. Even so, he uneasily insists that his small business is an 'honest living,' and in a barber shop he almost starts a fight with a banker who sneers at him. He also tells a couple of self-righteous cops that he would never stoop to extortion. During the course of the film, he emerges as a slightly more believable version of a fantasy Bogart sometimes embodiedthe tough man whose exterior disguises compassion and an outraged sense of justice. From indirect references in the dialogue, we learn that he was once a policeman in Chinatown, where his job was 'puttin' Chinamen in jail for spittin' in the laundry.' His orders were to do 'as little as possible' because, as the district attorney once said, 'you may think you know what's going on, but you don't.'' Gittes complains, 'You could never figure out what was happening.' Something tragic happened in Chinatownthe movie never tells us what, but it concerned a woman Gittes was trying to help. Now, during the course of his present investigation, his history repeats itself with a vengeance. He becomes involved with the wealthy and enigmatic Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and tries to help her out of trouble. Events begin to take on affinities with those in Vertigo (1958): the upper-class woman in the present becomes an echo of a woman in the past, and after the detective has peeped into other people's lives and found the keys to a murder and a political scandal, he is crushed under the very guilt he was trying to overcome. But the solution to the mystery also has profound social consequences. By the end, the Chinese ghetto has become the symbol of an epic corruption and irrationalitya disease that spreads as wide as the city and is about to spread into the surrounding valley.
The crimes depicted in Chinatown include not only murder and political chicanery, but also incest and pedophilia between the almost mythical tycoon Noah Cross (Huston, a myth himself, who had recently played Noah in The Bible) and his daughter Evelyn. Even so, the movie would probably be less disturbing if Polanski had not subtly linked its dark sexual themes to the psychology of Gittes. In an interview at the American Film Institute, Polanski revealed that he had greatly heightened the subjectivity of the narrativein fact, he shot nearly everything from Gittes's point of view, showing him peering through camera lenses or windows and constantly spying on the other characters. Largely because of this device, Chinatown becomes a study in the sadistic gaze, and it ends when Gittes finds himself an unwitting accomplice in the death of the woman he is spying uponindeed, he is handcuffed to the man who fires the gun.
The theme of universal guilt and sexual malaise is typical of classic noir, but Chinatown benefits from the relaxation of censorship codes, and despite its underlying emphasis on voyeurism, its treatment of Evelyn Mulwray is relatively unusual. Given the deep ambivalence toward women in movies such as The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past, and The Lady from Shanghai, we expect her to be a vessel of evil sex; in fact, she turns out to be a victim. Chinatown is also unusual in its forthright treatment of greedy capitalists and crooked politicians. Towne based his script on an actual scandal that hit Los Angeles in the early decades of the century, when rich men bought cheap farmland and had it incorporated into the city, thus acquiring control over the area's water supply. As Mike Davis observes, 'The windfall profits of these operations welded the ruling class together and capitalized lineages of power (notably, the Times-Mirror empire) that remain in place today' (114). In the last analysis, therefore, 1930s L.A. becomes a metaphor for the whole of Richard Nixon's America.
Meanwhile, Polanski's European sophistication comes through, giving the movie a decadent, voluptuous pace and a subterranean horror. The violence of the film is understated and largely repressed, but occasionally it
