1973 · R · Film
A detective film that wanders like it has nowhere to be — until the last five minutes, which have somewhere very specific to go.
Robert Altman’s 1973 film is a loose, unhurried adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novel, but it uses the source material the way jazz uses a standard: as a point of departure rather than a destination. Elliott Gould plays Marlowe as a man slightly out of time — a 1950s archetype dropped into 1970s Los Angeles, where everything has changed and nobody told him. The film meanders through the canyon and the beach and the Santa Monica money with what seems like amiable indifference. Then the last scene arrives. It is one of the four or five most surprising endings in American film, and it recontextualizes everything that came before it in about thirty seconds.
Best watched late when you are in the mood for something that does not announce itself. The rhythm is unhurried — almost deliberately shaggy — and that rhythm is the point: Altman wants you slightly off-guard when the ending comes. Pair it with someone who likes noir and is willing to sit with a film that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The going-nowhere is the whole setup.
VERDICT · Wanders for ninety minutes and then ends with one of the most surprising scenes in American cinema. Stay.
POUR · A bourbon, rocks, something that goes with Los Angeles and moral ambiguity.
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