Altman's take on Chandler seems increasingly influential as the years go by. His film takes the form of a detective story, but the story doesn't really go anywhere ... or more precisely, goes a whole lot of places just to end up back where it started. The pleasure here isn't in the mechanics of the story so much as having these characters interact in laid back 1970's California and have something like a plot emerge from their interactions. The seeds of "The Big Lebowski" and (especially) "Inherent Vice" lie right here. People tend to play up the "1950's Marlowe adrift in 1970's L.A." angle, but I've never really felt that angle comes through to clearly. Since you can't really get more quintessentially early 70's than Elliott Gould, I have never felt that he seems out of step here.
Review of The Long Goodbye
