Spoiler alert: I'm going to talk discuss the plot of both the movie and the book versions of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye and specifically how the twist ending differs between them.
A little more than a week ago I finished The Long Goodbye, a detective novel by Raymond Chandler (I'm almost done with his entire oeuvre, just a few pages left on Playback, and then I'm going to give the posthumously released Poodle Springs a try.), who many say is the greatest of all crime writers. I am not very familiar with crime/mystery fiction, but I must say that Chandler is now one of my favorite authors, having read most of his books in the last six months or so. The Long Goodbye is his longest book, and I've heard it called his best. I'm still partial to The Little Sister, and a few of his short stories stick out to me, like Goldfish and Red Wind. But The Long Goodbye is a fine book. I watched the movie version directed by Robert Altman a few years ago, so I had a vague notion of how it ended, but the book was very different from the movie. And the ending is quite different, although the major plot point that Terry Lennox faked his death, and he's still alive, remains intact.
After finishing the book I decided to re-watch the movie. I remembered liking it the first time I watched it, but I didn't recall the details of how it differed from the book. The primary difference is that the story is set in the 1970s, the time of the movie's release (1973). The costumes and scenery and style of dialogue were all updated. But the moral compass of the film was also updated to 1970s morality. To me, this was more interesting to think about. Raymond Chandler builds the protagonist of his novels, private investigator Philip Marlowe, into a simple, smart and tough, at times funny hero-figure. He is always good, and he is almost always right. In Altman's film version, screenwriter Leigh Brackett turns Good and Right on their heads.
Here's the plot of the novel:
Philip Marlowe observes a guy making a drunken fool of himself in the parking lot of a night club. He decides to help him out. He takes him home, gives him a place to sleep and sobers him up, and learns his name is Terry Lennox. We find out that Terry Lennox is rich, or at least married into a rich family. Marlowe keeps running into him, so we learn that Terry gets a divorce. Then he leaves town with Marlowe's help. Some time later he returns, shows up at Marlowe's office, asks him out for a drink and tells him that he's remarrying his ex-wife. After this, Terry regularly drops by at Marlowe's office, and they go for a drink in the late afternoon. If you know Marlowe like I do, after having read several of Chandler's novels, then you know he's a loner, and this short-lived relationship with Terry Lennox is about as close to friendship as he ever gets.
One day, Terry shows up at Marlowe's door, disheveled, with a gun in his hand, and asks Marlowe to drive him to the Tijuana airport. Marlowe doesn't ask any questions; he just takes him. As Terry is leaving to get on the plane, he tells Marlowe that he killed his wife. But Marlowe is suspicious about the circumstances and doesn't believe him. When Marlowe gets back to Los Angeles the cops take him in for questioning regarding the death of Terry Lennox's wife, but he refuses to say anything about having just driven Terry to the airport. He refuses to believe that Terry could have done this.
Marlowe is held in a jail cell for a while and eventually he is informed that Terry committed suicide in a small Mexican village after writing out a confession to the murder. Marlowe is released. He still refuses to believe that Terry committed the murder.
Somehow word gets out about his loyalty to his friend and he is soon hired for a job on the basis of his ability to stand up to the cops. At this point the rest of the plot begins, and at first it seems to have little to do with Terry Lennox, but slowly everything some how points back to Terry. Marlowe uncovers the true murderer and is vindicated. But the real mystery is, Why did Terry lie to him? Marlowe is left puzzling over this when he is visited by someone who claims to be able to prove that Terry committed suicide. Marlowe quickly figures out that this man is Terry in disguise, that he faked his death by bribing the police in Mexico. He is disappointed. There is a significant amount of violence and death throughout the novel that can be directly attributed to the fact that Terry faked his death.
Marlowe was only half-correct in his assessment of Terry. He knew that he wasn't a murderer, but he was unaware of how he was being used. He allowed himself to befriend this individual and then gave him more credit than he deserved. The title of the book is The Long Goodbye and refers to how we reconcile with the death of a friend. But when the truth is revealed, Marlowe's friend is not dead, only their friendship. The book ends with Terry walking away. "That was the last I saw of him," Marlowe narrates.
Now consider the plot of the movie. It begins with Terry showing up at Marlowe's door, asking for a ride to Tijuana, with no explanation for how they met or the nature of their relationship. Then the rest of the story happens, mostly the same but severely truncated and missing many major characters from the novel. But instead of Marlowe discovering the killer in this lengthy and substantial subplot, he learns that he was wrong. Terry murdered his wife after all. Marlowe is made a sucker for helping him. He goes in pursuit of Terry, finds him in Mexico and guns him down.
Unlike the Marlowe of Raymond Chandler's imagination, Altman's Marlowe is gullible, incorrect, and lacks self-control. The film rejects Chandler's 1950s sense of morality as fraudulent. It reacts against the novel by telling a mostly similar story, but making its meaning be the opposite. The fact that Marlowe is entirely wrong, rather than half-right, and he responds to this truth with a murderous rage (which the film attempts to depict as justice) completely undermines Raymond Chandler's message that goodness must be naive at times or else it isn't worth it.
Here's a excerpt from the novel. Marlowe has come out of an inquest involving the suicide of one of his clients. He and a police officer named Bernie Ohls have been talking. Ohls says:
"You're an awful lucky boy, Marlowe. Twice you've slid out from under a
heavy one. You could get overconfident. You were pretty helpful to those people
and you didn't make a dime. You were pretty helpful to a guy named Lennox too,
the way I hear it. And you didn't make a dime out of that one either. What do
you do for eating money, pal? You got a lot saved so you don't have to work
anymore?"
I stood up and walked around the desk and faced him, "I'm a romantic, Bernie. I
hear voices crying in the night and I go see what's the matter. You don't make a
dime that way. You got sense, you shut your windows and turn up more sound on
the TV set. Or you shove down on the gas and get far away from there. Stay out
of other people's troubles. All it can get you is the smear. The last time I saw
Terry Lennox we had a cup of coffee together that I made myself in my house, and
we smoked a cigarette. So when I heard he was dead I went out to the kitchen and
made some coffee and poured a cup for him and lit a cigarette for him and when
the coffee was cold and the cigarette was burned down I said goodnight to him.
You don't make a dime that way. You wouldn't do it. That's why you're a good cop
and I'm private eye..."
Raymond Chandler tried to give us a way to think about how we approach various situations in life. Yes, the world is a cynical place to live. You get get used-up sometimes, but according to Chandler, that's no reason to not be Good. Altman and Hackett instead show us a Marlowe who is delusional in his judgment of character, and who in turn becomes a victim/avenger of fallacy. The 1970s Marlowe is a product of his environment and a slave to instinct. The 1950s Marlowe believes he can overcome the evil of the world with good. Both storytellers have a claim on the truth. I can understand both outlooks, but I prefer 1950s Marlowe.
