The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye (1973) is Robert Altman's loose-limbed neo-noir, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Late one night, private eye Philip Marlowe drives his pal Terry Lennox down to the Mexican border. By morning Lennox's wife is dead and Terry has reportedly killed himself. Marlowe isn't buying any of it.

Elliott Gould plays Marlowe against type — a rumpled, mumbling holdover from the 1940s wandering through the sun-bleached sprawl of 1970s Los Angeles. The cops haul him in, gangsters lean on him, and a boozing novelist named Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden) and his wife drag him into their own slow-motion collapse. Raymond Chandler never wrote the ending this film lands on.

Altman took the hard-boiled detective template and turned it inside out: the camera drifts and floats, the dialogue overlaps in that signature mumble, and John Williams' title song keeps returning in a dozen different arrangements. Audiences were baffled in 1973; cinephiles now rank it among the best Marlowe pictures ever made. Stream The Long Goodbye (1973) online on iFILM.