The MoFo Top 100 Neo-noir Countdown

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The Long Goodbye - Private investigator Philip Marlowe helps a friend out of a jam, but in doing so gets implicated in his wife's murder while taking another case that might or might not be related.



Here, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz shares his introduction to the film.

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This, along with Night Moves, were probably the two that I most wanted to get to before the countdown, but I just couldn't. It's a big blindspot that I will try to remedy soon.


SEEN: 69/96
MY BALLOT: 21/25

List facts!



The Long Goodbye is Robert Altman's second entry in the countdown, after The Player (#47).

The 70 point gap between Seven and The Long Goodbye will be the second biggest gap in all the countdown.

You all hit it!

The Long Goodbye was #19 on the MoFo Top 100 of the 1970s.

The first time I saw The Long Goodbye it was very inauspicious, and a far less than ideal presentation. You kids born in the 1990s and 2000s will not remember, but there was such a thing as black and white television sets. I mean, originally ALL televisions were only capable of black and white, but even long after color sets became the standard you could still purchase black and white sets for far less. My family had one, initially as a small “extra” TV that went in our kitchen in the 1970s. But that little sucker hung around (bright yellow plastic), and at one point it became mine. Until I later wrangled a color set for my bedroom, I had this one. Not only was it black and white, but it was teeny. Probably 13”, maybe even smaller than some of the laptop screens you may be reading this on. But, it was mine. Wasn’t hooked up to cable, either, just the rabbit ears for local programming.



One night the late movie on one of my local UHF channels was The Long Goodbye. I was probably thirteen. I didn’t really know much about Altman at that point, I had only seen MASH (1970) on TV, which my Dad was a big fan of. I hadn’t yet read any Raymond Chandler or quite hit my devouring as many old movies as I can phase. The movie started, and even panned and scanned on a crap B&W set, periodically interrupted by commercials, something about it drew me right in. I loved ”The Rockford Files” and other P.I. and cop shows, but this was different. The first ten minutes is a guy talking to his cat then grocery shopping for it. What am I even watching? As it all unfolded in that lackadaisical Altman fashion, I was more and more transfixed. Not by the mystery or who done it, but by the attitude and the dreamlike nature of it all. I watched it until the wee hours of the morning and that was that. It was an odd but undeniably fascinating movie, even through the dreadful little old TV.

It stayed with me, and while I hadn’t seen it again all the years since, I never forgot it. Then when I got my first LaserDisc player – I think this was the Christmas I was twenty-one – when I went out to buy my first round of discs at Suncoast Motion Picture Company, a chain that used to be in Malls back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there it was: Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. It was an unlikely pick among the stacks and stacks to choose from, but it became one of the first seven or eight LDs I owned. But now not only was I older, not only had my cinematic appreciation and experience grown exponentially, and not only had I read all of Chandler, but the LaserDisc was letterboxed, and I now had a big color television. As much as it had transfixed me the first viewing, now I was blown away by this weird, funny, funky little movie. It was Chandler, but it also very much wasn’t. Much more Altman than Chandler, but such an ultimately powerful take on the material, setting our knight errant into the hazy Los Angeles of 1973, post-Manson Murders, during the Watergate trial, with the mainstream power structure being replaced by naked Hippies and cats with refined palates. And Altman’s widescreen visuals and audio techniques and my god the John Williams theme played twenty different ways, all anchored by Elliott Gould’s weary and bemused Marlowe who it turns out is about the only honorable fella left in this f*cked up town. I loved it.



Now that I owned it, and since my collection was only starting*, I watched The Long Goodbye over and over and over again, as one should. The laissez-faire surface cynicism masking true resentment and morality is rather brilliant. Along with Harry Mosby in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (#40), The Long Goodbye is probably the best of the ‘70s Noirs at transplanting not the tropes and plot of the Classic Noirs but juxtaposing the inherent justice and morality of that era with the conspiratorial new world.

The Long Goodbye was #2 on my ballot, twenty-four of its 389 points.






*difficult for me to remember exactly at this point, now that we are over thirty years onward, but I believe the discs I got with my player that my Dad picked out for me were The Empire Strikes Back, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Philadelphia Story, and Young Frankenstein. In that first trip to the video store in the couple days after Christmas I believe my first purchases were The Long Goodbye, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Blues Brothers, Die Hard, and A Fistful of Dollars. My collection ultimately grew to over 700 titles before the advent of and explosion in popularity of DVD that killed the format in 1998-ish. I donated a few boxes worth to a theatre fundraiser in Portland, OR and sold a few here and there, but I still have hundreds and hundreds of LaserDiscs. Jealous? I didn’t think so. My wife would greatly appreciate if somebody would come and take them all out of our garage, please.

Nice! It's neck and neck with Cure with my favorite discovery from the Hall of Fames. Here is what I wrote about it.

Was it on my ballot? Nope. Another "relied too much on Letterboxd" casualty.

The Long Goodbye also holds the eternal distinction of being the finest film Arnold Schwarzenegger will ever be involved with.

More videos, because there can never be enough discussion of and rumination about The Long Goodbye. Not for this MoFo's taste, anyway...