Very good but not great film. I'm a big admirer of Robert Altman's movies. Unlike other by-the-book directors, the maverick Altman will break barriers and change the way we watch cinema. The Long Goodbye was one of the movies that Siskel and Ebert talked about on a special edition of their show, where they talked about their favorite films of the last Golden Age for Hollywood (1970-74). While it's good and compelling, it's a bit slow at times. I'm not a Raymond Chandler fan, so it was a little harder for me to judge. Elliot Gould plays the chain-smoking, cussing P.I. Phillip Marlowe superbly. Gould does a good job of masking his usual voice to sound different. A friend of Marlowe's, played by ex-baseball pitcher Jim Bouton, requests to be driven to Tijuana. He does so, then the next day, Marlowe is arrested for accessory to murder. Bouton's character's wife has been murdered. After he is released, he finds out that Bouton has committed suicide. Marlowe decides to solve this case, and it then leads him into a hard-boiled story of marital affairs, alcoholism, and loan sharks. Still, the movie, despite a bit of tedium here and there, is very good. Gould's terrific performance, as well as Sterling Hayden's role as a drunken author who's behavior has been questionable of late, are standouts. The whole cast is uniformly good. The violence is a bit nasty, Mark Rydell's Sonny Augustine, a Jewish mobster who is also looking for Marlowe's friend because of money, hits his fiance in the face with a bottle to express his anger. It's groundbreaking because of how the characters have been updated from the 1940's to the 70's, as well as the content. It's a bit dated today, but it's still a good film. A lot better than what we're seeing now.