When the guys over at Filmspotting first announced their “The Detective and The Dude” Drive-In Double Feature, I’d have given anything to be in Chicago on November 6th, watching Bogart’s Phillip Marlowe crack wise and Jeff Bridge’s The Dude slack wise-ass, all on the big screen. But, that wasn’t going to happen, so I resigned myself to participating via my DVD collection. Only, I don’t own The Big Sleep. I’m not sure WHY I don’t own it, but them’s the facts. Then, last week they announced that they weren’t able to procure a copy of it either, so they’d be screening another film about Chandler’s private dick, The Long Goodbye. Now, I own The Long Goodbye. I haven’t seen it, but I OWN it. Back in business, I was now going to get to watch a film I’d never seen as well as one of my all-time favorites. The Detective and The Dude!
So, four hours later…
I really enjoyed The Long Goodbye. My track record with Altman has been love or hate, and I was glad this fell in with his better films. I’m a big fan of crime-noir and detective stories, and seeing Altman take on the genre was very interesting. The comedy is subtle for the most part, as is the script. Too often with mysteries you see the end game coming, especially with today’s serialized takes airing on television. The Long Goodbye takes its time, setting up all the pieces, never quite putting them all together, right up until the film’s final moment. And what an unforgettable moment it is. The lone gunshot of the movie is pretty harrowing, and echoes with you as the credits roll.
The Big Lebowski, on the other hand, draws on a plot with more twists and turns, but handles them in an almost polar opposite fashion. Not only do most of them prove to be some sort of red herring, the Coens have one of the main characters broadcast some of the bigger plot points relatively early in the film. A noir detective film that plays out as a comedy of errors and mistaken identity. I’ve seen it fifty times and it gets better every time I watch it.
I think Altman’s naturalist/improvisational style of film making plays well against the Coen’s…contained chaos, for lack of a better term. Altman shoots a murder mystery as if he was eavesdropping on the entire thing and the cinematography of the Coen’s slacker comedy makes it look like Goodfellas. The two films are as alike in their similarities as their differences. When Daniel O’Brien wrote about The Long Goodbye in his book “Robert Altman: Hollywood Survivor,” he described it as “a study of a moral and decent man cast adrift in a selfish, self-obsessed society where lives can be thrown away without a backward glance … and any notions of friendship and loyalty are meaningless.” The Big Lebowski is almost the complete antithesis to that statement.
Both make use of unconventional leading men. Elliott Gould doesn’t exactly scream hard boiled detective, taking over the role of Phillip Marlowe from more likely candidates like Humphrey Bogart and James Garner. And Jeff Bridges wasn’t really known for his comedy, most of his career had consisted of dramatic roles, with the occasional turn towards quirky sci-fi (TRON, Starman). But both pull off their characters tremendously. So much so that I see Gould in an entirely new light now and to this day my first thought is “The Dude!” whenever Bridges steps on screen in any film.
Both films end with the death of a main character, one played for laughs and one played for sheer bad-assery, but both equally surprising. At one point in The Big Leboswki, The Dude is mistaken for a private detective, despite his slovenly dress code. And while Marlowe is never mistaken for a slacker, it very well could be because of how well dressed he appears in the film. The handful of times we see his apartment we clearly see he’s not one for neatness, while the Dude’s apartment is almost a total contrast to that.
Both movies have pretty strong supporting performances. John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak is as bombastic and scenery-chewing as Sterling Hayden’s Roger Wade. Thematically, though, Wade is probably more in line with David Huddleston’s performance as The Big Lebowski. Julianne Moore is wonderful as the slightly off Maude Lebowski, but Nina van Pallandt’s Eilleen Wade is just as sexy, and far more integral to the plot of The Long Goodbye. Altman’s been known for his large casts, but the Coen’s troop of characters dwarves that of The Long Goodbye.
Music plays a rather large part in both films as well. Of all the things in The Long Goodbye that so obviously inspired and informed The Big Lebowski, I wouldn’t have thought the music, or rather how it’s used and placed, would be one of them. While The Long Goodbye features only two pieces of music (“Hooray for Hollywood” and “The Long Goodbye”), Lebowski has a pretty expansive soundtrack. But, in almost all instances, the music appears organically in the scene, be it from a car stereo or a passing mariachi band.
A lot of the success of both films is owed to the writing as well as the performances. Leigh Brackett, the screenwriter on The Long Goodbye, was no stranger to Raymond Chandler, having adapted The Big Sleep in the late 40s, with Bogart playing Phillip Marlowe. She admittedly strayed from the source material here, even changing the ending rather drastically. The hard-boiled feel is still there, but choosing to set it against a 1970’s Los Angeles gives the movie a “man out of time” feel. The dialogue is uneven, by design I imagine. Altman’s know for letting, even encouraging his performers to improvise their lines, where as in The Big Lebowski, supposedly every line of dialogue was scripted. Every curse, every “man” and “dude” was written on the page. As a result, with The Long Goodbye you get scenes that don’t feel forced and are intentionally uncomfortable, but that lack the rhythm and punch you get from writers like the Coens.
In the end though, it’s those lead performances by Bridges and Gould that shine brightest in the two films; two men that share a similar sensibility, but are oceans apart when it comes to their determination and execution. And, oddly enough I guess, both very relatable and empathetic. There’s a part of all of us that wants to be as suave and self-assured as Phillip Marlowe, and at the same time there’s nothing we’d like better than to sit around in our bath robe, bowling with our friends, lazing the days away. The Detective and The Dude are opposite sides of the same coin, and no matter how it lands, heads or tails, you win.
