Quirky and mostly noncommercial director Robert Altman takes on the detective genre. Altman was always game to try something different, so why not a Raymond Chandler mystery set in Los Angeles. Altman and his screenwriter Leigh Brackett updated the Chandler novel from the 1940's to the 1970's but kept Philip Marlowe as a more of a 1940's character rather than a contemporary private detective.
As always with Altman there was the usual cast of his favorite characters, Elliot Gould, Henry Gibson, Nina Van Pallandt and in a rather small part, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The director Mark Rydell played a very scary crime boss named Marty Augustine and Sterling Hayden an interesting actor was cast as an alcoholic writer which was apparently typecasting when it came to him.
The screenwriter Leigh Brackett had started her career working for Howard Hawks on 1946's The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart playing Philip Marlowe. Brackett had been around quite a while but apparently she got along very well with Altman.
This is a typical Robert Altman film with lots of improvisation, his famous multilayered dialog, an interesting visual style from the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and music from mister Star Wars composer himself John Williams One of the best jokes in the film is the title song constantly repeating itself in different versions throughout the film.
This is one of Altman's best films. The mystery is actually fairly easy to follow as long as you pay attention to the overlapping dialog in the soundtrack and it's probably as authentic a picture of 1970's Los Angeles that you are going to get. But as usual with an Altman film it was a commercial failure. With the exception of MASH, Altman was never a guy you could count on to for a money making feature film.
The running time is 112 minutes.
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