But such is the power and subtlety of Raymond Chandler’s writing that we are always conscious of his central character’s deep well of loyalty at work, driving this longest of goodbyes.Elliot Gould is far from the ideal imagined by Raymond Chandler for his saint of the city Philip Marlowe-“Hey, it’s okay with me” is the mumbled philosophy of this rumpled PI in the 1970s LA-but he’s perfect for Robert Altman’s idiosyncratic adaptation of The Long Goodbye (1973). In the hard-boiled world, no detective would ever give voice to feelings like these, and Marlowe doesn’t. The brief friendship has struck a sympathetic chord in him. All we know is that Marlowe does not believe the Terry Lennox he knew was capable of such a vicious crime. Nor is it so apparent that Marlowe seeks to vindicate his dead friend, either. Gangsters, writers, publishers, quacks, and, of course, beautiful women enter Marlowe’s life after Lennox’s suicide, but not all meet on a trail readily connected to the solution of Sylvia Lennox’s murder. When Lennox turns up a suicide with a signed confession in Otatoclán, it gets Marlowe out of jail, but it does not get Lennox out of his life.
Marlowe does help, and is arrested and jailed. Something in Lennox’s character interests Marlowe, enough that he doesn’t question why Lennox is asking for help getting to Mexico right after his wife has been brutally murdered.
They begin a casual friendship, meeting for gimlets at Victor’s Marlowe learns that the scars on his face are mortar wounds and that he is married to the promiscuous daughter of multimillionaire Harlan Potter. Taking pity on Lennox, Marlowe brings him home to sober up. Marlowe explains in an extraordinary opening line that establishes wealth, trouble, and the central figure of conflict in the story. “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers”.
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