losing his cat
by
Douglas Messerli
Leigh
Brackett (screenplay, based on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye), Robert Altman (director) The Long Goodbye / 1973
Altman’s
loser of a private detective, Philip Marlowe, loves his cat, which he proves in
the early sequences of The Long Goodbye by
getting up at 3:00 A.M. to feed him, and when the cat
refuses to eat
the mess he has cooked up—Marlowe has forgotten to buy new cat food—the private
detective trots out to an all-night grocery to get his cat the needed special
favorite food, of which his local grocery, apparently, has run out. The cat
does not appreciate his pretense of serving him another cat food out of the
already discarded empty can.
These early scenes, to many viewers, may seem
pointless, but they establish a loving character who, entirely disinterested in
his eroticized-lesbian yoga neighbors, refuses to loosen his noir-period tie in a
world that has clearly gone to the dogs. In fact, Altman’s amazing film is
filled with images of dogs—particularly after Marlowe’s cat goes
missing—appearing in nearly every scene of the film, some of them—particularly
in his scenes with Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt), whose Rottweiler apparently
hates this cat lover, despite Eileen’s
attraction to him when she hires Marlowe to bring back her husband from a
corrupt detoxification clinic.
No one seems to care about anyone else in
this 1970’s version of Chandler’s myth, or, even worse, seems not even to be
aware of each other’s existence. The deepest relationship Marlowe has with his libidinous
neighbors is their request for boxes of brownie mix, presumably so they might
mix pot into its ingredients.
Everyone in this film has helped to destroy Marlowe’s lovely, and desperately hungry, cat. He will return to an apartment (in a significant historical building which Howard and I know very well, since our friends Carol Elliel and Tom Muller live their today), that is sadly empty, despite the eye-candy from his window, which he seemingly no longer enjoys.
Marlowe’s beloved cat is a male. Perhaps,
as the nasty detective who interrogates him early in the film suggests, the
detective is indeed a “faggot.” At one point, the villain, Augustine, suggests
that all of his men and Marlowe remove their clothes to reveal themselves as
innocent or guilty. The gangster’s quickly strip, while Marlowe, slow to the
process, is saved by the return of the money by Wade’s wife. But clearly
Gould’s wonderful portrayal of the mythical Chandler figure seems totally
disinterested in the women who torture most the bad boys of this play. I’ll go
with the “passive” hero any day as opposed to the manipulating male figures
this story portrays. If this isn’t exactly a “gay” movie, it’s certainly a portrait of
a man removed from female love. Marlowe, if nothing else, is a gentleman of the
old school, what we might have described as the unmarrying kind. Anyone have
any Cory cat food so that he might delight his starving cat, if he can find him?
Might I add, this is one of the great
movies of the late 20th Century?
Los Angeles,
November 5, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment