Robert Altman calls the conceit of his Malibu-set 1973 gem The Long Goodbye "Rip Van Marlowe." It's pretty clear that the maverick is up to mischief along these lines from the film's opening shot, in which the Raymond Chandler creation Philip Marlowe (played here by a dishevelled Elliott Gould) wakes up in the wee hours of the morning still wearing his familiar unpressed suit. What's so terribly anachronistic about this sight? Well, Gould's Marlowe lives next door to a yoga-practicing nudist colony.

Marlowe walks into a riddle in The Long Goodbye when he agrees to drive friend Terry Lennox (former major league baseball player Jim Bouton) across the border. When Marlowe returns from Tijuana, he discovers that Terry's wife was found dead in his absence. After being held for three days as an accomplice to murder, Marlowe is released, Terry, it is learned, has committed suicide, and life goes on. Marlowe agrees to track down Roger Wade (an absolutely brilliant Sterling Hayden), a missing author who left his trophy wife (Nina Van Pallandt) while on a bender; with the Wades residing in the same neighbourhood as the departed Lennoxes, it's only a matter of time before Marlowe starts to connect the dots between the two cases and learns, as he so often does, that nobody can be trusted. The film builds to a startling conclusion that rubs your nose in hard-boiled values (capping it all off with a scratchy rendition of "Hooray for Hollywood")--and subsequently works as both a product of the so-called "second golden age" of filmmaking, the '70s, and an hommage to the first golden age, the '40s, when the depressing spectre of WWII gave birth to such cold-hearted (and, ironically, German-influenced) but didactic pictures as Double Indemnity.

The Long Goodbye stands as a classic example of seventies filmmaking, not only because it's unsparing, but also due to its auteurist conformation: Altman is unmistakably at the picture's helm, what with The Long Goodbye's glorious zooms, naturalistic sound, and noticeably--but no less effective for it--improvised stretches of dialogue. A Cahier du cineaste's wet dream, the picture also joins Roman Polanski's Chinatown in yanking a uniquely outmoded genre, the film noir, into the 1970s. But where Chinatown would make explicit the things treated cryptically during the Hayes Office years, the earlier The Long Goodbye takes an altogether different tack: it's less excited by the lifting of constraints upon the detective genre than by how a forties antihero stands in ethical contrast to self-absorbed seventies types, throwing into sharp relief the extent to which codifying a studio picture's moral obligations led to a violence-solves-everything cinema when American movies were by definition at their most righteous. Subversive and engaging, The Long Goodbye is simply above reproach.

Vitally, MGM presents The Long Goodbye in widescreen on DVD. The 2.35:1 video transfer, enhanced for 16x9 displays, reproduces Vilmos Zsigmond's flashed photography with admirable fidelity. (In "Vilmos Zsigmond Flashes The Long Goodbye" (14 mins.), a featurette elsewhere on the disc, the acclaimed DP pontificates on his attempts in The Long Goodbye to approximate human vision through the controversial post-production technique of exposing the undeveloped negative to additional, pure light, which literally dampens blacks and softens intense colours until they become pastel hues.) Expect an alternately sooty and gauzy image, just as the filmmakers intended. Sound is crisp 2-channel mono that unfortunately tends to emphasize the looped nature of Gould's extensive mumbling.

Other extras include Greg Carson's 25-minute "Rip Van Marlowe", a plaintive retrospective featuring Altman and Gould (interviewed in separate locales). Gould admits to feelings of apathy that helped him identify with Marlowe while Altman recalls quitting the project because Dan Blocker--the original Roger Wade--had passed away. (And he answers the inevitable question regarding Arnold Schwarzenegger's cameo.) The piece ends with a clever closing-credits tribute to MAD MAGAZINE cartoonist Jack Davis' one-sheet for the film that, sadly, MGM chose not to recycle for the cover of this DVD. An in-depth article from the March, 1973 issue of AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ("Creative Post-Flashing Technique for The Long Goodbye"), reproduced as on-screen text, plus five radio spots and the spoilerish trailer for The Long Goodbye round out this essential disc.-Bill Chambers