The Long Goodbye (film) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

The Long Goodbye was previewed at the Tarrytown Conference Center in Tarrytown, New York. The gala was hosted by Judith Crist, then the film critic for New York magazine. The film was not well received by the audience except for Nina van Pallandt's performance. Altman attended a Q&A session afterwards and the mood was "vaguely hostile", leaving the director reportedly "depressed".

The Long Goodbye was not well received by critics during its limited release in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miami. Time magazine's Jay Cocks wrote, "Altman's lazy, haphazard putdown is without affection or understanding, a nose-thumb not only at the idea of Philip Marlowe but at the genre that his tough-guy-soft-heart character epitomized. It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire". As a result, the New York opening was canceled at the last minute after several advance screenings had already been held for the press. The film was abruptly withdrawn from release with rumors that it would be re-edited. They analyzed the reviews for six months, concluding that the reason for the film's failure was the misleading advertising campaign in which it was promoted as a "detective story" and spent $40,000 on a new release campaign, which included a poster by Mad magazine artist Jack Davis.

The Long Goodbye was re-released and in his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "it's an original work, complex without being obscure, visually breathtaking without seeming to be inappropriately fancy". Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and praised Elliott Gould's "good performance, particularly the virtuoso ten-minute stretch at the beginning of the movie when he goes out to buy food for his cat. Gould has enough of the paranoid in his acting style to really put over Altman's revised view of the private eye". Pauline Kael's lengthy review in "The New Yorker" ("Movieland-The Bums' Paradise," October 22, 1973), called the film "a high-flying rap on Chandler and the movies," hailed Elliot Gould's performance as "his best yet," and praised Altman for achieving "a self-mocking fairy-tale poetry."

Despite Kael's effusive endorsement and its influence among younger critics,The Long Goodbye remained unpopular, and earned poorly in the rest of the U.S.; nevertheless, The New York Times listed The Long Goodbye in its "Ten Best List" for film for that year, while Vilmos Zsigmond was awarded the National Society of Film Critics' prize as Best Cinematographer. Ebert later ranked it among his "Great Movies" collection and wrote, "Most of its effect comes from the way it pushes against the genre, and the way Altman undermines the premise of all private eye movies, which is that the hero can walk down mean streets, see clearly, and tell right from wrong".