In Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel “The Long Goodbye” (which I discuss in this clip), the archetypal private eye Philip Marlowe drives a 1948 Lincoln Continental (a tip of the hat to the deliciously fanatical Internet Movie Cars Database for that piece of information)—a twenty-five-year-old vehicle that, at a time of rapid change in design and, of course, in society at large, looks more than its age and conjures an instant, ironic nostalgia. Altman builds his film on the very contrast between the world as reflected in the events of Chandler’s novel (which came out in 1953) and the Los Angeles of the moment of filming. That contrast comes to life, first of all, in the ingenious casting of Elliott Gould—the exemplary actor of the time—as Marlowe. Chandler reportedly said that his favorite screen incarnation of the character was Dick Powell (in Edward Dmytryk’s “Murder, My Sweet,” an adaptation of “Farewell, My Lovely”); but here’s Chandler, in a 1946 letter, about Humphrey Bogart (in Howard Hawks’s “The Big Sleep”):
I’d like to know what the writer, who died in 1959, at the age of seventy, would have made of Gould’s exquisite blend of impulsive, inspired, sardonic humor and insolent attitude—of professional bravado and intimate confusion. In any case, Altman’s film is the perfect antidote to neoclassical fastidiousness: he doesn’t merely celebrate genre clichés and conventions, he holds them up to the light of modern life and uses them as a prism to reveal its hidden tones.
