THE LONG GOODBYE
Film Forum

“It’s a bright, guilty world,” Orson Welles sighed from the soundtrack of his 1947 film, “The Lady From Shanghai.” The world in “The Long Goodbye,” Robert Altman’s 1973 shambling shaggy-dog reconfiguring of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe mystery, is one of the brightest and guiltiest ever depicted on film.

With the exception of a trio of pivotal side trips to Mexico, that world is confined to Los Angeles, a city that Altman and his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, envision as a shadowless, yellowing place so mired in its past that it has nearly ground to a halt in the present.

Instead of going the time-tested, two-fisted route, Altman gives us a private eye that he has described as a “Rip Van Marlowe.” Elliot Gould plays the paradigmatic gumshoe as a kind of mumbling, energetic sleepwalker. Every unfiltered Camel Mr. Gould’s tousle-headed and rumpled Marlowe lights appears to be his first of the day and every conversation seems to take place before he’s had his morning coffee.

When Terry Lennox (former Yankee knuckleballer Jim Bouton) shows up at Marlowe’s apartment in the middle of the night with some nasty scratches on his face and a request for a no-questions-asked lift to the Mexican border, our hero shrugs and complies. What are old friends for? But the next day the police question Marlowe as an accessory to murder. Terry forgot to mention that his wife was dead. What’s more, a motor-mouthed psychotic gangster named Augustine (director Mark Rydell) comes around in search of a bag of gambling money that Lennox was supposed to deliver in Mexico City.

And then there are Lennox’s neighbors, Eileen Wade (Nina Van Pallandt ) and her husband, Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden — never better). Eileen hires Marlowe to boost her alcoholic writer spouse from rehab. Roger sees Marlowe as a kindred spirit. Or is it an alibi?

As in Chandler’s novels, getting to the bottom of who killed whom and why isn’t so much the point as getting a good long look at the ethical landscape that nurtures all the lies and cruelties. In that sense, in spite of the film’s many revisionist touches (beginning and ending the film with a blast of “Hooray for Hollywood” on the soundtrack tops the list), Altman created the most improbably faithful screen adaptation of Chandler ever made. “The Long Goodbye” is one of those rare movies, like Robert Aldrich’s similarly irreverent 1958 private eye mash-up “Kiss Me Deadly,” that take the temperature and check the pulse of the times in which they are made. Opening today in a spectacular new widescreen print at Film Forum, Altman’s finest film has returned for a week to chart the moral ills of Hollywood circa 1973, and check the vital signs of America today. Don’t miss it.

Bruce Bennett

THE VALET
PG-13, 85 minutes

“The Valet” seems less like a film than an exercise in futile facial comedy. Just how many ways can François Pignon grimace and squirm without eliciting a hint of laughter from the audience?

All the trappings of a comedy are present in this whimsical — one might say wafer-thin — French import from the writer-director Francis Veber. The music is lighthearted, the characters broadly drawn, and the sentiments sweet in nature but silly in presentation. What’s unmistakable, however, is how tediously and timidly it all drifts by — scenes literally move to and fro, dissolving and materializing without an inch of depth.

The best thing about “The Valet” is the premise, the way that it is grounded in a skewered universe overrun with paparazzi and shareholder scandals. François (Gad Elmaleh) is the mopey, shy antihero. He works as a valet and shares an apartment with his slob of a best friend, parking other people’s cars and going home to sleep alone. He dreams of proposing to the girl of his dreams, Emilie (Virginie Ledoyen), of sharing with her how he so desperately wants to be more than just a friend.

But just as she is put off by François’s advances, finding it difficult to take his romantic proposals seriously, a paparazzo changes this dullard’s life forever. As he skulks down the street one day, the flash of a light bulb leads to photos in the next day’s newspaper — there is François standing next to a wealthy executive named Levasseur (Daniel Auteuil) and his mistress (Alice Taglioni). Desperate to keep their affair a secret, since Levasseur’s company is in the name of his skeptical wife, the lovers concoct a scheme to convince the world that she is not the businessman’s lover, but the valet’s.

By that night, Francois is presented with an indecent, but titillating, proposal: live with the supermodel, play the part of the good boyfriend, revel in the headlines, and after the whole thing blows over, collect a big paycheck.

He may be ugly, but Francois is not dumb, so he takes the deal and does his best to leverage his faux romance into solid romantic capital with Emilie, aiming to make her jealous enough to whisk him out a model’s arms.

Despite the classic setup, the decided lack of sensuality and sexual tension leaves the whole story cold. François, clearly, is a character sketched out with some affection, and while that should score Mr. Veber some humanitarian points, it leaves the film feeling far too nice to ever really be funny.

François in a bed with a supermodel? Not really as awkward as Mr. Veber thinks. François having his heart broken? Sadder than Mr. Veber seems to admit. François, the overnight celebrity, strutting his stuff? A bit more forced than Mr. Veber intends.

We’re not watching a funny guy go through the ringer in “The Valet” — we’re seeing a genuinely nice guy getting abused, both mentally and physically, for our amusement. We don’t chuckle, so much as pity him. We tip the valet — we don’t make fun of him.