Philip Marlow in The Long Goodbye

Right from the opening sequence in The Long Goodbye, the viewer sees that this is not your typical detective film. Marlowe (Elliott Gould) wakes up in his clothes, with his cat scratching at his face. What director Robert Altman has done, is to take the Marlowe character from the 1940s and dropped this laid-back, super-cool character, almost unchanged, into the frothy, hippy, pot-smoking Los Angeles of the 1970s. This Marlowe is like a swimming bird, …

…broad daylight. <Tab/>From background information, this is not the real Philip Marlowe. He is best played by the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Robert Montgomery. Elliott Gould shares the name, but its hard to believe it's the same character that does have clients of his own. Marlowe is Altman's stand-in, skipping through a hell-like vision of hippy, seventies California. It's like a crazy and weird version of film-noir in color.