Robert Altman’s 1973 film *The Long Goodbye* is presented as a distinctive neo-noir that still feels fresh 53 years on, particularly because it recasts Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe for the countercultural New Hollywood era. Now available free on Tubi, the film is praised for combining comedy, melancholy and cynicism while undermining the conventions of the traditional hard-boiled detective story.

Elliott Gould plays an unconventional, distracted Marlowe, whose search for cat food precedes his involvement in a tangled web of murder, disappearance, infidelity and organised crime in Los Angeles. Altman and screenwriter Leigh Brackett substantially altered Chandler’s novel, giving the story a darker ending in which Marlowe kills his friend Terry Lennox and novelist Roger Wade dies by suicide; its deliberately loose, meandering plot places atmosphere and character above straightforward mystery-solving.