R.I.P. Robert Altman

12:06:2006
In respect to the death of the great man, here is a piece I wrote for Hotdog magazine about my favourite scenes from my favourite Altman film, 'The Long Goodbye'
Marty Augustine’s scenes from ‘The Long Goodbye’
(Robert Altman, 1974)

At the beginning of ‘The Long Goodbye’ private dick Phillip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) gives his friend Terry Lennox a lift down to the Mexican border. On returning home Marlowe realises that Lennox was escaping from some serious heat. Lennox’ wife has turned up dead and $350,000 belonging to a gangster called Marty Augustine which was entrusted to Lennox has gone missing. So that evening Augustine pays Marlowe a visit.

Augustine’s gang is a mixed bunch. There are Italian, Mexican, Jewish, Black and Austrian guys and they all agree with Mr Augustine that Marlowe’s wisecracks aren’t particularly funny and deliver a few jabs to Marlowe’s kidneys. So far it’s all by-the-book. Augustine explains to his beautiful girlfriend that she should wait in the car and listen to the radio as he and Marlowe have a little business to discuss. The gang hustle him up to his apartment where they proceed to wreck the place searching for the missing money that Augustine believes is hidden there.

The search turns nothing up but Marlowe’s laundry, so Augustine explains his position. He has a wife in an expensive health spa in Basel. He has three beautiful daughters in an expensive summer camp. He takes tennis lessons three times a week on his own private tennis court. He lives in an expensive part of town opposite Richard Nixon’s house. He has butlers and maids and cooks and gardeners. “All that stuff costs money. I gotta juice the guys I gotta juice so I can make money so I can juice the guys I gotta juice. And you have my money. Where is my money?”

There is a knock at the door. It is Augustine’s girlfriend. She had heard a noise outside and got scared and wanted to know if she could get a Coke. Augustine’s demeanour changes instantly. He sits her down and while one of his hoods is getting a coke from Marlowe’s fridge he makes a sentimental speech about how much he loves her and how beautiful she is. Then when one of the hoods comes back with the coke bottle Augustine takes it and smashes it into her face.

She collapses screaming, blood spurting from her nose and mouth. “Get her out of here! Get her out!” screams Augustine as two of his men wrap a sheet around her face and take her sobbing out to the car. He turns to Marlowe.
“Now that’s someone I love. And you I don’t even like.”
In the long tradition of ‘hero threatened by a gang of hoods’ scenes a few stand out in movie history: Fernando Rey shooting Gene Hackman up with heroin in ‘The French Connection 2’, Laurence Olivier doing a bit of dentistry on Dustin Hoffman in ‘Marathon man’, scenes too numerous to mention from the Goodfellas/Godfather films.

Raymond Chandler, creator of private dick Phillip Marlowe and such works as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon is as good as any of them at having his hero suddenly confronted by one Mr Big or another and his gang of goombahs- but Chandler’s work ‘The Long Goodbye’ wasn’t made as a black and white Howard Hawks movie of the 1940’s. It was a Robert Altman film of the early 1970s, and a very queer one at that with two of the most bizarre ‘threatened by a gang of hoods’ scenes I have ever seen.

The reason why the ‘Coke bottle’ scene works so well is the atmosphere of menace that Altman builds up as Augustine and his men close around Marlowe. When Augustine gives his lecture on how well he lives we know it’s the preamble to something nasty. Will he cut our hero’s nostrils open with a knife? Do a bit of dentistry on him? Soak him in petrol and perform an ear-ectomy? But the sudden appearance of the girlfriend and Augustine’s sweet talking her with such cheesy lines as “I go to bed with a lot of girls, but I make love to you. Look at that face. Isn’t that a face for a magazine model?” lulls us into dropping our guard, and just when it’s down… bam. He glasses his own girlfriend just to make a point to the man he’s threatening. And it knocks us sideways. The gang leave with the stricken girl, and Marlowe is unharmed.

Later in the film Augustine has Marlowe brought to his sumptuous flat. The money still hasn’t turned up and now he’s less inclined to be patient. The girlfriend is there as well, her face bandaged up and some sort of metal contraption holding her mouth together. Augustine tells Marlowe how he realised that he had been unfair to his girlfriend and that when she was lying in hospital after extensive facial surgery he crept into her room, stripped naked and presented himself to her with the statement “before you you see a man with nothing to hide. I apologise.”

And as a result he demands that Marlowe strip naked. Marlowe refuses, so to make him feel less embarrassed Augustine demands that his entire gang strip naked. At this point the more observant viewer may spot a young Arnold Schwartzenegger amongst the gang, though he appears in the credits as ‘Arnold Strong’. It is undoubtedly him, though. When he removes his shirt he flexes his ‘pecs a few times.

So now the room is full of gangsters in their underpants, and Augustine isn’t through yet. He summons the Jewish guy from the gang.

“Your father was a mohel” For those who didn’t watch Seinfeld, a Mohel (pronounced ‘moyle’) is someone who performs circumcisions.
“Cut it.”
“Cut it?”
“Cut it off.”
And it is there that we leave this scene as I don’t want to spoil the ending. The two ‘Marty Augustine’ scenes don’t have a lot to do with the rest of the film, and could have been cut without affecting the main plot, but they are the highpoints of a film which should rank as one of Altman’s best. Made around the same time as ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘Nashville’ it is often overlooked but is full of quirky Altman touches. When Marlowe gets out of his car and walks into his apartment building. We don’t see it as a straight shot at street level. We see it as a long zoom from a balcony on which two shapely women in leotards are doing slow backflips and trying to name all the state capitals of the US.

When Marlowe gets off a bus in a Mexican village and walks into the courthouse the camera strays off him and ends up finding two dogs fucking in the street as a mariachi band climaxes a rendition of the song ‘Long Goodbye’- which is another odd facet of the film. The entire soundtrack of the film is this one song ‘Long Goodbye’ recorded by eight different artists. Not only that, but the song turns up in supermarket and lift muzak, the aforementioned mariachi band, and some removal men carrying boxes into a house who happen to be whistling it. By the end of the film you can’t get it out of your head, it’s so insidious.

If like me, you had to sit through ‘Popeye’ as a kid and still harbour resentment towards Mr Altman then get hold of ‘The Long Goodbye’ and start the healing process, for it is a work to behold.

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Epilogue
I once asked Altman about how he'd come to cast Schwarzenegger in 'The Long Goodbye' and he told me this great story about his casting guy raving about someone called 'Arnold Strong' who had 'really big muscles'. I asked him if he'd consider having him in any future films and he said he didn't think Arnie needed his help any longer. He will be missed, though to be honest his last few films weren't much to shout about, Gosford Park included.

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