The Long Goodbye

Elliott Gould stars as the hard-boiled, wise-cracking private investigator Philip Marlowe who gets caught up with a host of shady and villainous characters — including a sadistic mobster, a greedy psychiatric quack, an alcoholic author, and a Malibu femme fatale — after he unwittingly helps his best friend Lennox flee from a murder charge. Altman updates the noir genre by setting it in zany 1970s California, complete with beachfront mansions and topless pot-obsessed yoga babes. Yet Marlowe remains a man of the past, with an old-fashioned moral code that both sets him apart from everyone around him and propels his investigation into who the real murderer is.