Metacritic reviews

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye attacks film noir with three of his most cherished tools: Whimsy, spontaneity and narrative perversity.

It's great fun and it's funny, but it's a serious, unique work.

A gloriously inspired tribute to Hollywood that never loses sight of what Los Angeles has become.

Despite cries of outrage from hard-line Chandler purists, this is, along with Hawks' The Big Sleep, easily the most intelligent of all screen adaptations of the writer's work.

Sometimes important plot-points unfold through windows, too, and The Long Goodbye as a whole peels back the surfaces of private-eye stories, paying special attention to their macho bluster and abused women.

If you can have another movie myth shattered in high style, with love as well as wit, The Long Goodbye is for you. [29 Oct 1973, p.80]

Altman gracefully kisses off the private-eye form in soft, mellow color and volatile images; the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality). Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance.

While it may not be Chandler, it is a moody and entertaining film.

Robert Altman's film version of Raymond Chandler's novel is an uneven mixture of insider satire on the gumshow film genre, gratuitous brutality, and sledgehammer whimsy.

The Long Goodbye rides off furiously in too many different directions with too many gratuitously Godardian camera movements to make even one good movie. [29 Nov 1973, p.84]