Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) awakens in the middle of the night when his cat jumps on him. Out of cat food, he offers the cat something else. The cat shoves it on the floor, where Marlowe leaves it. He goes out to get food for the cat but the cat refuses that. At this point, Terry Lennox, an old friend, arrives with a story about a fight with his wife and needing a ride to the Mexican border. Uh huh. No sooner does he arrive back in Los Angeles than the police are waiting for him and asking where he took Lennox. Marlowe says nothing, even spending several days in jail. When he learns that Terry killed his wife, he is baffled. He is being released because Terry committed suicide in Mexico, closing the case. But Marlowe's troubles are only beginning. A thug shows up and demands the money that Terry owed him; either Marlowe locate the money or there will be consequences. Then there is the neighbor of Terry who calls about her missing husband, a somewhat famous author. Unsurprisingly, it all ties in with Terry Lennox.
This is the worst performance I have ever seen by Elliot Gould. In every scene, he is lighting a cigarette. He's dragging matches on every surface available to light half-smoked cigarettes. Most of the time, he is a flat monotone. Is he depressed? For a private detective, he does almost no detecting. He just wanders around as the clues come slap him. He is thoroughly unlikeable. Playing on the 40s origin of the character, he drives a 1948 Lincoln, a car that couldn't possibly hope to blend. Try to tail someone in that thing. Well, he does. Sure. Then, in order to get information from demonstrably corrupt officials in a small Mexican town in 1973, Marlowe pays the princely sum of $5,000! How do you stay in business?
The movie has a soundtrack of 1 song. It is a sad dirge of a song that repeats in different styles and formats though the film. Here it is on the radio and here the piano man at the bar sings it. Combined with Gould's flat delivery, this melancholy excuse for a song adds to the misery.
When the story is all told, it is stupid. Why would Terry Lennox's mistress hire Marlowe to find the husband on whom she was cheating? Her husband had told Lennox's wife about the affair, triggering the fight that resulted in her death. Why does the thug attack his mistress to prove how serious he is to Marlowe? What's with stripping off his clothes? That Gould is utterly unmoved by anything makes the stripping scene even more bizarre though it is funny to see Arnold Schwarzenegger as an unnamed hood eager to strip.
IMDb rates this a 7.6 film. How? Who likes this crap? I've enjoyed some of Robert Altman's movies and have always liked Elliot Gould but this is darn near unwatchable. Thumbs down.
