Like Raymond Chandler, Robert Altman (1925-2006) was a difficult, hard-drinking, self-destructive artist, a brilliant maverick who achieved his first success late in life. In 1973, his career still in the ascendant after the popularity of his first expansive, widescreen movie, MASH, he made a controversial screen version of Chandler's last work of consequence.

Published in 1953, The Long Good-bye was arguably Chandler's best, certainly his most personal novel and turned upon his knight-errant private eye Philip Marlowe going down the mean streets of Los Angeles to defend the reputation of his friend Terry Lennox, who's accused of murdering his wife before apparently committing suicide in Mexico.

Altman brought in Leigh Brackett, co-screenwriter with William Faulkner on the 1946 film of Chandler's The Big Sleep. His big changes were to simplify the plot and, above all, to bring forward the action some two decades from the conformist early 50s to the permissive 70s. In a revealing documentary accompanying this Blu-ray disc, Altman speaks of "Rip Van Marlowe", seeing his hero as a man sleepwalking into a later era and trying to make sense of its amorality, decadence and lack of values, though this is only an exaggerated form of the fictional California the disillusioned Chandler made his own.

As played by Elliott Gould, Marlowe is a quizzical, self-mocking figure, constantly commenting on the world and his anachronistic presence in it. Indeed, everyone seems trapped in a vacuum of nostalgia and allusions to the past, especially Hollywood's.

Superbly photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond in a desaturated colour that echoes a bygone age, The Long Goodbye is an elegant, chilly, deliberately heartless movie. A masterpiece of sorts, it digs beneath the surface of the supposedly liberated spirit of the times to expose the ethos that took America into the Vietnam war and produced Watergate. In pushing the cynical idealist Marlowe over the edge it ends up true to the spirit of Chandler.