It was a cold rainy January night in 2014 when waiting for my indomitably better half to return home, I decided to finally take a look at Robert Altman’s adaption of the Raymond Chandler classic ‘The Long Goodbye’.  With the cold seeping through our relatively ineffective single glazed windows, the radiator cranked and a glass of rum in hand I sat down to be transported to 1970s Malibu, and whilst the film is itself fantastic it was the amazing locations and interiors that captured my imagination.  

The film opens with Marlowe, played by Elliot Gould, in his bachelor pad.  No ordinary apartment, this is the Hightower Apartments just a stones throw from the Hollywood Bowl.  Straight off the street and into the parking garage, to get to the apartments themselves, you ride an Italianate elevator (not dissimilar to the elevator in Salvador, Brazil) straight up onto the hillside, whereupon you walk across a bridge walkway to enter!  Straight across from Marlowe’s a group of beautiful hippy girls live, with a traffic signal marking the beginning of their plot.  They don’t seem to do much in the film but party and eat brownies.  Watching the film I expected this all to be Hollywood trickery, so I was very happy to learn that the apartments are real and people still live in them, including Marlowe’s very own.  What a dream.

Through a series of plot twists and turns, the film then heads down the coast to the affluent area of Malibu to visit Eileen Wade the beautiful wife of an alcoholic novelist.  The Wade residence is the ultimate beach house.  Floor to ceiling windows feature in every room, all of which seem to feature exposed brickwork painted white, with the leafy green vegetation of the 70s that you would expect and lots of delicious teak wood furniture.

A little later on, Marlowe and Mrs. Wade enjoy a candle lit dinner on the floor of the house, with what looks like driftwood furniture and I’m not sure if I can imagine it, but the sound of the waves drifting through the window.  If I could live anywhere this summer, it would most definitely be here.

The final interior that I really adore in this film is a small scene, where Marlowe stops in at his local piano bar.  Red lights, smoke and dark wood would make this a definite stop-off for me on any hot, sticky LA day.

The film is a very different interpretation of Chandler’s classic novel, has an absolutely killer soundtrack and lives and breathes it’s locations.  It even features a very young Arnold Schwarzenneger in one of his first film roles (bonus shot below).  It’s a must-see.

Grab a copy here.