Philip Marlow in The Long Goodbye

Right from the opening sequence in The Long Goodbye, the viewer sees that this is not your typical detective film. Marlowe (Elliott Gould) wakes up in his clothes, with his cat scratching at his face. What director Robert Altman has done, is to take the Marlowe character from the 1940s and dropped this laid-back, super-cool character, almost unchanged, into the frothy, hippy, pot-smoking Los Angeles of the 1970s. This Marlowe is like a swimming bird, he's there, but out of his element. He basically exists in a world of his own, where he lets things happen around him.
Philip Marlowe has…