The Long Goodbye (1973)

Saw The Long Goodbye (1973), a noir film directed by Robert Altman.  It was shot in Altman's usual style: heavily improvised, naturalistic and sarcastic, full of amiable shagginess.  The film was apparently billed as a send-up of the noir genre, and it contains many wacky elements, but it's sort of like The Big Lebowski: it's a real noir but the main character is largely disinterested.  In the case of The Big Lebowski it's because the main character is in over his head, but in this case, it's because the main character would rather laze around his apartment, admiring his female neighbors doing topless yoga.  It's funny to watch the character's barely-masked frustration as a gang of toughs or cops or whatever break down his door once more.

There's real violence in the film as well, mixed in with this goofing.  There's one really shocking scene involving a psychotic Jewish mob boss and a bottle of coke.  There's also gun-shots and deaths and so on.  It all seems to serve counterpoint to the light attitude of the main character.  He's played as being good at his job but so bored with the frustrations of it that he begins joking with everyone, just to relieve the tension, but if it was just him joking around he'd come off like an insufferable know-it-all, so some violence and some confusion help to ground him a little.

I enjoyed the film.  It kept my attention and wasn't obnoxious.  It contained boobs and blood, but it seemed to wink, to kind of understand that these were genre clichés that it was including, not for themselves, but as set-dressing.  Anyway, I liked the film.  It was good.