Though sold as a horror film, director Bernard Vorhaus’ “Mr. X” (1948, The Film Detective) Widowed socialite Lynn Bari (who lives in the incredible Villa de Leon in Pacific Palisades) still mourns the loss of her husband (Donald Curtis) two years after his death, which makes her an ideal mark for mentalist Turhan Bey (whom she meets on Pirates Cove Beach). Kino’s Blu-ray balances a new 4K master and vintage material – interviews with Altman, Gould, and DP Vilmos Zsigmond, testimony on Altman, Chandler, and hard-boiled fiction – with a new commentary by Tim Lucas, among other extras. Gould’s sotto voce performance is among its chief appeals, as is John Williams’ clever score, which is echoed in nearly every diegetic sound the eccentric cast, which includes baseball pitcher/scribe Jim Bouton, a (genuinely added) Sterling Hayden, Nina van Pallandt, director Mark Rydell, and a cameo by Arnold Schwarzenegger, adds to the electric circus vibe, while LA Plays Itself in glimpses of Gerald Ford-era Malibu (especially the Colony), Wilshire/Westwood, and the Hollywood Hills (Marlowe’s incredible digs in the High Tower Apartments).
Robert Altman’s jaundiced take on Raymond Chandler’s 1953 detective novel won’t please its fans, but offers an honest and at times uncomfortably real look at the schizophrenia induced by living in an allegedly free-thinking and liberal city like Los Angeles (much of which remains accurate today). “ The Long Goodbye” (1973, Kino Lorber) A slovenly, muttering Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) navigates two disappearances – a close friend and a Hemingway-style author –but finds his efforts thwarted at every turn by something worse than organized crime: an incestuous, moral-free web of the Malibu scene, cure-all doctors, and hamfisted cops on both sides of the border.
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