Cross 1970s noir, LA in wintertime, whimsy and spontaneity, and you get Robert Altman's sardonically revisionist take on Raymond Chandler's gumshoe detective Philip Marlowe.

A TIFF Cinematheque Special Presentation One screening only!

The earlier movie Marlowes Humphrey Bogart, James Caan, Robert Mitchum, Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell are terse and guarded. Elliott Gould remakes Marlowe as a maladroit mumbler, a shambling hipster-loser who has enough trouble finding his lost cat, never mind a clue. When Marlowe performs a favour for a friend, he finds himself embroiled in a labyrinthine murder case involving a drunken novelist Sterling Hayden, the writer's much-younger wife Nina van Pallandt, a quack Dr. Feelgood Henry Gibson, a Jewish gangster Mark Rydell, and other assorted L.A. freaks, weirdos, and disreputables en route to a shocking climax in Mexico. Updating the Chandler novel to the 1970s, "Altman constructs not only a comment on the changes in values in America over the last three decades, but a critique of film noir mythology one of the finest movies of the '70s" Geoff Andrew, Time Out London.

Tickets: www.tiff.net/films/the-long-goodbye/