SOURCE: "Show-Offs," in Partisan Review, Vol. XLI, No. 2, 1974, pp. 273-74.

In the following mixed review, Baumbach complains that, "what's finally wrong with The Long Goodbye is that for all its artistic pretensions, all of them, the film is not quite serious, not serious enough to carry the freight of its pretensions."

Seeing movies, writing about them is a more subjective business than the authoritative voice of most reviews admits. One runs into a good deal of self-deception and cant among reviewers who try to make the fleeting reality on the screen seem unequivocal. There is so much fantasy invested in moviegoing that movie reviews tend to tell us more about the reviewer than the reviewed.

This is prelude to saying that Robert Altman's odd version of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, which has many incidental virtues, disappointed me and that my disappointment may have as much to do...