Tubi clearance sale

Three movies that I’d bookmarked for future viewing on Tubi were about to depart the channel, so I had to move them up in my queue and watch them quickly.  

I’m not sure why Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) begins and ends with “Hooray for Hollywood” – it folds into the "L.A. Noir" category, but much of it takes place in Malibu and Mexico, with no mention of films or filmmaking. 

Elliot Gould plays the venerable private detective Philip Marlowe with an insouciant charm, a hipster anti-hero and the only character in the film who wears a business suit, even on the beach, smokes (constantly, striking wooden matches on any flat surface within reach), or has zero interest in a sorority of potheads who practice topless yoga on the balcony across from his apartment.

If you're looking for Altman’s sometimes leftfield casting, The Long Goodbye includes Jim Bouton, with a pivotal role (but thankfully few lines), and Nina van Pallandt, a 1970 headline maker thanks to her role in the silly 1970 Clifford Irving-Howard Hughes “scandal.”

Toss in the excellent Gould, Sterling Hayden playing to type as a blocked Hemingwayesque writer and Henry Gibson, going against the grain as a tough-guy, and you have the best of the post-Bogart Philip Marlowe movies.

The social order within the Rat Pack is never more apparent than in Salt and Pepper (1968). Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin share top billing in a drama like Some Came Running; Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis get stuck with this comedy (which they co-produced) about nightclub owners in “Swinging London” who find themselves involved in stopping a military coup of the U.K.

Sammy isn’t just the co-owner of the club, he’s also the nightly entertainment, and gets a big song and dance number, frugging and whipping off a “solo” on an electric guitar that isn’t plugged in. He only needed to wait a year for his real shot for a big number in a big movie, The Rhythm of Life in Sweet Charity.

A fascinating subtext throughout, knowing how Lawford and Davis died, is watching them forever lighting up, smoking or having a cigarette smoldering between their fingers. There’s no oxygen tank assistant listed in the credits, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.

One year after Dirty Harry comes Hickey and Boggs (1972), with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby menacingly pointing big guns. This is one dark and brutal movie. Culp (who directed) and Cosby play private detectives financially and emotionally at the end of the line. As a disillusioned Cosby says, “There’s nothing left of this profession. It’s not about anything.”

But even as both are prone to confusion about their identity, purpose and meaning in life, they also buoy each other.

The plot is somewhat convoluted, but a missing person case leads to a string of deaths (a lot of deaths) and shootouts (including a firefight in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium and on the field of the Los Angeles Coliseum).

Professional hitmen, Black Power nationalists, dark bars at midday, Mexican immigrants, sunbaked urban settings – as a noir movie about the “seamy underbelly” of Los Angeles in the 1970s, Hickey and Boggs is an underrated gem.