On the phone from his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Gould spoke warmly of the movies in the series. “The films hold up as social comments in relation to what seemed to be a changing world,” he said. On the matter of being a generational symbol, though, he was more tentative. “For an awkward audience that didn’t necessarily understand the order of things,” he said, “I would perhaps say I was someone to identify with. One of the things about me is that I’m vulnerable. You can see through me.”  That touching transparency is central to Mr. Gould’s appeal both on and off screen. He has long been prone to bouts of public introspection. The 1970 Time profile pins its subject to the psychoanalytic couch, coaxing out details of his childhood in Bensonhurst, the only son of immigrant parents who had high hopes for his showbiz career, and his failed marriage to Barbra Streisand, whose early stardom saddled him with the nickname Mr. Streisand.  “I’m a little embarrassed about all that now,” he said. “I let myself be known before I understood myself. But had I understood what I was doing, I couldn’t have accomplished it.”  There was certainly an element of bravado in some of his early career decisions. For “Little Murders” (1971), a dark farce based on a Jules Feiffer play, Mr. Gould approached — and briefly secured — Jean-Luc Godard to direct. “I wanted someone really avant-garde,” he said. But the relationship with the irascible Mr. Godard soon foundered.  Mr. Gould said, “I told him: ‘Look, the establishment here does not want to work with you. I want to work with you, and the establishment wants to work with me.’ ” (Mr. Godard’s response, as Mr. Gould tells it, is not printable.)  The studio ended up installing the actor Alan Arkin as director. “Elliott was a dream as an actor and a producer,” said Mr. Arkin, who added that the characterization of Mr. Gould as an emblem of uptightness was misleading. “I’ve always thought he had a looseness about him.”  That easygoing quality is perhaps best showcased in the films Mr. Gould made with Mr. Altman. The partnership did not begin smoothly. Mr. Gould and his “MASH” co-star Donald Sutherland found Mr. Altman’s improvisatory method off-putting and wanted him fired. “Sutherland and I both took ourselves a little too seriously,” Mr. Gould said. “But luckily I came around. Bob opened everything up for me.”  Mr. Gould and Mr. Altman teamed up for four more films, including “California Split” (1974), in which Mr. Gould and George Segal play compulsive gamblers, and “The Long Goodbye” (1973), a revisionist update of Raymond Chandler with Mr. Gould’s indelibly mournful take on Philip Marlowe. It was perhaps his definitive performance. He has recorded numerous Chandler books on tape since and said he hoped to play Marlowe again, in an adaptation of “The Curtain,” one of the stories that inspired “The Big Sleep.”  Listening to Mr. Gould talk, it is hard not to hear traces of Marlowe’s gently rambling voice-over in “The Long Goodbye.” He speaks almost in a stream of consciousness, interrupting himself to remind his interviewer that he hasn’t forgotten the question and breaking off anecdotes to ask, “Have you read this somewhere before?”  The film from the BAMcinématek series that he was most eager to discuss was “The Touch,” Bergman’s first English-language movie, which Mr. Gould flew to Sweden to shoot right after landing that Time cover. “I remember just about everything about it,” he said, starting with the dread that overcame him when he read the script and came to a sex scene that required him to strike his co-star Bibi Andersson. “I immediately got a migraine.”  Mr. Gould said he relished playing an atypical role — an alienated Jewish-American academic who wrecks the marriage of a Swedish couple — but was emotionally ill-equipped to handle the shoot, and realized that Bergman might have cast him precisely for that reason: “Ingmar came laughing to me one day with a picture of my character, who’s an archaeologist, dusting off a skull. He said, ‘Bring this to your analyst in New York and tell him it’s Elliott finding himself.’ ”  Whether or not Mr. Gould found himself, he came home with his perspective altered. He withdrew from an expensive Warner Brothers project, his production company folded, and he went for more than a year without work, eventually resurfacing with “The Long Goodbye.” (The studio, United Artists, insisted he first take a sanity test.) Bergman later dismissed “The Touch” as a low point of his career, but the film has special resonance for Mr. Gould. (It has been out of circulation for years, and BAMcinématek will be screening Mr. Gould’s own print.)  As the memory of his ’70s heyday receded, Mr. Gould matured into an inventive character actor, staying visible in recent years with recurring roles on “Friends” and in Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s” series. He had successful hip replacement surgery and is, he pointed out more than once, a proud grandfather.  “I’ve always been interested in participating and functioning as an older person,” he said. “The idea is to continue to work. The work is the life. It’s how I learned about the world.”  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E8 of the New York edition with the headline: An Angsty Leading Man Who Caught the Spirit of His Times. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Elliott Gould is being honored in his native borough, Brooklyn, with a series at BAMcinématek called “Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age.”