“I think he just made up my part because he wanted to work together. I loved it. He gave me wing scars and let me sing ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’ to Bud. I stopped people on the road to tell them about Bob and how I loved Bob and how I’d do anything for Bob. And of course he took full advantage and he put me sitting naked in the fountain. To his credit it was a long lens and there was nobody in the streets and I was this bird, this fairy godmother. Why I did those things…”—Sally Kellerman in Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, Mitchell Zuckoff, 2009
The 1970 Brewster McCloud was the immediate followup to M.A.S.H., a surprise hit that, among other things, lifted a substantial number of once-struggling actors, including Kellerman, out of obscurity and into a particularly hip limelight. As another one of those performers, Michael Murphy, notes in Zuckoff’s endlessly engaging book, the expected thing for a director to do in the wake of such success would have been to have calculated a follow-up that capitalized on that newly-found prominence, bolstered it, brought it to the next level. Murphy: “A lot of directors […] would be thinking, ‘Let me be careful about my next film and who is in it and who can help me remain successful[…]” You know, like the way Gary Winick did 13 Going On 30 in the wake of Tadpole. OK, maybe that’s not even close to the best example? But you get the idea. In any event, no; Altman went with more than a few of his M.A.S.H. company to Houston, Texas, to make a picture from a script by the same writer whose name is credited for Otto Preminger’s legendary disaster of several years prior, Skidoo, about a reclusive young man who tries to realize the isn’t-that-just-like-us-crazy-humans dream of becoming a bird. And after this Altman would make the masterful McCabe and Mrs. Miller. As different as these three films seem if you judge them strictly by their précises, and as differently as they each play on screen, there’s a real through-line to these pictures. If you want to see genuinely improvisational American filmmaking as backed (after a fashion) by major studios, you probably couldn’t ask for more instructive representations than these.
McCloud is, of course, in many respects the absolute messiest of the three, and even for many of Altman’s hardest-core admirers, it occupies a place of befuddlement in the director’s ostensible canon. Robin Wood can barely be bothered with it in his exhaustive, somewhat tortured essay on Altman, “Smart-Ass and Cutie-Pie,” which appears in Wood’s seminal text Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. This despite the fact that from the very start of the film, it kind of embodies those very two qualities that Wood names in the essay’s title. The credit sequence begins, stops at the request of Margaret Hamilton’s dyspeptic national anthem singer, then starts again, leading up, among other things, to this very smart-ass title card:
For what it’s worth, here’s Wood’s sole consideration of McCloud, from that essay, the context being an exploration of the European influence in Altman’s work: “At its worst, the hankering for European models expresses itself in cheap opportunistic borrowings that deprive the originals of all their complexity: the “Last Supper” pose in M.A.S.H., the Makavejev effects (notably René Auberjonois’ recurrently intercut bird lecture) in Brewster McCloud, the use of Romeo and Juliet to accompany and counterpoint the lovemaking in Thieves Like Us (surely traceable to the English lesson in Bande a Part) What is interesting here is not the effect Altman achieves but the relative resourcefulness of the gleanings—Buñuel, Makavejev, and Godard, instead of the usual Fellini (though he turns up too in the circus finale of Brewster McCloud).”
The self-referentiality inherent in the smart-ass attitude comes to something of a head with the demise of Hamilton’s character, when the fact that the one-time portrayer of the WIcked With of the West is lying in death wearing something like a pair of ruby slippers (“red rhinestone shoes,” they’re called in the dialogue), after which point McCloud becomes something like a film of parts, parts that will likely be most gratifying to lovers of lead actor Bud Cort.
There are funny bits, weird bits, nasty bits. The great character actor Bert Remsen shows up, playing as he frequently did for Altman, a grotesque, a relentless racist caricature who hassles McCloud for his fancy camera. Shelley Duvall makes her screen debut, largely seeming to be doing an impression of the Warner Brothers cartoon creation Sniffles the mouse; near the film’s finale, her character vomits (more European hankering, Bergman division?) and almost immediately thereafter kisses her Young Republican boyfriend, and so on. There are also bits of unexpected elegiac lyricism, as in Kellerman’s exit from the Astrodome to the strains of a song by John Phillips, whose then manager Lou Adler was a producer on the picture; the long take somehow slightly anticipates the kosmische finale of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
The film sometimes seems to luxuriate in a certain kind of half-assedness, which is also kind of fascinating; the indifference with which it treats its car-chase sequence is all the more kind of extraordinary given that said chase had been coördinated and staged by the same man who concocted the epic, classic chase in Bullitt. In Zuckoff’s book, Michael Murphy remembers how that sequence’s denoument came to be: “One night toward the end of the movie, I could tell [Altman] was getting sick of being in Houston. It was a hundred and forty degrees and we’re in those hot clothes…Bob says ‘I’m going to kill you tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Kill me? Why what do you mean, kill me?’ He says, ‘Yeah, it’ll be great. We’ll run your car into that lagoon down there in the park. You’re going to kill yourself. It’ll be great.’ I knew that part of it was he just wanted to end this movie and get the hell out of there.”
Reviewing the film in the New York TImes, the astute and witty Vincent Canby demurred: “It made me uneasy, as I’m inclined to be when I meet a $150,000-a-year movie executive whose newly freed spirit is expressed by his custom-made dungarees, his shoulderlength, “styled” hair and his love beads. It’s imitation hip.” Time has proven the film to be genuine Altman, at least, which makes this film’s release by the Warner Archive a noteworthy event, although said bare-bones release likely precludes the possibility of an extras-laden Blu-ray or complete Altman DVD box or some such thing seeing the light of day. It’s a good looking transfer of exceptional materials, as witness the detail in the zoom-in on Kellerman in the top screen capture; yes, you can see those cosmetic wing scars on her fetching back.
I’ve never seen this, but have long wanted to. Altman in the ’70s was really extraordinary, for all the reasons you note, regarding how he went about following up MASH. He seemed so all-embracing of whatever the hell material happened to pass through his field of vision that I think, while your NASHVILLEs and your MCCABE AND MRS. MILLERs and your LONG GOODBYEs are unimpeachable and all that, his quote-unquote marginal stuff, like this, and QUINTET (which I quite enjoy, and would love to see again) and THIEVES LIKE US (really great, I think) is frequently more fascinating. But I suppose with any prolific artist, this is often the case.
I love many of those movies, but I think NASHVILLE is actually pretty impeachable.
Yeah, well, you just try it.
For me, ‘California Split’ isn’t mentioned nearly enough. It’s right up there.
On a totally disconnected side-note, it’s so weird to me to think of a time when John Williams regular collaborators were Robert Altman and Mark Rydell (though ‘Images’ is one of the very few Altman films I haven’t seen).
Okay. Paul Schrader once likened the movie to a wide and shallow wading pool, and I pretty much agree with him. The entire film is dotted with brilliant inventions – Gwen Welles’ striptease, Lily Tomlin’s sad marriage to Allen Garfield (Goorwitz) and beautiful relationship with her kids, Ronee Blakeley’s neurotic superstar (to my ears, she sings the one credible song in the movie outside of the gospel number), Michael Murphy’s political operative – and blanketed with terrible melodramatic cliches (Keenan Wynn and Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine as the super-stud singer with his stable of girlfriends, the absolutely improbable ending) and really terrible caricatures, the worst of which, hands-down, is Geraldine Chaplin’s reporter, although Jeff Goldblum’s magician isn’t far from the bottom. I vividly remember the excitement of seeing the movie when it came out, but for me, almost every other Altman movie before and after is more exciting, acute, daring: MCCABE, M*A*S*H*, THE LONG GOODBYE, CALIFORNIA SPLIT (there is absolutely nothing wrong with that movie), THREE WOMEN, BUFFALO BILL, you name it. I think Altman goes sour and strangely stodgy when he’s making big statements about America. If I were stuck in a waiting room for 3 hours and had to choose between NASHVILLE, A WEDDING, HEALTH and SHORT CUTS, I’d take NASHVILLE every time, but I don’t think it’s a very good movie.
That shot of Duvall walking out has a little to do with the end of Thieves Like Us too, I think.
Hey, I love SHORT CUTS!
But so anyway: I can’t take your points down one at a time, because I have no doubt you know the film better than I do (I’ve only seen it twice, myself), but, for example, while the Carradine character may play badly on the page, I think it plays like gangbusters on film, because Altman at his best was rarely about the grand gestures, but rather the little bits here and there, or simply letting the performances carry the day, as with that scene between Tomlin and Carradine, with her getting dressed while he talks to another girl, and she kisses him before going to work. It’s how you execute this stuff, as I’m sure you know full well, and I think Altman executes it beautifully.
As for the idea that the ending is “improbable”…er…so?
The first time I saw Nashville I decided I didn’t ‘get it’ since it’s treated as The Big One, and I love The Long Goodbye, McCabe, etc. Saw it again the other week and – still not getting it. As Kent Jones says, there are some good bits, but too few. The messiness I just find irritating, not lifelike, and there’s a curious flatness to the imagery after the amazingly rich California Split.
I almost wish it *were* a Big Statement movie. I’m not American – hence the not getting it, perhaps – but the Replacement Party stuff wasn’t funny/satirical enough, and feels like a punch pulled, a generalized pissiness. (More specifically I’m British so the Brit journalist character *really* grates.) Will watch again, but not for a while.
What I love about Zuckoff’s book is how it shows Altman’s working process through his collaborators. What a great organizer of directed chaos, more off-screen and in developing projects than on-screen (or maybe equal parts.) Reading this book, I got the feeling that none of those projects were more significant to Altman than others, he’d just put his head down, charge through and fuck the begrudgers. Location helped sway his decisions, it seemed. But didn’t he once say that selecting the next movie to make was like making pommes frites, you throw them in the hopper and see which one comes up first? Of course results varied but that must have been one great ride.
I’ve only seen BREWSTER McCLOUD once, years ago, and I remember 1) thinking how much you could tell that movie influenced P.T. Anderson and 2) wishing to have seen Stacy Keach’s character a couple more times.
@preston – Agreed. You also can see how, maybe more often than not, he was his own worst enemy which also informed the produce for better or worse. Wish they would’ve gotten into O.C. AND STIGGS a little more. You have Altman and Hopper working together in the early 80s and not one interesting anecdote? Ah well. Entertaining book. The Kevin Spacey story left a bad taste in my mouth, too.
What’s the Kevin Spacey story?
Agree with Kent’s takedown of Nashville. Pauline’s jumping the gun and proclaiming it a masterpiece seemed to bully others into seeing more in it than is actually there. There are a few good bits, but overall it’s scattershot and smug in its superiority to the characters. Still, I love Henry Gibson’s performance of “For the Sake of the Children,” a wonderful parody of country mawkishness, and Karen Black’s crack about Julie Christie’s hair. In Zuckoff’s book, Gibson offers the most eloquent and insightful comments.
Bill: “What’s the Kevin Spacey story?”
Glenn: [bites tongue, hard]
But seriously…Bill, it’s worth getting the book itself and reading it entire, really; one may take issue with its aesthetic and whatnot, but it’s really…juicy material. Suffice it to say that Spacey is referred to herein as “the Norman Bates of show business.”
Bill, I agree – Keith Carradine and Lily Tomlin act the scene beautifully. If the scene were in a different film, I might like it more. But it’s in a grand bicentennial panorama in which multiple varieties of then contemporary American callousness are dutifully ticked off – the laid back, self-centered womanizing musician is variation , or something, next door to the insensitive husband, the egomaniac country music titan, the smooth political operative, the unthinking young girl, etc., all preying on the naïve and the good-hearted. The more I think about it, the worse it becomes. As for the ending, “improbable” may be the wrong word choice – how about “ridiculously unlikely?” I know what you’re getting at – that assassinations are never predictable, therefore always improbable. So let me put it this way. In this movie, with these characters performing these actions, there is absolutely no way I believe this action as anything but a very, very crude rhetorical device, capped by one of the crudest declarations in modern movies: “This isn’t Dallas, this is Nashville…” Yuck.
But, to each his/her own.
While Robin Wood is certainly correct about Altman’s sometimes superficial lifting from European models, and Makavajev is exactly the kind of free spirit director one could see Altman borrowing from, I think he’s a bit off, or at least doesn’t give the whole picture, on this specific case. In McGilligan’s nasty* biography Jumping Off the Cliff one of the director’s old cohorts from his industrial film days traces Auberjonois’s lecture to a “wrap-around” format–a constant return to the narrator/lecturer, addressing an unseen audience, interspersed with filmed bits demonstrating the information–common to educational films of the type Altman churned out during his formative years as a director. Maybe a double-barreled influence, Calvin films for the structure and Makavejev for the increasingly grotesque transformation (though I also see a bit of Freaks there myself: “One of us,” as the cops chant in The Player.)
Preston: “Reading this book, I got the feeling that none of those projects were more significant to Altman than others, he’d just put his head down, charge through and fuck the begrudgers.”
An excellent summation, and one of the reasons that Altman always struck me (probably an unflattering burst of chauvinism on my part, I admit) as so exemplary an American director. Like how Eastwood followed up the dawning critical recognition for his directorial talents on Outlaw Josey Wales by helming The Gauntlet, except Altman played that zigzag move for three straight decades.
And I love Nashville (bill’s right, a lot of it works better in action than it has any right to on the page), but agree it’s unfortunately overshadowed other, greater, efforts, California Split chief among them.
*Impossible to do an honest portrait of Altman without pointing out some remarkably asshole moves from Altman throughout his career, sure, but McGilligan dwells on them and relishes the takedowns from peers too much for my taste.
Michael – I don’t even like Kael, so she didn’t bully me into anything.
Glenn – Well now I guess I’d better! But I will, honestly. Somehow, I just forgot it existed, even after that foofaraw over the one “review”…
Kent – Fair enough. Cliches rarely feel like cliches when employed by Altman at his most discerning, so what can you do? If it works (for me), it works (for me). But the line about NASHVILLE being so smug and superior never made sense to me – I often think that what critics of NASHVILLE claim Altman tried and failed to do is not what he was ever trying to do, and is therefore not failing to do it. You know what’s smug and superior? M*A*S*H.
So, yeah, to each his own.
The most jaw-dropping quotes in the Zuckoff book are from the Matthew Modine/Jane Adams spat. Boy, would I have loved to be a fly on that wall. Or not.
Anyway, yeah, it’s an essential book, although one wishes it were 100 pages longer (and you KNOW that material exists & just didn’t make the cut).
I do love Nashville and it may be one of my all time favorites. I feel more like the film is a loose essay on ‘celebrity’ than ‘America in 76’. Most everyone in that film is dealing with recognition issues, wanting be noticed, to be seen, to put on a show. One could fairly say “that WAS what America was about in ‘76” but to me the characters are too sensitively drawn, positively or negatively, to be a mawkish parody. To me Altman wasn’t a ‘deep issue’ kinda filmmaker. Absurdist, absolutely. I don’t see as him trying to capture the American zeitgeist, but maybe showing the foibles of the famous and those who wanted to get that way.
And I loved Geraldine Chaplin’s character; I thought she was the most absurd of them all. But like most of Altman, each to their own.
I agree with everything Preston just said.
The smug superiority isn’t just a problem in NASHVILLE. For the longest time I felt it in nearly every Altman film I screened. And the big issue for me wasn’t so much the looking down his nose/lens at all the people in the world of his films. It’s that he didn’t seem to include himself along with the rest of us. As if he were exempted from collusion with the way things are just for having noticed it himself. I forget what film it was that broke through to me, but I eventually realized I was wrong–at least about the last part. Altman never thought he was better than the whole ridiculous lot of humanity. Got the Warner Archive disc sitting on my shelf and now I’m really looking forward to it. Thanks, Glenn.
warren oates: “I forget what film it was that broke through to me, but I eventually realized I was wrong–at least about the last part.”
Maybe Nashville, since, contra the claims of directorial smugness and Chaplin’s godawful caricaturing, Altman was as far as I know always consistent in claiming her reporter was meant as a way of inserting himself into the proceedings.
>As for the ending, “improbable” may be the wrong word choice – how about “ridiculously unlikely?
Or “overdetermined”. “Pretentiously portentous”. “Almost as facile as the earthquake in Short Cuts”. All of those work for me, too.
Outside of a few moments I never have been a fan of Nashville–it’s a showcase for all of Altman’s worst instincts, almost as bad as the Jack Lemmon stuff in Short Cuts. I think the primo stuff of that era–Cal Split, Long Goodbye, McCabe and Thieves–just wipes it out, but because it was long, big and ended with a portentous bang, it’s presumed to be the masterpiece.
I think it’s interesting that there can be so many different points of view about Altman and which films are the best. From my perspective it has to do with what he represented when his films first came out, what those films meant when set against the movie landscape of the moment. For other people, younger than Glenn or myself, I’m sure it’s very different. Even if I don’t like NASHVILLE so much anymore, I still treasure the experience of seeing it for the first time.
I don’t buy the “smug and superior” line, and Robin Wood’s critique of Altman never had much traction for me – he could have made exactly the same argument about HIS GIRL FRIDAY. If I prefer M*A*S*H* to NASHVILLE, it’s because everything and everyone in it is shadowed by the war. At any rate, smugness and superiority have nothing to do with my problems with NASHVILLE.
I don’t understand why Altman’s statements in an interview about Geraldine Chaplin’s character should have any bearing on how we see her in the movie. Nor do I care about Altman’s offscreen life – why should it make a difference?
I agree with Preston – Altman is not at all a deep issue kind of filmmaker. Most great filmmakers aren’t. My problems are with the movies that TRY to deal with big issues. NASHVILLE may indeed play best as a “loose essay on celebrity,” but to recast it as such is to leave out a lot of its rhetorical moves. On the other hand, I don’t see any “mawkish parody” in the movie. Just a lot of shallow conceptions. To me, any number of characters and situations within the film could have served as the basis of a great movie – Lily Tomlin and her kids most of all – but instead they’re stuck in this one.
Oy – up above I wrote that Tomlin’s character is married to Garfield. Dead wrong, of course – her scene with Ned Beatty and the kids is great.
Tomlin has one scene where she’s totally out of character, and in that caricaturish Altman way–talking in a cornpone accent and telling some story that either should’ve come from one of the other characters or else has to make us think less of her than the film would otherwise have it.
The critical line about Altman that’s always irked me is how he supposedly “detested” the genres he worked in, and the thesis seems to be that he deliberately shredded them in some pretentious hippie snit. But there’s a difference between despising something and seeing that it needs replenishing, and the movies usually made to serve as evidence–most notably “McCabe” and “Long Goodbye”–are actually incredibly observant of their respective conventions. The placement of “Hurray for Hollywood” doesn’t begin to diminish how shattering it is when Roger Wade drowns or Marty Augustine does his Coke bottle number, and the straw-haired gunslinger murders Carradine by employing the oldest trick in the Western book, and that scene’s shot as straight as an arrow. If Altman hated genre, then so did David Chase–a man who clearly adores the gangster form. It’s rather a case of them understanding that genres are robust enough to handle multiple layers of meaning.
(And just as a sidebar, something that really struck me about “They Drive by Night” when I saw it again was how tonally consistent it is with “Thieves”, especially the performances of the two women: O’Donnell, with her overalls, Cokes and smokes, is practically Duvall’s spiritual mirror. I’ve read Altman saying he’d never seen Ray’s movie, and I believe it, but I’d swear I can feel the earlier movie’s fingerprints all over the later one. It may just be the power of Edward Anderson’s novel coming through.)
Kent Jones: “I don’t understand why Altman’s statements in an interview about Geraldine Chaplin’s character should have any bearing on how we see her in the movie.”
It shouldn’t; just going for a joke based on the direction the conversation had gone in relation to Nashville and Chaplin, and warren oates’s comment in particular.
@Kent – “I think it’s interesting that there can be so many different points of view about Altman and which films are the best.”
NASHVILLE’s not even my favorite, but I can’t say what my favorite actually is because I think I’d get yelled at.
Oh, c’mon–“O.C. & Stiggs” isn’t THAT bad.
“I think Altman goes sour and strangely stodgy when he’s making big statements about America.”
What director doesn’t? I’m of the view that attempts to make big statements about America – big statements about practically anything, for that matter – are almost invariably deadly. Several Fords are exceptions, and… maybe the GODFATHER films, which I have mixed feelings about.
Tom Block, it’s LIVE, not DRIVE, and I don’t believe Altman for a minute when he claims he never saw the original. It is a great novel, and it was almost made into a movie in the mid-30s by Rowland Brown.
I agree with you – all that stuff about turning genres inside out was just rhetoric of the period. The movies told a different story.
C’mon, Bill, tell us your favourite! (Mine’s A WEDDING.)
>it’s LIVE, not DRIVE
At least I mixed it up with something else that’s good.
It rhymes with “Smoshford Shmark”. Which obviously a lot of people liked plenty well. But I know of one person around here who did not.
At least one person here thinks “Smoshford Shmark” is a shmasterpiece.
I know – I do! And you, too, I’m guessing.
As it happens, I’m the guy who doesn’t like “Gosford Park.” In fact, as Lina Lamont would put it, I caint staind the thing. And I was so bufuddled by the love it got that I saw it a second time just to see if I was missing something, and I couldn’t staind it yet again. And it’s not as if I didn’t try and it’s not as if I don’t have regrets about it. I’ve subsequently become friendly with one of its producers, how awkward is that? I may have to give it a third try, at that.
Interestingly enough, I found stuff to like in late Altman that a lot of other people caint staind, e.g. “Dr. T and the Women” and “Kansas City.” But I have an odd quirk with Altman; his films rarely rise to the surface of my consciousness unbidden. They haven’t been subsumed into my personality that way stuff like “Psycho” and “Bride of Frankenstein” and early Truffaut and Godard and some Lang and Preminger have. And yet whenever his name comes up, I find him endlessly fascinating to talk about.
My pal Joseph Failla e‑mailed me today reminding me, among other things, of my early thoughts on “McCloud,” that is, my take on the picture when we were both ten:
“It’s still easy to remember you telling me about the film in grade school, when you got around to the plot, I said ‘What? It’s about WHAT??!!!!’ Which would still be a fair reaction today, even with viewers familiar with Altman and his delirious quirks. I don’t want to start a debate over what Altman’s strangest journey might be (THREE WOMEN and QUINTET are sure contenders) but none are quite as amusing and simultaneously depressing as this earlier flight of fancy. Somehow combining such diverse story threads as a young man learning to fly in a construction of his own making within the confines of the Houston Astrodome and a detective investigation into a series of murders where all the victims are found splattered with bird shit, sounded so off the wall to make it a must see. But more importantly, BREWSTER became my introduction to absurdist cinema and opened my eyes in more ways than one.
As weird as BREWSTER was (is), it does make for an excellent follow up to MASH (both 1970), pushing that same anarchistic humor to the breaking point. This was probably the only time Altman could get a film like this made, as he had the backing to do so after the success of MASH and as the climate was ripe for youth oriented rebellion stories. Still a year away from true cult stardom in HAROLD AND MAUDE, Bud Cort makes for a perfect innocent misfit who just might be responsible for several local killings. It’s easy to see why Shelley Duvall was destined for stardom, but does anyone else besides me find Michael Murphy hysterical as San Fransico super Det. Frank Shaft (his untimely fate still mystifies me)? I love the emotional tunes that cover some very touching sequences, like the one you feature with that magnificent long shot of Sally Kellerman leaving the stadium. And who is Sally Kellerman here anyway? Cort’s lover? Mother? Guardian? I’m still moved today with Kellerman’s heartbreak at Cort’s rejection and Cort’s subsequent discovery of his new found love’s betrayal. And while Cort’s flying sequence is initially exhilarating, the finale is an all time downer that hasn’t lost it’s ability to upset me after all these years.
Every time I see BREWSTER I’m reminded just how oddball and downright surreal films like this could be and probably never will again (not at my local cineplex anyway). Also is this not the funniest use of the MGM lion intro in any of their films? Oh and btw, is it my imagination or was the flying through the clouds dream sequence appropriated for the last shot of BADLANDS a few years later?”
Somewhere, Altman is blazing a fatty and laughing his ass off at all of this…
Aww, look kids! Like Rick Blaine, the ostensibly hardened, clear-eyed, almost cynical skeptic, Castle Bravo turns out to be a sentimentalist who believes in an afterlife! Who says you don’t learn anything from comments threads?
Also, Slightly Shorter Castle Bravo: I hate all you assholes and so would Altman, nyah nyah.
Considering what he said to me the first time we met, and where, at the very least you’re correct on Altman’s end…
>was the flying through the clouds dream sequence appropriated for the last shot of BADLANDS a few years later?
Just don’t tell me Malick stole it from “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?”
I liked “Brewster” well enough at the time, but I was a huge Altman fan thanks to “MASH” and I was living in Houston when they shot it. (I kept tripping over the locations without trying to–I saw Murphy’s spinout into the pond.) I haven’t seen it since ’72 at the latest and have no idea how I’d respond to it today. It doesn’t play well in my memory, I know that much, but outside of “Three Women” Altman’s fantasia side never did do much for me.
“Considering what he said to me the first time we met, and where, at the very least you’re correct on Altman’s end…”
Jesus wept. Let me guess, he said “I hate the people in the future who talk about me and my movies.” Or perhaps he just said “Who are you?” Or perhaps “I hate you.” The possibilities are endless.
Not that I have/had anything at all invested in the issue, but Altman was perfectly pleasant to me the only time we met.
Very pleasant man. Like I said, I’m sure he’s puffin’ away…
As long we’re championing the weird underrated Altmans, I’ll second Tom Block’s comment on O.C. & STIGGS, still an oddly intriguing exercise in pranking that never went quite far enough for me. But there’s great stuff in there, like the skewering of Southwestern suburban obsession with cacti, for instance. And the very idea that all of this cul-de-sac comfort should be undone by proto-Jackasses. I’m also pretty fond of the cinematography in IMAGES, which Vilmos Zsigmond smack in the middle of an amazing run for him as a cameraman.
Champion of weird underrated Altmans: POPEYE.
Harry Nilsson songs. Amazing production design. Bizarre, utterly committed performances from the entire cast. It was the first Altman I saw (in a cinema, as a child) and I loved it. Rewatching it years later I loved it for different reasons, despite its many flaws.
GOSFORD PARK plays to me like a BBC costume drama and I see more of writer Julian Fellows in it than I do Altman. Fellows just had a smash hit on UK TV with a pretty similar (ie. UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS-aping) drama called DOWNTON ABBEY, and all it really lacks that GOSFORD PARK has is Altman’s smooth ease with a large ensemble.
I like THE GINGERBREAD MAN and THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL: both make great use of rain.
The perils of not being able to spend too much time at this site while at work rear their ugly head again. To sum up: only seen bits of BREWSTER MCCLOUD, but one of these days, I’ll sit down and watch the whole damn thing, agree with Bill and others about NASHVILLE (and I also love SHORT CUTS, for that matter; I think Altman’s using small gestures and intimate scenes in those movies makes them alive, rather than oppressive Big Statements), while I have grown to like THE LONG GOODBYE more over the years (back when I was younger, I was one of those who thought it was contemptuous), I maintain NIGHT MOVES is a better deconstruction of that genre, sorry, but I despise POPEYE (along with 3 WOMEN, QUINTET, and BEYOND THERAPY, my least favorite Altman films), while my favorite under-appreciated Altman is probably A PERFECT COUPLE or COOKIE’S FORTUNE (though I also think PRET-A-PORTER is better than given credit for; I’m one of those who think Kim Basinger is hysterical rather than annoying, and any movie ending with Anouk Aimee naked can’t be all bad).
Robert Altman making a musical for kids remains about as strange as Martin Scorsese directing a film that inspired a long-running sitcom. POPEYE was my first Altman too and I still like it. Just as I like things like SHORT CUTS and GOSFORD PARK and THE GINGERBREAD MAN and 3 WOMEN, among others, as well as kneeling at the altar of THE LONG GOODBYE. TANNER ’88 is a favorite as well. Couldn’t stand COOKIE’S FORTUNE though. Haven’t seen BREWSTER in about 15 years, I should really try to do something about that.
About a year ago I attended an Altman tribute at the Billy Wilder Theater in L.A. where THE LONG GOODBYE was screened and Elliott Gould spoke afterwards. Vilmos Zsigmond was sitting behind me (I can remember Glenn ‘liking’ this on my Facebook page when I posted it) and sitting behind him was Paul Dooley–the only snatch of their conversation I could make out was Dooley saying ‘We were there for six months, we had Fellini’s crew…’ so it was easy to figure he was talking about POPEYE. The theater was packed and shortly before the lights went down I spotted Sally Kellerman looking around for an open seat, a sight which seemed rather Altmanesque. That was a fun night.
For me, BREWSTER, like a lot of Altman, just completely short-circuits my critical facilities. I just love it, in all its loping, disheveled glory. I don’t care if it’s good or bad, I just like spending time with it. I find Cort’s character to be something of a takedown of the sensitive innocent so popular in films of the era (and sometimes played by Cort himself)—this seemingly sweet kid is likely responsible for several murders, and is literally a motherfucker. To me it anticipates SLACKER in capturing the sun-baked weirdness of Texas eccentrics, the kind of no-big-deal freakiness that’s so different from the more flamboyant weirdness of the coasts. Plus, as Glenn says, it’s just admirable to see something so weird *exist*.
As for favorite unappreciated—I love KANSAS CITY and A WEDDING (Nina van Pallandt’s monologue to her husband kills me—the way Altman found the one and only angle at which her beautiful face looks terrible for a monologue that climaxes with “You used to think I was pretty”) and I greatly enjoyed THE COMPANY (it’s pretty much a central pillar of my VJ sets). Never much liked THIEVES LIKE US, though—a great opening, and some lovely scenes in the cabin, but it’s just too plot-heavy for my tastes.
Kent–
One thing that I think you mis-or-under estimate about Nashville is the impact of the music and the way the music complicates, aestheticizes in a good way, the rambling political attitudinizing. What Altman needed was something he was perforce forced to believe in against his own withering reductive irony and performance was it, sustainingly so in Nashville. No matter how many jibes and negatives he piles up the music has its own intransigent power. You could say musical performance is the unifying spinal column type effect, the way western genre conventions are in McCabe and noir motifs are in The Long Goodbye, surely the other two strongest Altmans. He needed that element to find authentic balance and Nashville has it.
I’d go so far as to say NASHVILLE is first and foremost *about* music. To me the moment that’s really central is Carradine singing “I’m Easy”. We know everything he says in that song is a lie. Half the audience in the club knows it’s a lie. But they tear up anyway, just like we do. Throughout the movie, performance is a falsehood (like adulterer Haven Hamilton singing “For the Sake of the Children”) or a mask (the way Sueleen’s eyes go dead when she realizes she has to finish the striptease, and tosses out the falsies). The only person who seems to be singing from the heart is Barbara Jean, and it’s killing her. Yet in all the lies, there’s something real, something naked as Suellen—when Carradine says “It’s not my way to love you just when no one’s looking”, he does mean it. Or he means something.
NASHVILLE is a musical, and like most musicals, it deploys slightly flat characters to create a heightened world—without Altman’s improvisatory technique, the resemblance to the movie 1776 would be even more striking.
Hi Larry.
I disagree. For a very simple reason. For me, the music is completely lacking in conviction: as satire, as a thematically linked suite (like the songs Baskin would write for WELCOME TO LA, which are terrible but which acquire some kind of power because of their place in the movie), as ersatz country and, heaven knows, as real country. That sweet little Bogdanovich movie, THE THING CALLED LOVE, had more conviction. So, for that matter, did Rudolph’s SONGWRITER. As for Altman’s best, I think CALIFORNIA SPLIT is possibly even better than MCCABE.
“NASHVILLE is a musical, and like most musicals, it deploys slightly flat characters to create a heightened world—without Altman’s improvisatory technique, the resemblance to the movie 1776 would be even more striking.”
I’m a little confused about this potentially-striking resemblance to 1776– the comparison seems to come out of left-field; if you mean simply that both deploy “slightly flat characters to create a heightened world”*, I’ll agree with you to a point, though I’m not sure how Altman’s improvisatory technique minimizes that resemblance (or any other that might be present). Mind, I’m not trying to start an argument here; I’m actually having a little bit of trouble following that last bit and was hoping for some further elaboration along those lines.
[*– And both are, to be perfectly frank, stone-cold masterpieces of American cinema, films that you can watch again and again. I’ve seen “1776” something like thirty times, and each time it’s been a revelation.]
It just sprang into my head too, so I sure as hell haven’t fleshed it out. And I’ve only seen 1776 once, years back, and remember it vaguely, so yeah, we’re deep into late-night blog commenting… I was just thinking of them as Bicentenial-era musicals on the subject of “America, How’re You Doin’?”, I suppose one could develop the idea that both are using the bouncy hopefulness of the classic American musical much like they use the hopefulness of America’s founding ideals, as a backboard to bounce off of without ever dismissing it. And I do love the idea of playing “200 Years” over the end of 1776…
Oh yeah, Altman did make “The Gingerbread Man.” Talk about throwing pearls before swine: is it even possible to make a decent movie based on a John Grisham book? God knows it’s not the fault of either the directors or the cast.
I will say one thing about “A Prairie Home Companion,” it’s a better movie than “The Departed.” I wouldn’t mind at all if Altman had won Scorsese’s oscar, though it would better if he took Ron Howard’s (since obviously David Lynch was going to be screwed over that year).
Glenn, I hope you don’t mind me linking this. It’s a piece I wrote about “California Split” a few years back that still captures why I love Altman’s work so much (when I do love it):
http://thehighhat.com/Potlatch/007/split_block.html
>“A Prairie Home Companion,” it’s a better movie than “The Departed.”
I might’ve agreed until recently, when I gave “The Departed” a second, and then a third and a fourth, chance. I’ve come around to thinking it’s awfully good, and I don’t say that lightly: the last Scorsese narrative film I thought truly great was “Goodfellas”. (I specify “narrative” because “No Direction Home” and “My Voyage to Italy” are flat-out masterpieces. When I was making a best-of list a while back I was struck by the fact that despite there being scores of really good documentaries in the last decade, those two are the only ones I could lump in with the best overall films of that period with a good conscience.) The one drawback in “The Departed”–the Leo-Farmiga subplot—is admittedly a huge one: there’s basically no believable reason for that woman to sleep with that guy given her situation, and where the scenes with the gang felt so textured and lived-in, the Leo-Farmiga scenes felt eminently scripted-rehearsed-processed-synthesized. I won’t bore everyone with the things I liked about it, but just to atone for initially throwing it on the Cape Fear-Shutter Island compost pile, I’m willing do a little public recanting.
Interesting that so many finger Brewster as the possible murderer; I figured blame clearly lay at the feet of Kellerman’s fallen angel.
And I’ll second Glenn on Kansas City being one of my favorites.