ROBERT ALTMAN

ROBERT ALTMAN

BREWSTER MCCLOUD
(1970)

A boy yearns to fly in Robert Altman's whimsical youthquake parable.
With the aid of seraphic Louise (Sally Kellerman), owlish Brewster (Bud
Cort) constructs a pair of human-size wings in his Houston Astrodome
nest to realize his dream. Meanwhile, conservative creeps, including a
witchy "Star-Spangled Banner"-belting crone (Margaret Hamilton) and
Brewster's skinflint boss (Stacy Keach), keep turning up dead covered with
bird droppings; the Houston Establishment calls in blue-eyed, turtleneck-
wearing "San Francisco supercop" Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy) to investigate.
Brewster cooks his own goose, however, when he defies Louise's edict against
sex and hooks up with Astrodome usher Suzanne (Shelley Duvall) after she
impresses him (and saves him) by out-driving Shaft in her Road Runner.
Despite her apparent sweetness, Suzanne ultimately will not compromise her
comfortable home for flight with Brewster. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

CALIFORNIA SPLIT
(1975)

The most narratively loose of Robert Altman's 1970s films,
California Split details the haphazard lives of two compulsive
gamblers searching for that ever-elusive big score. Newly single
and soon-to-be-unemployed Bill (George Segal) joins live-wire pal
Charlie (Elliott Gould), as the pair moves from Fruit Loops with Charlie's
hooker roommates Sue (Gwen Welles) and Barbara (Ann Prentiss) to bets
on horses, backroom card games, boxing, and basketball. They make it to
Reno, but Bill comes to realize that even the big score may not be the answer
to the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life. For Charlie, however, that's all
there is. Infusing his episodic narrative with an equally laid-back attitude
towards events and emotions, Altman produces a "celebration of gambling"
that is in itself something of game, filled with random incidents, trivial and
serious, amusing and not, that emphasize the essential rootlessness of the
gambler's life. Altman's signature mosaic of sound, produced for the first
time through a multi-track stereo soundtrack, layers dialogue, gambling
announcements, and Phyllis Shotwell songs to evoke the chaotic gaming
atmosphere as authentically as possible. Gambling may seem more
exciting than the depressive Bill's drab office job, but its pleasures
are strictly temporary. Everything becomes transient, whether
luck or marriage or even friendship between like-minded pals.
~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

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CALIFORNIA SPLIT

H.E.A.L.T.H.
(1986)

Altman came up with a new acronymic title for this rare 1979 comedy.
The letter stand for Happiness, Energy And Longevity Through Health --
the name given a health-food convention at a Florida luxury hotel.
Altman utilizes the hotel as a gathering place for numerous interrelated,
interconnecting plot threads. The unifying theme is a satire of politics,
a la Watergate. Playing the unflappable hotel manager, Alfre Woodard
stands out in a stellar cast including Carol Burnett, Glenda Jackson,
James Garner, Lauren Bacall, Henry Gibson, Dick Cavett, and Paul
Dooley (who co-wrote the screenplay with Altman and Frank Barhydt).
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

IMAGES
(1972)

Even when he was a red-hot director in the early 1970s, Altman
occasionally recharged his batteries with a "small" picture. Filmed
in Ireland, Susannah York stars as a woman who is plagued by hallu-
cinogenic visions of her former lovers. It's possible she's schizophrenic,
but the audience is never quite certain whether or not what she's seeing
is actually happening. Altman perversely refuses to let the audience in
on the whole truth; at the end, we're nearly as tormented as Ms. York.
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

THE LONG GOODBYE
(1973)

"It's OK with me...." Applying his deconstructive eye to the
"film noir" tradition, Robert Altman updated Raymond Chandler
in his 1973 version of Chandler's novel, The Long Goodbye. Smart-
aleck, cat-loving private eye Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is certain
that his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) isn't a wife-killer, even after
the cops throw Marlowe in jail for not cooperating with their investigation
into Lennox's subsequent disappearance. Once he gets out of jail, Marlowe
starts to conduct his own search when he discovers that mysterious blonde
Eileen Wade (Nina Van Pallandt), who hired him to find her alcoholic novelist
husband Roger (Sterling Hayden), lives on the same Malibu street as the absent
Lennox and his deceased spouse. As numerous variations on the title song
play in unexpected places, Marlowe encounters a shady doctor, a bottle-
wielding gangster (director Mark Rydell), and a guard aping Barbara Stanwyck
(among other stars), before heading to Mexico to stumble on the truth once and
for all. Alternately a cheeky send-up of Hollywood and a cutting revision
of the powerful detective and his moral code, the movie, cowritten by Altman
with Leigh Brackett, who co-scripted The Big Sleep in 1946, presents a Marlowe
wholly adrift in 1970s Los Angeles. Unlike the ultra-cool version of Marlowe
embodied by The Big Sleep's Humphrey Bogart, Gould's Marlowe is a man out of
his time, driving a vintage sedan and impervious to the hippie girls who live across
from him. The truth he discovers only confirms how much the moral universe
of the old Hollywood Marlowe no longer applies to contemporary California,
and, despite his passive refrain, that's not OK with him. Altman's widescreen,
zoom-lens shots layer characters upon each other while constantly shifting
the composition, emphasizing that people are never as they seem and that
events are out of Marlowe's control. Marlowe's impotence and Altman's acerbic
tone did not sit well with critics or audiences, nor did TV censors approve of
Marlowe's final capacity for violence; the original ending was re-edited for TV
prints. Despite its cool reception in 1973, Altman's appraisal of the powers
of Hollywood myth made The Long Goodbye one of the more telling 1970s
reworkings of the film noir tradition, as well as a central player in
Altman's ongoing 1970s effort to revisit major Hollywood genres in light
of contemporary American values. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

MCCABE AND MRS MILLER
(1971)

Memorably described by Pauline Kael as "a beautiful pipe dream of a movie",
this film reimagines the American West as a muddy frontier filled with hustlers,
opportunists, and corporate sharks -- a turn-of-the-century model for a 1971
America mired in violence and lies. John McCabe (Warren Beatty) wanders
into the turn-of-the-century wilderness village known as Presbyterian Church,
with vague plans of parlaying his gambling winnings into establishing a fancy
casino-brothel-bathhouse. McCabe's partner is prostitute Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie),
who despite her apparent distaste for McCabe helps him achieve his goal. Once McCabe
and Mrs. Miller become successful, the town grows and prospers, incurring the jealousy
of a local mining company, who wants to buy McCabe out. Filmed on location in Canada,
the film makes use of such Altman "stock company" performers as Shelley Duvall, Rene
Auberjonois, John Schuck and Keith Carradine. The seemingly improvised screenplay
was based on a novel by Edmund Naughton and features songs by Leonard Cohen.
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

STREAMERS
(1983)

Based on the virulently antimilitary play by David Rabe, Streamers
is set in a basic-training barracks. Matthew Modine is among the raw
recruits who alternate between strutting around like bantam cocks
to snivelling like frightened children. To test one another's manhood,
the recruits indulge in violent physical and verbal game playing. Special
attention is given those whose skin color or outlook on life is at odds
with the "standards" of the group. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

SECRET HONOR
(1985)

Secret Honor is perhaps the most self-indulgent of Robert
Altman's "small" films--and that's saying a lot. The cast consists
of one solitary person: Philip Baker Hall, cast as former President
Richard M. Nixon. For 90 minutes, Hall/Nixon staggers around
his study, ruminating about his fate. In free-association fashion,
Nixon manages to blame everyone--his family, Eisenhower, Kissinger--
but himself for his downfall. Though the film would have been
most effective had the camera simply concentrated on Hall's extended
monologue, Altman insists upon cutting away to four video monitors
that Nixon has installed in his room to spy on his guests. Secret
Honor was released with two different subtitles: The Last Testament
of Richard Nixon and A Political Myth. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

THIEVES LIKE US
(1974)

Released in the same 12-month span as Terrence Malick's Badlands
and Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express, this film also tells a story
of doomed outlaws in love. Depression-era criminals T-Dub (Bert Remsen),
Chicamaw (John Schuck), and Bowie (Keith Carradine) band together
to rob banks after escaping from a prison farm. Hiding out with Dee
Mobley (Tom Skerritt) and Keechie (Shelley Duvall), and then with T-Dub's
in-law Mattie (Louise Fletcher) between bank jobs, the three crooks are a
loyal group, but increasingly sensational news accounts of their bloodless
robberies force them to split up before their next crime. After a car accident,
Chicamaw leaves the injured Bowie in Keechie's care. Love blossoms between
the two naïfs, compelling Bowie to find a way to balance his bond to Keechie
with his loyalty to his friends and the need for money to head for Mexico.
With the law closing in, Bowie and Keechie learn the hard way about the
finite honor among thieves, and the need to survive. Adapted from the
same Edward Anderson novel as Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night (1949),
Altman, writers Calder Willingham and Joan Tewkesbury, and Altman's
acting "regulars" reworked not just the classical crime movie but also the
1967 hit Bonnie and Clyde, presenting a resolutely unglamorous portrait of
this Coke-swilling outlaw couple and the survivors' stoic drive to carry on.
With the radio providing soundtrack and commentary, and the newspapers
sending a veiled warning, Bowie and Keechie cannot escape the outside world,
but they also cannot transcend it into the realm of myth. Rather than turning
the crimes into stylish exploits, Altman's camera remains outside most of the
robberies, observing the banal action on the street; he saves the slow-motion
in the climactic shoot-out for the witnesses rather than the dead. His zoom
shots hover between fragments of emotion and place, while they maintain
their observational distance. With its deceptively laid-back tone, eye for
expressive detail, and ear for ironic juxtaposition, Thieves Like Us
takes its place in Altman's exceptional body of early 1970s work.
~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

THREE WOMEN
(1977)

Three Women takes a surreal, improvisational and rather eerie look at the
lives of three women in a western desert town. The plot centers around
the youngest of the women, Pinky (Sissy Spacek), an eccentric, withdrawn
woman trying to begin a new life. She finds work as an attendant at a
hot springs spa catering to the elderly and infirm. There she befriends her
co-worker Millie (Shelley Duvall), an equally strange but more outgoing woman;
the two bond, and are soon sharing an apartment. Pinky becomes increasingly
dependent on Millie, eventually adopting aspects of her personality and
appearance. This obsessive attachment is threatened when Pinky discovers Millie
with a man -- Edgar (Robert Fortier), the macho cowboy husband of local artist
Willie (Janice Rule), the last of the title's three women. Pinky's subsequent,
desperate actions precipitate the film's enigmatic conclusion, involving
an unexpected series of confrontations and role reversals amongst the three
women. This story tends to take a backseat to the elliptical, spooky imagery,
particularly the desert landscapes, and the quirky performances -- not
surprising, given that the film was reportedly shot without a full screenplay
and inspired by Altman's own dreams. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide

A WEDDING
(1978)

An over-frenetic satire on American marriage rituals and hypocrisy
concerns the upper-crust marriage between Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz Jr.)
and Muffin Brenner (Amy Stryker). As the film begins, a senile bishop forgets
the lines to the wedding ceremony and Nettie Sloan (the groom's grandmother)
drops dead in an upstairs bedroom. Nettie's death is not disclosed to the two
families who converge at the wedding reception. As the two sets of in-laws slam
into each other, the bride and groom disappear in the ensuing whirlwind of chaos as
both extended families vie for sexual favors and try to keep hidden never-discussed
family secrets. Regina Corelli (Nina van Pallandt) is revealed to be a drug addict,
while Luigi, is endeavoring unsuccessfully to keep his Mafia connections under wraps.
Meanwhile, the bride's family, although more down to earth, are revealed to be no
better. Tulip Brenner (Carol Burnett) begins to flirt with one of the wedding guests,
Mackenzie Goddard (Pat McCormick), while Snooks Brenner (Paul Dooley) acts like a
lout and drinks heavily. And flying around the edges of the action like Tinkerbell
is Buffy Brenner, the Brenner's youngest daughter who is pregnant by the groom.
And as other characters bang into each other -- sexual degenerates, hard-
nosed radicals, raw-boned emotional wrecks -- the wedding reception
heads for its inevitable nuclear explosion. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide