Altman at 100: Six Films That Made the Maverick an American Original

This year marks the centenary of legendary rebel director, stoner aesthetic pioneer, and serial genre revisionist Robert Altman. Born in 1925 and raised in Missouri, this Jewish kid who toiled for almost two decades in industrial films and network TV before getting his chance to make movies left quite a legacy. Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and the Coen Brothers are just a few of the top flight modern directors who acknowledge the enduring influence of this endlessly innovative humanist with a misanthropic edge.

So in this hundredth year of his birth BFG salutes the fifty year movie making career of “the pirate king of American film making” with an examination of six of his best.

1. MASH (1970)

Altman’s big break in film and first masterpiece came because, at the time, execs at Fox Studios were focused on big budget projects like Patton (1970). No one was paying much attention to a low budget afterthought awash in development hell called MASH. Reportedly, over two dozen directors had already turned down this hot potato dark satire of the Korean War. But Altman who had been chafing for years under the artistic constraints of episodic network television was wily enough to realize the opportunities proffered by a low expectations project nobody wanted. The man who piloted WWII B-24 “Liberator” long range bombers in the Pacific while still a teenager leapt at the opportunity to portray the absurdity of war.

MASH thus became the laboratory within which the then already 45 year old Altman began to implement all the techniques he had envisaged but never had the freedom to implement in his long apprenticeship in industrial film and early TV. All the things we now refer to as Altmanesque: large ensemble casts, improvisation, multiple storylines, overlapping dialogue, roaming cameras, disdain for large organizations, and humble humanism with a satiric edge saw their imperfect early implementation in MASH.

The great yet flawed film shows its age when it too often descends into the easy laughs from dumb misogynistic bro-style comedy — taken for irreverence at the time — targeting Sally Kellerman’s “Hot Lips” Houlihan character. Happily, this is a flaw well addressed in Altman’s later work.

The anti-war classic released during the height of the Vietnam War would earn the Palme d’Or in Cannes and Altman’s first Academy Award nomination for best director. It would also win an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for McCarthy era communist witch hunt black list victim Ring Lardner Jr.. (Lardner Jr. previously won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for 1942’s Woman of the Year )

2. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Altman’s great revisionist Western which set the standard for so many that followed. Warren Beatty is John McCabe, the ill fated dreamer gambler trickster of indeterminate background, who strikes it rich via a very busy bordello in the just risen from the dirt frontier mining municipality of Presbyterian Church. The fir treed and foggy Pacific Northwest town’s name comes from the prominent but always near empty building at the center of the not even aiming for sanctimonious settlement.

Beatty’s McCabe is an atypical hero, not necessarily brave — unless absolutely necessary — and almost childishly naive when it comes to the answer to Machiavelli’s sadly rhetorical question “Is it better to be loved or feared?” The townsmen may love the charismatic and entertaining McCabe in their way. But when push comes to shove they will not put their livelihoods, let alone their lives, at risk to support him. McCabe, too soft for this world but too proud to buckle, is slowly abandoned by all as ruthless corporate railroad interests and the killers they employ slowly tighten their grip on the town. The cruelty with which these interests refuse to let a scrambling McCabe go back on his initial very ill advised refusal to “cooperate” once he realizes what he is up against is palpable.

Echoes of the inhuman sadism of Butler, the railway company henchman played by Hugh Millais can be found in the Anton Chigurh character so memorably played by Javier Bardem in the Coen Brothers No Country for Old Men.

This is particularly evident in the tonally identical failed bargaining-for-their-lives sequences McCabe plays out with the implacable Butler, “I don’t do deals” and Woody Harrelson’s Carson Wells plays out with the equally pitiless Chigurh, “You should admit your situation there would be more dignity in it.”

Julie Christie is magnificent as Constance Miller, McCabe’s opium addicted lover and brothel partner. Miller’s a sad but unbroken woman who’s seen this movie before. No one needs to tell her the likely outcome of McCabe’s stubborn refusal to heed her counsel to take the powerful interest’s money and run. During the film’s tragic conclusion in a lattice of interconnected shots a poppy benumbed Miller resignedly packs her bags as McCabe is methodically hunted down and killed. All while the town that used to be his looks the other way. A Leonard Cohen rich dirge like soundtrack adds to the almost hallucinatory mood of powerlessness, resignation and loss. The sad inevitable final snow swept sequences of the film bring to mind High Noon without the relatively happy ending.

3. The Long Goodbye (1973)

In his 1973 film adaption of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye, Altman does for the hard boiled detective genre what he did for the Western in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The mischievous director transplants Chandler’s iconic private dick from the mean streets of the straight laced and suppressed black and white 1950s into the tie dyed everything’s groovy sun bleached psychedelia of peak hippie era L.A.. Elliot Gould’s chain smoking, cat loving Philip Marlowe is thus a man out of time encumbered with a moral code revolving around friendship, honor, and loyalty. Something the corrupt Los Angeles he now inhabits little comprehends. Marlowe’s coping mechanism mantra constantly muttered under his breath — “It’s okay with me” — works until it doesn’t.

Marlowe is not just a moral anachronism. In a wonderful cinematic flourish Altman also makes him a visual one. Elliot’s Marlowe, sporting a very unCalifornian almost funereal pallor looks like he has never spent more than twenty minutes out in the sun. This coupled with his closely cropped black hair, a dark rumpled off the rack J.C. Penney suit and his black 1948 Lincoln Continental Cabriolet ensure the always somewhat disoriented detective and his accoutrements constantly “pop”. Perfect visual counterpoints to all that golden sun kissed sand and surf. The scene where Marlowe sits on the beach chatting with doomed self destructive Hemingway inspired character Roger Wade (a never been better Sterling Hayden) is simply stunning. Reportedly, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond created these dreamy Kodachrome like images using a “flashing” technique to desaturate the film.

Those scenes also highlight pioneering female screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s outstanding dialogue — some of the best you will hear in an Altman film or any other. (No surprise. Leigh Brackett also co-wrote the screenplays for The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), and The Empire Strikes Back (1980))

Roger Wade:
I tell you what we’re gonna do, Marlboro. You’re gonna take that goddamn J.C. Penney tie off and we’re gonna have an old fashioned man to man drinking party.

Philip Marlowe:
Well, that’s okay but I’m not taking off the tie.

Roger Wade:
What’ll you have?

Philip Marlowe:
What are you drinking?

Roger Wade:
What I’m drinking is called Aquavit.

Philip Marlowe:
I’m drinking what you’re drinking.

Roger Wade:
Well God bless you. I like to hear that. People these days go, “Oh, I want a little of this. Oh, and a little of that and a twist of lemon.” Balls!

…

Roger Wade: Do you ever think about suicide, Marlboro?

Philip Marlowe: Me, I don’t believe in it.

You could listen to these two all day. The scenes where Gould interacts with the LAPD are also particularly entertaining.

This movie with its stoner aesthetic of blissed out blurriness was a clear inspiration for the Coen Brothers foray into Chandler territory, The Big Lebowski. An early tip of the hat to Altman among many from the Coens is when their Dude mirrors Marlowe in a forlorn late-night character-establishing visit to a supermarket. In another, Ben Gazarra’s off kilter gangster Jackie Treehorn parallels Mark Rydell’s equally odd mob boss Marty Augustine.

What is less often recognized is the influence of Carol Reed’s The Third Man on The Long Goodbye. Altman himself was far from above borrowing. The settings, interactions, and even the mood of the closing sequences of the two films are almost identical. You can also see Altman’s playful nod to Anton Kara’s iconic zither music (omnipresent in The Third Man) in his own playful constant employment of John Williams The Long Goodbye theme throughout his film. Altman even uses it for a doorbell.

4. California Split (1974)

Altman favourite Elliot Gould plays Charlie Watters while, still in his handsome leading man phase, George Segal plays Billy Denny as inveterate gamblers in this early paean to male bonding and the highs of risking it all – then going back and doing it again. Charlie and Billy once freed from the dissatisfaction and disappointment of everyday life flow through low stakes poker tables, boxing matches, broken noses, race tracks, and high stakes casino tables chasing experience highs. Altman, a gambler and the son of a gambler, is a master of mood and of atmosphere. The director experienced the world in large gulps, inhaling everything in his environment and he transmits this sensory experience to his viewers. You’re not at the craps table with Segal and Gould. You were over at the next table hearing scraps of their conversation and getting elbowed out of the way as a crowd formed around them. Altman was not interested in presenting a few characters. He captured entire environments.

On a thematic level California Split is at its best when it conveys the emptiness of those portions of life a gambler must live between his last and his next wager. As the film’s brilliant conclusion so deftly demonstrates – winning is beside the point. It’s the adrenaline rush accompanying the risk and the distraction from the soul destroying emptiness of just being that brings them back to the table.

The film’s impact can be seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight and Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven through Ocean’s Thirteen — where,  in yet another tribute to Altman, Elliot Gould resurfaces as touchstone central character, old school casino mogul Reuben Tishkoff.

(Inquiries into why both Elliot Gould’s character in 1974’s California Split and Jack Nicholson’s character in 1974’s Chinatown both go through long portions of their respective films with eye catching ever evolving bandages on their noses are ill-advised.)

5. Shortcuts (1993)

Altman’s embrace of multiple complex interwoven plot lines reaches its zenith in Shortcuts, the director’s 1993 take down of tinseltown’s unhappy off marquee multitudes. In the midst of a Medfly infestation smug surgeons, broken birthday clowns, unfaithful cops, bitter booze soaked bakers, snarky aspiring artists, guys who live for four hours of fishing, kids hit by cars, worn to the heels waitresses, macabre make up men, phone porn specialists, and stay at home moms live, love and come across the occasional corpse. The maverick director was in a cynical mood when he created this cutting adaption of Raymond Carver short stories featuring a cavalcade of dysfunctional couples each wounded in their own way. Nobody comes out of this autopsy of West Coast anomie looking good. (Except maybe that clown.)

Somehow, however, Altman juggles these ultimately intertwined tales fast enough it all comes off as enormously entertaining and darkly funny. The grizzled Hollywood vet may delight in exposing the foibles of his characters. But, gentle humanist that he is, he also clearly loves the characters. Tim Robbins stands out as pompous, philandering, puffed up California Highway Patrolman Gene Shepard. Gene wakes each day eager to dress like he is ready to invade Poland: all the better to impress the chicks that the caddish motorcycle cop constantly pulls over for “driving too slowly.” This sin, he then solemnly informs them, “is just as dangerous as driving too fast” before hitting them up for their phone numbers. Contrary to initial indications, Gene’s long suffering wife Claire (a terrific Madeleine Stowe) secretly adores the fact her husband’s a scoundrel. Shortcuts revels in these sorts of uncomfortable revelations.

It’s hard to overestimate the impact the film had on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. Shortcut’s tragic phone porn operator storyline — a sex worker’s constantly befuddled burly slow burn teddy bear of a husband (Chris Penn) suddenly breaks and transforms into a murderer — serves as a template for the very similar docile-till-he-isn’t Little Bill (William Macy) in Anderson’s porn world opus. Then there is Shortcuts brief but haunting dual crazed laughter sequence featuring two sisters. A similar sequence appears in Boogie Nights in that film’s frantic two women laugh/scream filled “Will you be my mom?” scene. Eagle-eyed observers will note Anderson not only lifts the power of that scene, he goes so far as to employ one of the same actresses Altman originally used to recreate it, the brilliant Julianne Moore.

6. Gosford Park (2001)

Altman once more flexes his impressive capacity to encompass all genres when he bends the pre World War II British drawing room upstairs downstairs drama to his will — surprisingly well. He injects a few Americans, including a Charlie Chan filmmaker from Hollywood, into the exercise for good measure. The Jewish producer’s early entreaty to the British colleague who brought him to the annual know-your-place hunting party “How do you put up with these people?” reverberates throughout the film.

The dialogue is delightful justly earning Altman understudy Julian Fellowes an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Wife of strapped American at Gosford to beg for money: “Don’t try and steer the conversation it makes you sound desperate.”

American husband: “Well, I am fucking desperate.”

A Brit snob to his wife: “Stop snivelling, someone will think you’re Italian.”

At the age of 76 Altman’s eye for the telling detail remains firmly in place. Particularly remarkable is how he draws attention to lapses in that era’s concept of hygiene. In one memorable scene, a gloved butler in tailcoat and tie arranges a gleaming labyrinthine silver setting at the posh candlelit main dining table. He admiringly examines a large salad fork before enthusiastically spitting on said implement prior to polishing.

Of course there is a murder complete with Agatha Christie-like resolutions and additional Altmanesque flourishes. (Ryan Phillippe as the undercover American actor posing as his producer’s valet for role research. ) Class divides being no match for proximity there is also plenty of sub rosa tragic outcome interclass canoodling.

Gosford Park runs for well over two hours and twenty minutes but it could have happily gone on for three.

 

Altman died in 2006. The most fitting of all his many honors may well have been The Independent Spirit Awards creation of the Robert Altman Award, an ensemble award given to a film’s director, casting director, and cast in recognition of outstanding film work done together.

 

Honorable Mentions

Nashville (1975 )

Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976 )

The Player (1992 )

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)