It's been a while, but we're back in business with our latest—and possibly greatest—Skin-depth look to date. No matter how much success he achieved, Robert Altman constantly behaved like a Hollywood outsider, a rebel, a maverick, a man not tethered to the notion of doing things the way they'd always been done. This would entice big names to come work for him, some who loved his style of working and others—Warren Beatty, most notably—who had little to no patience for Altman's sometimes deliberately off-putting techniques.
A man as focused on partying and having a good time as he was on making good movies, Altman is a larger than life figure in the Hollywood story—a sort of Ernest Hemingwayof filmmakers. Since so many legends have been printed about Altman at this point in time, it becomes harder to find out what's true and what isn't, but what is undeniably true is that Altman was a singular voice in American cinema.
Altmanhad a European filmmaker's love of making film a cacophony of delights for all of your senses. He wasa pioneer of overlapping and telescoping dialogue, making the viewer feel as if they just dropped in on a conversation between a bunch of people. What is so commonplace now in film was a true revolution at the time, one that many—including Beatty, once again—thought an unnecessary distraction to the audience.If Altman's films did anything at all, they invited you to a party, and though many of his films have a strong narrative throughline, they were really the first "hang out" films popularized in the 90s by filmmakers as diverse as Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith.
Watching an Altman film is like getting a front row seat to a side of life one might never have access to otherwise. While his contemporaries tried to make films that appealed to as broad an audience as possible, Altman seemed to deliberately want to turn off the segment of the movie going population that wouldn't appreciate his films.
Altman was nothing if not flagrantly anti-establishment, likely a by-product of an upbringing which saw him bounce from Catholic school to public school to military school, beforeserving in the Air Force during WWII. He saw authority in all its many forms, found it inherently flawed, and made it his life's work to systematically tear it all down. If there was a voice of authority, Altman wanted to challenge it, and he never lost this streak, even when he himself became the establishment. All the more reason to burn the whole thing down and try to start again, which he did successfully, several times.
In just under 40 years—from 1967 until his death in 2006—Altman directed 34 feature films, 6 made for television films, two miniseries, and a handful of other odd directing jobs. He also directed literally dozens of televisionepisodes prior to 1967, along with countless industrials and commercials, so calling him prolific doesn't really do justice to the sheer depth and breadth of his catalog. For this reason, I've decided to split this into two parts, the first covering his heyday from 1967-1979. In two weeks we'll look at everything from 1980-2006, but for right now, let's dig into the work he did in his truly free-wheeling, rambling days as Hollywood's preeminent maverick, starting with the film where that legend began...
M*A*S*H
Lo these many years since M*A*S*H exploded onto screens in 1970, no film has made such a hellish existence seem like such a blast. Embracing the youthful naiveté that leads many young men and women to enlist in the first place, the freewheelingsoldiers of the4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in South Korea were a direct affront to the noble and jingoistic war heroes cinema had brought us countless times over the years. That it lost the Best Picture Oscar to Patton speaks to just how long it took the mainstream to embrace Altman's devil may care attitude toward everything, including war.
The very first bit of dialogue in the film involves characters talking over one another, an almost shocking development at the time and one that would come to define the Altman style. It's played very explicitly for laughs in this scenario—with Gary Burghoff's Radar O'Reilly anticipating every order that Roger Bowen's Col. Blake is rattling off—but it was also Altman's way of preparing audiences for a new kind of moviegoing experience...
M*A*S*H is sort of the ultimate boys will be boys film, where anyone immune to the charms of Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John McIntyre (Elliott Gould) either had to change their attitude toward them—as Sally Kellerman's Major "Hot Lips" O'Houlihan eventually does—or be carted off to the loony bin like poor Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall). On the road to embracing Hawkeye, Trapper John, Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt) and the rest, Kellerman's Hot Lips endures several humiliations.
First, her secret tryst with Burns is broadcast to the entire camp over the loudspeaker after being enjoyed solely by the group of misfits huddled in the broadcast booth. This incident leads to Burns' expulsion and earns O'Houlihan her fiery nickname—it's what she told Frank to kiss during their rendezvous. Her next indignity is also the film's most famous scene, when her shower is turned into a spectator event where nearly everyone in the camp gathers to find out if Hot Lips is a "real blonde"...
In the book "Robert Altman: An Oral History," the directorand Kellermanrecant their memories ofshooting the scene...
Altman: Sally was very nervous about this. I don't think she'd ever been naked in a film before or publicly, and she said,'I don't know how to do this'... Well the first shot we made, the tent thing went up—Sally looked at us and she hit the ground in the tent so fast that we couldn't even tell what she was doing. She was on the ground before the flap came up.
Kellerman: When I looked up, there was Gary Burghoff stark naked standing in front of me. The next take, he had Tamara Horrocks, she was the more amply endowed nurse, without her shirt on... So I attribute my Academy Award nomination to the people who made my mouth hang open when I hit the deck.
That Altman is successfully able to mine this woman's indignities for laughs is just another sign of the changing times. These scenes are all played for laughs, and Altman revels in putting the audience on the side of the miscreants.O'Houlihan and Burns' biggest problem was that they were stuffy, by the book authoritarians, and folks like that needed to be taken down a notch on film. The restrictive Hays code would have never allowed such flagrant insubordination by a group of soldiers, but Altman was a leading voice in the anti-authoritarian wave that swept through Hollywood in the 70s.
The incredible box office success of M*A*S*H opened doors for Altman, and like many of the otherfilmmakers of the day, he mined it for every last bit of creative freedom he could achieve. He wouldn't have another financially successful film until 1974's California Split... but he did get to do whatever he wanted for quite some time.
Brewster McCloud
Also made and released in 1970, Altman's fifth narrative feature—counting 1957's The Delinquents—is also one of his strangest. Brewster McCloud(Bud Cort) is a loner who dreams of one day flying with wings he designed himself. He lives in the Houston Astrodome. His best friend, Louise (Sally Kellerman), is either a fallen angel or a bird whose wings were clipped. People are turning up dead covered in bird shit, leading ace detective Frank Shaft (Altman regular Michael Murphy) to suspect Brewster, what with his obsession with birds.
Brewsterfalls for Suzanne (Shelley Duvall, in her film debut), though Louise warns him not to sleep with her or he'll lose his desire to fly. There's also a lecturer (René Auberjonois) who may or may not be turning into a bird, and the whole thing ends with a circus performed around the corpse of the dead Brewster. It's an absolutely bonkersmovie that only merits mentioning here because Sally Kellerman's nude scene is a direct callback to her shower scene from M*A*S*H. From "Robert Altman: An Oral Biography"...
Kellerman: I stopped people on the road to tell them about Bob (Altman) 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 these things...
McCabe Mrs. Miller
In 1971, Altman was hot thanks to M*A*S*H's box office and awards season success, and Warren Beatty was the biggest actor/producer in the industry. Since taking the reigns on producing Bonnie Clyde, Beatty had built a reputation as a shrewd businessman with an eye for films that he could produce and star in. At the time he was also in a relationship with British actress Julie Christie, making them a perfect pairing for first-time producer David Foster (The Thing, The Mask of Zorro) and his adaptation of the book "McCabe."
The story goes that Beatty pursued Altman for the directing job, though Beatty denies this saying only that he thought M*A*S*H was terrific and approved him as director.The production itself was apparently fraught with tension between Altman and Beatty,with the leading lady caught between the two oversized egos, Julie Christie. From "Robert Altman: An Oral History"...
Julie Christie:Warren liked to be perfect. I liked to get the hell on with it. It's all too painful—let's get out of here. You had two very different types of ego working in a small area. I'm not going to go any further than that. To my mind it's Bob's best film. It needed the tightness that Warren brought to it and it needed the expansiveness that Robert brought to it.
Set in the Pacific Northwest during a typically terrible mid-19th Century winter, the film tells the story of a man named McCabe (Beatty) and his dream of building a saloon/whorehouse in the small town of Presbyterian Church. He partners with the other name in the title, an experienced madam named Mrs. Miller (Christie), and business booms, eventually attracting the attention of some rather unscrupulous business men.
Being set predominantly in a whorehouse means there's quite a bit of skin in the flick, though the film's natural light interiors make a lot of it hard to see. Maysie Hoy, Linda Sorenson, and Janet Wright play three of the tavern's best call girls, all of them going fully nude throughout the film's second act...
If nothing else, Altman helps to normalize nudity in film—an American mainstream tradition only three and a half years old at this point—by presenting it very matter of factly. These are working girls showing their wares, cleaning themselves, and servicing their customers. It's pretty great that Altmanequated nudity with normalcy and matter of factness. This helped to make the very notion of showing naked women on film more acceptable as "part of the story's integrity," one of those phrases you hear bandied about from time to time. The film is set in a whorehouse, it would be weird to see exclusively clothed women hanging out there.
Images
Throughout his career, Altman made very small, off-the-radar films that next to no one has seen in this day and age. Without being an Altman completist, it's doubtful your average film fan has seen Quintet or HealtH or A Perfect Couple, and Altman's 1972 film Images falls squarely in that category. Altman alleged that he built the film around a poem he once wrote, as told in "Robert Altman: An Oral History"...
Altman: I wrote a poem once and it went, 'I'm looking in a mirror, I'm looking at myself in the mirror, and behind me is another mirror, and I see myself looking into the mirror, seeing myself.'
This poem makes about as much sense as the film itself, a dream-like narrative involving a married couple (Susannah York and Altman regular René Auberjonois) and their bizarre retreat to the countryside wherein ghosts of the past begin reappearing in their lives. Viewed by many as a meditation on schizophrenia, the film is a bit of a muddled mess wherein the real issue with the film is its willingness to let certain scenes go unexplained—like this one of York entering a room to see, gasp, her naked self already on the bed...
The film also contains perhaps Altman's sexiest nude scene from this first part of his career. Set once again in a shower, Altman's camera lovingly pans up York's bare backside as she climbs into the tub, but a reflection shows us her fantastic front as well...
If nothing else, at least Images seems to be trying something, which is more than I can say for HealtH, and I feel it's always better for a filmmaker to have tried and fallen short than to have played it safe and succeeded. His next film was also an experiment, though one that feels a touch more calculated to succeed...
The Long Goodbye
An endlessly fascinating concept for an adaptation of Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye finds private dick Philip Marlowe (a never better Elliott Gould) waking up after a big sleep. Literally, the film posits what if Marlowe woke up in present day (1973) Los Angeles and has to solve a case. Originally set up for Peter Bogdanovich to direct with Robert Mitchum in the lead, the film meandered its way through a couple of incarnations before reuniting Altman with his M*A*S*Hstar Gould.
Anyone expecting a straight detective story was greeted with another of Altman's boozy, hazy, dreamlike narratives that meanders rather than keeping up a brisk pace. Altman's Marlowe is a man out of time and the film—with its brilliant early John Williams score—wants to spend time hanging out with him. The film's biggest miss comesin the lack of skin from star Nina Van Pallandt, who would pop up clothed in Paul Schrader's American Gigolo, but that just might be some wish fulfillment on my part.
Thankfully Rutanya Alda picks up the slack as Marlowe's perennially topless neighbor, who just hangs out topless all day with her friends. The scenes in the film are shot from a distance, and look better in still form than in GIF form...
This film's legacy is alive and well in Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, as underrated today as The Long Goodbye was in its day. There's something about early 70s Los Angeles hazy detective tales that audiences just aren't receptive to initially, and I think it has to do with getting on a film's wavelength. Picture yourself as one of the topless ladies hanging out in Marlowe's building, they're on the film's wavelength, for sure.
Thieves Like Us
If, after seeing McCabe and Mrs. Miller, you found yourself wondering what Altman's take would be on another Warren Beatty film, Thieves Like Us is the film for you. Like Bonnie Clyde and Terrence Malick's Badlands before it, Thieves Like Us centers on miscreants and outcasts from society, Altman's favorite kind of people. Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall star as Bowie and Keechie, star-crossed lovers on the run from the law as part of a band of outlaws that includes Bert Remsen's T-Dub and John Schuck's Chicamaw.
What this film lacks that the other two films I just mentioned had was a sense of perpetual motion. Like so many of Altman's films, the narrative likes to take extended breaks from the action. Story is almost always secondary to character in most of Altman's early works. His later works managed this balance much more artfully, but the characters here just don't resonate in the way they did in BC and Badlands.
What Thieves Like Us does have on those films, however, is nudity. Shelley Duvall, in her only nude scene, stands up in a tub and walks fully nude toward Carradine an hour and eighteen minutes into this flick.
It's a terrific nude scene, beautifully and fluidly shot by French cinematographer Jean Boffety, and if it has to be Shelley's one and only, I'm glad it was this one...
Nashville
Altman's other hugely acclaimed film of the decade came along in 1975 when he re-teamed with writer Joan Tewkesbury for another sprawling character-based drama. The film's tremendous ensemble cast brought it plenty of heat and the word around town was that Altman was back—as if he had gone anywhere, working constantly between M*A*S*H and Nashville.There's no form or structure here, just a circular story that's so carefully constructed that all of its seams are invisible to the eye. It feels like spending a whirlwind couple of days in Nashville and getting to know and care about multiple people all at once.
While sex is in constant play in the film, there's not as much nudity as one might expect. Lily Tomlin earned an Oscar nomination for her role as a singer and married mother to two deaf childrennamed Linnea, who catches the eye of lothario musician Tom, played by Keith Carradine. When he begins to pursue her, she finds herself in a position she hasn't been in for quite some time, and ends up sleeping with him. Tomlin manages to be mom sexy in this flick, despite the many more scantily clad women around her...
Shelley Duvall also shows up in a see-through pair of panties and a mostly see-through top...
It's Gwen Welles that steals the show, however, as Sueleen Gay, a waitress doggedly trying to make it in the music business despite having very little talent. Taking a gig at an all-male fundraiser for the unseen presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker, poor Sueleen is booed off the stage for her bad singing—and the fact that she didn't take off her clothes. She acquiesces and returns to the stage, giving the guys what they want and simultaneously realizing how good it feels to hold an audience in the palm of your hand, by whatever means necessary...
Writer Joan Tewkesbury described filming the scene in "Robert Altman: An Oral Biography"...
Tewkesbury: When we get down to shooting the striptease, the first thing after the dress comes off, the socks come out of the bra. And I just thought, 'Oh my God, you're a genius, girl.' And she took off every stitch of clothing and walked offstage. And those men stood—it still makes me very emotional—and they gave her a standing ovation. It was the emotional core of the film. She is every person in that movie. Every person in that movie believes that if they just do that one thing, it won't matter, everybody will forget and they will get famous, or get the job, or will get to sing the song, or they will be the front-runner in that campaign. Everybody in this movie compromises at some point or another.
So don't ever let anyone tell you that a nude scene can't have emotional weight and impact. The writer herself said that this was the emotional core of the film.
A Wedding
Our final film for part one is another of Altman's ensemble pieces, but not as sprawling. Not sprawling at all, in fact, but very small and focused on the titular event and the people participating. Muffin Brenner (Amy Stryker) is the daughter of a simple truck driver (Paul Dooley) and his wife (Carol Burnett), and she is getting married to Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz, Jr.), the son of a well-to-do family. Everything goes to hell in a hand-basket in what amounts to a rather silly diversion that Altman himself said started as a joke.
The film's nude scene is one of Altman's legendaryupsetting the apple cart scenes, with Mia Farrow playing the perennial bridesmaid sister Buffy to Stryker's bride Muffin, and she steals her sister's thunder with this topless photo shoot...
This causes the priest to go into shock, and what else could possibly go wrong with this wedding, amirite? This is a perfectly fine film with some great character actors, but it just doesn't have the depth you want it to, and a good many of its "what else could go wrong" jokes are stale. We leave our director in a slump that would continue for several years, but we'll be back in two weeks to see how this all turns out.
