Countdown (Robert Altman, 1967)

James Caan in Countdown

Cast: James Caan, Joanna Moore, Robert Duvall, Barbara Baxley, Charles Aidman, Steven Ihnat, Michael Murphy, Ted Knight, Stephen Coit, John Rayner, Charles Irving, Bobby Riha. Screenplay: Loring Mandel, based on a novel by Hank Searls. Cinematography: William W. Spencer. Art direction: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Gene Milford. Music: Leonard Rosenman. 

Reality intervened to make Countdown obsolete within a few months after it was released, so that the scenes of the astronaut played by James Caan plodding across the lunar surface -- instead of bouncing on it as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would soon be seen doing -- look ridiculous. Countdown is watchable today mainly for the people involved with it who went on to better things. Caan and Robert Duvall were just a few years away from stardom thanks to The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), and even Ted Knight, who plays a NASA press relations man, would find a better journalistic role on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970. But it was almost the undoing of its director, Robert Altman, who was fired by Warner Bros. for what became one of his signature techniques: overlapping dialogue. What energy and interest Countdown generates comes from Altman's ability to keep things moving, but he's saddled with a tired story about the space race with the usual cliches, including the astronaut's anxious wife, played woodenly by Joanna Moore. 

A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman, 2006)

Garrison Keillor in A Prairie Home Companion

Cast: Woody Harrelson, L.Q. Jones, Tommy Lee Jones, Garrison Keillor, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Tim Russell, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin. Screenplay: Garrison Keillor, Ken LaZebnik. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Dina Goldman. Film editing: Jacob Craycroft. Music: Garrison Keillor. 

Garrison Keillor used to be celebrated as a humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain and James Thurber, crafting stories out of the regional American experience with his best-selling tales of Lake Wobegon, Minn. and hosting a public radio show with a devoted following. His descent into obscurity came, like many others, with charges of inappropriate sexual behavior, but it's a mark of how famous he once was that a feature film with a starry cast was built around his radio show. A Prairie Home Companion was Robert Altman's last feature, and it demonstrates his ability to direct an ensemble of vivid characters. The thread of story concerns the final broadcast of the show, brought about by the purchase of the theater by a large Texas corporation. Somehow, a mysterious figure in a white trench coat, played by Virginia Madsen and billed in the credits as "Dangerous Woman," is inserted into the plot, as is the character of Guy Noir, the private eye played on the radio by Keillor but in the film by Kevin Kline. But the point of the movie is really to have the stars show off. Keillor's owlish presence is what holds the movie together, and the cast seems to be having fun. Whether the audience does too seems to be a matter of taste. I admit that I never appreciated Keillor's humor. It always seemed to contain a whiff of condescension to the residents of Lake Wobegon and the old-fashioned down-home music on his show, a kind of smirky folksiness, and that mars the film for me. 

Popeye (Robert Altman, 1980)

Paul Dooley, Shelley Duvall, and Robin Williams in Popeye

Cast: Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall, Ray Walston, Paul Dooley, Paul L. Smith, Richard Libertini, Donald Moffat, MacIntyre Dixon, Roberta Maxwell, Donovan Scott, Allan F. Nichols, Wesley Ivan Hurt, Bill Irwin. Screenplay: Jules Feiffer, based on characters created by E.C. Segar. Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno. Production design: Wolf Kroeger. Film editing: John W. Holmes, David A. Simmons. Music: Morton Stevens, songs by Harry Nilsson. 

The busy, noisy adaptation of the Popeye cartoon was not particularly well-received by either critics or audiences when it was released, and it was something of a commercial disaster because of cost overruns during its filming in Malta. Much of the blame fell on its director, Robert Altman, but a lot of it had to do with its flamboyantly indulgent producer, Robert Evans, and some also cited the widespread use of cocaine on the set. The casting can't be faulted: Robin Williams in the title role and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl couldn't be bettered. (Evans originally wanted Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin to play the roles.) But the songs by Harry Nilsson lack melodic hooks and the decision to record them live on the set was a mistake, considering that none of the actors was a real singer. Popeye has its moments, many of them contributed by the appealing Wesley Ivan Hurt, Altman's grandson, as the infant Swee'pea, but it's really something of a mess. 

Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

Ronee Blakley in Nashville

Cast: David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Timothy Brown, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Cristina Raines, Bert Remsen, Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, Keenan Wynn, Elliott Gould, Julie Christie. Screenplay: Joan Tewkesbury. Cinematography: Paul Lohmann. Film editing: Dennis M. Hill, Sidney Levin. Music: Arlene Barnett, Jonnie Barnett, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Gary Busey, Juan Grizzle, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Joe Raposo. 

Nashville hated Nashville. That's because it wasn't about them, but like most major movies of the '70s, from Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) to Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), it was about American angst. I hadn't seen it since its release and as I did then, I found it deserved the critical hosannas for sheer audacity but was also exasperatingly inconsistent in achievement. The satire remains pungent, especially when it involves Geraldine Chaplin's clueless BBC reporter, constantly missing the point, stumbling over her own preconceptions, or desperately searching for metaphors as she tours a junkyard or a school bus lot. Some of the performances are great, especially Ronee Blakley's fragile diva, Michael Murphy's oily political advance man, Gwen Welles's clueless would-be singer, and Lily Tomlin's unappreciated wife. But although the great Barbara Harris gets her moment to shine late in the film, her character is poorly integrated, and Shelley Duvall is wasted in a role that has no point. The decision to have the actors write and perform their own songs was a mistake, especially in the case of Karen Black, who never comes across as a credible rival to Blakley's Barbara Jean. Still, the film serves its major purpose, to portray an America wrenched by post-Watergate anxiety as it prepares to celebrate its bicentennial. Nashville is bracketed by two songs, one asserting that "we must be doing something right to last 200 years," the other anxiously repeating "you may say that I ain't free, but it don't worry me." What comes in between is apt demonstration of both premises. 

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall in 3 Women

Cast: Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janice Rule, Robert Fortier, Ruth Nelson, John Cromwell, Sierra Pecheur, Craig Richard Nelson, Maysie Hoy, Belita Moreno, Leslie Ann Hudson, Patricia Ann Hudson. Screenplay: Robert Altman, Patricia Resnick. Cinematography: Charles Rosher Jr. Art direction: James Dowell Vance. Film editing: Dennis M. Hill. Music: Gerald Busby. 

Coleridge claimed that he wrote the poem "Kubla Khan" after he had an opium-induced dream. Robert Altman said that he made the film 3 Women after a dream in which he was making a movie with Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, but he didn't specify what might have induced the dream. There's no stately pleasure dome in 3 Women, which takes place in a bleak little town in the California desert that, as several people comment, looks like Texas. Duvall plays Millie, who works in a rundown spa helping elderly people and invalids in and out of the therapy pool and the hot tubs. She's asked to train a newcomer named Pinky (Spacek), a naive young woman who, like her, is from Texas and is also named Mildred. Pinky is awed by the more worldly Millie, and soon becomes her roommate in a small apartment complex owned by Edgar Hart (Robert Fortier) and his pregnant wife, Willie (Janice Rule), who also run a shabby bar called Dodge City. Eventually, tensions develop between the meek Pinky and the pretentious Millie, whom everyone else laughs at behind her back, and when Millie suggests she move out, Pinky attempts suicide by jumping off the apartment balcony into the swimming pool. She survives, spends some time in a coma, and awakes with a distinct personality change. Although the film largely focuses on Millie and Pinky, the third woman, Willie, who is an artist, plays a major role in their story and its somewhat eerie denouement. Critics praised 3 Women, and many think it's one of Altman's best films. It veers off onto the fringes of the surreal, enhanced by Gerald Busby's spiky score. Spacek and Duvall improvised much of their dialogue, including Millie's very funny "dinner party" menu made up of recipes from magazine ads for processed foods, with "pigs in a blanket" serving as entree. 

Cookie's Fortune (Robert Altman, 1999)

Cookie's Fortune (Robert Altman, 1999)

Cast: Charles S. Dutton, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Liv Tyler, Patricia Neal, Chris O'Donnell, Ned Beatty, Courtney B. Vance, Donald Moffat, Lyle Lovett, Danny Darst, Matt Malloy, Niecy Nash, Randall Mell, Rufus Thomas, Ruby Wilson. Screenplay: Anne Rapp. Cinematography: Toyomichi Kurita. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Abraham Lim. Music: David A. Stewart.

Cookie's Fortune is one of Robert Altman's lesser-known movies, but it's an eminently likable one, a comedy about that familiar literary trope, the dysfunctional Southern family. It's set in the picturesque small North Mississippi town of Holly Springs, which I know well because it was on the way from Oxford to Memphis back when there were no four-lane roads to travel on. In the film, it's a place with no apparent racial tensions: When a black man, Willis Richland (played by the great Charles S. Dutton), is arrested for the murder of elderly Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (a wonderful performance by Patricia Neal), the white sheriff refuses to believe he did it: "I've fished with him," he explains to the skeptical out-of-town forensics expert. Altman and screenwriter Anne Rapp simply choose not to make racial animosity a factor in their story, which is really about how difficult it is to keep secrets in a place as small and as nosy as Holly Springs and its like. Cookie's death is actually a suicide, but her niece Camille (Glenn Close), who discovers the body, chooses to cover it up -- actually eating the suicide note, which is not addressed to her -- because (a) the fact of suicide would cause a scandal in the town and (b) she stands to inherit as the next-of-kin to Cookie, assuming there's no will. (There is, but she doesn't find it in the cookie jar where it's hidden.) Camille enlists her rather slow-witted sister, Cora (Julianne Moore), in the cover-up. But suicide will out, as well as lots of other family secrets. All of this is taking place over Easter weekend, when Camille's production of Salome -- by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon, as the poster says -- is being staged in the local First Presbyterian Church, starring Cora in the title role. Cookie's Fortune is a charming film, carried along by a cast that Altman stands out of the way of and lets do their thing.

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

Elliott Gould and Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye

Philip Marlowe: Elliott Gould
Eileen Wade: Nina van Pallandt
Roger Wade: Sterling Hayden
Marty Augustine: Mark Rydell
Dr. Verringer: Henry Gibson
Harry: David Arkin
Terry Lennox: Jim Bouton
Jo Ann Eggenweiler: Jo Ann Brody

Director: Robert Altman
Screenplay: Leigh Brackett
Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Music: John Williams

The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's loopy take on the myth of the hardboiled private eye, holds up well today, thanks to Elliott Gould's performance as Philip Marlowe. A long way from the world-weary, cynical Marlowes of Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, Gould's version of the character is a guy who will go out in the middle of the night to buy food for his cat and will stop dead in the middle of the street for a dog that refuses to get out of the way of his car. Not that he's a softy, exactly. He's not above meting out his own brand of punishment -- a bullet to the gut -- for someone who's eluded the law. It's just that he sees the world as a messed-up place and feels sympathy for its innocents: mainly, cats and dogs. Otherwise, there are few innocents in the circles Marlowe finds himself caught up in. He smokes incessantly, even though no one else around him does, thinking nothing of lighting up -- often from the butt of a previous cigarette -- before he enters someone else's space. He smokes so much that it's surprising he has the wind to chase Eileen Wade's car on foot for several blocks. The plot, as so often in adaptations of Raymond Chandler, doesn't matter so much as the attitudes on display, Marlowe's as well as the various people who are trying to prevent him from uncovering their secrets. Altman indulges himself in his usual overlapping, improvised dialogue, especially in group scenes like the one at the L.A. police station or the ones at which Marlowe is surrounded by gangster Marty Augustine and his henchmen. (One of whom is played by the unbilled and mute but indomitably there Arnold Schwarzenegger.) There are some great set pieces, such as the horrifying scene in which Marty Augustine smashes a Coke bottle in his girlfriend's face, or the attempt of Marlowe and Eileen to rescue Roger from the crashing surf -- with the nice touch that the Wades' Weimaraner fetches Roger's cane from the waves. There's some entertaining filigree around the narrative edges, like the gaggle of nubile starlets who live next door to Marlowe. And there's some offbeat casting that, for once, works: Nina van Pallandt, whose chief claim to fame is that she was hoaxer Clifford Irving's mistress and ratted on him about his fake Howard Hughes autobiography, and Jim Bouton, the ballplayer whose behind-the-scenes book Ball Four tattled on the misbehavior of idols like Mickey Mantle. Leigh Brackett, who collaborated on the screenplay for Bogart's The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), is the credited screenwriter, and apparently did shape the plot for Altman, but the dialogue has that off-the-cuff, on-the-set character of most of the director's films. John Williams's title theme, sometimes with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, is wittily deployed throughout the movie, as doorbell chimes or supermarket Muzak, and in various arrangements, including one for the municipal band of the Mexican town of Tepotzlan.

Filmstruck

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller

I have been watching Deadwood on HBO GO, and now realize how much that series owes to what may be Robert Altman's best film, which is also the greatest of all "stoner Westerns." McCabe & Mrs. Miller is very much of the era in which it was made, with its fatalistic view of its loner protagonist, doomed by his naive willingness to go up against the big corporate mining interests who want to buy him out. Hippies against the Establishment, if you will. But as shows like Deadwood demonstrate, that agon has continued to play itself out in popular culture, long after the counterculture supposedly met its demise. It's also very much at the heart of the mythos of the American Western, which always centered on the loner against overwhelming odds. McCabe & Mrs. Miller came along at a time when the Western was in eclipse, with most of its great exponents, like John Ford and Howard Hawks, in retirement, and some of its defining actors, like John Wayne, having gone over to the side of the Establishment. So when iconoclasts like Altman and Warren Beatty, coming off of their respective breakthrough hits M*A*S*H (1970) and Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), took an interest in filming Edmund Naughton's novel, it was clear that we were going to get something revisionist, a Western with a grubby setting and an antiheroic protagonist. The remarkable thing is that McCabe & Mrs. Miller, perhaps more than either M*A*S*H or Bonnie and Clyde, has transcended its revisionism and formed its own tradition. For once, Altman's mannerisms -- overlapping dialogue, restless camerawork, reliance on a stock company of actors like Michael Murphy, John Schuck, and Shelley Duvall, and a generally loosey-goosey mise-en-scène -- don't overwhelm the story. Some of this is probably owing to Beatty's own firmly entrenched ego, which was often at odds with Altman's. His performance gives the film a center and grounding that many of Altman's other films lack, especially since he works so well in tandem with Julie Christie's performance as Mrs. Miller, the only thing about the film that the Academy deigned worthy of an Oscar nomination. How the Academy could have overlooked the contribution of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond remains a mystery, except that at this point the cinematographers branch was dominated by old-school directors of photography who had been brought up in the studio system, which was to flood the set with light -- one reason why Gordon Willis's magisterial chiaroscuro in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) failed to get a nomination the following year. Altman also made a brilliant directoral decision to film in sequence, so that the town of Presbyterian Church, the work of production designer Leon Erickson and art directors Al Locatelli and Philip Thomas, takes shape around the action.