Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)

Rory Cochrane and Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused

In Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater does -- albeit on a smaller scale -- something like what Francis Ford Coppola did for the gangster film in The Godfather (1972) or Sam Peckinpah did for the Western in The Wild Bunch (1969): They took a familiar movie genre, in Linklater's case the teen comedy, and perfected it. Linklater doesn't parody it the way Tina Fey did in Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) or sentimentalize it the way George Lucas did in American Graffiti (1973), though the latter film, with its oldies soundtrack, comes closer to what Linklater accomplishes. But Linklater explicitly rejected the nostalgia of American Graffiti. His attitude is summed up by the character Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London), the quarterback who resists signing a no alcohol, no drugs pledge so he can stay on the team: "If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself." Linklater has said that he wanted to avoid the melodramatic excesses of teen films -- the car crashes and pregnancies -- and to reflect the reality of just "riding around and trying to look for something to do with the music cranked up." Roger Ebert and others have called Linklater an anthropologist. It's easy to see this in his best work, such as the 12-years-in-the-making Boyhood (2014) and the Céline-and-Jesse trilogy, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013), in which Linklater takes the time to get to know his characters and the way their experiences have shaped them at specific moments in their lives. But in Dazed and Confused we are offered only a few hours with a host of characters, on the last day of school in 1976 -- the summer that Linklater turned 16 -- and into the evening that follows. There is beer and pot and vandalism -- which gets the vandals shot at -- and some rather frustrated sexuality, but it never turns into anything worse than the seniors hazing the freshmen by paddling them, and the most sadistic of the seniors getting a bucket of paint dumped on his head in retribution. There is no plot as such, but who needs plot when you have a cast of formidable but then-unknown young actors, including two future Oscar winners, to create the characters? Ben Affleck evokes the sadism of O'Bannion, whose obsession with paddling freshmen begins to frighten even his fellow hazers. Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson, the twentysomething slacker who still hangs out with high school kids, is the very embodiment of the Peter Pan complex. He insists "You just gotta keep livin', man," but reveals the unacknowledged sadness within by saying, "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age." Linklater's genius is demonstrated in his ability to tell so much about so many in his huge cast of characters, from the completely baked Slater (Rory Cochrane) to the class nerds (Marissa Ribisi, Anthony Rapp, and Adam Goldberg), in such a short time.

Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932)

Victor Fleming is the credited director on two of the most beloved films in Hollywood history: Gone With the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). I say "credited director" because it's widely known that many other directorial hands were involved in both movies. Fleming took over the former only after George Cukor had been fired from it (reportedly on the insistence of Clark Gable). Some of Cukor's scenes remain in the film, and others were reportedly directed by Sam Wood and King Vidor, but GWTW is mostly the product of its obsessive, micromanaging producer, David O. Selznick. The Wizard, too, was primarily the work of its producers, Mervyn LeRoy and Arthur Freed; once again a director, Richard Thorpe, was fired from the film before Fleming was brought on, LeRoy directed some of the scenes, as did Cukor and Norman Taurog, and the Kansas scenes are well-known as having been directed by Vidor after Fleming went to work on GWTW.  So was Fleming more than just a replacement director or a fixer of movies gone astray? The best evidence that Fleming was a pretty good director on his own is Red Dust, a funny, sexy adventure romance that established Gable, especially when he was teamed with Jean Harlow, as a top box-office draw. Fleming demonstrates a sure hand with the material, keeping it from bogging down in melodramatic mush in the scenes between Gable and Mary Astor. The action is set in Hollywood's idea of a rubber plantation in French Indochina -- what Vietnam was called back when Americans were pronouncing Saigon as "SAY-gone," if the movie is to be trusted. Dennis Carson (Gable) manages the plantation when he is not being distracted by the arrival first of Vantine (Harlow), a shady lady, and then of Barbara Willis (Astor) and her husband, Gary (Gene Raymond), an engineer who has been sent to survey an expansion of the plantation. Carson and Vantine have been spending several weeks of unwedded bliss before the Willises arrive, but pretty soon he is making a play for Mrs. Willis, using the old trick of sending the husband off to survey the swamps while she remains behind. All of this is handled with delicious innuendo, possible only because the Production Code had not yet gone into effect: for example, the scene in which Vantine rinses off in a rain barrel while Carson looks on (and in), or the fact that Carson and Mrs. Willis's adultery goes unpunished except for a flesh wound. Both Harlow and Astor sashay around in improbable barely-there finery by Adrian. Fleming went on to make another pre-Code delight with Harlow, the screwball comedy Bombshell (1933), which alludes to the Hays Office's concerns about Red Dust. John Lee Mahin was screenwriter on both films, though some of the better lines in Red Dust were contributed by the uncredited Donald Ogden Stewart. The movie is marred only for today's viewers by some period racism: the colonialist attitude toward the native laborers as "lazy" and the giggling Chinese houseboy played by Willie Fung.

A Royal Affair (Nikolaj Arcel, 2012)

Mads Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander in A Royal Affair

Caroline Mathilde: Alicia Vikander
Johann Friedrich Struensee: Mads Mikkelsen
Christian VII: Mikkel Boe Følsgaard
Juliane Marie: Trine Dyrholm
Ove Høegh-Guldberg: David Dencik
Augusta, Princess of Wales: Harriet Walter

Director: Nikolaj Arcel
Screenplay: Rasmus Heisterberg, Nikolaj Arcel
Based on a novel by Bodil Steensen-Leth
Cinematography: Rasmus Videbæk
Production design: Niels Sejer
Costume design: Manon Rasmussen

A Royal Affair features a Swedish actress, Alicia Vikander, and a Danish actor, Mads Mikkelsen, who are already well known in the United States, but they almost get the film stolen out from under them by Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, a young Danish actor unknown on this side of the Atlantic. The film, as its title suggests, is a romantic historical drama. It's based on the story of the arranged marriage of Princess Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (a sister of George III) to King Christian VII of Denmark, and her affair with the king's adviser, the German physician Johann Friedrich Struensee, a story that, as the film is careful to point out, is an analog to the story of Guinevere, Lancelot, and Arthur. It's a rough analog, because unlike Arthur, Christian (Følsgaard), was quite mad. And except for cuckolding the king, Struensee (Mikkelsen) is really more Merlin than Lancelot to him -- a physician who tries to temper Christian's madness but also a political adviser determined to bring the ideas of Locke and Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers to feudal, priest-ridden Denmark. Director Nikolaj Arcel and co-screenwriter Rasmus Heisterberg naturally gravitate more toward the romance than the politics, using as their primary source a novel by Bodil Steensen-Leth that tells the story from the point of view of Caroline, who is as disgusted with her mad husband as he is indifferent to her. Vikander is splendid in the role as she goes from naive enthusiasm at the idea of marrying a king, even though she's never seen him before they're wed, to icy disillusionment and from indifference to Struensee to passion. Mikkelsen is a little stolid in his role: He communicates Struensee's passion for Enlightenment ideas better than he does his passion for Caroline. But Følsgaard has a grand time playing the mercurial Christian, who is sometimes plausibly sane and even likable, but mostly acts like a four-year-old in a grown man's body, with the additional danger of having the royal prerogative to do what he wants. Arcel does a good job of rising above the clichés of the genre, and cinematographer Rasmus Videbæk and production designer Niels Sejer do justice to the handsome settings, most of them in and around Prague.

Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1960)

Suddenly, Last Summer is a film with a rare distinction: Both Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor received Oscar nominations as best actress for their performances in it. Only two other movies have that distinction: Bette Davis and Anne Baxter were nominated as best actress for All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) and Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine for The Turning Point (Herbert Ross, 1977). That none of the six won may suggest that they split the votes: In the case of Hepburn and Taylor, the winner was Simone Signoret for Room at the Top (Jack Clayton). Pardon this excursion into Oscar trivia, but I think it says something about the film that these two performances are the most memorable thing about it -- and not always for the right reasons. The only other nomination it received was for the art direction and set decoration of Oliver Messel, William Kellner, and Scott Slimon. There were none for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's direction or for the screenplay credited to Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams. In fact, Williams had nothing to do with the film, and according to John Lahr's fine biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, he later called it "an abortion." It was Vidal, then, who accomplished the task of expanding Williams's one-act play into a two-hour film. What Vidal and Mankiewicz actually accomplish is a kind of parody of Williams's style at its most florid. They take the film beyond the play's single setting in the jungle-like hothouse and dilute and dissipate the intensity of the play's great scenes for Catherine and Mrs. Venable (Hepburn). Vidal himself regretted the decision to film the attack on Sebastian, which in the play is only described by Catherine, but it's likely that producer Sam Spiegel insisted on showing Taylor in her revealing white bathing suit.  Hepburn at this point in her career couldn't help being a collection of familiar mannerisms -- the haughty head-tilt, the reedy vocal production -- but she holds the screen like no other actress. Taylor, however, fails to evoke Catherine's vulnerability and she begins her great final narrative on too high a pitch, then has to sustain it to the point of shrillness. Montgomery Clift, as the doctor who tries to resist Mrs. Venable's attempt to eradicate Catherine's memories with a lobotomy, is clearly a damaged man, suffering the effects of alcohol and drugs after his near-fatal car crash in 1956, but Taylor was insistent on casting him, over Mankiewicz's objections, which continued well into filming. Taylor and Hepburn both mothered him, and they resented Mankiewicz's sometimes harsh treatment, to the point that, according to several accounts, when Hepburn finished her final scene she spat at the director. For a glimpse at what Suddenly, Last Summer can be in other hands, check out the 1993 BBC version of the play with Maggie Smith (an actress with her own distinct mannerisms who knows how to use them in service of the character) and an astonishing performance by Natasha Richardson.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

Marina Vlady in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

Juliette Jeanson: Marina Vlady
Marianne: Anny Duperey
Robert Jeanson: Roger Montseret
John Bogus, the American: Raoul Lévy
Roger: Jean Narboni

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Based on an article by Catherine Vimenet
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

At the beginning of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, we see a beautiful woman on the screen and the narrator (Jean-Luc Godard) whispers to us some things that he knows about her: that she is the actress Marina Vlady and that she is looking to the right. And yes, she is Marina Vlady, but in a moment the narrator is whispering again that she is Juliette Jeanson, which is the role Vlady is playing in the film. And yes, she is looking to the right, except that it's our right; she is looking to her left. So immediately Godard has launched us into some conundrums involving actor and role as well as subject and object. Godard will insistently whisper his comments on these and other epistemological questions throughout the film, as we watch Marina/Juliette move through a day in which Juliette takes her daughter to a very strange day care center, has her car washed, buys a dress, meets a friend, and turns a few tricks. We also watch the work at construction sites and contemplate the swirling foam on the surface of a cup of coffee. And throughout we are not only whispered to by Godard, but also hear Juliette's thoughts and the conversation of other characters on the nature and limitations of language and art and philosophy, as well as the psychic disturbance and political significance of the Vietnam War. For some, all this will constitute an hour and a half of pretentious and boring fiddle-faddle, the cinematic equivalent of the philosophical bull sessions we had in our college dorms. But let me hasten to defend the philosophical bull session: It stretched our minds at the right time in our lives, when we had the patience for ideas. Too few of us have the patience for ideas anymore, and that may be an incalculable loss. It's easy to mock films like 2 or 3 Things, to ignore their essential playfulness, their overturning of the complacent expectation that a movie should tell a story or excite or entertain us. But pause to gnaw on some of the some of the things that are said in the film, such as "To say that the limits of language, of my language, are those of the world, of my world, and that in speaking, I limit the world, I end it." Or contemplate the fact that the surface of a stirred cup of coffee looks like the spiraling of a galaxy. Or engage your eyes with cinematographer Raoul Coutard's widescreen compositions. Or question the film's obsession with commercialism, which echoes Andy Warhol's exaltation of soup cans and Brillo boxes into art. Or do anything else that the film prods you to do, including wonder why Juliette leads the life she does, and you've got at the heart of what makes Godard such a radically important filmmaker.

A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964)

Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, John Lennon in A Hard Day's Night

John: John Lennon
Paul: Paul McCartney
George: George Harrison
Ringo: Ringo Starr
Grandfather: Wilfred Brambell
Norm: Norman Rossington
Shake: John Junkin
TV Director: Victor Spinetti
Millie: Anna Quayle
Police Inspector: Deryck Guyler
Man on Train: Richard Vernon
Simon Marshall: Kenneth Haigh

Director: Richard Lester
Screenplay: Alun Owen
Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor
Film editor: John Jympson
Musical director: George Martin

I am the same age as Ringo Starr and was born only a little over a week before John Lennon, so I watch A Hard Day's Night with more than ordinary nostalgia, the kind that might make me say with Wordsworth, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!" except that I'd be lying. Still, if there was bliss to be had in that post-Kennedy-assassination, Goldwater-haunted, Cold War summer of '64, it was to be found in watching John, Paul, George, and Ringo larking about at the movies. It was a breath of optimism, a statement that youth could conquer the world. It didn't quite turn out that way, but it didn't for Wordsworth either: He was talking about the French Revolution, which proved not to be so heavenly. This is, of course, one of the great film musicals, packed with engaging songs. They may be more lightweight than the Beatles' later oeuvre, lifting the heart rather than stirring the imagination, but they're impossible to resist. It also slyly, cheekily makes its point about the generation the Beatles are trying to leave behind: the ineptly bullying managers, the fussy TV director, the marketing executive sure that he has a handle on What the Kids Want, the Blimpish man on the train who tells Ringo, "I fought the war for your sort." Ringo's reply: "I bet you're sorry you won." Celebrity is closing in on them, epitomized by the wonderfully elliptical dialogue in John's encounter with a woman who is sure that she recognizes him but then puts on her glasses and proclaims, "You don't look like him at all." John mutters, "She looks more like him than I do." Alun Owen's screenplay, written after hanging out with the Beatles, absorbing and borrowing their own jokes, was one of the two Oscar nominations the film received, along with George Martin's scoring. None of the songs, of course, were nominated. Neither were Richard Lester's direction, Gilbert Taylor's cinematography, or John Jympson's editing, all of which kept the film buoyant and fleet.

Theeb (Naji Abu Nowar, 2014)

Theeb (the name, we learn, means "wolf") is a young Bedouin boy whose older brother, Hussein, is called on to help an Englishman find his way to a well in the desert. The Englishman, a soldier, carries with him a wooden box that arouses Theeb's curiosity, though the Englishman angrily shoos him away every time Theeb tries to inspect it. It is 1916, and we recognize the box as a detonator and, especially if we've seen Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), realize that the soldier is delivering it to the Arabs rebelling against the Ottoman Empire. When Hussein leaves with the soldier, Theeb sneaks away to follow them; when he catches up with them, the soldier insists that they don't have time to return him to the tribe's camp but must continue to the well, where he is scheduled to meet up with his contacts. At this point, the conventional desert adventure movie might play off the relationship between the angry soldier and the curious boy, perhaps developing a friendship between them as they carry out the soldier's mission. But this isn't a conventional film. It's British-Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar's first feature film, and even though he describes it as a "Bedouin Western," it's grounded in actuality more than in Hollywood genre films. All of the actors except Jack Fox, who plays the soldier, are non-professionals.  Abu Nowar and co-screenwriter Bassel Ghandour spent a year living with and researching the Bedouins in Jordan, and choosing their cast, including the pre-adolescent Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat, who plays Theeb in an engagingly natural performance. The film takes place at the same time and in the same place as Lawrence of Arabia, and the cinematography of Wolfgang Thaler shows the influence of Freddie Young's work on that film. But Theeb stands Lean's celebrated film on its head by making the soldier a dispensable secondary character. The adventure is Theeb's, as he finds himself first alone in the desert and then with a companion he has good reason to hate. The result is a smart, unsentimental look at a place and way of life filled with hardships and perils. It received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for best foreign language film.

Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)

Heaven's Gate, for all its history as a calamitous flop, is not so much a bad movie as an inchoate one. You can see it go awry from the very beginning, when it tries to pass off the ornate architecture of Oxford University, where the scenes were filmed, for the spare red brick and granite of Harvard Yard. The film opens with a frenzied commencement for the Harvard class of 1870, which devolves into a swirling dance to the "Blue Danube" waltz. It's potentially an exhilarating opening, but it goes on and on and on, and serves almost no purpose in the rest of the film, except to introduce us to James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and his friend William C. Irvine (John Hurt), members of the graduating class. Then the film jumps 20 years, to Wyoming, where Averill is marshal of Johnson County. We never learn why Averill, who is a wealthy man, winds up in this hard and thankless job, living in near-squalor and hooked up with Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert), the madam of a brothel. As for Irvine, with whom Averill reunites during a stopover in Casper on his way back to Johnson County, he has somehow become involved with the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, a group of cattlemen led by the sinister Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) who are trying to keep immigrants from settling on the land they want to graze. It's clear that director-screenwriter Michael Cimino at some point wanted Irvine, who is presented as an effete intellectual, to serve as a kind of chorus, commenting on the action, and as a foil to the more robust Averill, but Irvine keeps getting lost in the turns of the narrative and the excesses of Cimino's ideas. (The shooting took so long that Hurt was able to film David Lynch's The Elephant Man during his down time from Heaven's Gate.) In Casper we also meet Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who works as a kind of hit man for the cattlemen. But Champion is also a friend of Averill's and a rival of his for the attentions of Ella. There is the core of a more conventional Western in the relationships among these characters, but Cimino isn't interested in being conventional. What he is interested in are the elaborate set pieces like the waltz scene, a later scene with dozens of couples on roller skates, enormous throngs of extras milling through the streets of Casper, crowds of immigrants making their way to Johnson County, and battle scenes in which the citizens of the Johnson County settlement retaliate against the troops led by Canton that are determined to exterminate them. There are pauses in the hullabaloo for quieter scenes designed to work out the triangle formed by Averill, Champion, and Ella, but their characters are so lightly sketched in that we don't have much sense of the motives behind their sometimes enigmatic actions. And yet, it's a somehow maddeningly watchable film, thanks in large part to the often breathtaking cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, a committed performance by Huppert, the Oscar-nominated sets of Tambi Larsen and James L. Berkey, and yes, the sheer extravagance of what Cimino throws onto the screen. Without a plausible screenplay it could never have been a good film, but occasionally you can see how it might have been a great one.

Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015)

Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt in Sicario

Kate Macer: Emily Blunt
Alejandro: Benicio Del Toro
Matt Graver: Josh Brolin
Dave Jennings: Victor Garber
Ted: Jon Bernthal
Reggie Wayne: Daniel Kaluuya
Steve Foring: Jeffrey Donovan
Manuel Diaz: Bernardo Saracino
Silvio: Maximiliano Hernández

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Screenplay: Taylor Sheridan
Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Production design: Patrice Vermette
Film editing: Joe Walker
Music: Jóhann Jóhannson

Sicario is a suspenseful, well-directed, superbly acted, and finely photographed film whose chief flaw is that it can't decide between what it needs to be, an action thriller, and what it wants to be, a biting commentary on the international social and political consequences of the War on Drugs. As the latter, Sicario could almost be a postscript to Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), to the point that it casts Benicio Del Toro, who won an Oscar for the earlier film, in the key role of Alejandro, a CIA operative with a personal agenda. Emily Blunt, an actress who seems to be able to do anything (she's been cast as Mary Poppins in a forthcoming sequel), plays Kate, a young FBI agent whom we first see leading a SWAT raid on a house in Chandler, Ariz., that is suspected of being a link to a Mexican drug cartel. Not only is the house full of dozens of corpses, an outlying building explodes when agents try to open a locked trap door, killing two of them. Because of her work on the raid, Kate is offered an assignment on a special team to capture Manuel Diaz, the man responsible for the bombing. The operation is headed by Matt Graver, a jokey, casual, swaggering type whom Kate's partner, Reggie, mistrusts immediately. Kate herself gets stonewalled when she tries to get more details about their mission, and even what part of the government Graver and his mysterious, taciturn partner, Alejandro, work for. It's the CIA, of course, and Kate's presence on the mission is largely to provide an excuse for the presence of the agency on this side of the border, where it's not supposed to operate unless it's working with domestic law enforcement. Their first mission, in fact, is across the border, to Juárez, where they are to pick up an associate of Diaz's who has been captured and is being extradited. Much of this trip is seen from the air: We watch the line of SUV's, looking from above like large black beetles, that carry the members of the task force across the border, smoothly gliding around the traffic backed up at the checkpoint and into the city. It's on the return trip that they encounter a bottleneck: a staged traffic accident strands the convoy in traffic, where they are ambushed by cartel operatives trying to prevent the captured man from testifying. Having survived this encounter, Kate is naturally more determined than ever to get some answers to her questions about the real nature of the mission and the exact roles being played by Graver and Alejandro in it, but she will find that the more she knows, the more danger she is in. Intercut with Kate's story are vignettes of the life of Silvio, a Juárez cop, and his wife and young son. Director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan keep the significance of these scenes from us until they finally merge with the principal plotline toward the end of the film. It does not end well, of course. Kate has a disillusioning revelation about the purpose of the mission that has put her in harm's way several times, and although the downer ending of the film has an impact of its own when it comes to social and political commentary, it clashes oddly with the generic thriller medium in which it's set. But Villeneuve's direction serves both elements of the film well, Roger Deakins's cinematography received a well-deserved Oscar nomination, and Joe Walker's film editing probably deserved one.

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.