There's a fascinating exchange in Altman's movie The Player where the vunderkind offers the opinion that the studios can save money by not hiring writers. All they have to do is apply newspaper headlines to the process and the scripts will write themselves. Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) quips, "I was just thinking, if we could get rid of the actors and directors, you really might have something."
Even though Mill intends that as a devastating rejoinder to the pompous idiot he is addressing, in a way that is kind of what Altman does do in his movies. Sure, he litters them with stars, but when you have twenty to thirty stars in a movie, there are no stars because no one can upstage anyone else.
Executing that working philosophy exemplifies taking movies where they had heretofore never gone. So what's the next step? It's been forty odd years. You'd think we'd have something better to show for it than that fucking Avatar. Is it possible to make a "real" movie--meaning one that people like that is smart and imaginatively innovative?
It used to happen all the time. That period of time was called the first half of the 1970s. I'll go far out on a fragile limb here and even opine that very little of significance has happened cinematically since the release of Jaws in 1975. The crystallization of the blockbuster drove a stake through the heart of creativity in contemporary filmmaking. Obviously, some exceptions have presented themselves, but those exceptions were almost exclusively committed by directors who had established their cache prior to 1975. Kurosawa, Coppola, Kubrick, Godard, Woody Allen and Robert Altman: those are the fellows who exhibited the most post-Jaws imagination and each of them had made a well-deserved reputation for doing what he does best before 1975. You can even throw Scorsese into that mix if that makes things more palpable.
Technology has played the largest role in the de-emphasis of creative imagination--just as it always has. When movie production evolved from silent to talkies, everyone thought that the quality of films would de facto rocket through the stratosphere and yet it was years before any "new" movie surpassed Birth of a Nation, City Lights, or Metropolis.
This same working philosophy applies in endeavors unrelated to movie making. I had an interesting conversation this very day with a man quite knowledgeable about various aspects of internet marketing. This tremendously nice person was able to bandy about all the terminology in a pleasant and cogent manner, making his business needs quite clear to me in a brief period of time. At first I sort of rolled back in my seat, marveling at his mastery of some fairly complex concepts. And then I was struck out of the blue sky by how he had not managed to integrate what he knew into anything useful, much less enjoyable. While I am not interested in picking on my new friend, I have to admit that in the end I was nonplussed. He has the same goals that most people have: he wants to use the internet to make a lot of money or to at least make a reasoned shot at it. To accomplish this, he has obviously attended his share of webinars and consulted with all manner of charlatan and scalawag. And while he dazzled me with his fluency in the usage of Search Engine Optimization, keyword niches and anchor text, I have to confess that what I would have preferred to have heard him say was: "I'd like you to build a website that accomplishes its purpose in a way that no other website has ever been used before. I'd like it to be aesthetically appealing, yet persuasive through its use of the medium itself, rather than with an emphasis on simulating organic processes." That would have been a fun conversation.
There's nothing inherently stultifying about technological changes. The problem arises when we enter an Alvin Toffler type of fascination with gadgetry and lose sight of what it is that people actually want. Some folks in the ironically titled entertainment industry are too busy generating false needs for the audiences to suffer than to put effort into using their real imaginations to tell a story or stories in a way that is fresh. Sequels, pre-quels, remakes, franchises: these are the money words that Hollywood loves. Why bother thinking when all we have to do is throw Bruce Willis into a movie and give him a bazooka?
Even two directors I like--Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino--often take the hard-easy way out by wallowing their audiences in ponds of violence rather than considering that there are things more ghastly than the reality of physical pain or more glorious than the reflection of an exposed breast in the gleam of a sword.
So, yes, we are still waiting for Altman's prediction. Despite all the evidence of the last forty years to the contrary, we remain optimistic. With all the great minds around, how can we fail?
THE LATE SHOW
When I checked out the guide and saw that The Late Show (1977) was coming on in half an hour, I skipped across the room with my arms in the air and my feet a-sailing. I had not seen this wonderful Robert Benton-directed Robert Altman-produced movie since the day it hit the theater in Huntington, West Virginia. I left the movies that day feeling I had just watched a terrific movie, a movie that captured the strange spirit of odd friendships. It was also the first time I can remember thinking that a movie's casting has more power than its plot.
So there it was on TV tonight. Lisa Ann heated the cheese and I pulled out the chips and I loved every minute of it. Lisa Ann turned to me when the closing credits were rolling and said, "That was sort of a Phil Mershon movie, wasn't it?"
I didn't say anything for a few seconds. I recognized that I had not been insulted. But I wasn't clear on exactly what she meant.
She said, "It was cute."
"Cute" is one of those words people use when they try to make you feel better about the fact that they do not want to sleep with you. "Oh, you are so cute. But, no, it just wouldn't feel right."
"It's your kind of humor," she clarified. "I can see why you like it."
Well, hell. She nailed me. It is my kind of movie. If I made a list of my one hundred favorite films, I would expect that at least ninety of them would have friendship as a theme. If you are honest with yourself, the same is true for you.
The Late Show would be on my version of that list.
Citizen Kane is not just a movie about Patty Hearts' grandfather; it is about friendship, or the horror of its absence. Casablanca is more than a love story and Nazis; it's also about the grudging admiration Rick has for Victor Laslo. MASH is very much about friendships that would never have happened had the participants not been dragged into an idiotic war. Goodfellas is less a movie about gangsters than it is a movie about friendships betrayed. Name any movie that has stuck with you over the decades and I will bet that some type of strange friendship is at that movie's heart.
Strange friendships are right up director Robert Benton's alley. The first movie he wrote was 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, the two main characters of which, it will be recalled, weren't all that much in the lover department, but her desire to reinvent herself was the impetus for the friendship between the two. Five years later, Benton was back with Bad Company, a civil war era film about draft resisters who team up for an unlikely life of armed robbery. But with the script for The Late Show, bolstered by Altman's genius in casting Lily Tomlin and Art Carney in the leads, Benton has earned his way into heaven. As Margo, Lily Tomlin is a little bit goofy, a little bit astrological, and very edgy. As Ira, Art Carney is cagey, weather-worn, and lonely as an abandoned hound dog. Even within the realm of the 1940s detective noir to which this movie pays considerable homage, we recognize right away that their relationship will be an unusual one.
Someone has kidnapped Margo's cat. In fact, the cat is being held for ransom by someone to whom Margo owes money. She is introduced to Ira at a cemetery where he is sending off one of his best friends, another private detective named Harry. Margo wants Ira to find her cat. Ira is offended at the suggestion. He may be old, he may be living in a modest home, he may be lonely, but he has not degenerated to the point where he tracks down missing felines.
Ira discovers that the recently departed Harry was murdered while trying to do that very thing.
The rest of the plot runs amok. And that is not a criticism. The story has a kind of logic--just one that's nearly impossible to follow. Besides, the plot doesn't matter.
What matters is the way Margo and Ira come to care about one another. Being young and feisty, she gets on Ira's nerves. For instance, when she mentions to him that she had to sell some marijuana to pay his fee, he asks, "How long have you been a pusher?"
When Ira has to go into a room that will probably reveal something they don't want to see, Margo, who has actress among many other jobs on her resume, panics. Ira says, "You're an actress, right? Well, act calm."
This is not The Bickersons. These two people are together in a somewhat contrived series of situations and just try to make the most of it. Margo does not want to fence stolen merchandise or sell pot to make ends meet, but she can't pay her bills on the money she makes as an actor, an agent, a talent manager, or any of the other careers she admittedly does not have the self-discipline to do well. When she suggests to Ira that he take the vacant apartment next door to her because they work so well together, we recognize that both of them have an emptiness they would love the other to fill and when he turns her down because he has grown so accustomed to his life of quiet desperation, we actually ache for the both of them.
Look, there was a time in my life, somewhere around the time when I first saw this movie, that I harbored a secret wish that by the time I reached Carney's age, I would be just like his character in this movie. So, yes, as usual, Lisa Ann was correct. It is a Phil Mershon kind of film, at least to the extent that nuggets remain of the person I was then. As the Black Panthers used to say, "The more things remain the same, the more they remain the same."
If you have read this far, then just maybe you have some of that Art Carney or Lily Tomlin in you as well. Hey, different generations have different heroes. But just as the great actors of my parents' generation transcended typecasting--it's a straight line between, say, Humphrey Bogart and Orson Welles to George C Scott and Peter Sellers--so do two actors most celebrated for their comedic skills make those legends irrelevant in this movie. Tomlin worked the camera as well as anyone who ever stood in front of one and not once yielded to any impulses to become too endearing or sympathetic. The same with Carney: every time our feelings shift from empathy to sympathy, he comes out with guns a-blazing and makes us reevaluate what we think we know.
My advice? Watch this movie with someone who will tell you afterwards that this is your kind of movie.
So there it was on TV tonight. Lisa Ann heated the cheese and I pulled out the chips and I loved every minute of it. Lisa Ann turned to me when the closing credits were rolling and said, "That was sort of a Phil Mershon movie, wasn't it?"
I didn't say anything for a few seconds. I recognized that I had not been insulted. But I wasn't clear on exactly what she meant.
She said, "It was cute."
"Cute" is one of those words people use when they try to make you feel better about the fact that they do not want to sleep with you. "Oh, you are so cute. But, no, it just wouldn't feel right."
"It's your kind of humor," she clarified. "I can see why you like it."
Well, hell. She nailed me. It is my kind of movie. If I made a list of my one hundred favorite films, I would expect that at least ninety of them would have friendship as a theme. If you are honest with yourself, the same is true for you.
The Late Show would be on my version of that list.
Citizen Kane is not just a movie about Patty Hearts' grandfather; it is about friendship, or the horror of its absence. Casablanca is more than a love story and Nazis; it's also about the grudging admiration Rick has for Victor Laslo. MASH is very much about friendships that would never have happened had the participants not been dragged into an idiotic war. Goodfellas is less a movie about gangsters than it is a movie about friendships betrayed. Name any movie that has stuck with you over the decades and I will bet that some type of strange friendship is at that movie's heart.
Strange friendships are right up director Robert Benton's alley. The first movie he wrote was 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, the two main characters of which, it will be recalled, weren't all that much in the lover department, but her desire to reinvent herself was the impetus for the friendship between the two. Five years later, Benton was back with Bad Company, a civil war era film about draft resisters who team up for an unlikely life of armed robbery. But with the script for The Late Show, bolstered by Altman's genius in casting Lily Tomlin and Art Carney in the leads, Benton has earned his way into heaven. As Margo, Lily Tomlin is a little bit goofy, a little bit astrological, and very edgy. As Ira, Art Carney is cagey, weather-worn, and lonely as an abandoned hound dog. Even within the realm of the 1940s detective noir to which this movie pays considerable homage, we recognize right away that their relationship will be an unusual one.
Someone has kidnapped Margo's cat. In fact, the cat is being held for ransom by someone to whom Margo owes money. She is introduced to Ira at a cemetery where he is sending off one of his best friends, another private detective named Harry. Margo wants Ira to find her cat. Ira is offended at the suggestion. He may be old, he may be living in a modest home, he may be lonely, but he has not degenerated to the point where he tracks down missing felines.
Ira discovers that the recently departed Harry was murdered while trying to do that very thing.
The rest of the plot runs amok. And that is not a criticism. The story has a kind of logic--just one that's nearly impossible to follow. Besides, the plot doesn't matter.
What matters is the way Margo and Ira come to care about one another. Being young and feisty, she gets on Ira's nerves. For instance, when she mentions to him that she had to sell some marijuana to pay his fee, he asks, "How long have you been a pusher?"
When Ira has to go into a room that will probably reveal something they don't want to see, Margo, who has actress among many other jobs on her resume, panics. Ira says, "You're an actress, right? Well, act calm."
This is not The Bickersons. These two people are together in a somewhat contrived series of situations and just try to make the most of it. Margo does not want to fence stolen merchandise or sell pot to make ends meet, but she can't pay her bills on the money she makes as an actor, an agent, a talent manager, or any of the other careers she admittedly does not have the self-discipline to do well. When she suggests to Ira that he take the vacant apartment next door to her because they work so well together, we recognize that both of them have an emptiness they would love the other to fill and when he turns her down because he has grown so accustomed to his life of quiet desperation, we actually ache for the both of them.
Look, there was a time in my life, somewhere around the time when I first saw this movie, that I harbored a secret wish that by the time I reached Carney's age, I would be just like his character in this movie. So, yes, as usual, Lisa Ann was correct. It is a Phil Mershon kind of film, at least to the extent that nuggets remain of the person I was then. As the Black Panthers used to say, "The more things remain the same, the more they remain the same."
If you have read this far, then just maybe you have some of that Art Carney or Lily Tomlin in you as well. Hey, different generations have different heroes. But just as the great actors of my parents' generation transcended typecasting--it's a straight line between, say, Humphrey Bogart and Orson Welles to George C Scott and Peter Sellers--so do two actors most celebrated for their comedic skills make those legends irrelevant in this movie. Tomlin worked the camera as well as anyone who ever stood in front of one and not once yielded to any impulses to become too endearing or sympathetic. The same with Carney: every time our feelings shift from empathy to sympathy, he comes out with guns a-blazing and makes us reevaluate what we think we know.
My advice? Watch this movie with someone who will tell you afterwards that this is your kind of movie.
THE LONG GOODBYE
I can be bought. Let there be no doubt. But my price for saying nice things about you in print comes at a very high cost. What it would take to get me to say something favorable about someone in the book publishing industry or elsewhere would be to receive a book called Black Amazon of Mars: and Other Tales From the Pulps, an anthology of writings by one of the greatest writers whose words I have had the pleasure to digest: Leigh Brackett.
Those words first came to me in a college course, of all the unlikely places. It was in Dr. Robert Gerke's Science Fiction class back at my beloved Marshall University in the late 1970s that I read "The Jewel of Bas" and from whence forever my opinion of all those science fiction nerds did change. Bob Gerke and I had a custom of amusing one another by smoking Camels in his office while belaboring pointless subjects such as whether Anthony Burgess could be thought of as an sf writer, would it be fun to actually have dinner with Kurt Vonnegut, and the suggestion that just possibly George Orwell had known and written about everything that needed to be known, so why the hell even bother with anything else? One day I punctuated one of my pathetic smoke rings with the question, "Who is this Leigh Brackett, anyway? Why isn't she on the cover of Time magazine? These stories of hers are incredible!"
"Do you know your Raymond Chandler?" he asked.
That was such a cool way to ask the question, I thought. It was the way a practicing southern attorney might have asked the jurors in a murder trial, "Do ya know your Bible?"
"Yeah, I know Chandler. Detective fiction. Philip Marlowe."
Bob shook his head and ground out a Camel. "The Shakespeare of the modern detective story. He wrote The Big Sleep. Hollywood made it a film. Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay with a little help from William Faulkner. Leigh Brackett is one of the best. That was back in the forties. You ever hear of a little thing called The Empire Strikes Back?"
"I don't watch Stars Wars movies."
"Why not? Don't be a snob, Mersh. The trash aesthetic has elevated more people than Milton, I assure you."
This from the man who taught Chaucer in Middle English.
"Well, Leigh Brackett wrote The Empire Strikes Back. In the old days she turned out horror films, westerns such as Rio Bravo, all kinds of movies, while still writing her stories. They called her the queen of the space opera, but as we have seen, she was far more than that. What you really should do, if you want to have a good time, is take some young lady to go see The Long Goodbye. The people who put together the movie schedule here are going to run it later this month. Robert Altman is the director. Elliott Gould plays Marlowe, or The Marlboro Man, as one of the characters calls him. It's brilliant."
Young ladies were not exactly lining up to accompany me to the movies in those days, so I went stag and had to agree with Bob Gerke: it was brilliant.
The actual movie added and subtracted a few items from the Leigh Brackett script, but you can read the original here and decide for yourself: Leigh Brackett Screenplay for The Long Goodbye. You will learn a lot from reading this.
One of the things you will not necessarily learn from either the screenplay or the movie that eventually appeared, is how the $350,000 made it's way back to gangster Marty Augustine, but what you will discover for certain is that Raymond Chandler, Leigh Backett and Robert Altman cared very much about friendship.
They knew how to express that concern.
The opening scene of the movie has detective Marlowe waking up at 3AM because his cat is hungry. The cat nudges him and he crawls out of bed with some reluctance but with a manner that convinces us he has been in this situation before tonight. Seeing that he is out of Coury Brand Cat Food, Marlowe fries some scrambled eggs and serves them to the cat. The feline is not impressed. Undeterred, Marlowe leaves his apartment to go to the all-night grocery to fetch some cat food. As he leaves, one of his neighbors, who likes to do yoga sans clothing while inhaling various mind-altering substances with her like-minded girlfriends, asks him if he will pick her up two boxes of brownie mix. He says he will. And he does. But the store is out of Coury Brand Cat Food, so he settles for a different brand. Knowing the cat is nobody's fool, Marlowe sneaks into the kitchen, fishes an old empty Coury can out of the trash, and shoves the faux cat food into the can. He lets tabby into the kitchen and makes a big production about how this is the real stuff, see, I'm taking it out of the can and placing it in your dish--and the cat is not fooled. From that one scene we learn that the cat kows things about people that Marlowe has yet to understand.
Both Elliott Gould and the cat deserved major award recognition for their performances together. If acting is at least in part about reacting, these two characters reacting to one another is one of the finest extended moments in motion picture history.
Elliott Gould, despite having been one of the most in-demand actors of the very early 1970s, had perhaps suffered from some overexposure by 1973, when this picture was released, and from interviews I've read, it appears he was relieved to get the job. He had already set the world on fire by playing Trapper John in Altman's MASH. After turning down a star role in the same director's McCabe and Mrs Miller, Gould accepted roles he wanted in critical faves and commercial busts such as Little Murders and Getting Straight. Even though he would go on to have parts in three more Altman films and was never out of work for long, The Long Goodbye was his last major role on the big screen.
With Brackett's words, Altman's direction and his own brilliance in front of the camera, Elliott Gould shines darkly in one of the most under-celebrated movies of the ages.
If by any chance my saying that Gould is magnificent is in and of itself insufficient to get you to watch this classic movie, then I will add that the support cast includes Sterling Hayden as a self-destructive writer type, probably based to an extent on Hemmingway, Henry Gibson as the notorious Dr. Verringer (the Hollywood equivalent of a Doctor Feelgood), David "Kung-Fu" Carradine as a long-winded storytelling convict, and, even though he is uncredited, I have it on reasonable authority that one of the gangster's henchmen is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
No one will tell me who played the cat.
It has been written elsewhere that in this movie, private eye Philip Marlowe goes to sleep a 1953 detective and wakes up in a 1973 world, with all the shallow narcissism that concept implies. Perhaps that is the reason for one of the most substantial differences between the original Chandler novel and the finished movie. In the former, Terry Lennox, a friend of Marlowe's, is a real friend: fascinating, sympathetic and symbiotic. In the movie, he is a fake friend: boring, pompous and parasitic--although Marlowe does not accept this until deep into the story.
And so this movie is about the nature of the longing for friendship. It is about the nature of the longing for friendship in Los Angeles, specifically Hollywood. It's some Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), a little Warren Zevon, a bit of the audience from "Let's Make a Deal." But mostly it is the invincible threesome of Brackett, Altman and Gould. And while the director made sure the soundtrack included as many different versions of the title song as possible, it was the closing credits tune that actually tells the story: "Hooray for Hollywood," by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting:
Hooray for Hollywood That screwy ballyhooey Hollywood Where any office boy or young mechanic can be a panic With just a good looking pan And any barmaid can be a star maid If she dances with or without a fan Hooray for Hollywood, Where you're terrific if you're even good Where anyone at all from Shirley Temple to Aimee Semple Is equally understood Go out and try your luck, you might be Donald Duck Hooray for Hollywood Hooray for Hollywood That phoney super-Coney Hollywood They come from Chillicothes and Paducas with their bazookas To get their names up in lights All armed with photos from local rotos With their hair in ribbon and legs in tights Hooray for Hollywood You may be homely in your neighbourhood But if you think that you can be an actor, see Mr. Factor He'll make a monkey look good Within a half an hour you'll look like Tyrone Power Hooray for Hollywood.
I can be bought. Let there be no doubt. But my price for saying nice things about you in print comes at a very high cost. What it would take to get me to say something favorable about someone in the book publishing industry or elsewhere would be to receive a book called Black Amazon of Mars: and Other Tales From the Pulps, an anthology of writings by one of the greatest writers whose words I have had the pleasure to digest: Leigh Brackett.
Those words first came to me in a college course, of all the unlikely places. It was in Dr. Robert Gerke's Science Fiction class back at my beloved Marshall University in the late 1970s that I read "The Jewel of Bas" and from whence forever my opinion of all those science fiction nerds did change. Bob Gerke and I had a custom of amusing one another by smoking Camels in his office while belaboring pointless subjects such as whether Anthony Burgess could be thought of as an sf writer, would it be fun to actually have dinner with Kurt Vonnegut, and the suggestion that just possibly George Orwell had known and written about everything that needed to be known, so why the hell even bother with anything else? One day I punctuated one of my pathetic smoke rings with the question, "Who is this Leigh Brackett, anyway? Why isn't she on the cover of Time magazine? These stories of hers are incredible!"
"Do you know your Raymond Chandler?" he asked.
That was such a cool way to ask the question, I thought. It was the way a practicing southern attorney might have asked the jurors in a murder trial, "Do ya know your Bible?"
"Yeah, I know Chandler. Detective fiction. Philip Marlowe."
Bob shook his head and ground out a Camel. "The Shakespeare of the modern detective story. He wrote The Big Sleep. Hollywood made it a film. Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay with a little help from William Faulkner. Leigh Brackett is one of the best. That was back in the forties. You ever hear of a little thing called The Empire Strikes Back?"
"I don't watch Stars Wars movies."
"Why not? Don't be a snob, Mersh. The trash aesthetic has elevated more people than Milton, I assure you."
This from the man who taught Chaucer in Middle English.
"Well, Leigh Brackett wrote The Empire Strikes Back. In the old days she turned out horror films, westerns such as Rio Bravo, all kinds of movies, while still writing her stories. They called her the queen of the space opera, but as we have seen, she was far more than that. What you really should do, if you want to have a good time, is take some young lady to go see The Long Goodbye. The people who put together the movie schedule here are going to run it later this month. Robert Altman is the director. Elliott Gould plays Marlowe, or The Marlboro Man, as one of the characters calls him. It's brilliant."
Young ladies were not exactly lining up to accompany me to the movies in those days, so I went stag and had to agree with Bob Gerke: it was brilliant.
The actual movie added and subtracted a few items from the Leigh Brackett script, but you can read the original here and decide for yourself: Leigh Brackett Screenplay for The Long Goodbye. You will learn a lot from reading this.
One of the things you will not necessarily learn from either the screenplay or the movie that eventually appeared, is how the $350,000 made it's way back to gangster Marty Augustine, but what you will discover for certain is that Raymond Chandler, Leigh Backett and Robert Altman cared very much about friendship.
They knew how to express that concern.
The opening scene of the movie has detective Marlowe waking up at 3AM because his cat is hungry. The cat nudges him and he crawls out of bed with some reluctance but with a manner that convinces us he has been in this situation before tonight. Seeing that he is out of Coury Brand Cat Food, Marlowe fries some scrambled eggs and serves them to the cat. The feline is not impressed. Undeterred, Marlowe leaves his apartment to go to the all-night grocery to fetch some cat food. As he leaves, one of his neighbors, who likes to do yoga sans clothing while inhaling various mind-altering substances with her like-minded girlfriends, asks him if he will pick her up two boxes of brownie mix. He says he will. And he does. But the store is out of Coury Brand Cat Food, so he settles for a different brand. Knowing the cat is nobody's fool, Marlowe sneaks into the kitchen, fishes an old empty Coury can out of the trash, and shoves the faux cat food into the can. He lets tabby into the kitchen and makes a big production about how this is the real stuff, see, I'm taking it out of the can and placing it in your dish--and the cat is not fooled. From that one scene we learn that the cat kows things about people that Marlowe has yet to understand.
Both Elliott Gould and the cat deserved major award recognition for their performances together. If acting is at least in part about reacting, these two characters reacting to one another is one of the finest extended moments in motion picture history.
Elliott Gould, despite having been one of the most in-demand actors of the very early 1970s, had perhaps suffered from some overexposure by 1973, when this picture was released, and from interviews I've read, it appears he was relieved to get the job. He had already set the world on fire by playing Trapper John in Altman's MASH. After turning down a star role in the same director's McCabe and Mrs Miller, Gould accepted roles he wanted in critical faves and commercial busts such as Little Murders and Getting Straight. Even though he would go on to have parts in three more Altman films and was never out of work for long, The Long Goodbye was his last major role on the big screen.
With Brackett's words, Altman's direction and his own brilliance in front of the camera, Elliott Gould shines darkly in one of the most under-celebrated movies of the ages.
If by any chance my saying that Gould is magnificent is in and of itself insufficient to get you to watch this classic movie, then I will add that the support cast includes Sterling Hayden as a self-destructive writer type, probably based to an extent on Hemmingway, Henry Gibson as the notorious Dr. Verringer (the Hollywood equivalent of a Doctor Feelgood), David "Kung-Fu" Carradine as a long-winded storytelling convict, and, even though he is uncredited, I have it on reasonable authority that one of the gangster's henchmen is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
No one will tell me who played the cat.
It has been written elsewhere that in this movie, private eye Philip Marlowe goes to sleep a 1953 detective and wakes up in a 1973 world, with all the shallow narcissism that concept implies. Perhaps that is the reason for one of the most substantial differences between the original Chandler novel and the finished movie. In the former, Terry Lennox, a friend of Marlowe's, is a real friend: fascinating, sympathetic and symbiotic. In the movie, he is a fake friend: boring, pompous and parasitic--although Marlowe does not accept this until deep into the story.
And so this movie is about the nature of the longing for friendship. It is about the nature of the longing for friendship in Los Angeles, specifically Hollywood. It's some Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), a little Warren Zevon, a bit of the audience from "Let's Make a Deal." But mostly it is the invincible threesome of Brackett, Altman and Gould. And while the director made sure the soundtrack included as many different versions of the title song as possible, it was the closing credits tune that actually tells the story: "Hooray for Hollywood," by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting:
Hooray for Hollywood That screwy ballyhooey Hollywood Where any office boy or young mechanic can be a panic With just a good looking pan And any barmaid can be a star maid If she dances with or without a fan Hooray for Hollywood, Where you're terrific if you're even good Where anyone at all from Shirley Temple to Aimee Semple Is equally understood Go out and try your luck, you might be Donald Duck Hooray for Hollywood Hooray for Hollywood That phoney super-Coney Hollywood They come from Chillicothes and Paducas with their bazookas To get their names up in lights All armed with photos from local rotos With their hair in ribbon and legs in tights Hooray for Hollywood You may be homely in your neighbourhood But if you think that you can be an actor, see Mr. Factor He'll make a monkey look good Within a half an hour you'll look like Tyrone Power Hooray for Hollywood.
COOKIE'S FORTUNE
Drama, according to my high school junior English teacher, is conflict. These days, of course, man against man is the most common type, although on occasion we encounter vampire against man, sinister outer space zombie strippers against man, and even the infrequent subhuman man against man. There are even the often tantalizing cases of inner man against outer man. In a Robert Altman movie experience, however, the nature of the conflict is often more linear, more multi-dimensional, perhaps even more cosmic. I suspect that must be one powerhouse reason why many viewers, including myself, are delighted to disregard the lesser Altman trademarks, such as the humor being cued by strands of music, or the invariable quiet weirdness of some of the more feminine characters, and instead we just lay back and allow our minds to groove on the strands of humanity amid the characterizations. Altman's genius (as tired and unworthy an appellation to burden a genius with as can be found) rests in large part upon his ability to get relatively large casts of characters to form an individuality within a collective sameness. In M*A*S*H we saw often outrageous--yet somehow appropriate--individuality within the framework of an Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. In Nashville, twenty-four characters traversed a series of stages, each of whom screaming--however quietly or shrilly--his or her own version of the year in which they lived within the framework of the title city's musical establishment. In The Player, the framework was a Hollywood movie studio, while the individuals staying alive within it were decision makers, writers, and an assortment of clerical and support staff.
In Cookie's Fortune (1999), scenarist Anne Rapp and director Robert Altman venture into the micro-cosmic village of Holly Springs, Mississippi, a town with no particular central leadership, yet one populated with infinitely believable people who share connections often in spite of themselves. Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) lost her husband Buck two years prior and has never spent a day since without wishing he were still there with her in that big old house. She possesses considerable verbal skill, suggesting an education worthy of her presumed financial status. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close) is Cookie's sister, cousin, niece--it's often hard to be sure which, but that's part of the plot--something of a sympathetic yet hatefully disconnected case who dominates everyone merely because she intuits that the people she rules would run into stone walls without her constant guidance. Her sister (or daughter, or niece--again, it services the plot) Cora Duvall (Julianne Moore) remains Camille's puppet to the end, even when an ironic twist blows apart any hope Camille grasps of having the freedom she herself demands. In one especially humorous scene, Cora has been told to "tick a lock" by Camille and cannot even bring herself to open her mouth to speak when a Sheriff's Deputy tries to make small talk about the shooting death of Cookie.
Most everybody in town liked Cookie very much. After all, she was old, a bit on the decrepit side, but not without charm. She smoked a series of lady's pipes, kept her late-husband's extensive gun collection in a cabinet that wouldn't quite close, and had one hell of a nice garden through which she kept an eye on the precocious neighbor boy who was always stealing her croquet balls.
We know where we are throughout every instant of this movie, a fact that reinforces the often fictionalized feel of the small southern fishing town. From the first shots of the crumbled tin walls that house the local bar to the rapturous holiness of deputies talking about fishing, from the absurdity of the Church's Easter play being Salome (written, the marque informs us, by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon) to Manny (Lyle Lovett) with his outre creepy lust for Emma (Liv Tyler) (Cora's daughter, sister, niece, etc), and especially from Lester (Ned Beatty) second in command in the Sheriff's office and his peaceful relationship with Willis Richland (Charles S. Dutton). These two men amplify every scene they are in together, even when the presence of one is only referenced by the other, as when Willis finds himself charged with Cookie's murder and Lester states with calm certainty that he is innocent because "I've gone fishing with the man."
Most of us--especially those who grew up in small towns and moved to bigger cities--want very much to believe that this is pretty much the way things play out in small towns with a major industry being the selling of catfish. The authenticity is not for one second in question here, even as we watch with mounting anger as Camille violates the sanctity of Cookie's suicide by poking her body with a jabbing finger, rearranging the death scene to look like a murder, and insisting that respectable people do not commit suicide. The irony of this and other magnificently staged scenes is so multi-tiered that it may take some serious afterthought to catch them all. Here's Camille, the most burlesque version of the southern belle since Scarlett O'Hare, attempting to redefine protocol into every place she marches her self-important bodice. If her own sense of propriety requires that Willis be charged with the murder of his friend (and possible relative), then so be it. If her version of comfort dictates that Emma has to go back to living in a van instead of in a big old roomy house, that must be God's will. And if Cookie's will needs to be destroyed to safeguard her own concept of an appropriate lifestyle denied her by her own mother, well then it might have behooved her to find that last will and testament in the cookie jar before the lawyer, Jack Palmer (Donald Moffat) beat her to it. It would be stupid to ignore the theme of miscegenation in this movie. Altman sets us up from the beginning to misinterpret the relationship Willis has with almost everyone, but especially with Cookie. When we meet him, he is tossing back shots of Wild Turkey in his friend's bar. We watch him apparently steal a bottle of hooch on his way out. From there he stops by Emma's van to tap on the glass. We surmise that the glass may not be the only thing he hopes to tap that Good Friday evening. We follow him to Cookie's home where he walks up to the gun case and begins to remove the valuable armaments.
Our evaluations in the above three scenes is by large part influenced by the fact of Willis being black. Surprise! Surprise! We may just have it wrong. It turns out that Willis was not so much stealing the whiskey as borrowing it. The next day he brings back a half bottle to replace the one he took, a common unspoken routine between the customer and his bartender. His stopping by Emma's van was merely to check in with the young lady to see if she would have Easter dinner with him and Cookie. And the reason he removed the guns from their display was because he had promised Cookie he would clean them as a favor to her before the night was over.
This would be a very sub-O. Henry series of twists were it not for the fact of Willis's relationship to the town and particularly to Cookie and Emma. The latter asks him about his childhood and he talks about his grandfather who had thirty-four grandchildren. "Thirty-four!" she says, astonished. "How'd he tell you all apart?"
"Well, eighteen of them were girls and sixteen boys, so that helped. And among us boys, some of them were white and some of us were black. I was the blackest of them all." A kind of meta-brilliance with Cookie's Fortune is the freedom Altman gives the support characters, a freedom which allows them to aid in the strength of the central actors. Courtney B. Vance as Inspector Otis Tucker is so free in this movie that we could never mistake him for the role he played in TV's "Law and Order: Criminal Intent." The normally cosmetic Chris Dutton as officer Jason Brown allows his character to be simultaneously bumbling yet identifiable because of the sheer enthusiasm he brings to his small town world. And Donald Moffat, not exactly the most household name in Hollywood (a fact that is Hollywood's loss and not ours), positively incinerates all levels of other people's pomposity with a richness of character that crumples every starched pleat in town.
About halfway through this movie, I thought to myself, "Hey, this is very nice. There'll be no need to watch it a second time, but it's still pleasant." By the end of the film, an extended moment that stretches for generations, I knew just how wrong I was to be so dismissive. This film contains a tangible holiness that an earlier Altman might have considered worth gently mocking. That his intent remains entirely respectful of good and bad folks alike remains the most cosmic irony of all. I wish my high school English teacher was around to give me an "amen."
In Cookie's Fortune (1999), scenarist Anne Rapp and director Robert Altman venture into the micro-cosmic village of Holly Springs, Mississippi, a town with no particular central leadership, yet one populated with infinitely believable people who share connections often in spite of themselves. Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) lost her husband Buck two years prior and has never spent a day since without wishing he were still there with her in that big old house. She possesses considerable verbal skill, suggesting an education worthy of her presumed financial status. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close) is Cookie's sister, cousin, niece--it's often hard to be sure which, but that's part of the plot--something of a sympathetic yet hatefully disconnected case who dominates everyone merely because she intuits that the people she rules would run into stone walls without her constant guidance. Her sister (or daughter, or niece--again, it services the plot) Cora Duvall (Julianne Moore) remains Camille's puppet to the end, even when an ironic twist blows apart any hope Camille grasps of having the freedom she herself demands. In one especially humorous scene, Cora has been told to "tick a lock" by Camille and cannot even bring herself to open her mouth to speak when a Sheriff's Deputy tries to make small talk about the shooting death of Cookie.
Most everybody in town liked Cookie very much. After all, she was old, a bit on the decrepit side, but not without charm. She smoked a series of lady's pipes, kept her late-husband's extensive gun collection in a cabinet that wouldn't quite close, and had one hell of a nice garden through which she kept an eye on the precocious neighbor boy who was always stealing her croquet balls.
We know where we are throughout every instant of this movie, a fact that reinforces the often fictionalized feel of the small southern fishing town. From the first shots of the crumbled tin walls that house the local bar to the rapturous holiness of deputies talking about fishing, from the absurdity of the Church's Easter play being Salome (written, the marque informs us, by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon) to Manny (Lyle Lovett) with his outre creepy lust for Emma (Liv Tyler) (Cora's daughter, sister, niece, etc), and especially from Lester (Ned Beatty) second in command in the Sheriff's office and his peaceful relationship with Willis Richland (Charles S. Dutton). These two men amplify every scene they are in together, even when the presence of one is only referenced by the other, as when Willis finds himself charged with Cookie's murder and Lester states with calm certainty that he is innocent because "I've gone fishing with the man."
Most of us--especially those who grew up in small towns and moved to bigger cities--want very much to believe that this is pretty much the way things play out in small towns with a major industry being the selling of catfish. The authenticity is not for one second in question here, even as we watch with mounting anger as Camille violates the sanctity of Cookie's suicide by poking her body with a jabbing finger, rearranging the death scene to look like a murder, and insisting that respectable people do not commit suicide. The irony of this and other magnificently staged scenes is so multi-tiered that it may take some serious afterthought to catch them all. Here's Camille, the most burlesque version of the southern belle since Scarlett O'Hare, attempting to redefine protocol into every place she marches her self-important bodice. If her own sense of propriety requires that Willis be charged with the murder of his friend (and possible relative), then so be it. If her version of comfort dictates that Emma has to go back to living in a van instead of in a big old roomy house, that must be God's will. And if Cookie's will needs to be destroyed to safeguard her own concept of an appropriate lifestyle denied her by her own mother, well then it might have behooved her to find that last will and testament in the cookie jar before the lawyer, Jack Palmer (Donald Moffat) beat her to it. It would be stupid to ignore the theme of miscegenation in this movie. Altman sets us up from the beginning to misinterpret the relationship Willis has with almost everyone, but especially with Cookie. When we meet him, he is tossing back shots of Wild Turkey in his friend's bar. We watch him apparently steal a bottle of hooch on his way out. From there he stops by Emma's van to tap on the glass. We surmise that the glass may not be the only thing he hopes to tap that Good Friday evening. We follow him to Cookie's home where he walks up to the gun case and begins to remove the valuable armaments.
Our evaluations in the above three scenes is by large part influenced by the fact of Willis being black. Surprise! Surprise! We may just have it wrong. It turns out that Willis was not so much stealing the whiskey as borrowing it. The next day he brings back a half bottle to replace the one he took, a common unspoken routine between the customer and his bartender. His stopping by Emma's van was merely to check in with the young lady to see if she would have Easter dinner with him and Cookie. And the reason he removed the guns from their display was because he had promised Cookie he would clean them as a favor to her before the night was over.
This would be a very sub-O. Henry series of twists were it not for the fact of Willis's relationship to the town and particularly to Cookie and Emma. The latter asks him about his childhood and he talks about his grandfather who had thirty-four grandchildren. "Thirty-four!" she says, astonished. "How'd he tell you all apart?"
"Well, eighteen of them were girls and sixteen boys, so that helped. And among us boys, some of them were white and some of us were black. I was the blackest of them all." A kind of meta-brilliance with Cookie's Fortune is the freedom Altman gives the support characters, a freedom which allows them to aid in the strength of the central actors. Courtney B. Vance as Inspector Otis Tucker is so free in this movie that we could never mistake him for the role he played in TV's "Law and Order: Criminal Intent." The normally cosmetic Chris Dutton as officer Jason Brown allows his character to be simultaneously bumbling yet identifiable because of the sheer enthusiasm he brings to his small town world. And Donald Moffat, not exactly the most household name in Hollywood (a fact that is Hollywood's loss and not ours), positively incinerates all levels of other people's pomposity with a richness of character that crumples every starched pleat in town.
About halfway through this movie, I thought to myself, "Hey, this is very nice. There'll be no need to watch it a second time, but it's still pleasant." By the end of the film, an extended moment that stretches for generations, I knew just how wrong I was to be so dismissive. This film contains a tangible holiness that an earlier Altman might have considered worth gently mocking. That his intent remains entirely respectful of good and bad folks alike remains the most cosmic irony of all. I wish my high school English teacher was around to give me an "amen."
BREWSTER McCLOUD
Imagine a movie smarter than its audience. What kind of film would that be? If by smarter we mean that the technical aspects are part of an industrial trade foreign to most viewers, then nearly all motion pictures are smarter than nearly all motion picture watchers. On the other hand, if by smarter we mean that a grasp of the subject matter or content is beyond the reach of the people who buy their tickets, then I would conclude that the cinema in question is a filmed lecture delivered by Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. What I suspect we really mean when we say that a film is over the head of its audience is that the powers of imagination have exceeded that to which the common moviegoer is accustomed. The film is, to coin a phrase, out of the viewer's comfort zone.
Stanley Kubrick, for all his genius, did not make movies over the heads of his audience for the simple reason that his films invariably had some character with whom the audience was inclined or coerced into identifying. For all his esoterica, Woody Allen has always been a man of the people, albeit, one with a richer reading list but one who still values the audience response, at least when he does not curl his lips against it, neither approach having the luxury of being supercilious. You could argue that some foreign filmmakers were artful beyond the routine pale, but once again, whether one means Truffaut, Godard, Kurosawa, or Bunuel, the intent to challenge the audience remains a priority over deliberately alienating the paying (or pirating) public.
In order for any film to lay legitimate claim to being beyond the general perception levels, the assertion must be based in a coalescing of the director and writer's imaginations. What the film is about, what happens in it, the motivations of the characters, their dreads and desires, the way the film looks in a darkened theatre, the sounds the audience will scarcely recall yet will have nonetheless experienced, the primordial cave pictures that continue to mesmerize the masses--Dammit, it isn't easy being Robert Altman, as he would be the first to tell you if he hadn't passed away at precisely the proper time.
Brewster McCloud, the film that is the subject of today's analytic dissection, teems and spills over with imagination, from the repetition of the movie's title during the opening credits sequence to the naming names close-out at the end and everywhere in between, this film radiates the power of its creator's mind and since that mind did belong to one Robert Altman then that fact in and of itself should and would be enough to at the very least get our attention if not send half the glee club out to take courses in genuflecting and the odd and occasional curtsy.
But if you balk at enjoying a film solely on the basis of the reputation of its director, the good news of the day is that Brewster McCloud--neglected in its own time--is one of those films about which it is infinitely appropriate to quip, "Mighty fine film, indeed, that one." The cast was pulled from most of the same director's crew on M*A*S*H, minus Gould and Sutherland, meaning that, yes, we do get the sensational Sally Kellerman and yes we do get the unbelievably comic Rene Auberjonois as the bird-man narrator.
Bird-man, do I say? Indeed, I do say. The film is about flying. Whether the vignette pertains to the Stacey Keach character who is a nasty relative of Wilbur and Orville or to sex as a metaphor, flying is the subject and Bud Cort (Boone from M*A*S*H) aims to learn. This is really just a great science fiction film, if you must know, and even though I don't think it was ever recognized as such, the plot could just as easily have come from Philip K. Dick or even Leigh Brackett.
There were probably more stupid movies released in 1970 than any other year to that point in the history of film. There were also more unheralded classics, such as the three we've already peeked at this new year (The Magic Christian, The Boys in the Band, and The Ballad of Cable Hogue, in case you've forgotten). Brewster McCloud (even the character's name works) falls into that category as well. Altman moves the scenes around his characters to the extent that sometimes it appears that the people are standing still and the camera is doing all the acting. Even there this is no accident. Even there this is brilliance at work and woe unto the sad fool who fails to learn to fly right along with the owlish Brewster, a character who fails to draw in the audience, which is probably why the movie tanked on release. People prefer characterization over story-line and technique. I suppose that is proper enough. We should, however, remember that film as a thing, as a craft, is a visual medium and as such it has a responsibility that supersedes the banality of a theatrical plot and rich, subtle characterization. A good film tells a story. A great film brings the audience in and lets them discover the story.
Stanley Kubrick, for all his genius, did not make movies over the heads of his audience for the simple reason that his films invariably had some character with whom the audience was inclined or coerced into identifying. For all his esoterica, Woody Allen has always been a man of the people, albeit, one with a richer reading list but one who still values the audience response, at least when he does not curl his lips against it, neither approach having the luxury of being supercilious. You could argue that some foreign filmmakers were artful beyond the routine pale, but once again, whether one means Truffaut, Godard, Kurosawa, or Bunuel, the intent to challenge the audience remains a priority over deliberately alienating the paying (or pirating) public.
In order for any film to lay legitimate claim to being beyond the general perception levels, the assertion must be based in a coalescing of the director and writer's imaginations. What the film is about, what happens in it, the motivations of the characters, their dreads and desires, the way the film looks in a darkened theatre, the sounds the audience will scarcely recall yet will have nonetheless experienced, the primordial cave pictures that continue to mesmerize the masses--Dammit, it isn't easy being Robert Altman, as he would be the first to tell you if he hadn't passed away at precisely the proper time.
Brewster McCloud, the film that is the subject of today's analytic dissection, teems and spills over with imagination, from the repetition of the movie's title during the opening credits sequence to the naming names close-out at the end and everywhere in between, this film radiates the power of its creator's mind and since that mind did belong to one Robert Altman then that fact in and of itself should and would be enough to at the very least get our attention if not send half the glee club out to take courses in genuflecting and the odd and occasional curtsy.
But if you balk at enjoying a film solely on the basis of the reputation of its director, the good news of the day is that Brewster McCloud--neglected in its own time--is one of those films about which it is infinitely appropriate to quip, "Mighty fine film, indeed, that one." The cast was pulled from most of the same director's crew on M*A*S*H, minus Gould and Sutherland, meaning that, yes, we do get the sensational Sally Kellerman and yes we do get the unbelievably comic Rene Auberjonois as the bird-man narrator.
Bird-man, do I say? Indeed, I do say. The film is about flying. Whether the vignette pertains to the Stacey Keach character who is a nasty relative of Wilbur and Orville or to sex as a metaphor, flying is the subject and Bud Cort (Boone from M*A*S*H) aims to learn. This is really just a great science fiction film, if you must know, and even though I don't think it was ever recognized as such, the plot could just as easily have come from Philip K. Dick or even Leigh Brackett.
There were probably more stupid movies released in 1970 than any other year to that point in the history of film. There were also more unheralded classics, such as the three we've already peeked at this new year (The Magic Christian, The Boys in the Band, and The Ballad of Cable Hogue, in case you've forgotten). Brewster McCloud (even the character's name works) falls into that category as well. Altman moves the scenes around his characters to the extent that sometimes it appears that the people are standing still and the camera is doing all the acting. Even there this is no accident. Even there this is brilliance at work and woe unto the sad fool who fails to learn to fly right along with the owlish Brewster, a character who fails to draw in the audience, which is probably why the movie tanked on release. People prefer characterization over story-line and technique. I suppose that is proper enough. We should, however, remember that film as a thing, as a craft, is a visual medium and as such it has a responsibility that supersedes the banality of a theatrical plot and rich, subtle characterization. A good film tells a story. A great film brings the audience in and lets them discover the story.
3 WOMEN
If one function of film is to inform our dreams, then fairness requires dreams to fulfill our movies. The 1977 Robert Altman film 3 Women succeeds.
Altman has a dream and on his way to the airport stops at 20th Century to see Alan Ladd Jr., who green-lights the project in time for the director to catch his flight. After all, this was Robert Altman and Fox did owe a debt of gratitude to cinema and certainly it didn't matter much that there was no script at this point. Who needed a script when the ending was still unformed?
Has anyone ever told you that your dreams did not make sense or that they were not logical? You'd probably laugh at anyone who dared say such a thing because what you'd been discussing was ephemera, intangible, a series of images which the brain has conjured out of all the senses presented to it, reconstructed in a way that does not rely upon logic for its value. 3 Women, just like our dreams, does have a kind of logic, but it isn't the kind in which we move through in our awakened periods, although, as with our dreams, it often accentuates the most intriguing aspects of what we call our own personal reality.
If we are regular movie-goers in 1977, we recognize Sissy Spacek from the previous year's Carrie, a film heavy with dream sequences. From the instant we set eyes upon her character Pinky, we suspect that something is not quite right with the young lady, that something about her does not quite fit, and that just possibly we should not trust what we see. Today she begins her first day of work helping old folks at a physical therapy facility in what feels like an area east of Los Angeles, out in the desert. That she is much younger than those for whom she is responsible is no coincidence since Pinky acknowledges nothing about her own parents, as becomes quite clear later in the film. The spa surroundings are the kind of places where cowboy films of Wyatt Earp have been shot right alongside miniature golf courses.
Pinky meets Mildred, played by Shelley Duvall. We recognize Ms. Duvall from any number of earlier Altman creations and we notice right away that she too fails to fit in with the people around her, whether they are her coworkers or her neighbors. Millie is assigned to show Pinky the ropes, probably because the boss suspects they will get along, or else as punishment for both of them being just a bit unusual. Indeed, Millie spends a good bit of the movie having conversations with people who do very little to acknowledge her existence. Adding to their sense of unease, neither Milly nor Pinky have much in the way of a background and this is deliberate. When a character enters our dream, we do not have time to evaluate that person's history. Instead we make quick and disjointed impressions of the person and that is all we can do with the characters in this movie. Maybe Millie is a weird duck and maybe the weirdness is really everyone else.
Also working in the spa are two female twins, neither of whom contributes much to the narrative other than being so aloof that we simply dislike them in general and even feel a small sense of relief when one of the coworkers tells Pinky, "We don't like the twins."
Far and away the most disjointed character in the movie is Willie Hart, played to near silent perfection by Janice Rule. Willie creates sand paintings on swimming pools and elsewhere and she is with child until the last few minutes of the film. She is married to a retired stunt man who used to work in cowboy pictures.
For all intents and purposes, these three women could all be different aspects of one another and when it turns out that Pinky's "real" name is Mildred, we are not terribly surprised, although we are properly disturbed, just as we are troubled by the rhyme of the name Willie. These three women have suffered damages and they continue to suffer them, on and on until the women seem to merge into a single unit, be it a nuclear family, a Manson Family, or a single person with three personas.
To say more about the story would be to risk divulging the narrow and winding plot. However, it pulls on me to say that dream-work in this picture is very much impressionistic, in the artistic sense of the word, a facet that is not uncommon in much of Altman's work. The Long Goodbye was rife with extended sequences that not only felt dreamy but which even drifted away from the Raymond Chandler novel enough to be their own reaction to having read the book. Even given the soft and deadly punch from the brilliant, instinctive acting of the three principals in this motion picture, the real performance remains the movie itself, at once loping along with all the time in the world just as it abruptly shifts to tense alignments that rustle the pulse. If you were to only view one Robert Altman film, it should be Nashville. If you have the luxury of two, the second must be 3 Women.
Altman has a dream and on his way to the airport stops at 20th Century to see Alan Ladd Jr., who green-lights the project in time for the director to catch his flight. After all, this was Robert Altman and Fox did owe a debt of gratitude to cinema and certainly it didn't matter much that there was no script at this point. Who needed a script when the ending was still unformed?
Has anyone ever told you that your dreams did not make sense or that they were not logical? You'd probably laugh at anyone who dared say such a thing because what you'd been discussing was ephemera, intangible, a series of images which the brain has conjured out of all the senses presented to it, reconstructed in a way that does not rely upon logic for its value. 3 Women, just like our dreams, does have a kind of logic, but it isn't the kind in which we move through in our awakened periods, although, as with our dreams, it often accentuates the most intriguing aspects of what we call our own personal reality.
If we are regular movie-goers in 1977, we recognize Sissy Spacek from the previous year's Carrie, a film heavy with dream sequences. From the instant we set eyes upon her character Pinky, we suspect that something is not quite right with the young lady, that something about her does not quite fit, and that just possibly we should not trust what we see. Today she begins her first day of work helping old folks at a physical therapy facility in what feels like an area east of Los Angeles, out in the desert. That she is much younger than those for whom she is responsible is no coincidence since Pinky acknowledges nothing about her own parents, as becomes quite clear later in the film. The spa surroundings are the kind of places where cowboy films of Wyatt Earp have been shot right alongside miniature golf courses.
Pinky meets Mildred, played by Shelley Duvall. We recognize Ms. Duvall from any number of earlier Altman creations and we notice right away that she too fails to fit in with the people around her, whether they are her coworkers or her neighbors. Millie is assigned to show Pinky the ropes, probably because the boss suspects they will get along, or else as punishment for both of them being just a bit unusual. Indeed, Millie spends a good bit of the movie having conversations with people who do very little to acknowledge her existence. Adding to their sense of unease, neither Milly nor Pinky have much in the way of a background and this is deliberate. When a character enters our dream, we do not have time to evaluate that person's history. Instead we make quick and disjointed impressions of the person and that is all we can do with the characters in this movie. Maybe Millie is a weird duck and maybe the weirdness is really everyone else.
Also working in the spa are two female twins, neither of whom contributes much to the narrative other than being so aloof that we simply dislike them in general and even feel a small sense of relief when one of the coworkers tells Pinky, "We don't like the twins."
Far and away the most disjointed character in the movie is Willie Hart, played to near silent perfection by Janice Rule. Willie creates sand paintings on swimming pools and elsewhere and she is with child until the last few minutes of the film. She is married to a retired stunt man who used to work in cowboy pictures.
For all intents and purposes, these three women could all be different aspects of one another and when it turns out that Pinky's "real" name is Mildred, we are not terribly surprised, although we are properly disturbed, just as we are troubled by the rhyme of the name Willie. These three women have suffered damages and they continue to suffer them, on and on until the women seem to merge into a single unit, be it a nuclear family, a Manson Family, or a single person with three personas.
To say more about the story would be to risk divulging the narrow and winding plot. However, it pulls on me to say that dream-work in this picture is very much impressionistic, in the artistic sense of the word, a facet that is not uncommon in much of Altman's work. The Long Goodbye was rife with extended sequences that not only felt dreamy but which even drifted away from the Raymond Chandler novel enough to be their own reaction to having read the book. Even given the soft and deadly punch from the brilliant, instinctive acting of the three principals in this motion picture, the real performance remains the movie itself, at once loping along with all the time in the world just as it abruptly shifts to tense alignments that rustle the pulse. If you were to only view one Robert Altman film, it should be Nashville. If you have the luxury of two, the second must be 3 Women.
READY TO WEAR
Even the duds that director Robert Altman created have a lot going for them, so it must be admitted from the outset that Ready to Wear (1994) fails to be all bad. Because of the enormity of the excellent cast, one gets the initial impression that this fashioned show of a fashion show may be a Nineties version of Nashville. And in a way it is. I mean, we have all kinds of famous clothing designers displaying their wares or wears, we have a reporter (played by Kim Bassinger) who steals every scene and who we just know will crumble in the end, we have Cher who, as the Elliott Gould of the 1990s, makes an appearance for the purposes of gentle sarcasm, and we have a loosely strung-together story-line that isn't particularly the point.
So what's the problem?
The damned thing isn't very interesting. That's the only problem with this movie.
The film begins strong enough, with a French title, Pret-a-Porter and the words "A Robert Altman Film" in Russian letters at the beginning. We get to see Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren. We get Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts. We get Forest Whitaker. Sadly, that is all we get. The ending is so contrived that even if it was supposed to insult us by being obvious in advance it still doesn't work because by the time we get there we no longer have any reason to care.
It has been claimed by more erudite writers than myself that Altman had a tendency to alternate successes with failures and that even his failures were worth watching. That is almost true.
The biggest problem with this film is the script. Altman and Barbara Shulgasser simply don't know what to do with their most potentially interesting characters. The fashion guru who dies early on has zero personality, even though most of the people in the movie claim he was a rotten person. It might have been nice to have understood why this was so. Tracey Ullman, Linda Hunt and Sally Kellerman, as the editors of fashion magazines, come off as vastly more dull than even those occupations would suggest. And the character of the in-demand photographer Milo, played by Stephen Rea, is simply stupid, even his snideness not worth the bother.
The talents of all the actors mentioned above are thoroughly wasted here unless it is somehow supposed to be interesting that Anne Eisenhower (Julia Roberts) is fascinating because she gets amorous when she drinks alcohol, or that Joe Flynn, a sportswriter played by Tim Robbins, is intriguing because his luggage gets stolen and he can't do much about it because his French is so bad.
No, this is a colossal mess of a film, one that by its very existence besmirches the well-earned reputation of all those involved as being the brilliant directors, writers and actors that they certainly are. Genius is maligned here.
So what's the problem?
The damned thing isn't very interesting. That's the only problem with this movie.
The film begins strong enough, with a French title, Pret-a-Porter and the words "A Robert Altman Film" in Russian letters at the beginning. We get to see Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren. We get Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts. We get Forest Whitaker. Sadly, that is all we get. The ending is so contrived that even if it was supposed to insult us by being obvious in advance it still doesn't work because by the time we get there we no longer have any reason to care.
It has been claimed by more erudite writers than myself that Altman had a tendency to alternate successes with failures and that even his failures were worth watching. That is almost true.
The biggest problem with this film is the script. Altman and Barbara Shulgasser simply don't know what to do with their most potentially interesting characters. The fashion guru who dies early on has zero personality, even though most of the people in the movie claim he was a rotten person. It might have been nice to have understood why this was so. Tracey Ullman, Linda Hunt and Sally Kellerman, as the editors of fashion magazines, come off as vastly more dull than even those occupations would suggest. And the character of the in-demand photographer Milo, played by Stephen Rea, is simply stupid, even his snideness not worth the bother.
The talents of all the actors mentioned above are thoroughly wasted here unless it is somehow supposed to be interesting that Anne Eisenhower (Julia Roberts) is fascinating because she gets amorous when she drinks alcohol, or that Joe Flynn, a sportswriter played by Tim Robbins, is intriguing because his luggage gets stolen and he can't do much about it because his French is so bad.
No, this is a colossal mess of a film, one that by its very existence besmirches the well-earned reputation of all those involved as being the brilliant directors, writers and actors that they certainly are. Genius is maligned here.
