Robert Altman's cinema is the cinema of uncertainty and surprise. As he himself lives a life of risk and gamble, with all coherence-and complacency-gone, his cinema technique is characterized by devices that unsettle the viewer. His overlapping sound-tracks, with multiple babble where we are accustomed to the artifice of one character speaking at a time, typify Altman's subversion of familiar devices. Altman's sound-track prevents passive reception; the viewer must actively select which voice he will listen to from the jumble he hears. Similarly, Altman violates the security of a fixed and consistent visual perspective by continually shooting off glass surfaces. In a magnificent shot in The Long Goodbye, the quarrelling Wade couple (Sterling Hayden and Nina van Pallandt) lose physical substance by the intervening window, while the transparent image of Marlowe (Elliott Gould) on the same window, playing tag with the sea, provides a counterpoint of incredible complexity. Always, an Altman shot through or off glass makes our relationship to the material unstable. At the least, it gives us pause for reflection.
Moreover, Altman's very choice of subject matter constitutes an assault upon our assumptions of a progressive history and the integrity of narrative. Altman's mature films can be considered in three groups. In one, he engages with the most popular, commercial, forms of narrative, the traditional genres. In Countdown (1968) he deals with the space drama, in That Cold Day in the Park (1969) the psychological thriller, in M*A *S*H (1970) the war movie, in McCabe and Mrs. Miller(1971) and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) the Western, in The Long Goodbye (1973) the private eye,
and in Thieves Like Us (1974) the cycle of gangster-on-the-run dramas.
But each film undermines the assumptions and conventions of its genre. As early as Countdown, the heroes' sense of alienation and division even among themselves counters the genre's convention of teamwork.1 Generally, the Altman genre firm rejects the glamor and romanticism of the traditional film-M*A*S*H, McCabe, The Long Goodbye, Buffalo Bill. Altman deflates heroic pretences in his genre work. The private voice first assumes, then undermines, the public form.
In a second group, Altman eschews conventional forms and delivers a private vision in extremely private vocabulary: Brewster McCloud (1970), Images (1972), 3 Women (1977), and Quintet (1978). Granted, one may define a trace of genre behind these works (the whodunit and fantasy in Brewster, the psychological thriller in Images and 3 Women, and the doomsday horror in Quintet) but Altman's personal tone dominates the remnants of conventional narrative form.
Moreover, Altman's very choice of subject matter constitutes an assault upon our assumptions of a progressive history and the integrity of narrative. Altman's mature films can be considered in three groups. In one, he engages with the most popular, commercial, forms of narrative, the traditional genres. In Countdown (1968) he deals with the space drama, in That Cold Day in the Park (1969) the psychological thriller, in M*A *S*H (1970) the war movie, in McCabe and Mrs. Miller(1971) and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) the Western, in The Long Goodbye (1973) the private eye,
and in Thieves Like Us (1974) the cycle of gangster-on-the-run dramas.
But each film undermines the assumptions and conventions of its genre. As early as Countdown, the heroes' sense of alienation and division even among themselves counters the genre's convention of teamwork.1 Generally, the Altman genre firm rejects the glamor and romanticism of the traditional film-M*A*S*H, McCabe, The Long Goodbye, Buffalo Bill. Altman deflates heroic pretences in his genre work. The private voice first assumes, then undermines, the public form.
In a second group, Altman eschews conventional forms and delivers a private vision in extremely private vocabulary: Brewster McCloud (1970), Images (1972), 3 Women (1977), and Quintet (1978). Granted, one may define a trace of genre behind these works (the whodunit and fantasy in Brewster, the psychological thriller in Images and 3 Women, and the doomsday horror in Quintet) but Altman's personal tone dominates the remnants of conventional narrative form.
In the third group Altman may be said to reconcile his private vision with public forms of address. In this category he uses a familiar social institution as a prism through which to project his idiosyncraticvision. The result in each case is a sweeping cultural anatomy, in which the silly specific becomes a microcosm for American culture and civilization: the gambling world in California Split (1974), country music in Nashville (1975), marriage in A Wedding (1978), contemporary courting and family lives in A Perfect Couple (1979), and the election convention in Health (1980). In the latter, the health-faddists are both a parallel and a parody of America's political health. When the Col. Cody figure assails the impotent idealist (Glenda Jackson playing a Stevenson-Carter surrogate), the film undercuts the conventions of sexual blackmail and the corrupt power-broker familiar from such political dramas as The Best Man and Advise and Consent. In exposing Cody as a fraud, Altman explicitly rejects the dubious security of even the cynicism of the form. In all these films, Altman's tension between public and private rhetoric forces us to question our experience of conventional narrative, our assumptions of what we are as individuals, and the integrity of American civilization.
Altman's casting similarly explores the tension between public image and private meaning. For one thing, he has a private vocabulary of actors, the continuing company that he has either discovered or uniquely developed. Even in his recurring bit players, he establishes a private perspective through actors who are not familiar from other directors' work.
For example, he uses the quiet Belita Moreno in three different roles where a warm responsiveness is at odds with chilling relationships. In 3 Women she is the close friend of Doris, the Chinese girl at the spa, but from the perspective of the two Millies, she seems cold and remote. In A Wedding she again seems detached from the silliness of the ceremonies; but now one is more aware of her superior sense and emotional life. These virtues, latent in her first role and acknowledged in the second, are amplified in her Alcira in A Perfect Couple, the sensitive, doomed sister striving to escape her oppressive, cold family. Ms. Moreno's three roles for Altman form a coherent expansion of a single theme, the possibility of warmth and intimacy within a cold and exclusive community.
Similarly, Altman uses Bert Remsen as a cantankerous, usually crippled, nasty old man, from Brewster through A Wedding. But with each exposure he grows more amiable. Robert Fortier is a dangerously macho pseudo-cowboy in 3 Women, softened into the vulpine gardene rin A Wedding, then emasculated completely as the orange-bedecked security officer in Health. In the lacquered elegance of Nina van Pallandt, Altman consistently discovers a suppressed sensitivity, from her amoral and dangerous Mrs. Wade in The Long Goodbye to the pathetically vulnerable, drugged and stiffly gracious mother of the groom in A Wedding.
Altman's casting similarly explores the tension between public image and private meaning. For one thing, he has a private vocabulary of actors, the continuing company that he has either discovered or uniquely developed. Even in his recurring bit players, he establishes a private perspective through actors who are not familiar from other directors' work.
For example, he uses the quiet Belita Moreno in three different roles where a warm responsiveness is at odds with chilling relationships. In 3 Women she is the close friend of Doris, the Chinese girl at the spa, but from the perspective of the two Millies, she seems cold and remote. In A Wedding she again seems detached from the silliness of the ceremonies; but now one is more aware of her superior sense and emotional life. These virtues, latent in her first role and acknowledged in the second, are amplified in her Alcira in A Perfect Couple, the sensitive, doomed sister striving to escape her oppressive, cold family. Ms. Moreno's three roles for Altman form a coherent expansion of a single theme, the possibility of warmth and intimacy within a cold and exclusive community.
Similarly, Altman uses Bert Remsen as a cantankerous, usually crippled, nasty old man, from Brewster through A Wedding. But with each exposure he grows more amiable. Robert Fortier is a dangerously macho pseudo-cowboy in 3 Women, softened into the vulpine gardene rin A Wedding, then emasculated completely as the orange-bedecked security officer in Health. In the lacquered elegance of Nina van Pallandt, Altman consistently discovers a suppressed sensitivity, from her amoral and dangerous Mrs. Wade in The Long Goodbye to the pathetically vulnerable, drugged and stiffly gracious mother of the groom in A Wedding.
Michael Murphy develops for Altman the persona of a glib, sophisticated hustler. In Brewster McCloud, Murphy plays Shaft, an explicit parody of Steve McQueen's Bullitt. Shaft kills himself when a driving accident ends his hopes of realizing his chosen myth of heroism. But in his prime, Shaft was the glamorous front-man for an obviously gross and corrupt police force. In McCabe, Murphy plays Sears, another "front," the business agent dispatched by the Company to buy out McCabe. Again, a sinister, corrupt force lurks behind Murphy's handsome mien. Finally, in Nashville Murphy plays Triplett,the slick front-man for Walker's presidential campaign, another instance of ethically compromised handsomeness. In Health James Garner plays a Murphy type of role, the hustling PR man, but with his own brand of sexual opportunism and prowess.
Altman's personal reading of an actor may begin with a point in his physical impression. For example, Bud Cort's wide-eyed boyishness as the abused intern in M*A*S*H may have shaped Altman's conception of his next hero; as Brewster McCloud, Cort played an idealist who briefly achieves his impossible dream of flight, in a negative world. In Buffalo Bill, Altman casts against physical type when he introduces a small unknown as the famous Sitting Bull, Frank Kaquitts, and the large, familiar actor, Will Sampson, as Bull's translator, their physical reversal tells us that the message is greater than the man; the legends of both Bill and Bull are larger than their human reality.
Shelley Duvall may be the most striking example of Altman's personal casting. She began as the improbable femme fatale in Brewster McCloud, who lures the idealist to his doom. Then she played the mail-order bride in McCabe, the lovesick moll in Thieves Like Us, the short-short groupie in Nashville, Grover Cleveland's wife in Buffalo Bill, and the yellow-spun Millie in 3 Women. Common to all these roles is the tension between worldliness and naivete. In Brewster Duvall embodies worldly contamination. In McCabe her character blossoms from mousey mail-order wife to radiant prostitute, when she adjusts to
the exigencies of a frontier widowhood. In Nashville she is callous but nonetheless poignant, parlaying her unpromising physical nature into some kind of style and some kind of romance. In Buffalo Bill, her charming silliness and unabashed vacancy make her a positive contrast to her blustering, pretentious husband. But 3 Women provides Duvall's apotheosis, as Andrew Sarris has enthused:
Altman's personal reading of an actor may begin with a point in his physical impression. For example, Bud Cort's wide-eyed boyishness as the abused intern in M*A*S*H may have shaped Altman's conception of his next hero; as Brewster McCloud, Cort played an idealist who briefly achieves his impossible dream of flight, in a negative world. In Buffalo Bill, Altman casts against physical type when he introduces a small unknown as the famous Sitting Bull, Frank Kaquitts, and the large, familiar actor, Will Sampson, as Bull's translator, their physical reversal tells us that the message is greater than the man; the legends of both Bill and Bull are larger than their human reality.
Shelley Duvall may be the most striking example of Altman's personal casting. She began as the improbable femme fatale in Brewster McCloud, who lures the idealist to his doom. Then she played the mail-order bride in McCabe, the lovesick moll in Thieves Like Us, the short-short groupie in Nashville, Grover Cleveland's wife in Buffalo Bill, and the yellow-spun Millie in 3 Women. Common to all these roles is the tension between worldliness and naivete. In Brewster Duvall embodies worldly contamination. In McCabe her character blossoms from mousey mail-order wife to radiant prostitute, when she adjusts to
the exigencies of a frontier widowhood. In Nashville she is callous but nonetheless poignant, parlaying her unpromising physical nature into some kind of style and some kind of romance. In Buffalo Bill, her charming silliness and unabashed vacancy make her a positive contrast to her blustering, pretentious husband. But 3 Women provides Duvall's apotheosis, as Andrew Sarris has enthused:
"Millie could be written off as a nerd were it not for something magical in Shelley Duvall's performance .... if I want to convey what 3 Women really is as opposed to what it merely means, I could do worse than try to evoke Shelley Duvall's stride as she walks from one social Calvary to another."
Moreover, her character's "cumulative gallantry under stress " over-whelms Sarris:
"There is so much spiritual grace in that stride, and so much wisdom in Altman's decision to follow that stride to the end of his scenario, that one is ennobled simply by witnessing the bonds of compassion between the director and his actress."2
In Duvall Altman exalts a body that is quite outside conventional Hollywood interest. The thin, gangly, 5'7" freckled bonebag with malocclusive teeth and straw hair is not your usual romantic heroine. She's more like Famine, especially in Altman's last image of her in Thieves Like Us. Pregnant and alone, she sucks poisonous sustenance from her Coke, from her idealization of her lover, and from the radio's babble of evangelical promises. Indeed, simply by casting Duvall and the coarse-featured Keith Carradine in roles usually played by the romantic likes of Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell (They Live ByNight) or Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway (Bonnie and Clyde), Altman restores a realistic human dimension, warts and all, to the fictions of an impossible, romantic mythology.
Something about Duvall's meaning to Altman can be inferred from her replacement by Marta Heflin in A Wedding, and Heflin's subsequent development in A Perfect Couple. In A Wedding Heflin plays a guest who is carefully padded and prodded by a girlfriend to enjoy the license of the occasion. Ultimately, she is taken by her friend's rough and macho husband, in a breach of both honor and observance. Heflin's character seems far more passive than any of Duvall's; Heflin's drifts, but Duvall's characters leap wholeheartedly for their deception and abuse, yet stamp themselves upon their world. Despite these opposite temperaments, Duvall and Heflin have the same type of homey, thin, undernourished body.
So, too, the Heflin role inA Perfect Couple. Here Altman's point is the harmony possible between discordant types. Paul Dooley plays a middle-aged, chubby Greek-American, with an Old World tyrannical father. Heflin plays a boney, mod rock singer. These lovers have nothing in common except their opposite tastes in music and their opposite kinds of patriarchal tyrant. But they are Altman's perfect couple, combining obvious opposites, in contrast to his Imperfect Couple (Fred Bier and Jette Seear) who flit through the film as the ostensibly perfect match, with the same wardrobe and beaming eye, but who eventually break up, their harmony exposed as narcissism. Altman prefers to place the chance for love in Heflin's padding, sniffling and uncertainty, rather than in the complacent, overstuffed icons of an easy harmony.
Moreover, her character's "cumulative gallantry under stress " over-whelms Sarris:
"There is so much spiritual grace in that stride, and so much wisdom in Altman's decision to follow that stride to the end of his scenario, that one is ennobled simply by witnessing the bonds of compassion between the director and his actress."2
In Duvall Altman exalts a body that is quite outside conventional Hollywood interest. The thin, gangly, 5'7" freckled bonebag with malocclusive teeth and straw hair is not your usual romantic heroine. She's more like Famine, especially in Altman's last image of her in Thieves Like Us. Pregnant and alone, she sucks poisonous sustenance from her Coke, from her idealization of her lover, and from the radio's babble of evangelical promises. Indeed, simply by casting Duvall and the coarse-featured Keith Carradine in roles usually played by the romantic likes of Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell (They Live ByNight) or Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway (Bonnie and Clyde), Altman restores a realistic human dimension, warts and all, to the fictions of an impossible, romantic mythology.
Something about Duvall's meaning to Altman can be inferred from her replacement by Marta Heflin in A Wedding, and Heflin's subsequent development in A Perfect Couple. In A Wedding Heflin plays a guest who is carefully padded and prodded by a girlfriend to enjoy the license of the occasion. Ultimately, she is taken by her friend's rough and macho husband, in a breach of both honor and observance. Heflin's character seems far more passive than any of Duvall's; Heflin's drifts, but Duvall's characters leap wholeheartedly for their deception and abuse, yet stamp themselves upon their world. Despite these opposite temperaments, Duvall and Heflin have the same type of homey, thin, undernourished body.
So, too, the Heflin role inA Perfect Couple. Here Altman's point is the harmony possible between discordant types. Paul Dooley plays a middle-aged, chubby Greek-American, with an Old World tyrannical father. Heflin plays a boney, mod rock singer. These lovers have nothing in common except their opposite tastes in music and their opposite kinds of patriarchal tyrant. But they are Altman's perfect couple, combining obvious opposites, in contrast to his Imperfect Couple (Fred Bier and Jette Seear) who flit through the film as the ostensibly perfect match, with the same wardrobe and beaming eye, but who eventually break up, their harmony exposed as narcissism. Altman prefers to place the chance for love in Heflin's padding, sniffling and uncertainty, rather than in the complacent, overstuffed icons of an easy harmony.
Altman's clearest case of celebrity casting is Paul Newman as the clay-footed Buffalo Bill. Newman's casting as the blustering, incompetent, lying, paranoid racist centers the film's anti-heroic anatomy of the legend-making industry in America. Actually, Altman's undercutting of Newman's heroic persona is itself consistent with the actor's entire career. For over thirty years, in such films as The Rack, The Long Hot Summer, The Young Philadelphians, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, through Hud, The Hustler, and Torn Curtain, on to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, The Sting and Slap Shot, Newman's steely good looks have been used to play against his character's latent corruption. In Quintet, Newman's aspect of playfulness and moral lightness has been shifted from the central character to the society of that ice-age world's end.
The supporting cast in Buffalo Bill is equally significant. Will Sampson's Bill Halsey is at first mistaken for Sitting Bull because, as Buffalo Bill puts it, "he looks more like Sitting Bull than Sitting Bull." Halsey ends up portraying Sitting Bull in Bill's wild west show; that is, he fulfills the white man's myth of the Indian, bringing the initial error of identity into a kind of ersatz reality. Moreover, Sampson's Halsey is a rebuttal to his most famous role, the heroic Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. His present role as spokesman and interpreter contrasts to his virtual silence in the earlier film. As well, Altman has Sampson's character compromise himself when he sells out to Buffalo Bill's image of Bull. This evades the simplistic heroism of the Noble Savage that Sampson played earlier. For in Altman's view, the myth of the perfect Indian would be as dangerous as the myth of the perfect Buffalo Bill. Again, from the distortions and amplifications of mythology, Altman salvages the touching grace of a flawed humanity.
So, too, in the fringe casting. Burt Lancaster, a star with honest Western associations, is Ned Buntline, consistent with the film's general concern with the confusion between reality and legend. As Buntline tells Bill, "Inventing you was the thrill of my life." The management of Bill's wild west show is cast with performers of distinctly modern persona, especially Harvey Keitel and Joel Grey. As theshow's producer, Grey in effect plays a young variation on his cynical,detached M.C. of Cabaret. His language and values assume a distinctly modern tone: "By enlarging our show we possibly disimproved it"; "We've just signed the most futurable act in history." As we see an Indian attack turn into a staging and a log cabin is wheeled off, we hear, "We're in the authentic business."
In one specific, Altman reverses the traditional process of character identification. The opening credits introduce the characters as types (e.g., The Sure Shot, The Legend Maker) but they are identified by name at the end (Annie Oakley, Ned Buntline). That is, Altman's process is to individuate, to move from the general type to the personal character; traditional fiction may begin with a specific character, such as the real Buffalo Bill or the real Sitting Bull, but proceeds to generalize it into its wishful mythopoeia.
The supporting cast in Buffalo Bill is equally significant. Will Sampson's Bill Halsey is at first mistaken for Sitting Bull because, as Buffalo Bill puts it, "he looks more like Sitting Bull than Sitting Bull." Halsey ends up portraying Sitting Bull in Bill's wild west show; that is, he fulfills the white man's myth of the Indian, bringing the initial error of identity into a kind of ersatz reality. Moreover, Sampson's Halsey is a rebuttal to his most famous role, the heroic Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. His present role as spokesman and interpreter contrasts to his virtual silence in the earlier film. As well, Altman has Sampson's character compromise himself when he sells out to Buffalo Bill's image of Bull. This evades the simplistic heroism of the Noble Savage that Sampson played earlier. For in Altman's view, the myth of the perfect Indian would be as dangerous as the myth of the perfect Buffalo Bill. Again, from the distortions and amplifications of mythology, Altman salvages the touching grace of a flawed humanity.
So, too, in the fringe casting. Burt Lancaster, a star with honest Western associations, is Ned Buntline, consistent with the film's general concern with the confusion between reality and legend. As Buntline tells Bill, "Inventing you was the thrill of my life." The management of Bill's wild west show is cast with performers of distinctly modern persona, especially Harvey Keitel and Joel Grey. As theshow's producer, Grey in effect plays a young variation on his cynical,detached M.C. of Cabaret. His language and values assume a distinctly modern tone: "By enlarging our show we possibly disimproved it"; "We've just signed the most futurable act in history." As we see an Indian attack turn into a staging and a log cabin is wheeled off, we hear, "We're in the authentic business."
In one specific, Altman reverses the traditional process of character identification. The opening credits introduce the characters as types (e.g., The Sure Shot, The Legend Maker) but they are identified by name at the end (Annie Oakley, Ned Buntline). That is, Altman's process is to individuate, to move from the general type to the personal character; traditional fiction may begin with a specific character, such as the real Buffalo Bill or the real Sitting Bull, but proceeds to generalize it into its wishful mythopoeia.
In McCabe and Mrs. Miller Altman plays against his two stars' personae as part of his overall assault upon the false idealization of the Western: "I just wanted to take a very standard Western story with a classic line and do it real or what I felt was real, and destroy all themyths of heroism."3 At the time, Julie Christie personified the sexualfreedom and independence of "swinging London." This persona began with her prophetic role in Billy Liar (1963), and developed through Darling (1965), Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) and Petulia (1968). But in McCabe her image of the free sexual spirit was radically revised to a creature of economic determinism, whose inability to enjoy genuine independence and a sincere emotional life drove her to the cold comfort of the opium den.
Correspondingly, Warren Beatty had the image of an irresistible sexual smoothie but also as a maladjust, someone of energy and combative initiative but somehow out of synch with his time and society. This combination of sexual facility and battling idealism pervades his career, from Splendor in the Grass (1961) through Lilith (1963), Mickey One (1965), culminating in his career-making Bonnie and Clyde (1967). After McCabe, he consolidated this character in The Parallax View (1974) and Heaven Can Wait (1978). In McCabe, both Christie and Beatty work in the same way as the visual and lyrical splendors of the Western do: they are traps by which the audience is drawn into a habitual response to the form, then caught out by the anti-heroic deflations.
The star persona with which Altman is most often associated is Elliott Gould. In effect, Altman created Gould's persona as a wry, disillusioned, indomitable anti-Establishment slob, with his pre-stardom lead in M*A*S*H. In addition, Altman set a pattern by playing Gould against a subdued partner, who yearns for the Gould character's freedom. Altman played Gould against the cerebral, impassive and aloof Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (a pairing repeated in the imitative S*P*Y*S) and against the genial, cowed, urban everyman, George Segal, in California Split. In these pairings Gould acts out his partner's sunken impulses. Gould's persona came to depend upon a partner even in other directors' works (e.g., Robert Blake in Busting, James Caan in Harry and Walter Go to New York, Robert Culp in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice). Without one, he seems to have gone mad, as in Arkin's Little Murders and Bergman's The Touch. When in The Long Goodbye Altman deprives Gould of a partner, the hero is totally isolated. He is abandoned by his friend, his cat, the neighboring "melon convention," and reduced to chattering to himself.
Correspondingly, Warren Beatty had the image of an irresistible sexual smoothie but also as a maladjust, someone of energy and combative initiative but somehow out of synch with his time and society. This combination of sexual facility and battling idealism pervades his career, from Splendor in the Grass (1961) through Lilith (1963), Mickey One (1965), culminating in his career-making Bonnie and Clyde (1967). After McCabe, he consolidated this character in The Parallax View (1974) and Heaven Can Wait (1978). In McCabe, both Christie and Beatty work in the same way as the visual and lyrical splendors of the Western do: they are traps by which the audience is drawn into a habitual response to the form, then caught out by the anti-heroic deflations.
The star persona with which Altman is most often associated is Elliott Gould. In effect, Altman created Gould's persona as a wry, disillusioned, indomitable anti-Establishment slob, with his pre-stardom lead in M*A*S*H. In addition, Altman set a pattern by playing Gould against a subdued partner, who yearns for the Gould character's freedom. Altman played Gould against the cerebral, impassive and aloof Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (a pairing repeated in the imitative S*P*Y*S) and against the genial, cowed, urban everyman, George Segal, in California Split. In these pairings Gould acts out his partner's sunken impulses. Gould's persona came to depend upon a partner even in other directors' works (e.g., Robert Blake in Busting, James Caan in Harry and Walter Go to New York, Robert Culp in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice). Without one, he seems to have gone mad, as in Arkin's Little Murders and Bergman's The Touch. When in The Long Goodbye Altman deprives Gould of a partner, the hero is totally isolated. He is abandoned by his friend, his cat, the neighboring "melon convention," and reduced to chattering to himself.
In The Long Goodbye Altman presents Gould as a Philip Marlowe who has the clothes, lifestyle and values of the '50s, but is stranded in the '70s, the only straight character in a stoned culture. As usual, Altman's supporting cast is crucial to the themes. With the antiquated Marlowe stand Sterling Hayden's writer Wade as a positive parallel and hoodlum Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) as a negative. All three are caught between antiquated personal styles and their unsympathetic period.
The other key figures are so unfamiliar in the film context that they give us an uncertainty analogous to that of the three misfits. Marlowe's friend Terry Lennox, who involves him in the plot, is played by Jim Bouton, the former baseball player who wrote some controversial exposes of his sport and former friends. The romantic heart of the conspiracy is played by Nina van Pallandt, then known primarily for her association with the Clifford Irving-Howard Hughes hoax. Another instigator of evil, the sadistic sanatorium director, is played by Henry Gibson, in his feature film debut departing radically from his lovable teddybear image on the TV Laugh-In series. Altman continuedhis vicious, against-the-grain casting of Gibson in Nashville, A PerfectCouple and Health, always discovering a treachery and cunning beneath Gibson's persona of innocence.
Similarly, Altman's casting in A Wedding provides for a cultural and historical survey of 20th-century America, in addition to its more obvious treatment of its social metaphor. As Nettie Sloan, Lillian Gish at 82 years of age seems to embody the history of film as well as the family. In her first appearance, she is shot from behind, in a nightdress, standing girlishly at her window. The shot evokes her image in her classics with D. W. Griffith. Her character's death in the present film represents the loss of innocence and grace in film history as well as in the nation's social development. Hence the touching stillness in Altman's shot of the first car to arrive at the wedding reception; it is taken from the room where the Gish figure, with her noble but ambivalent film and social traditions, has just died.
Gish's iconic function is confirmed by the other casting. The generation of Lillian Gish modulates down to the callow vacuity of Desi Arnaz, Jr. and his impregnated sister-in-law, Mia Farrow. Both performers are second-generation descendants of TV and film stars respectively. Between the classic film star and the bastard-TV youth stand two intervening generations. Howard Duff, a familiar romantic lead from the '50s, plays Dr. Jules Meecham, a soothing family friend who dispenses hard drugs and fast feels, as if to embody the soporifics and veiled eroticism of the old Hollywood romance. (Nettie Sloan may also be summarizing Duff's acting style when she remarks that Dr. Meecham "couldn't cure a ham.") As Mitch Brenner, the family intruder and arriviste, Altman cast the then-unknown Paul Dooley. Gish's oldest friend, the senile bishop, is played by a lesser-known Hollywood figure from the old days, former director John Cromwell. Ruth Nelson, a once blacklisted Hollywood actress, is cast as Beatrice Sloan Cory, a revolutionary Leftist looney. The offbeat secret adulterer is an offbeat comedian, Pat McCormick. Head writer on Johnny Carson's TV show, McCormick's stepping forth as an actor parallels his character's covert venture into a buoyant flirtation. His romantic partner is a more visible TV performer; Carol Burnett as Tulip Bren- ner develops her TV image as scatty but warm (and continues as a seduced naif in Altman's Health). The fluttering reception coordinator is Geraldine Chaplin, a cultural interloper by her English accent, her associations with snooping and silliness from her earlier Nashville role, and overall the fugitive sense of Hollywood's lost grandeur in her surname. Nina van Pallandt and Dina Merrill are Gish's daughters, the former stoned to vacancy and the latter a fatuously complacent princess. All in all, this drama of personae draws film history as well as social history out of its basic declension from Lillian Gish to Desi Arnez, Jr.
The other key figures are so unfamiliar in the film context that they give us an uncertainty analogous to that of the three misfits. Marlowe's friend Terry Lennox, who involves him in the plot, is played by Jim Bouton, the former baseball player who wrote some controversial exposes of his sport and former friends. The romantic heart of the conspiracy is played by Nina van Pallandt, then known primarily for her association with the Clifford Irving-Howard Hughes hoax. Another instigator of evil, the sadistic sanatorium director, is played by Henry Gibson, in his feature film debut departing radically from his lovable teddybear image on the TV Laugh-In series. Altman continuedhis vicious, against-the-grain casting of Gibson in Nashville, A PerfectCouple and Health, always discovering a treachery and cunning beneath Gibson's persona of innocence.
Similarly, Altman's casting in A Wedding provides for a cultural and historical survey of 20th-century America, in addition to its more obvious treatment of its social metaphor. As Nettie Sloan, Lillian Gish at 82 years of age seems to embody the history of film as well as the family. In her first appearance, she is shot from behind, in a nightdress, standing girlishly at her window. The shot evokes her image in her classics with D. W. Griffith. Her character's death in the present film represents the loss of innocence and grace in film history as well as in the nation's social development. Hence the touching stillness in Altman's shot of the first car to arrive at the wedding reception; it is taken from the room where the Gish figure, with her noble but ambivalent film and social traditions, has just died.
Gish's iconic function is confirmed by the other casting. The generation of Lillian Gish modulates down to the callow vacuity of Desi Arnaz, Jr. and his impregnated sister-in-law, Mia Farrow. Both performers are second-generation descendants of TV and film stars respectively. Between the classic film star and the bastard-TV youth stand two intervening generations. Howard Duff, a familiar romantic lead from the '50s, plays Dr. Jules Meecham, a soothing family friend who dispenses hard drugs and fast feels, as if to embody the soporifics and veiled eroticism of the old Hollywood romance. (Nettie Sloan may also be summarizing Duff's acting style when she remarks that Dr. Meecham "couldn't cure a ham.") As Mitch Brenner, the family intruder and arriviste, Altman cast the then-unknown Paul Dooley. Gish's oldest friend, the senile bishop, is played by a lesser-known Hollywood figure from the old days, former director John Cromwell. Ruth Nelson, a once blacklisted Hollywood actress, is cast as Beatrice Sloan Cory, a revolutionary Leftist looney. The offbeat secret adulterer is an offbeat comedian, Pat McCormick. Head writer on Johnny Carson's TV show, McCormick's stepping forth as an actor parallels his character's covert venture into a buoyant flirtation. His romantic partner is a more visible TV performer; Carol Burnett as Tulip Bren- ner develops her TV image as scatty but warm (and continues as a seduced naif in Altman's Health). The fluttering reception coordinator is Geraldine Chaplin, a cultural interloper by her English accent, her associations with snooping and silliness from her earlier Nashville role, and overall the fugitive sense of Hollywood's lost grandeur in her surname. Nina van Pallandt and Dina Merrill are Gish's daughters, the former stoned to vacancy and the latter a fatuously complacent princess. All in all, this drama of personae draws film history as well as social history out of its basic declension from Lillian Gish to Desi Arnez, Jr.
Continuing the parallel between the social and the filmic referents, the effete American family/cinema was revitalized by the injection of Vittorio Gassman. His casting trails a fugitive sense of the illicit and the vitally erotic from his first international success in Bitter Rice (1948) and Anna (1951) to his roles as illegal immigrant in The Glass Wall (1953) and Rhapsody (1954). His character keeps a basement grotto, reviving his homeland cafe, which underpins Gish's Old South mansion the way the neo-realist infusion can be said to have restored realistic concerns and humanity to American film.
Before Altman shuffled this cast of 48 roughly equal characters in A Wedding, in Nashville he worked with 24 characters, of varying degrees of familiarity. At the highest point of social authority standst he best-known performer, Henry Gibson, as the self-aggrandizing magnate with the false image of avuncular warmth. The familiar Keenan Wynn, playing a man attending his wife's death, represents the traditional American values of family and sentiment. His frustration by the callous wanderings of his dippy hippie niece (Shelley Duvall) represents the social and familial tensions of the generation gap.
At a second level are the slightly familiar presences of Duvall, TV comedienne Lily Tomlin (also cast against type as a sober mother of deaf mutes), and as the rockstar-playboy, Keith Carradine. At the other extreme are Ronee Blakely as the doomed Barbara Jean and Barbara Harris as the rising star, Winnie, plucky, scatter brained, but to prove astonishingly talented when the disaster allows her a clear chance to sing. This casting of a variety of media personae coheres with the film's double anatomy of the media and culture.
More significantly, in this large-cast drama we don't know which character will emerge as the central one. Not until the Ken doll shoots the Barbie doll do we know which of the several stories will provide the dramatic center. As the characters are all people who have come to Nashville to make their fame and fortune, the large cast forms an aptly anonymous community, from which one hero may emerge. Harris's performance of "It Don't Worry Me" is one aspect of the upbeat conclusion that Altman manages to salvage from his survey of American division and frustration.
Before Altman shuffled this cast of 48 roughly equal characters in A Wedding, in Nashville he worked with 24 characters, of varying degrees of familiarity. At the highest point of social authority standst he best-known performer, Henry Gibson, as the self-aggrandizing magnate with the false image of avuncular warmth. The familiar Keenan Wynn, playing a man attending his wife's death, represents the traditional American values of family and sentiment. His frustration by the callous wanderings of his dippy hippie niece (Shelley Duvall) represents the social and familial tensions of the generation gap.
At a second level are the slightly familiar presences of Duvall, TV comedienne Lily Tomlin (also cast against type as a sober mother of deaf mutes), and as the rockstar-playboy, Keith Carradine. At the other extreme are Ronee Blakely as the doomed Barbara Jean and Barbara Harris as the rising star, Winnie, plucky, scatter brained, but to prove astonishingly talented when the disaster allows her a clear chance to sing. This casting of a variety of media personae coheres with the film's double anatomy of the media and culture.
More significantly, in this large-cast drama we don't know which character will emerge as the central one. Not until the Ken doll shoots the Barbie doll do we know which of the several stories will provide the dramatic center. As the characters are all people who have come to Nashville to make their fame and fortune, the large cast forms an aptly anonymous community, from which one hero may emerge. Harris's performance of "It Don't Worry Me" is one aspect of the upbeat conclusion that Altman manages to salvage from his survey of American division and frustration.
The 24-character cast of Nashville and the 48-character cast of A Wedding are the extreme instances of an Altman tendency. Instead of focusing on a star, he develops a community of characters. As Altman tells it, on M*A*S*H he cast ten actors who were not in the script "so that we had an identity and a community rather than just this guy works one day because we need a guy who has a line here. We put everybody on for the run of the picture so that we could develop a communal feeling-we weren't restricted to just this part and that part."4 On McCabe and Mrs. Miller he did the same thing with 40 actors. Consistent with this are the reports from his shooting locationsthat stress the party atmosphere; Altman's crews enjoy a community experience in the filming.
Moreover, as Molly Haskel has observed, "The flux of characters in an Altman film, like the repertory of actors whose faces we can't always place, are surely crucial to his vision of humanity-people bouncing off, or brushing against, one another without connecting."5 Consistent with this, Altman shoots the bit players as much as the stars. Even in such an early work as M*A*S*H, Andrew Sarris noted "the second-unit shooting style, without any sitcom reaction shots of the principals".6 Here modus operandi relates to thematic concern.Altman's sense of community in the process of his art can be taken as an antidote to the basic horror of his vision, the isolation of his heroes and their destruction by a cold, indifferent society.
Consistent with his communal creativity, Altman entrusts his actors with the development of their characters even beyond the humanism of Renoir. "I'm looking for behaviors rather than actors," he has said, to explain his casting of a community.7 In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Warren Beatty wrote almost all his own lines. William Devane wrote his own part, which he then worked over with Beatty. Also, Altman tends to shoot in continuity to aid his actor's character development. In Nashville the actors were encouraged to compose their own songs. However much the Barbara Jean character was based upon the real Loretta Lynn, much was also drawn out of the experiences of the actress, Ronee Blakely. As Joan Tewkesbury describesAltman's method on that film, "Bob needs setups, situations where the characters could develop and react to one another .... to play around in, and the audience is supposed to pick and choose what they want to listen to."8 In The Long Goodbye, Sterling Hayden declared his Wade "the only role I'm not ashamed of. I'm going to let it all out. All of it. It's easy because the role of Roger Wade's so close to myself. A man who drinks because he's afraid of fear and failure, afraid he may be a coward."9
Moreover, as Molly Haskel has observed, "The flux of characters in an Altman film, like the repertory of actors whose faces we can't always place, are surely crucial to his vision of humanity-people bouncing off, or brushing against, one another without connecting."5 Consistent with this, Altman shoots the bit players as much as the stars. Even in such an early work as M*A*S*H, Andrew Sarris noted "the second-unit shooting style, without any sitcom reaction shots of the principals".6 Here modus operandi relates to thematic concern.Altman's sense of community in the process of his art can be taken as an antidote to the basic horror of his vision, the isolation of his heroes and their destruction by a cold, indifferent society.
Consistent with his communal creativity, Altman entrusts his actors with the development of their characters even beyond the humanism of Renoir. "I'm looking for behaviors rather than actors," he has said, to explain his casting of a community.7 In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Warren Beatty wrote almost all his own lines. William Devane wrote his own part, which he then worked over with Beatty. Also, Altman tends to shoot in continuity to aid his actor's character development. In Nashville the actors were encouraged to compose their own songs. However much the Barbara Jean character was based upon the real Loretta Lynn, much was also drawn out of the experiences of the actress, Ronee Blakely. As Joan Tewkesbury describesAltman's method on that film, "Bob needs setups, situations where the characters could develop and react to one another .... to play around in, and the audience is supposed to pick and choose what they want to listen to."8 In The Long Goodbye, Sterling Hayden declared his Wade "the only role I'm not ashamed of. I'm going to let it all out. All of it. It's easy because the role of Roger Wade's so close to myself. A man who drinks because he's afraid of fear and failure, afraid he may be a coward."9
The performers exert this shaping effect on their roles even when they were not originally cast in the role. For example, in A Wedding Dinah Shore was originally intended for the Carol Burnett role (and would have had similar TV associations), Shelley Duvall was to be the spirited girl-next-door, and Sissy Spacek was to have had the Mia Farrow role. Ben Gazzara in the Gassman role would have had more of an underworld than a neo-realist association. On Nashville, the Tomlin role was originally intended for Louise Fletcher, whose parents were deaf mutes, and Susan Anspach was to have had the role of Barbara Jean. But in the magic of film, a role becomes wholly taken over by the actor who plays it; original casting intentions pale away.
One effect of this deep involvement of the actor in his role is a quality of playfulness in the performance. For example, in Nashville there is a telling irony when Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) turns irately against his long-haired pianist, Frog, and declares that his type doesn't belong in Nashville. For the fumbling Frog is played by the supremely skilled Richard Baskin, who arranged the music for the entire film. Of course, this does not detract from Hamilton's sense that the unconventional musician does not belong in the film's Nashville.
Especially Altman's films with Elliott Gould cultivate the character's sense of himself as a role-player. In M*A*S*H, Gould leads Sutherland into several mock-film scenarios (e.g., their "pros from Dover" routine) and uses this superior sense of themselves as players to overwhelm the resistance of sobriety. Confirming Altman's kinship with this spirit, the closing lines heard over the camp P.A. announce M*A *S*H to be that night's film fare. Overall, the sense of play and its morality of flexible values and humane tolerance provide the ethical core of the film. It accounts for its shift of climax from the war genre to the football game here. Where the war genre focuses its action against a common, exterior enemy, in M*A*S*H the struggle is within a unit, between the forces of joyous play and those of murderous sobriety.
In virtually every one of Altman's films, and especially in M*A*S*H, McCabe and California Split, the virtuous characters are the ones who play games. "We've got to shoot crap," quips Trapper John (Gould) in the midst of a particularly gory operation. The villains are those who are too cold or rigid to play games, such as his various Franks-Burns in M*A*S*H and Shaft in Brewster McCloud. Hot-Lips grows from Burns's self-righteousness into humane community when she joins the cheerleading corps in the football game.
One effect of this deep involvement of the actor in his role is a quality of playfulness in the performance. For example, in Nashville there is a telling irony when Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) turns irately against his long-haired pianist, Frog, and declares that his type doesn't belong in Nashville. For the fumbling Frog is played by the supremely skilled Richard Baskin, who arranged the music for the entire film. Of course, this does not detract from Hamilton's sense that the unconventional musician does not belong in the film's Nashville.
Especially Altman's films with Elliott Gould cultivate the character's sense of himself as a role-player. In M*A*S*H, Gould leads Sutherland into several mock-film scenarios (e.g., their "pros from Dover" routine) and uses this superior sense of themselves as players to overwhelm the resistance of sobriety. Confirming Altman's kinship with this spirit, the closing lines heard over the camp P.A. announce M*A *S*H to be that night's film fare. Overall, the sense of play and its morality of flexible values and humane tolerance provide the ethical core of the film. It accounts for its shift of climax from the war genre to the football game here. Where the war genre focuses its action against a common, exterior enemy, in M*A*S*H the struggle is within a unit, between the forces of joyous play and those of murderous sobriety.
In virtually every one of Altman's films, and especially in M*A*S*H, McCabe and California Split, the virtuous characters are the ones who play games. "We've got to shoot crap," quips Trapper John (Gould) in the midst of a particularly gory operation. The villains are those who are too cold or rigid to play games, such as his various Franks-Burns in M*A*S*H and Shaft in Brewster McCloud. Hot-Lips grows from Burns's self-righteousness into humane community when she joins the cheerleading corps in the football game.
In The Long Goodbye Gould's Marlowe senses himself as a character caught in the conventions of a film role. In one scene he reminds interrogating detectives of their lines. So, too, his easy relationship with the guard who does star impersonations. The last shot parodies the end of another film where a pulp literary figure is overwhelmed by his exposure to the corruption of a friend, The Third Man. In summary, as Andrew Sarris observes, "Gould and Altman are both genuinely modern in their crippling self-consciousness. They aren ever quite sure where life begins and imitation leads off. They do not always distinguish carefully between dialogue and double-track monologues."'0
The essential metaphor of play is the center of Altman's vision of the end of the world, Quintet. In that bleak, frozen world, the game is no longer a relief from the rigors of reality but the very basis for the survivors' social order. It is as if the very air of life has become a suffocating force, when game and all its truancy have been co-opted for social order. As a result, the game is associated with death, there is no hope for regeneration, and the usual values of game-playing in Altman, the spirit of joy, chance and exuberance, are dead. A familiar star roster-Paul Newman, Nina van Pallandt, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey, Vittorio Gassman-play out this anti-game by which the dance of life becomes a killing reversal of the human spirit.
Altman's most complex essay on actors and roles is Images. Although the film recalls such suspense-horrors as Polanski's Repulsion, its dominant tone and themes involve the heroine's tripartite existence: in her immediate surroundings, in her fantasy-cum-memory, and in the escape world of the children's book she is writing, In Search of Unicorns. As all three of her worlds are depicted with equal realism, the film is an exercise in ambiguity, as closed and self-contained as Last Year at Marienbad. The entire film is pitched somewhere between the narrative level of characters and the documentary level of actors. Its concern is with that limbo between the self and the various images it projects-in response to the various, often inconsistent, sometimes overlapping, images of reality through which a sensitive soul may move.
The essential metaphor of play is the center of Altman's vision of the end of the world, Quintet. In that bleak, frozen world, the game is no longer a relief from the rigors of reality but the very basis for the survivors' social order. It is as if the very air of life has become a suffocating force, when game and all its truancy have been co-opted for social order. As a result, the game is associated with death, there is no hope for regeneration, and the usual values of game-playing in Altman, the spirit of joy, chance and exuberance, are dead. A familiar star roster-Paul Newman, Nina van Pallandt, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey, Vittorio Gassman-play out this anti-game by which the dance of life becomes a killing reversal of the human spirit.
Altman's most complex essay on actors and roles is Images. Although the film recalls such suspense-horrors as Polanski's Repulsion, its dominant tone and themes involve the heroine's tripartite existence: in her immediate surroundings, in her fantasy-cum-memory, and in the escape world of the children's book she is writing, In Search of Unicorns. As all three of her worlds are depicted with equal realism, the film is an exercise in ambiguity, as closed and self-contained as Last Year at Marienbad. The entire film is pitched somewhere between the narrative level of characters and the documentary level of actors. Its concern is with that limbo between the self and the various images it projects-in response to the various, often inconsistent, sometimes overlapping, images of reality through which a sensitive soul may move.
To define that limbo, Altman deliberately exchanges the names of his actors and their roles. Susannah York plays Cathryn. Cathryn Harrison plays Susannah. Rene Auberjonois plays Cathryn's husban Hugh. Hugh Millais plays her present lover, Marcel. Marcel Bozzuf plays her dead lover, Rene --and so it could go on, the character names throwing the actors into a continuing cycle of fading and reviving passion, waxing and waning reality.
As usual, the casting also demonstrates Altman's personal use of an actor. As the husband, Rene Auberjonois plays a man who is well meaning but laughably inadequate, like his priest, Dago Red, in M*A *S*H and his birdman-lecturer in Brewster McCloud. For Altman Auberjonois is always a man of specialized but pathetically irrelevant knowledge. As the dead lover, Marcel Bozzuffi conveys a cosmopolitanism and charm quite independent of anything he says or does, in contrast to the robust coarseness of the Hugh Millais character and the impotence of the husband.
Finally, the enigma of Images is intensified by the book the heroine is writing; it is actually Susannah York's novel. In so many ways, Images is a compelling mystery about its cast as much as its characters. Its concern with man's layers of consciousness and his refuges in fantasy extends to the actors' interplay with their roles. Throughout the film, the basic movement is outward. Cathryn does her puzzles by starting with the inside and working out. Husband Hugh works in a more formal, prosaic manner; he does the frame first, then fills in the interior. His style in art is similar, as he arranges a neatly framed image of dead material to photograph. Cathryn's writing is a matter of spinning out from her own fantasy and tensions, impulses
both suppressed and freed, into uncertain beyond. As Catherine explores and extends outward, Altman draws his drama from the mysteries of his cast.
As in Images, in 3 Women Altman is again concerned with the influences and veneers that comprise the human personality, so his characters again incorporate aspects of his actors. The Sissy Spacek character's assumption of the Duvall character's personality is prepared for by the particular nature of Duvall's early monologues. Duvall wrote them herself as a pastiche of phrases and tones from women's pulp magazines. As such, they recall the pulp rhetoric that Spacek spoke in her earlier lead, in Terrence Malick's Badlands.
As usual, the casting also demonstrates Altman's personal use of an actor. As the husband, Rene Auberjonois plays a man who is well meaning but laughably inadequate, like his priest, Dago Red, in M*A *S*H and his birdman-lecturer in Brewster McCloud. For Altman Auberjonois is always a man of specialized but pathetically irrelevant knowledge. As the dead lover, Marcel Bozzuffi conveys a cosmopolitanism and charm quite independent of anything he says or does, in contrast to the robust coarseness of the Hugh Millais character and the impotence of the husband.
Finally, the enigma of Images is intensified by the book the heroine is writing; it is actually Susannah York's novel. In so many ways, Images is a compelling mystery about its cast as much as its characters. Its concern with man's layers of consciousness and his refuges in fantasy extends to the actors' interplay with their roles. Throughout the film, the basic movement is outward. Cathryn does her puzzles by starting with the inside and working out. Husband Hugh works in a more formal, prosaic manner; he does the frame first, then fills in the interior. His style in art is similar, as he arranges a neatly framed image of dead material to photograph. Cathryn's writing is a matter of spinning out from her own fantasy and tensions, impulses
both suppressed and freed, into uncertain beyond. As Catherine explores and extends outward, Altman draws his drama from the mysteries of his cast.
As in Images, in 3 Women Altman is again concerned with the influences and veneers that comprise the human personality, so his characters again incorporate aspects of his actors. The Sissy Spacek character's assumption of the Duvall character's personality is prepared for by the particular nature of Duvall's early monologues. Duvall wrote them herself as a pastiche of phrases and tones from women's pulp magazines. As such, they recall the pulp rhetoric that Spacek spoke in her earlier lead, in Terrence Malick's Badlands.
In an Altman film, then, an actor is not cast just because he can act. Altman invites his cast into a community that will create his film. The invitation may be prompted by the director's personal response to the performer's image or nature, or by his awareness of the performer's associations from other films or from real life. In that lively spark between the public and the private languages of film lies Robert Altman's genius. He repeatedly exploits such diverse connotations in his treatment of a wide range of actors, an approach that enables him continually to upset or to challenge his viewer's habitual responses. In his actors as in the other kinds of conventions he employs, Altman inflects his material so as to undermine the security of familiar as- sumptions.
Notes
1. In the ending Altman originally wanted, Countdown would have closed on an of the astronaut on the moon helplessly deserted, walking in the wrong direction, away from the landing from which he was to be saved. William Con reshot the present ending to avoid what Warner Brothers took to be an anti- American conclusion. This is reported by Michael Murphy in "'I had to risk being liked in that scene,"' by Judith Kass, Movietone News, February 5, 1
p. 35.
2. Andrew Sarris, "Robert Altman Dreams a Movie," Village Voice, April 11, 1977, p.42.
Notes
1. In the ending Altman originally wanted, Countdown would have closed on an of the astronaut on the moon helplessly deserted, walking in the wrong direction, away from the landing from which he was to be saved. William Con reshot the present ending to avoid what Warner Brothers took to be an anti- American conclusion. This is reported by Michael Murphy in "'I had to risk being liked in that scene,"' by Judith Kass, Movietone News, February 5, 1
p. 35.
2. Andrew Sarris, "Robert Altman Dreams a Movie," Village Voice, April 11, 1977, p.42.
3 Women, RobertAltman, 1977
4. Ibid., p. 21.
5. Molly Haskell, "Bankrobbers Set Adrift," Village Voice, February 21, 1974, p. 63.
6. Andrew Sarris, "Bottom Line Buffaloes Altman," Village Voice, July 5, 1976, p.108.
7. Atlas-Guerin, op. cit., p. 21.
8. Cynthia Grenier, "Hello, 'Goodbye'," Village Voice, November 15, 1973, p. 69.9. Ibid.10. Andrew Sarris, "Movies," Village Voice, November 1, 1973, p. 68.
5. Molly Haskell, "Bankrobbers Set Adrift," Village Voice, February 21, 1974, p. 63.
6. Andrew Sarris, "Bottom Line Buffaloes Altman," Village Voice, July 5, 1976, p.108.
7. Atlas-Guerin, op. cit., p. 21.
8. Cynthia Grenier, "Hello, 'Goodbye'," Village Voice, November 15, 1973, p. 69.9. Ibid.10. Andrew Sarris, "Movies," Village Voice, November 1, 1973, p. 68.
from Cinema Journal 20, No. 1, Fall 1980
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