Robert Altman

3 Women

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Millie and Pinkie

3 Women, or Robert Altman’s 3 Women as the screen title has it, is Altman’s attempt to go one better than Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which was a peculiar story about two women whose identities become melded, switched, lumped together. Bergman did it as sci-fi, of sorts, whereas Altman’s crack at the same idea leans harder on horror. It’s Gerald Busby’s relentlessly spiky and spooky score that most obviously alerts us that this is a horror movie, again of sorts. Though this is an almost relentlessly bright and clean movie, here and there Altman reminds us what he’s about with temporary dives into gothic Hammer-style visuals. Sissy Spacek plays the naive young blow-in from … Read more

Secret Honor

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Philip Baker Hall as President Nixon

Secret Honor is one of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s favourite films, was loved by late lamented critic Roger Ebert and is one of the select fraction of movies given a home in Criterion’s choice “Collection”. Most people have never heard of it, though they do know its maker, Robert Altman, director of Mash, The Long Goodbye and Nashville, and later The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park. Secret Honor came between those two blocks of three, in the period after the relative flop of 1980’s Popeye and the comeback of 1992’s The Player, when no matter what Altman did (film, TV or theatre) nothing really seemed to hit bullseye. Nor, to be frank, … Read more

Brewster McCloud

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Suzanne (Shelley Duvall) and Brewster (Bud Cort)

Brewster McCloud, the Robert Altman film people rarely talk about, owes something to early Soviet pioneers like Eisenstein, but possibly a lot more to the ingestion of cannabinoids. It’s got experiment with form in mind, but it’s also sprawlingly formless, as if Altman was stoned while in the edit suite. We understand his point, but he will keep on making it. In high (take that any way you want) Altman style, it’s a scenes-from-a-montage affair, a collage of moments where Altman in effect says “This!… this!… this!… this!… and this!… are what it’s all about”. A snapshot of one world, then a snapshot of another, a movie reference, then a star from an old … Read more

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

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McCabe in a massive fur coat

The superb McCabe and Mrs Miller (generally styled McCabe & Mrs. Miller) was sold as a revisionist western when it came out in 1971. Its director, Robert Altman, went so far as to call it an “anti-western”. Even though Anthony Mann in the 1950s and Sergio Leone in the 1960s had paved the way with “revisionist” westerns of their own, the first reviews of Altman’s version of the revisionist western were harsh. Rex Reed of the New York Daily News called it, “an incoherent, amateurish, simple-minded, boring and totally worthless piece of garbage”, which is nailing your colours to the mast if nothing else. Other critics liked, loved and raved over it. Pauline … Read more

McCabe and Mrs Miller

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Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs Miller

As Ang Lee now redefines every genre he touches, so did Robert Altman three and more decades ago. Here’s his remodelling of the western, an “anti-western” according to him, though these days what Altman was doing decades ago has mostly been incorporated in the mainstream – the “anti-western” is now just a western. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie take the leads – he a lousy entrepreneur with a plan to build a whorehouse, she a Cockney madam with an opium habit and a determination to make McCabe succeed in the enterprise they agree to jointly undertake. They sleep together but she charges him top dollar. It’s that sort of relationship and that sort of … Read more

Magnolia

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Tom Cruise in Magnolia

Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up to Boogie Nights disappointed those who were hoping for more Dirk Diggler and his prosthetic schlong. At 182 minutes it also caught out those who were watching at the cinema with a beer or two inside them – knotted legs don’t make for maximum movie fun. At home with a pause button it’s pure luxury. Stylistically it’s heavily in debt to one of Anderson’s readily acknowledged influences, Robert Altman – the overlapping dialogue, the wandering camera and the faintly disengaged performances. By which I mean the actors are not all constantly presenting three-quarter profiles to camera (no, not even Tom Cruise). Yes, Tom Cruise. How often is it that … Read more

Mash

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Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould

An on-screen statement, put there at the behest of a nervous film studio, claims this film is about the goings-on at a field hospital during the Korean War. That statement apart, this is obviously a film about Vietnam, a war the Americans had already lost at home, if not yet out on the field of battle. Now, decades later, from the other end of the countercultural telescope, Mash’s relentless portrayal of the military hierarchy as being overrun by charlatans and buffoons seems a bit old hat. But the director making it had earned the right to his opinion. Robert Altman was a veteran of the Second World War who’d gone on to become … Read more

Dr T and the Women

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Richard Gere in Dr T and the Women

If, as the old joke has it, gynaecologists are always up to their elbows in work, how much more taxing would that job be if you were Richard Gere? That’s the proposition that Robert Altman lays before us in a film that’s often dismissed, his last of a line of flops that lay between Short Cuts (1993) and Gosford Park (2001). But Dr T is really worth a second look because of what Altman is doing, possibly unbeknown to his cast. Scouring Hollywood, he’s found a handful of irritating, self-obsessed and unhinged actresses and cast them just as they are – or is it more the sort of type they very often play? … Read more