News and Commentary – Robert Altman: The New Hollywood Years

Any pantheon of the New Hollywood must include Robert Altman, whose run of twelve films from 1967 to 1977 stands up robustly in comparison not only with his distinguished contemporaries, but alongside almost any figure we can think of in the history of cinema. So it is high past time that we gave him the official “New Hollywood Years” treatment, and properly induct Altman into the Hall of Fame. By any metric: quality, high-caliber quantity, the articulation of a distinct and recognizable style (yet without ever repeating himself); fiercely independent, and, of course, having something to say, Altman is a meritorious exemplar of everything the New Hollywood hoped to achieve.

Altman, born in 1925 and who saw considerable action serving in the Army Air Force during the Second World War, came relatively late to directing feature films. Most of his generational peers (Sidney Lumet and Arthur Penn, for example) earned their stripes working in the Golden Age of live television drama in the 1950s before graduating to Hollywood movies late in that decade. But with the exception of a couple of fifties quickies, Altman followed a longer and less traditional path to the big chair, first directing numerous industrial films and documentaries, and then working extensively in episodic television, helming dozens of installments for a variety of popular series. (In his chapter for The New Hollywood Revisited, David Sterritt emphasizes the importance of these early, obscure efforts in forging what would become Altman’s style.)

In 1967 Altman finally got his big chance, serving as a director for hire on Countdown, a yarn about the Space Race, which promisingly featured Robert Duvall and James Caan. (Barbara Baxley, who would resurface as Lady Pearl in Nashville also appears in the movie, as does Michael Murphy, whose numerous collaborations with Altman, starting with an episode of Combat! in 1963, would stretch across five decades.) Countdown is smartly shot—and terribly boring. Legends hold that Altman was fired late in the day by obtuse studio suits for incompetence – that is, for the innovative use of overlapping dialogue which would become Altman’s trademark – but these tall tales appear to be embellished. In any event, unless you’re an obsessive completist (guilty), Pass.

It would be two years before Altman’s next release, the modestly budgeted psychological drama That Cold Day in the Park, filmed in Vancouver. Starring Sandy Dennis and shot by László Kovács, Altman would later express dissatisfaction with the effort, which is nevertheless worth a look. But the director as we now know him would suddenly emerge the following year, in 1970, with M*A*S*H (an opportunity that fell to Altman after pretty much every conceivable director of note passed on the project). Here was The Robert Altman Film: large casts, relentless revisionism, profound cynicism of heroism and American mythology, encouraged improvisation with dialogue, innovations in sound recording, and seventies-film style endings (invariably downbeat or open). M*A*S*H featured Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould (they tried to get Altman fired during the production before coming around to his unorthodox methods), along with a very large party of favorites (including Rene Auberjonois and Sally Kellerman). In retrospect M*A*S*H is more important than it is great, but it is not to be underestimated. In the words of Martin Scorsese, speaking of that film: “The irreverence, the freedom . . . the creative use of the zoom lens and the long lens, the multiple voices on the soundtrack—he was like a great jazz musician, taking us all on a grand artistic journey.”

Altman’s next effort, Brewster McCloud, features strong performances by Michael Murphy and Sally Kellerman; a number of other players from M*A*S*H also return (and Shelley Duvall marks the first of her eight collaborations with the director). Brewster tells the story of a boy who lives in the bowels of the Astrodome, and wants to fly. The movie has its advocates . . . we are not among them. But next up was McCabe & Mrs. Miller, a masterpiece and one of the New Hollywood’s great revisionist westerns. Starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond crafted the film’s daring, impeccable, groundbreaking visual style of under-lit interiors and washed-out exteriors; Leonard Cohen’s songs matched those somber tones. We’ll get out of the way and let Pauline Kael tell you about this one: “McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a beautiful pipe dream of a movie—a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been,” read the first line of her legendary review. “Altman’s most distinctive quality as a director,” Kael astutely observed, is his “gift for creating an atmosphere of living interrelationships . . . a step toward a new kind of movie naturalism.” McCabe is “the work of a more subtle, more deeply gifted—more mysterious—intelligence than might have been guessed at from M*A*S*H.” “Can an American director get by with a movie as personal as this . . . giving form to his own feelings, some not quite defined, just barely suggested?”

Fresh from the (un)fabled old Northwest, Altman then reached for something completely different—the contemporary, Bergmanesque chamber piece Images, starring Susannah York and Rene Auberjonois. Based on a fantasy novel by York (who also took home the best actress prize at Cannes), Images offers a harrowing plunge into one woman’s mental illness. The least representative of Altman’s New Hollywood films, it shows the impressive breadth of the director’s sure hand.

The Long Goodbye is another masterpiece. Stunningly shot, it was Altman’s third film in three years with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (who also the director of photography for The Hired Hand, Deliverance and Scarecrow from 1971-73). Elliot Gould, Nina van Pallandt and Mr. Sterling Hayden headline a strong cast; we have written about this one previously—with Chinatown and Night Moves, it forms the holy trinity of revisionist films noir.

Altman would follow The Long Goodbye with a period piece, Thieves Like Us, based on same source material as Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948). Featuring assorted regulars alongside a few newcomers (lead player Keith Carradine and writer Joan Tewkesbury would continue on to Nashville), Thieves was an exercise in Altman’s profound cynicism about capitalism, law and order, and the hypocrisies of proper society—a less sentimental (and less successful) depression-era companion piece to John Houston’s landmark The Asphalt Jungle.

Radically switching gears yet again, Altman quickly unleashed another gem: California Split, which features Elliot Gould and George Segal as a pair of compulsive gamblers—the movie that one suspects hits closest to home for the director. (One major Altman biography was appropriately subtitled “Jumping off the Cliff.”) Well-described by Vincent Canby as “a fascinating, vivid movie, not quite comparable to any other,” this one remains somewhat underseen; difficult in places, it wanders a bit along the way, but purposefully builds towards a powerfully understated and ultimately brilliant conclusion.

And then there was Nashville, which New York Times political columnist Tom Wicker described as a “cascade of minutely detailed vulgarity, greed, deceit, cruelty, barely contained hysteria, and the frantic lack of root and grace into which American life has been driven.” (Of course, those now look like the good old days.) We have written about this one on several occasions, and have little to add here other than to note that Altman will be wearing a Nashville cap on his Hall of Fame plaque, for this, his most representative great film.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, with Paul Newman, could not help but suffer in comparison with Nashville, but it is much better than its reputation suggests, and in poking subversively at inspired-by-actual-events Americana, as is Altman’s revisionist wont, it holds up surprisingly well today. Still, despite the formidable presence of Burt Lancaster (and a somewhat incongruous Harvey Keitel), it is a minor effort. But Altman closed his New Hollywood years with another Triumph – the ethereal 3 Women (Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule) – a film that came to its writer-director in a dream. An accomplished movie that clearly reflects a singular, district vision, we must confess that it is not one of our favorites, so consider instead the high praise from Roger Ebert and Philip French.

Like many other leading seventies directors, Altman’s fortunes faded with the passing of New Hollywood era, as struggles with the blockbuster-minded studios mounted and his films entered a less consistently stellar phase. But Altman’s “years of exile” are to be admired. Following the old adage “a writer writes,” Altman’ credo appeared to be “a director directs,” and he kept very busy for the next fifteen years, with twelve features (some quite good) and high quality television work. Finally and ironically, there is a happy ending to this story: in the early 1990s Altman returned to the public eye with back-to-back triumphs The Player and Short Cuts, and his career flourished in a final decade of work, which included the late masterpiece Gosford Park.

Robert Altman: The New Hollywood Years

1967 Countdown

1969 That Cold Day in the Park

1970 M*A*S*H **

1970 Brewster McCloud

1971 McCabe & Mrs. Miller ***

1972 Images **

1973 The Long Goodbey ***

1974 Thieves Like Us *

1974 California Split **

1975 Nashville ***

1976 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson