ilmmaking is a chance to live life many times" -- Robert Altman




For years Altman has been a by-word for integrity and independence, a director compelled to lean on the private lives of the self-obsessed. Now, sadly, he's gone. Such a prolific figure leaves behind a lot for us to remember him by. Above all, the impudent way in which Altman tugged at the fictions of everyday life will be impossible to forget. Incredibly, he was around as early as 1948, playing an extra in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. However, his brief acting career never took off and in the same year he kick-started his future proper, co-writing Bodyguard with Richard Fleischer. It wasn't until 1958 that Altman directed his own feature, The Delinquents. He wrote this crass exploitation film in a week and shot it on a meager $63,000 budget. The film turned a $1,000,000 profit and people took note of his no-bullshit methods. After a stint in television, honing his ruthless, professional eye on shows such as “Bonanza,” Altman returned to Hollywood and never looked back.

Altman's naturalistic, overlapping style is one of the most identifiable in American film history. Like Sidney Lumet or John Frankenheimer, he was a true craftsman, an individual unafraid to comment politically on his times. The hazy realism through which his films asked us to peer can distract from his shattering reinventions of some distinctly American genres: the Western (McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the War movie (M*A*S*H), the Private Eye movie (The Long Goodbye) and the Musical (Nashville)—cementing his place in film history with these stone cold 70s classics. Altman's second golden period was the early 90s, The Player and Short Cuts reinvigorating his reputation and reminding audiences of his ability to seamlessly weave visual and literary narratives to beguiling effect. An immense figure, the world will be slightly less believable without him.
[Paolo Cabrelli]


STYLUS RECOMMENDS


McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

If M*A*S*H was Altman’s comic Hellerian send-up of the Vietnam War, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is where he takes the myths of American free-competition and its everyman ideology, now bitten in half by the bitterness of the war, and turns them into stark tragedy. Hung dim by the songs of Leonard Cohen, whose winter-snug tales serve Altman’s purposes perfectly here, Altman allows you the sly interplay—one of the movie’s few traditionally ‘charming’ interactions—of the gambler cum entrepreneur McCabe (Warren Beatty) against the cool, shrewd gentility of Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) as juxtaposition to an end you know before you know: big business is on its way, and if you don’t take their offer, they’ll take your life. This is the West in permanent eclipse, a bold vision of how in 1971 Manifest Destiny had been pasted into the corporate charter and erased elsewhere, how empyrean-blue had gone stone-blind grey.
[Derek Miller]


The Long Goodbye (1973)

Dressed throughout in a stern black suit but surrounded by the post-Day-Glo shimmer of 1970s Malibu, Elliot Gould is a modern-day Philip Marlowe and Altman’s lost hero in The Long Goodbye, a character willfully out of step with his surroundings, trying to avoid succumbing (completely, at least) to its fatalism or its excess (yoga in the nude, anyone?). In many ways, Altman did with the story of The Long Goodbye what he’d famously done with sound and dialogue in all of his films—giving you glimpses and pieces of a larger whole by reminding you just how rich and dull the intertextures of the everyday can be, moving so quickly and without any sense of proper chronology that your confusion becomes the stage for a wider, more realistic narrative. You can follow Altman’s borrowed tale or you can lose yourself within it. It doesn’t really matter: The Long Goodbye is a rich, effortless glimpse of film noir cool where even the smoothest California dandy goes out of his way for the perfect cat food.
[Derek Miller]


3 Women (1977)

Featuring Bergman-like dream sequences and a love scene between an elderly couple that rivals the Furries in The Shining for unexplainable horror, 3 Women is by far Altman’s most bizarre film. The story follows young Pinky (Sissy Spacek) and her totem-like idol / symbiote Millie (Shelley Duvall)—employees at a nursing home in Palm Springs. The narrative pursues female identity intricately woven with a psycho-sexual attachment and near fusion in both sororal and motherly figures, with Duvall's Millie evoking a complex reaction of pity and aggravation in her struggles to bed or even be acknowledged by her neighbors and co-workers. Pinky becomes the wedge between her delusions, eventually leading to the younger's suicide attempt, subsequent amnesia, and rebirth as Lolita-esque darling.
[Todd Depalma]


Secret Honor (1984)

Much like the movie adaptations of Streamers and Come Back to the Five and Dime…, Altman’s Secret Honor works in spite of his famed expansiveness. Secret Honor, however, is the best remembered of the trio mainly thanks to the masterful portrayal of Richard Nixon by a then-unknown Philip Baker Hall. In it, Hall pontificates for ninety minutes on “the homos from Westchester County or Cambridge,” Kissinger (“a whoremaster”), and “the secret honor” of his resignation. Joined only by closed-circuit TVs, some Chivas, and a loaded pistol, Hall's Nixon is what we always imagined him to be: a maniac, a broken man, a complete cipher. Altman's direction is as equally as crucial—somehow allowing us to forget that there is only one camera, one room, and one man. As a result—and despite its turn away from the sprawl of earlier and later work—Secret Honor makes perfect sense: a culmination of his understated 80s work.
[Todd Burns]


The Player (1992)

"If you've got something to say about me, say it to my face, not behind my back," Malcolm McDowell (playing himself) hisses to Tim Robbins' studio exec in "The Player." Long identified as Hollywood's enemy, Altman cinched his niche as a lover of actors with his most direct portrait of the company town: everyone's acting, but not in ways anyone else would let them—Whoopi Goldberg reborn as a riffing, tampon-twirling detective, Mr. Willis and Ms. Roberts as punchlines with legs, the betrayed glamorless girlfriend—and not the seductress—mundanely undressing for the camera. In the glare of sunlight, streetlights, and screening rooms, Robbins' murder of a screenwriter presents no existential abyss—just the threat of career-killing. Bookending his satiric noir with a long take of absurd story pitches and two gauzy "happy endings," Altman said it to their face and stealthily reappeared on the radar after a dozen years in the industry's wilderness.
[Bill Weber]


The Gingerbread Man (1998)

In the 90s John Grisham was, in Hollywood jargon, "hot property." 1997 saw the release of two wildly disparate adaptations of his carpentered prose, but the difference between Francis Ford Coppola's sportsmanlike conduct of The Rainmaker and Altman's disembowelment of The Gingerbread Man is the difference between William Wyler and Jean-Luc Godard. Southern lawyer Rick Magruder (Kenneth Branagh) fucks a caterer (born-for-martyrdom Embeth Davidtz) and what happens? Malfeasance! Lurid Gothic filigrees! Robert Duvall uncaged! An ingratiating Robert Downey, Jr. demonstrates once again that his buoyant instincts require a director who's on the same wavelength. The forgotten The Gingerbread Man is nothing less than the 90s' The Long Goodbye, complete with a splendidly clueless protagonist and a throwaway scene so apt that it epitomizes what made Altman such an unpredictable genius: when Downey exits a bar after failing to pick up two girls, one asks her friend, "Is he coming back?" Whereupon they giggle and begin to make out. Cut. Next scene.
[Alfred Soto]


Gosford Park (2001)

What sustains Altman's late masterpiece through 140 minutes is its ceaseless motion. Unlike La Règle du Jeu, the Jean Renoir film this one is but a hair from remaking, Gosford Park doesn't see anything its servant characters don't—but it makes clear that this isn't much. By carefully following its maids and footmen through their murder-mystery plot Altman's camera anchors what might have been goofy contrivance—motives are distributed amongst the guests like gift baggies—in a social reality that skirts didacticism without falling in.

Gosford's dialogue is Altman dialogue: voluminous and competitive. But there's not an unnecessary word, not a glance out of place. The movie satisfies the twin demands of structure and voluptuousness by erecting a quiet rigging of irrelevant but never meaningless subplots. This is no Christie pulp: this is a movie about confusion and regimentation, resentment and politesse, inward terror and outward calm, class hatred and the feudal spirit—and one of Altman's finest hours.
[Theon Weber]


For more of Stylus on Altman, visit movie writer Dave Micevic’s blog, The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.