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He was among the most prolific film-makers of the 1970s, churning out movies stuffed with innovative style and genre-busting content. So what ever happened to Robert Altman? It's a simple story: While he got less and less conventional in the '80s, Hollywood got more and more conservative. Denied the money to do his thing, Altman did other things: stage plays, made-for-cable dramas, even a couple of operas. But he never stopped making movies, and he has just released his latest, Vincent & Theo. A portrait of the Van Gogh brothers, it's his strongest work in years. That makes it another milestone in a career full of them. Here are some of the best.
M*A*S*H (CBS/Fox, 1970)
After years of reruns of the TV spin-off, it's refreshing to
experience again the harsh humor of the movie that started it all. An
antiwar comedy of the darkest kind, M*A*S*H was a breakthrough for
Altman — and for Hollywood. In addition to setting new standards for
four-letter wit, it also established Altman's trademark style: the
overlapping dialogue, the overflowing frame, the cheerful
overthrowing of traditional Hollywood values. Coming at the height of
the Vietnam debate, the message couldn't have been clearer — even
though the film is set during the Korean War. A
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Warner, 1971)
Altman's version of how the West was won deflated most of the
myths that made the Western genre great. But few Westerns, classic
or otherwise, have been so hypnotic or haunting. Warren Beatty's
McCabe is an entrepreneurial gambler with more ambition than brains.
Julie Christie's Mrs. Miller is a displaced English madam. They team
up to turn a mountain mining camp into a boomtown. Along the way a
near romance develops. Then some mining-company bad men attempt a
hostile takeover. Altman creates a mood piece that eschews
conventional plot and pace, but underneath it all there is a classic
story line taking shape. And when the pieces finally drift into
place, they're all the more effective — because they have the
randomness of life, instead of the neatness of art. A
Nashville (Paramount, 1975)
Released in time for the American Bicentennial, Nashville was
Altman's State of the Union address — as well as a social tragicomedy
of astonishing depth and complexity. As performers, politicians,
hustlers, and innocent bystanders all converge to change one
another's fates, the director fashions a sweeping statement about
stardom, fandom, politics, money, sex, and love. One of the greatest
American films of the '70s, Nashville remains Altman's crowning
achievement. A+
Popeye (Paramount, 1980)
Before Dick Tracy, before the movie version of Annie, there was Altman's Popeye — a musical comic-strip adaptation whose innovation was years ahead of its time. The only problem is that Altman's rambling
style sometimes works against the comic-book simplicity. But Robin
Williams makes a vividly convincing Popeye; Shelley Duvall, all skin
and bones, is a picture-perfect Olive Oyl. Equally impressive is the
world they live in — the lopsided, ramshackle harbor town of
Sweethaven, an ingenious piece of production design. Comic strips
don't come any more alive than this. B
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Embassy/Nelson, 1982)
Altman spent most of the '80s adapting stage plays for the screen — partly because he could do them cheaply, partly because he
was trying to create a new hybrid of theater and film. Some of his
efforts were successes (Streamers, Fool for Love), and some were not
(Beyond Therapy). But none was more memorable than this story of
small-town Texas women gathered for a 20-year reunion. The
ensemble — including Cher, Sandy Dennis, and Karen Black — is uniformly fine. But this is always Altman's show. Preserving the one-set
intimacy of Ed Graczyk's drama, the director makes no attempt to open
things up cinematically. Instead, he probes even deeper into these
characters. The result is an improbably transcendent adaptation of an
essentially second-rate play. B+
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