Something Different About Altman
Robert Altman: February 20, 1925-November 20 2006
When an 81-year-old dies unexpectedly, you know you’re looking at a pretty amazing 81-year-old. And they didn’t come more amazing than film director Robert Altman. His most recent movie, A Prairie Home Companion, is in cinemas now and is as strong and vibrant as any of his work.
Altman once observed that he liked to make movies Hollywood wasn’t interested in and Hollywood wanted him to make movies he wasn’t interested in. It’s probably why he ended up making some of the most influential and popular movies of all time: M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park. And he always had total control - from first take to last cut.
He wasn’t always successful, but he was never dull. Some of his less famous films are also among the best:
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) was a stage play, directed on Broadway by Altman then uncompromisingly committed to film. Sandy Dennis, Karen Black and Cher starred on stage and reprised their roles for the movie. For Cher it was life-changing. Altman was considered crazy when he cast her - the joke popstar - in a straight acting role. She repaid his shrewd decision and it led to a real movie career - think Silkwood (1983), Mask (1985), Moonstruck (1987), Mermaids (1990), Tea With Mussolini (1999) - and dozens of award nominations and wins including two Oscars.
Popeye (1980) with a screenplay by Jules Feiffer. It featuredShelley Duvall in the role she was born to play - Olive Oyl - and a perfectly-cast Robin Williams as the spinach-chomping sailor man, was a critical and box office flop. But its saturated colour, crazily distorted theatrical sets (built around a cove on the island of Malta - hence the saturated white light); delirious songs by Harry Nilsson, enhanced and orchestrated by the quirky genius Van Dyke Parks make it one of Altman’s most memorable and characteristic films.
Turning his attention to the Wild West in 1971, Altman shattered forever Hollywood’s saccharine representations of that era with McCabe and Mrs Miller. It starred an especially luminous Julie Christie as the world-weary, opium-smoking whorehouse madam and Warren Beatty as the inept would-be magnate of a mud-caked, snowbound nowheresville. Nearly 40 years on, the parallels between his role and that of Meryl Streep in A Prairie Home Companion are both touching and joyous. And, of course, there are the Leonard Cohen songs on the soundtrack when the naive discovered who the Sisters of Mercy really were. The film was not available to purchase for many years but is now on DVD.
Robert Altman was considering several new movie projects at the time of his death.
DVDs of McCabe and Mrs Miller, Popeye and Come Back to the Five and Dime, a wide selection Van Dyke Parks and Leonard Cohen CDs are easily available, new and used, on amazon.com
