Tag: Robert Altman

Short Cuts (1993)

Anne Archer and Jack Lemmon are just two of many intersecting lives in Altman’s Short Cuts

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: Andie MacDowell (Ann Finnigan), Bruce Davison (Howard Finnigan), Julianne Moore (Marian Wyman), Matthew Modine (Dr Ralph Wyman), Anne Archer (Claire Kane), Fred Ward (Stuart Kane), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Lois Kaiser), Chris Penn (Jerry Kaiser), Lili Taylor (Honey Bush), Robert Downey Jnr (Bill Bush), Madeleine Stowe (Sherri Shepard), Tim Robbins (Gene Shepard), Lily Tomlin (Doreen Piggot), Tom Waits (Earl Piggot), Frances McDormand (Betty Weathers), Peter Gallagher (Stormy Weathers), Annie Ross (Tess Trainer), Lori Singer (Zoe Trainer), Jack Lemmon (Paul Finnigan), Lyle Lovett (Andy Bitkower), Buck Henry (Gordon Johnson), Huey Lewis (Vern Miller)

Helicopters fly over Los Angeles, spraying against medflies. Beneath them, people’s lives entwine over the course of a couple of days. It could only be an Altman film. The man who turned the whole of Nashville into a set for, repeats the trick here with a brilliantly handled adaptation of a series of Raymond Carver short stories into one single inter-linked narrative, that explores a full gamut of emotions in that strange race we call humanity.

The son of TV commentator Howard (Bruce Davison) and his wife Anne (Andie MacDowell) is hospitalised after he is accidentally clipped by the car of waitress Doreen (Lily Tomlin). He’s treated by Dr Ralph Wyman (Matthew Modine), currently feuding with artist wife Marian (Julianne Moore). Marian befriends clown Claire (Anne Archer), who is horrified when her husband Stuart (Fred Ward) and his friends decide not to let finding a dead body spoil their fishing trip. Marian’s sister Sherri (Madeline Stowe) is becoming increasingly exasperated with philandering cop husband Gene (Tim Robbins), who is having an affair with Betty (Frances McDormand) estranged wife of Stormy Weathers (Peter Gallagher) who flew one of those helicopters spraying medflies. That’s not even mentioning a furious baker (Lyle Lovett), a sexually frustrated pool cleaner (Chris Penn) and his phone-sex worker wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) or Howard’s unreliable father Paul (Jack Lemmon).

There aren’t many directors in Hollywood who could throw this many plates onto sticks and keep them spinning. Certainly very few who could make it look as easy as Altman does. With no less than twenty leading characters spread out across at least nine storylines, many of which intersect but without those taking part of them being aware of it, this is such a carefully woven tapestry even a single loose thread could have led to the entire image unravelling into a sorry collection of fabric. The fact it doesn’t, and the film moves so confidently and vibrantly from place-to-place, shifting from perspective to perspective without ever once confusing or alienating the audience, demonstrates this is the work of a master at the top of his game.

Altman’s verité style is at its best here. There is no need for flash or intrusive cinematic tricks, when the entire film is a brilliant expression of the potential of cinematic narrative. Altman’s camera, with its observational stillness, is perfectly matched with masterful editing (the film is superbly assembled by Geraldine Peroni) that not only makes this a coherent whole, but also finds every trace of reaction and nuance from the characters. Time and time again the camera (and the editing) searches out and finds that little moment of reaction that adds a whole world of depth to the story.

Because, like some of Altman’s best films, this is all about a cascade of little moments that combine into one beautifully enlightening whole. Each story demonstrates a different facet of the human experience, but what they all have in common is the unpredictability of how events many turn out and how people may react to them. There is a wonderful unknowability about people which the film captures. Just when we think we have a person sussed, they will do or say something we don’t expect. A philanderer’s wife will be amused by his cheating than horrified. An abusive baker will have depths of kindness. Feuding couples will find they have more in common than not.

There’s also darkness and sadness. The film is largely anchored by the increasingly heart-string tugging collapse of Howard and Ann’s son – and the pain that can lie in parent-child relationships is also seen in the dysfunctional relationship between jazz singer Tess (Annie Ross) and her talented but depressed celloist daughter Zoe (Lori Singer). As Ann, Andie MacDowell gives one of her finest performances as a powerless mother desperate to do the right thing, her fear and vulnerability as touching as her pain is devastating. Somehow, it’s all the more affecting by knowing how distraught Lily Tomlin’s Doreen would be if she knew the terrible impact of her very minor accident was.

That’s another beauty of this tapestry. As characters ‘guest’ in each other’s stories, we don’t see them in black-and-white but as ordinary people doing their best. Tim Robbins’ cop would probably seem a selfish rogue agent in the eyes of several characters, but as we see more of his home life (dysfunctional but strangely loving), it’s hard not to warm to him. We understand why Ralph (Matthew Modine) is a bit distant with the Finnegans, because he’s distracted by concerns that his wife is having an affair. We can’t be angry at Doreen, because we know she’s such a decent person.

The film doesn’t shy away from the darkness of people, not less the slow bubble of sad-eyed depression in the eyes of Chris Penn, jealous of the people his wife (a very good Jennifer Jason Leigh) talks dirty to down a phoneline – a bubble that will burst before the film’s end. Peter Gallagher’s cocksure and charming pilot has the potential in him to do something quite unpleasant to his wife. Even Tim Robbins’ cop seems only a few degrees from potentially taking the law into his own hands.

Short Cuts is wonderfully constructed – and never feels overbearing or overlong despite its great length – but it’s not perfect. It’s very hard not to notice today that it’s view of the great melting pot of Los Angeles is overwhelmingly white. Nearly every single woman takes her clothes off at some point (Julianne Moore famously does an entire domestic argument nude from the waist down, which is making a point about the impact of long-term marriage but still Modine is fully clothed). Altman at times lets his cynicism (and even slight condescension) for some characters show a little too clearly.

But, despite those flaws, Short Cuts is an almost perfect example of smorgasbord story-telling in cinema. And no one else could surely have done it with such ease and wit as Altman did.

The Player (1992)

Tim Robbins is the ultimate heartless Hollywood exec in Altman’s vicious satire The Player

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: Tim Robbins (Griffin Mill), Greta Scacchi (June Gudmundsdottir), Fred Ward (Walter Stuckel), Whoopi Goldberg (Detective Susan Avery), Peter Gallagher (Larry Levy), Brion James (Joel Levison), Cynthia Stevenson (Bonnie Sherow), Vincent D’Onofrio (David Kahane), Dean Stockwell (Andy Sivella), Richard E. Grant (Tom Oakley), Sydney Pollack (Dick Mellon), Lyle Lovett (Detective Paul DeLongpre), Gina Gershon (Whitney Gersh), Jeremy Piven (Steve Reeves)

Hollywood: it’s a hell of a place. Sharks ain’t got nothing on studio power-brokers, hunting product to sell. After all, not a single letter of “Art” appears in “Hollywood”. Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) hears 50,000 pitches a year and gives the green light to ten or twelve. Mill is plagued with death threats. Confronting the writer (Vincent D’Onofrio) he believes responsible, he kills him in a fight. Can he get away with murder and successfully romance the writer’s artist girlfriend June (Greta Scacchi)? And, even more importantly, can he protect his job from hotshot executive Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher)?

Robert Altman had been working outside of the studios for well over two decades after negative experiences creating his critically acclaimed but hard-to-digest masterpieces (including McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Long Goodbye, the sort of films only Altman could make). His career had drifted during the 1980s, as his edgy, ‘disciplined ill-discipline’ approach (with overlapping sound and roving cameras) moved out of fashion. The Player was not only his payback expose on the studio system, with the exec a sociopath, but also his triumphant comeback to the frontline of film-making (he earned several awards, including a nomination for Best Director).

The Player is nominally a comedy, but in the way of Altman it also fits half a dozen other labels: from film noir to corporate satire. Above all it’s a maverick’s view of a system designed to produce product (Mill constantly speak of his films like this – he would love our modern age of “content”). The studio’s offices are lined with posters from classic Hollywood – but the studio produces the most crowd-pleasing cookie cutter movies you can imagine. It’s all about squeezing in all the ideal elements a film must have: “Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.” (In a neat subversive twist, these are of course all present in The Player – but then it’s to be expected when what we are seeing might actually be a film within a film).

Film pitches all have an air of desperation, every idea boiled down to simple, easily digestible slogans. It’s nearly always a combination of two other films – “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman!” – or involves the biggest stars (“Julia” and “Bruce” were those two stars – and both actors hilariously spoof themselves in the film’s climactic sequence). Ahead of its time, the film even features a pitch (from a cameoing Buck Henry) for The Graduate 2, a nostalgia tinted exploitation of the IP with all the original cast, that basically sounds like the sort of thing they’d actually make today.

There is no place for film-making as an art – any idea that can’t be compressed into 30 seconds is worthless. Mill’s knowledge of film is patchy at best, his attempt to make small talk about Bicycle Thieves boiling down to “Perhaps we should remake it?”. The film (possibly the film within a film within a film), Habeas Corpus, pitched by Richard E Grant’s pretentious writer (“No stars! No pat Hollywood endings!”) is only attractive because it has the wisp of Oscar about it (and Oscars mean Big Bucks). Even then, Mill plans to rework the whole film into exactly the sort of pat-Hollywood romantic thriller Grant’s character claims to hate (no character will support this decision more than Grant’s sellout writer). The only person who seems to actually watch films is Fred Ward’s studio head-of-security – and at least half of his references are met with blank incomprehension. When Griffin makes a speech donating the studio’s old films to a cultural library, his words about art and culture are incredibly hollow.

This vicious satire of the shallow culture of Hollywood – Larry Levy’s up and coming executive attends AA solely to network, not because he has a drink problem – is wrapped up in a beautiful noir framework, that’s brilliantly a few degrees off reality (for reasons that later become clear). Deluged by death threats from (he surmises) a disgruntled writer, Griffin meets the man he suspects – a pretentious holier-than-thou wannabe, played with chippy fury by Vincent D’Onofrio – who he beats to death in a neon-lit carpark, after a dig too far about Mill’s job security (as nothing threatens these guys more than the prospect of being drummed out of town).

Altman’s film wonderfully echoes the neon lit shadows of classic noir, while building a homage filled trap around Mill, desperate to escape punishment. Mill of course has killed the wrong man – and his stalker knows it – and his own heartless-but-effortlessly-cool business dealings are contrasted with his efforts to avoid the dogged pursuit of a police department (led, in a curious but just-about-effective piece of casting, by Whoopi Goldberg) correctly convinced he is guilty. The film asks, how much does morality intrude on Mill, when he’s led his whole life trampling people: isn’t literally killing someone only the next step up from all that metaphorical killing he’s been doing?

His one weakness is falling in love with his victim’s girlfriend, an artist played with a breezy sexiness by Greta Scacchi. Scacchi’s June is intriguingly unknowable – how much does she suspect Mill, and how much does she even care? – and the dance of seduction and suspicion between them is highly effective, culminating in a tastefully, imaginatively but highly sensually shot sex scene (built from Scacchi’s refusal to do a nude scene – instead the nudity comes from a full frontal of Robbins emerging from a mud bath).

Scacchi’s June feels like halfway between a real person and a movie construct – and that’s a deliberate effect in a film which, the ending suggests, may well have been a movie within a movie. Mill takes a pitch in the final moments from his actual blackmailer, who outlines the very film we have been watching, a pitch Mill accepts on condition the film (he?) gets a happy ending: cue Mill arriving home to June and the two of them using the same pat Hollywood pay-off lines to greet each other, we just saw Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts mouth in Mill’s happy-ending for Habeas Corpus. Apply the logic of a film to all the action and it suddenly makes sense on a whole new level, as a beautifully judged exploration of the very crowd-pleasing elements Mills praises, repackaged in a sharp and bitter satire.

Tim Robbins performance of restrained amorality is vital to the film’s success. In his career, any weakness is deadly – a mantra he applies to his interactions with the police and with June. Mill is so eerily controlled – fear is the only emotion he categorically shows, guilt never crosses his mind – you start to wonder if he even has a real personality. But, in the movie’s structure, he’s both a real person and also a construct whose life echoes scenes from the movies whose posters fill his office.

Altman balances these ideas of truth and reality perfectly within the studio satire. The film is astonishingly well-made, all Altman’s trademarks of overlapping dialogue and roving camera present and correct. It opens with a hugely confident seven-minute tracking shot around the studio, which feels like a real “I’m back!” statement – and is beautifully and wittily done. The film is crammed with dozens of celebrities playing themselves (they were given no dialogue and encouraged to improvise scenes), all of them keen to show they were in on the joke.

The Player is dark, witty and very clever, one of Altman’s sharpest and most enjoyable films. Crammed with echoes of film noir and a brutal expose of Hollywood business practice, it’s very well performed and keeps just enough lightness and humanity (it encourages to empathise, but not sympathise, with Mill, for all his amorality) to also be entertaining. One of the great films about Hollywood.

Nashville (1975)

Robert Altman’s sprawling classic takes on a whole city in the brilliant Nashville

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: David Arkin (Norman), Barbara Baxley (Lady Pearl), Ned Beatty (Del Reese), Karen Black (Connie White), Ronee Blakley (Barbara Jean), Timothy Brown (Tommy Brown), Keith Carradine (Tom Frank), Geraldine Chaplin (Opal), Robert Du Qui (Wade Cooley), Shelley Duvall (Martha), Allen Garfield (Barnett), Henry Gibson (Haven Hamilton), Scott Glenn (Pfc Kelly), Jeff Goldblum (Tricycle Man), Barbara Harris (Winifred), David Hayward (Kenny), Michael Murphy (John Triplette), Allan F. Nicholls (Bill), Dave Peel (Bud Hamilton), Cristina Raines (Mary), Bert Remsen (Star), Lily Tomlin (Linnea Reese), Gwen Welles (Sueleen Gay), Keenan Wynn (Mr Green)

Robert Altman’s magnum opus, Nashville has the city has its set and, seemingly, its entire population as the cast. Over the course of a few days, Nashville charts the interweaving lives of a host of people making (or trying to make) a living in the home of country and western and the hangers on and fans flocking around the edges. Meanwhile a presidential campaign plays out, trying to recruit stars as fund-raisers.

You could say that, on the surface, Nashville isn’t really about anything. Certainly, it’s plot (such as it is) is more based on observing our characters interacting with and responding to events. Wonderfully rich short stories overlap each other, the focus mothing smoothly from one and another. It’s not really grounded in an overarching plot, such as McCabe and Mrs Miller or The Long Goodbye. In many ways its more similar to M*A*S*H, an experience piece trying to capture the thoughts and emotions of a particular moment of time. It’s that which I think is the heart of it. Nashville is about very little, but really it’s about everything – and it’s one of the most enlightening and vital studies of twentieth century America you are ever going to see. A rich and fascinating insight into a particular point in history, in a country rife with tensions.

You can’t escape that Nashville takes place in an America under the shadow of traumatic events. The 1970s (and the legacy of the 1960s) has pulled America further apart than ever. It’s a country struggling with a wave of assassinations, still deeply scared by the sacrifice of JFK (several characters, most notably Barbara Bexley’s permanently intoxicated Lady Pearl, reflect on the loss of innocence that came with it). Scott Glenn’s uniform clad army private is only the most visual reminder that the country is being ripped apart by Vietnam. Bubbling racial tensions are captured by short-order cook Wade (a lovely performance by Robert Du Qui) who angrily denounces black country singer Tommy Brown (a suave Timothy Brown) as an Uncle Tom.

Politically, America isn’t heading anywhere. The film is continuously framed by a car literally driving around in circles, blaring out meaningless platitudes straight from the lips of Hal Phillip Walker a third-party Presidential candidate who is against a lot of stuff (lawyers in congress and the Election College) but doesn’t seem to be ‘for’ anything. His smooth advance man John Triplette (Michael Murphy, quietly unimpressed by the music stars around him) drums up musicians to appear at a benefit – not one of whom even ask about the politics of the man they are being asked to endorse. Nashville isn’t a film that feels particularly enamoured either with politics or the level of our engagement with it.

Instead there is a new religion in town: fame. The musicians of Nashville at the time were unhappy with the film, feeling that Altman planned an attack on their industry. Altman is, of course, smarter than this. Of course, there are some satirical blows landed – but the film has respect and admiration for artists with genuine talent. Its real criticism is for fakes and poseurs (of which more later). But for the talents at the centre, sure they are flawed – but there is a respect for their skills and genuineness that keeps the film relatable. (Altman would be far more vicious when he turned his eyes to Hollywood with The Player).

The artists at its heart are flawed but human. Haven Hamilton (a grandiose Henry Gibson) may be a blow-hard reactionary, but his patriotic pride and sense of personal responsibility is genuine (late in the film he will ignore a serious injury to show concern for others). At the film’s centre is fragile super-star Barbara Jean (a delicate Ronee Blakely), the beloved super-star teetering on the edge of a dangerous breakdown, overwhelmed with the pressures of fame and expectation. A lonely person, reduced to trying to communicate her unease to her audiences in rambling monologues. Looking for a human connection she’s unable to make elsewhere (this makes for a neat contrast with her rival, Karen Black’s bubbly but coolly distant Connie White who knows where to draw the line between public and private).

This humanity also makes for intriguing personal dilemmas. Singing trio Tom (a swaggering Keith Carradine), Bill (a frustrated Allan F Nicholls) and Mary (a saddened Cristina Raines) are in the middle of a love triangle (caused by Mary’s love for Tom, who loves the attention but doesn’t return the favour). Made more tense by Tom’s desire to go solo, the couple’s tensions are never firmly resolved – part of Altman’s avoiding of neat endings. Tom himself, in many ways a shallow lothario, is also shown to be feeling the same loneliness and emptiness as others.

It’s interesting that the film’s warmest character, Lily Tomlin’s Linnea, lies half-way between the world of the music and the world of normal life. A dedicated performer of gospel with an all-Black choir, Linnea also works tirelessly at home to support her two deaf children (who attract very little interest from their father, would-be fixer Ned Beatty). Linnea though is never portrayed as someone trapped in her life, in the way others are, but in complete acceptance – and even contentment – with her lot. Similar to Keenan Wynn’s grieving husband, desperate for his niece to engage with her aunt’s illness, the film’s real warmth is for those people grounded in real-life worries.

The film’s real fire is saved for the shallow wannabes that flock around the edges. The music stars may be flawed but they have talent (as witnessed by the film showcasing almost an hour of musical performance in its runtime – all the songs written and performed by the stars). Shelley Duvall’s would-be groupee is hilariously empty-headed and selfish. Ned Beatty’s greasy-pole climbing political animal is ridiculously pompous. At the top of the pile is Geraldine Chaplin’s reporter, an empty headed fame obsessive, hilariously fawning to the rich and famous and abrupt and rude to ‘the staff’, pontificating emptily in a car junkyard. Is she even a real reporter or just a fantasist?

Altman’s film also finds time for two very different women trying to find fame in this heartland of country and western. Sueleen Gray (Gwen Welles) is a waitress carefully cultivating all the patter of a star, but lacking the key attribute – talent. So desperate is she to ‘make it’ that she is willing to be exploited for a big chance, with only Wade having the decency to tell her she should cut her losses (advice she bats away in anger). By contrast, Barbara Harris’ Albuquerque, running from her husband to find fame, has the talent but never gets the opportunities – until of course at the very end (and it’s the result of the tragic fate of another woman whose doomed fate hangs over the film).

Nashville is a rich character study, but all these characters link back into an America at a turning point in its cultural history. Detached and disillusioned with politics, this is a country that is starting to see fame – and the indulgence of your own passions and desires – as the new religion. A religion that attracts both wannabes and also stalkers and dangerous obsessives (at least two of whom populate the film, one with fatal consequences). In this world, as idealism dies and is replaced by cynicism, people start to check out and either engage more with their own problems or yearn to change their lives and become something else. Altman’s film captures this moment in time personally, as well as being a compelling melting pot of stories. A rich, multi-layered tapestry – of which a review can only scratch the surface – it’s a great film.

MAS*H (1970)

Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt and Donald Sutherland are three madcap surgeons in Robert Altman’s MA*SH a film that looks less screwball and more misogynist every day

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: Donald Sutherland (Captain “Hawkeye” Pierce), Elliott Gould (Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre), Tom Skerritt (Captain “Duke” Bedford), Sally Kellerman (Major Margaret Hoolihan), Robert Duvall (Major Frank Burns), Roger Bowen (Lt Col Henry Blake), Rene Auberjonois (Father Mulcahy), David Arkin (SSgt Wade Vollmer), Jo Ann Pflug (Lt Maria “Dish” Schneider), Jon Schuck (Captain “The Painless Pole” Waldowski), Carl Gottlieb (Captain “Ugly John” Black)

Robert Altman’s counter-culture M*A*S*H was his first (and probably only) unreserved smash hit, the film where Altman cemented his style as a director. Although set in the Korean War, the film was clearly more about attitudes towards Vietnam. Today M*A*S*H is probably more well known as the filmic spring board for the extremely long-running TV show starring Alan Alda (which, at 11 years, lasted seven years longer than the war it was set in).

M*A*S*H (like the series) covers the mad-cap antics of the doctors at the 4077^thmedicine outpost near the frontlines of the Korean war, a casualty clearing station where young men are patched up and either sent back to the front line or sent home. While the base is a military operation, most of the doctors serving there are drafted civilian doctors rankled by rigid military discipline. The leaders of this prickly bunch are “Hawkeye” Pierce (Donald Sutherland), “Trapper” John (Elliot Gould) and “Duke” Bedford (Tom Skerritt), with their targets ranging from generals to the stiff-backed military figures on the base, specifically the officious but less-competent surgeon Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and Head Nurse Major Hollihan (Sally Kellerman).

M*A*S*H is the first expression of what became Robert Altman’s signature style as a director. The film has a grimy immediacy that throws the audience into the middle of the action, and is cut with an edgy lack of artifice that at the time was seen as barely competent film-making. That didn’t outrage people as much as Altman’s willingness to allow a lack of conventional discipline in dialogue delivery, with actors overlapping wildly, some dialogue drifting out of earshot or not being captured on screen, no real story being developed through it. It’s a deliberately scrappy, scratchy, almost clumsy film shot with a great deal of artistic discipline (including a spot on The Last Supper parody) but cut and sound-edited with a casual precision that makes it feel extraordinarily experimental.

It infuriated its screenwriter Ring Lardner Jnr (no doubt the Oscar that he received soothed his pain), and Altman’s loose, improvisational style and unwillingness to go for conventional framing and style also alienated his leading actors. Altman and Sutherland (with Gould’s support) each pushed for the other to be dismissed from the film (Sutherland has claimed to have never seen the film, and ton have never understood its success; Gould later apologised by letter to Altman and worked with him several times again) and the whole film’s final style – its influential fly-on-the-wall vibe and nose-thumbing lack of formal discipline – can be attributed completely to Altman’s vision and artistic independence.

The film is important as a key landmark in film-making style and in Altman’s development as a director – but there is no other way of saying it, it has dated extraordinarily badly. For those more familiar with the TV show, its tone is going to come as quite a shock. The TV show is a lighter, sillier, more socially conscious creation (increasingly so in its later years) where the tone was more japery and deadpan silliness. The film is cruel, and its lead characters are swaggering, alpha jocks and bullies, whose meanness and astonishing levels of misogyny are constantly celebrated and rewarded. For those who remember Alan Alda as Hawkeye, Donald Sutherland’s viciousness is coming to come as quite a shock!

Hawkeye and Trapper John’s vileness at frequent intervals is pretty hard to stomach (the less said about the racist, unpleasant Duke the better). The film is really keen to show that all this rampant cruel practical jokery is a survival mechanism against the horrors of war, and the difficulty of dealing with patching young soldiers up to send them back out to die. But the film never really gives us a sense of the war, and the surgery scenes (while effective in their bloodiness and counterpointing the frat house atmosphere of the rest of the film) fail to create that ominous sense of senseless never-ending conflict that the film needs to balance out the vileness of the humour. Further, while Hawkeye and Trapper John are both shown to be dedicated and gifted professionals, they also remain two-dimensional figures, never really shown to have an emotional hinterland that expands their work. They are instead more like Wall Street stockbrokers: excellent at their job, but still a pair of arseholes.

Their attitude to women – and the film’s attitude – is beyond troubling today, it’s flat out offensive. The nurses on station are treated as no more than snacks for the men to enjoy, that they are entitled to pick up as often as they like, and who are barely given any character at all. Sex is as much an entitlement as rations. On his promotion to Chief Surgeon, Trapper John demands (half-jokingly) sex, while Hawkeye “volunteers” a woman to help “cure” another character who fears he has turned homosexual and is considering suicide. Counter culture against the war is celebrated throughout – but it shown in this film to be overwhelmingly a masculine campaign, in which women have no place and no equality. Men can feel the war is terrible, and men can rebel against authority, but women exist only to service their needs.

All of this boils down into a real bad taste in the film’s treatment of ultra-professional Major Hoolihan. Reviled by Hawkeye, Trapper John and Duke for the twin crimes of taking her military career seriously and not being interested in sex with Hawkeye, Hoolihan is systematically degraded and humiliated throughout the film. From having her sex with humourless prig and fellow disciplinarian Frank Burns broadcast around the camp (giving her the nickname “Hot Lips” from her pillowtalk, a title she never escapes) to having the shower tent collapsed around her in front of the whole camp to settle a bet about whether she is a “real blonde” or not – her reaction to which we are misogynistically encouraged to view as hysteria, as dismissed by her commanding officer – it’s tough to watch. The one compliment she gets in the film on being a good nurse is accompanied by her insulting nickname, and by the end of the film she has been reduced to being depicted as an air-headed cheerleader at a football game. Even her credits picture shows her ultimate moment of humiliation. She’s seen as a Blue Stocking, unnatural because she is attractive but not willing to be sexually available to men. This is the sort of treatment that could drive a person to suicide, here treated for laughs. It’s impossible to watch with a smile today.

And it’s the dated part of the film as Hawkeye and Trapper are never questioned for this behaviour – indeed they are celebrated and encouraged throughout as fun, cool guys – when in fact they are the worst sort of jock bullies and their antics the sort of tedious frathouse rubbish that blights too many all-male clubs. They are working class Bullingdon boys, who value nothing, with the film giving them passes because they are great surgeons. Sutherland in particular isn’t charming, he’s creepy and unsettlingly cruel, while Gould at least has a madcap goofiness with touches of humanity.

Two hours with these arseholes is a long time, and the film just plain isn’t funny enough for what it is trying to do – neither does it convey the horrors of war enough, or the men’s understanding of it. More time shown on the surgeons at least acknowledging the horrors might have helped wonders – but the film assumes that we know what they are feeling and just rolls with it. You could generously say they are cruel in a cruel world. But the film never acknowledges the essential meanness of the humour here, and tries to involve us all in it with no sense of conflict or concern. It’s a troubling film to watch today, its rampant sexist cruelty is offensive and its lack of charm purely unintentional. Time will continue to be cruel to it.

Gosford Park (2001)

Cruelty, snobbery and viciousness – just another night at Gosford Park

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: Eileen Atkins (Mrs Croft), Bob Balaban (Morris Weissman), Alan Bates (Mr Jennings), Charles Dance (Lord Stockbridge), Stephen Fry (Inspector Thompson), Michael Gambon (Sir William McCordle), Richard E. Grant (George), Derek Jacobi (Probert), Kelly Macdonald (Mary Maceachran), Helen Mirren (Mrs Wilson), Jeremy Northam (Ivor Novello), Clive Owen (Robert Parks), Ryan Phillippe (Henry Denton), Kristin Scott-Thomas (Lady Sylvia McCordle), Maggie Smith (Constance, Countess of Trentham), Emily Watson (Elsie), Claudie Blakely (Mabel Nesbitt), Tom Hollander (Lt Commander Anthony Meredith), Geraldine Somerville (Lady Stockbridge), Jeremy Swift (Arthur), Sophie Thompson (Dorothy), James Wilby (Freddie Nesbitt)

We’ve always fancied ourselves that when Brits make films in America – think John Schlesinger’s brilliant analysis of New York hustlers in Midnight Cowboy – they turn the sharp analytical eye of the outsider on American society. But do we like it when America turns the same critical eye on us? Gosford Park is a film surely no Brit could have made, so acutely vicious and condemning of the class system of this country, without the hectoring that left-wing British filmmakers so often bring to the same material, it’s just about perfect in exposing the hypocrisy and cruelty that undermines our class system. You’ll never look at an episode of Downton Abbey the same way again.

In November 1932, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) hosts a shooting party at his country house. McCordle is almost universally despised by his relatives and peers – most especially his wife Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott-Thomas) – but tolerated as his vast fortune from his factories basically funds the lives of nearly everyone at the house party. While the upper classes gather upstairs, downstairs the servants of the house led by butler Jennings (Alan Bates) and housekeeper Mrs Wilson (Helen Mirren) order the house to meet the often selfish and thoughtless demands of the rich. The house is rocked midway through the weekend, when a murder occurs overnight. With motives aplenty, perhaps the new maid Mary (Kelly Macdonald) of the imperious Countess Trentham (Maggie Smith) has the best chance of finding the truth.

First and foremost, it’s probably a good idea to say that this is in no way a murder-mystery. Robert Altman, I think, could barely care less about whodunit. While the film has elements that gently spoof elements of its Agatha Christie-ish settings, Altman’s interest has always been the personal relationships between people and the societies they move in. So this is a film really about the atmosphere of the house and most importantly how these people treat each other. Altman despised snobbery, and in a world that is fuelled by that very vice, he goes to town in showing just how awful and stifling so many elements of the class system really were.

“He thinks he’s God Almighty. They all do.” So speaks Clive Owen’s Robert Parks, valet, of his employer the patrician Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance, excellent). You’ve got the attitude right there: the rich see themselves as a different species to those pushing plates around and cleaning clothes below stairs. The idea of there being anything in common is laughable. Slight moments of casual conversation between servant and master in the film are governed by strict laws and carry a quiet tension.

It’s so acute in its analysis of the selfishness, snobbery, cruelty and arrogance of the British class system that each time I watch it I’m less and less convinced that Downton Abbey (the cuddliest version of this world you could imagine) creator Julian Fellowes had much to do with it. This film is so far from the “we are all in this together” Edwardian paternalism of that series, you can’t believe the same man wrote both. All the heritage charm of Downton is drained from Gosford, leaving only the cold reality of what a world is like where a small number of people employ the rest.

Upstairs the hierarchy is absurdly multi-layered. Everyone is aware of their position, with those at the top of the tree barely able to look those at the bottom in the eye, let alone talk to them. The rudeness is striking. Maggie Smith (who is brilliant, her character totally devoid of the essential kindness of her role in Downton Abbey has) is so imperiously offensive, such an arch-snob, she can only put the thinnest veil over her contempt when she deigns to speak to her inferiors. Her niece, played with an ice-cold distance by Kristin Scott-Thomas, embodies aloofness, selfishness and casual cruelty.

Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam, superb) – the one real person in the film, and a film star – is treated like a jumped up minstrel player, with characters falling over themselves to make snide comments about his career. His guest Morris Weissman (an excellent Bob Balaban), a Hollywood film producer, is treated with similar contempt – when reluctant to divulge details of the film he is in England researching (a Charlie Chan film) for fears he will spoil his plot, the Countess bluntly informs him “oh, none of us will see it”. Later, as Novello plays the piano (essentially singing for his supper) only the servants are pleased – most of the upper classes endure it under sufferance (“Don’t encourage him” the Countess says when there is a smattering of applause). You can see why, after only a few hours in the house, Weissman whispers to Novello: “How do you put up with these people?”

The servants themselves are bits of furniture, or barely acknowledged at all. Altman doesn’t shoot a single scene without a servant present, but this often hammers home their irrelevance to the upper classes (it’s made even more effective by seeing actors like Bates, Jacobi, Grant, Macdonald, Owen and Watson essentially being treated as extras). There are no bonds between upstairs and downstairs at all. Any upset witnessed on either side is responded to with silence. When Emily Watson’s Elsie (a brilliant performance of arch awareness of her place) momentarily forgets herself and speaks out at the dinner table, it’s treated like she has crapped on the floor – needless to say her career is finished.

The servants however echo the pointless rituals and ingrained hierarchy of their masters below stairs. For ease (!) the house servants insist the visiting servants are only addressed by the names of their employers not their own names. At their dinner table, their seating reflects the hierarchy of their employers. Many of the servants are more grounded and “normal” than the upstairs types, but they are as complicit in this system continuing as anyone else. They simply can’t imagine a life without it, and accept without question their place at the bottom rung of the house.

Ryan Phillippe, later revealed as an actor masquerading as a servant (for research), immediately shows how hard it is to move between the two social circles. The servants despise him as a traitor who may leak secrets about their views of the employers. The guests see him as a jumped up intruder, even more vulgar than Novello and Weissman. His later humiliation is one of the few moments that see both sides of the social divide united (it’s fitting that it is an act of cruelty that reinforces the social rules that brings people together).

The focus is so overwhelmingly on the class system – with Altman’s brilliant camera work (the camera is never still) giving us the sense of being a fly-on-the-wall in this house – that you forget it’s a murder mystery. Here the film is also really clever, archly exposing the harsh realities of the attitudes held by your standard group of Christie characters. Dance’s Lord Stockbridge in a Christie story would be a “perfect brick” but here we’ve seen he’s a shrewd but judgemental old bastard. The film throws in a clumsy Christie-style incompetent police detective, played by Stephen Fry. This is possibly the film’s only real misstep as Fry’s performance touches on a farcical tone that seems completely out of step with the rest of the film. But the Christie parody is generally wonderful, exploding the cosy English world the public perception believes is behind Christie (even if the author herself was often darker than people remember!).

It’s a hilarious film – Maggie Smith in particular is memorable, from cutting down her fellow guests, to judgementally tutting at shop-bought (not homemade) marmalade – but it’s also a film that creeps up on you with real emotional impact. Kelly Macdonald is very good as the most “everyday” character, who takes on the role of detective and has superb chemistry with Clive Owen’s dashing valet. But the film builds towards a heart-rending conclusion – a conclusion that, with its reveal about the darker side of Gambon’s blustering Sir William, feels more relevant every day – that shows the secret tragedies and dark underbelly of these worlds, with a particularly affecting scene between Atkins and Mirren (Mirren in particular is such a peripheral figure for so much of the film, that her final act revelations and emotional response carries even more force). It’s heart rending.

Gosford Park is a film continually misremembered as either a cosy costume drama or a murder mystery. It’s neither. It’s a brilliant analysis of the British class system and a superb indictment of the impact and damage it has had on people and the country. Hilarious, brilliantly directed by Altman with a superb cast – it’s a masterpiece, perhaps one of the finest films in Altman’s catalogue.

McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971)

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie fail to conquer the Wild West in Altman’s revisionist Western McCabe and Mrs Miller

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: Warren Beatty (John McCabe), Julie Christie (Constance Miller), RenéAuberjonois (Sheehan), Michael Murphy (Eugen Sears), Antony Holland (Ernest Hollander), Bert Ramsen (Bart Coyle), Shelley Duvall (Ida Coyle), Keith Carradine (Cowboy), Hugh Millais (Butler), Corey Fischer (Reverend Elliot), William Devane (Clement Samuels), John Schuck (Smalley)

The Western is such a familiar genre of Hollywood film-making that you can be pretty familiar with nearly all the concepts that it contains – from the stranger in town through to the final shoot-out. All these familiar tropes were just challenges though for a film-maker like Robert Altman: how do we make a Western that features all these, but then completely twists and subverts it all into something that also feels like a product of the 1970s rather than the 1870s? Well Altman runs with all this in McCabe and Mrs Miller, his successful anti-Western.

In Washington State in 1902, John McCabe (Warren Beatty), a conman and card sharp, rides into Presbyterian Church, a town so small it’s named after its only prominent building. McCabe’s skills at cards quickly make him rich, and as the town’s mining fortunes grow so do his. He sets up a gaming and cat house in the town. Constance Miller (Julie Christie) is a cockney opium addict with experience of running whorehouses and she quickly partners with McCabe, promising that she can raise his profits tenfold. All goes swimmingly – until big business heads into town and makes an offer to buy out McCabe’s holdings (and the whole town) for redevelopment. When McCabe says no he quickly finds himself in over his head.

Altman’s film combines all the techniques that he had been experimenting with throughout his career into a perfect storm of Altmanesque technique. He and Vilmos Zsigmond, his skilled cinematographer, deliberately “flashed” the film to slightly over-expose it, giving the picture a slight sepia hue like a series of old photos. The camera leisurely roves around like curious spectator to the film, letting itself catch moments of interest here and there – sometimes refusing to focus on events that feel, by rights, that they should be centre of the film. It gives the film a real lived in feeling, while also making it look slightly like a historical record of true events. Either way, as the cold hits Washington State, it looks beautiful – candle-lit interiors mixed with coldly blue exteriors of snow and ice-covered surroundings.

But those visuals are as nothing compared to Altman’s experiment with sound. Sticking rigidly to the script was hardly ever Altman’s way and it’s certainly not here. In rehearsals, the actors felt free to experiment with and rework a script that had already been through the hands of several writers. Altman kept this loose, free-flowing, improvisational tone in the final film. As the camera roves round, so does the microphone, picking up snatches of conversation here and there – sometimes giving us a mixture of conversations from which we need to pick out what to listen to. In addition to that, most of the actors deliberately mumble their lines – or happily deliver them from mouths clutching cigars or chewing food. Anarchic is almost the right word for it – Altman doesn’t want to tell you what to listen to, and is more interested in getting across the atmosphere of the scene rather than the facts and figures. It takes some time to get used to – and at points is highly frustrating – but it creates its own mood.

And this mood is very different from what you might expect from a Western. There is a distinct lack of glamour here. This world of Presbyterian Church is dirty, grimy and lacking in any moral fibre or real sense of right and wrong. The church itself is respected but largely ignored by the citizens, who are far more interested in drinking, screwing and gambling. When violence occurs it is ignored as much as possible or – as in the final shoot-out that ends the film – it happens around people so wrapped up in their own concerns (from domestics, to a large fire) that they barely notice it happening. Needless to say, for those in the fire fight, there are no rules to be played by at all. People are shot in the back, shoot down innocent bystanders, and play by no rules whatsoever, stalking and shooting opportunistically.

McCabe is a perfect hero for this very different kind of Western. As played by Beatty, he is a cocksure coward nowhere near as clever, confident or controlled as he thinks he is. Arriving in the town, he seems like the height of glamour in his bearskin coat, and he swiftly masters the simple townsfolk with his tall tales and charisma. However, the more people who intrude on this world, the more quickly it emerges that McCabe has very little clue about what is going on, is easily cowed and has only the barest understanding of how the world works. Meeting with a lawyer, one scene later he is parroting a (completely misunderstood) version of the law that he has heard from there. Meeting with the “muscle” from the corporation, he deflates like a balloon, desperately making offers hand over foot. Beatty is very good as this puffed up coward, confused and constantly living a front but out of his depth in the world.

Julie Christie’s Mrs Miller is far more worldly than him, immediately able to recognise the dangers and understanding exactly the sort of men McCabe is dealing with. Mrs Miller’s opium habit is a quietly understated obsession, one the other characters seem unaware of, but which the viewer alone seems to know about. It raises questions of course – is this meant to imply perhaps some of what we see is a drug induced fantasy? But it doesn’t impact otherwise the relationship she develops with McCabe, part meeting of partners, part a protective relationship with Miller guiding McCabe.

The rest of the cast is stuffed with a series of Altman regulars, all of whom deliver fine performances. The stand-out is Hugh Millais, an English writer making his acting debut, who is simply sublime as the articulate and ruthless chief heavy sent by the company to intimidate McCabe.

For the film itself, your enjoyment of it is largely going to be affected by how easily you plug into its style of storytelling. There is very little story for much of the first half of the film, instead events continue in a loose and undisciplined style, but the second half delivers a more focused story of ambition pushed too far, and culminates in an impressively filmed ruthless shoot out. It is perhaps more of a film that is about the atmosphere and the style than the story, but as a redeveloped Western that carries across the style of the grimy 1970s it works extremely well. At first I thought I would never get into it, but by the end I found myself wrapped up in the story it was telling. Visually and performance-wise it’s superb. Altman is an acquired taste, but acquire it and you will be richly rewarded.

Coda: Much like The Long Goodbye I watched this film about a week ago at time of posting and I find myself thinking over several sequences in it again and again with ever more admiration. When watching it I felt it had been over promoted by critics. Now I increasingly think it might be something very special indeed.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

Philip Marlowe: You ain’t seen the great detective this dishevelled before

Director: Robert Altman
Cast: Elliott Gould (Philip Marlowe), Nina van Pallandt (Eileen Wade), Sterling Hayden (Roger Wade), Mark Rydell (Marty Augustine), Henry Gibson (Dr. Verringer), David Arkin (Harry), Jim Bouton (Terry Lennox), Ken Sansom (Colony Guard)

Philip Marlowe: The Great Gumshoe as you’ve never seen him before. Altman has taken Chandler’s original novel and re-set it into the 1970s. Marlowe (Elliot Gould) is still a private eye but a sort of eccentric Don Quixote, an ambling, mumbling oddity too noble to take on “divorce work”. After he gives his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) a lift to Mexico, he is left facing police wrath after Terry’s wife is found dead. He is cleared only when Terry is found dead in Mexico, having signed a confession. But Marlowe can’t believe his friend capable of murder – and investigates further.

Altman’s Chandler adaptation was widely criticised at the time – largely because it was completely mis-sold as a mystery detective yarn, which it certainly is not. There are no clues, the mystery is pretty vague at best and the detective hero not only does virtually no detective whatsoever, but is such a naïve soul with such a trusting 1950s style code of honour that he seems swept along by events like a broken reed in a stream. Far from the Marlowe of Bogart or Mitchum, Gould’s Marlowe was an almost wilfully uncool, awkward social misfit, whose lack of engagement with the world stemmed far more from his own lack of understanding than any cynicism.

On top of that, the film is an unusual blend of old and new. Marlowe is a scruffy man out of time, constantly smoking (no one else in the film does) and shuffling from encounter to encounter. Vital conversations happen outside of our (and Marlowe’s) hearing. The camera roams as wilfully as its lead character, rarely standing still to let us absorb the action, but constantly offering us a series of subjective angles. Like much of Altman’s work, the naturalistic sound recording lets dialogue overlap and clash. The entire soundtrack is a riff on the themes in the title song, the music popping up throughout like pleasant musak. Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography is both an inversion of film noir with its California brightness and (through a technique of deliberate overexposure called ‘flashing’) a sepia infected look at the 1970s that draws a link back to the source material’s 1940s origins.

But the tone of the movie is the most unusual thing: a strangely addictive hipsterish take on Marlowe, in which the majority of other characters are as shallow and self-obsessed as you would expect of the 1970s: aside from Marlowe, the only character who seems to apologise or keep to his word at any point is the film’s least sympathetic and most violent character. The eventual killer reacts to being confronted with his crime with a blasé self-entitlement. Across the apartment from Marlowe’s bizarre old-school Hollywood apartment block, a commune of hippie ladies exercise topless outside at all hours; everywhere you turn there are clashes between the old and the new.

The film’s opening immediately establishes what the film is going to be like, and is also one of the best sequences in the film: a quiet, gently paced quest Marlowe undertakes to find cat-food in the middle of the night and his inability to persuade said cat to eat the “wrong” brand of food that he brings back home. This secluded existence is only broken by the arrival of Terry Lennox, who immediately beats Marlowe at a bet on the number of 7s in the serial number on a $10 bill (which he wins despite Marlowe having the higher number of 7s, as he successfully lures Marlowe into an incorrect challenge). It’s a wonderful summation of the film’s plot, as well as a series of clear insights into Marlowe’s personality: a man out of time easily manipulated by those around him, who can’t fool a cat or win a bet with the best hand.

Gould’s performance is absolutely central to the mood and tone of the film. His Marlowe is a counterpoint to the hard-bitten detectives of film noir. Instead, he is a scruffy mumbler, whose continual, conversational patter throughout the film feels more like a commentary he is running for his own amusement than any attempt to communicate with the world around him. Gould’s charm and otherworldly quality basically is the film: he’s hardly off screen and he “sets the tone”: the film’s ambling, slightly confused glances at the modern world, where dialogue and motives are both equally unclear, exactly match the beats of Gould’s interpretation of the character. It’s a perfect performance for the film, a sly gag that also has heart and character.

The film’s off beat tone and lackadaisical attitude are punctured at several moments by astonishingly sudden upturns in tempo, and scenes that sizzle with the threat of (or actual) violence. These moments are linked to Mark Rydell’s brilliant performance as fast-talking Marty Augustine, a man whose actions are totally unpredictable. He is responsible for the film’s only real act of violence – but it’s a striking moment of brutality that no-one sees coming (least of all the other characters, on whose shocked faces and stunned silence the camera lingers).

Rydell’s exceptional performance is the stand out supporting one here, but there is also some very good work from Nina van Pallandt as a woman who is part vulnerable wife, part femme fatale, and whose emotional state and motivations constantly seem to shift and change (at a pace the audience barely keeps up with, let alone poor Marlowe). Sterling Hayden’s Hemingway-esque author is one of those primal force-of-nature performances that can grate, but it works in a film where so many of the other characters are restrained.

The film is an absorbing character study, and at the same time a sly commentary on both the 1970s, the source material and film itself: Gould’s Marlowe at points seems to be pushing on the wall of self-awareness (most notably in a hospital scene late in the film, a masterpiece of misdirection): later, Third Man style, he walks past another character without offering a beat of recognition, before (as the credits roll) he inexplicably starts dancing down a boulevard, the camera watching him in long shot. Hooray for Hollywood (the only other music in the film) bookends the film.

It’s a fascinating and highly enjoyable film with a series of striking scenes and character moments that capture the attention and imagination. It’s a film that needs, however, a certain expectation going into it. Don’t expect a detective story, don’t expect detection even, but instead a unique merging of comedy, social commentary, satire and drama powered by an almost wilfully off-hand lead performance. It’s the sort of unique concoction only Altman could have made. There isn’t really anything else like it.