Robert Altman had a career like few others in the history of American film. A war hero who flew 50 bombing missions in the Pacific, Altman worked first in industrial films and then in television, producing dozens of episodes in the 1950s and beyond. He then racked up three feature films plus one co-directed documentary (“The James Dean Story“) by the end of the 1960s, though none had made much impact.
But in 1970, at the age of 45, Altman had his breakthrough, with the Korean War comedy-drama “M*A*S*H,” that despite its tumultuous production went on to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and garnered five Oscar nominations. More importantly, the film was a huge box office hit that would go on to spawn an even bigger TV series. It made Altman a hot property at long last, and across the 1970s he worked with stars like Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Elliot Gould and Paul Newman, won plentiful awards and made another Best Picture-nominated hit with the ensemble piece “Nashville.”
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The late 1970s and 1980s were a rougher time for Altman, with a succession of ambitious failures and modest, little-seen dramas. But in the 1990s, the one-two punch of Hollywood satire “The Player” and acclaimed Raymond Carver adaptation “Short Cuts” put him back on top again. And in 2001, another Best Picture nominee arrived with his British murder mystery “Gosford Park.”
Despite a relatively late start, Altman directed 36 features between his 1957 debut “The Delinquents” and his death in 2006 not long after the release of his final film “A Prairie Home Companion.” He worked with everyone from Sterling Hayden and Robert Duvall to James Franco and Lindsay Lohan, he’s one of the few directors to have won the top prize at all three major European festivals, Cannes, Berlin and Venice, and he’s influenced dozens of top filmmakers, most notably his protege Paul Thomas Anderson.
But however many directors followed in his footsteps, there’s only one Robert Altman. His truly maverick point of view, his freewheeling, improvisatory manner, the thick vein of satire, the overlapping sound, the distinctive images and music, the repertory company of actors who’d return again and again (actors loved Altman, even when they fought with him) —other filmmakers might possess one or two of these qualities, but few could combine them all and come out with something so… Altmanesque.
Altman’s brilliant inside-the-movie-biz pic “The Player” hit Criterion last week —it’s the seventh of the director’s projects as such. To mark the occasion, and just because we’ve been wanting to do it for years, we’ve assembled a complete retrospective of all of Altman’s narrative features: the rule-breakers, the mold-makers, the best and the rest. Take a look below, and let us know your own favorite Altman movies in the comments.
“The Delinquents” (1957)
After the war, Altman returned to his hometown of Kansas City, where he found a job making industrial films for the Calvin Company, shooting as many as 65 such movies between 1949 and 1956. So when area theater owner Elmer Rhoden Jr. approached the director with $63,000 and the title “The Delinquents,” wanting to make a teen exploitation picture to cash in on the likes of “The Blackboard Jungle” and “The Wild One,” the aspiring director was ready to step up. Altman’s script sees nice-guy teen Scotty (future “Billy Jack” star Tom Laughlin) prevented from seeing his girlfriend Janice (Rosemary Howard) by her overprotective parents, which sends him down a slippery slope where he befriends hot-rodder Cholly (Peter Miller), only to fall afoul of his gang. It’s a fairly typical finger-wagging teen pic of the time (though United Artists, who picked the film up for distribution, added a little more moralism), with some tortured dialogue and uneven acting (Laughlin’s very good, while Howard’s sort of awful). But Altman’s promise is evident —there’s little sense of limited production value in Charles Paddock’s impressive black and white photography, or in the way that he stages and shoots the action. This wasn’t the Altman we’d come to know, but glimmers are certainly there. [C]
“Countdown” (1967)
Still less an auteur than a gun for hire trying to establish his voice at this point, Altman feels largely anonymous in his astronaut drama “Countdown,” which features few traces of his wit or inventiveness —indeed, he was reportedly fired from the film after production wrapped. Starring James Caan and Robert Duvall, with supporting turns from Ted Knight, Joanna Moore and Michael Murphy (who would appear in numerous Altman projects, including seven features and the “Tanner on Tanner” TV series), “Countdown” centers on the American/Russian race to be first in everything, manifesting in this case with a desperately premature moon-landing mission (the real deal happened the year after). Duvall plays a hot-headed astronaut with an ego who gets passed over as the lead on his mission in favor of his much less experienced colleague played by Caan. But they eventually put their differences aside for a risky, against-the-odds mission. Made a decade before Tom Wolfe first published “The Right Stuff” (which Philip Kaufman would make into a movie in the early ‘80s), “Countdown” was prescient at the time but feels dated now, lacking in dynamism and true suspense —and the flat, TV-like lighting and score don’t help. [C-]