Robert Altman would have been 95 on 20 February. Cinema Paradiso marks the occasion by celebrating a career that started back in 1948 and spanned 58 years. During this period, Altman helped shape New Hollywood by dispensing with traditional forms of storytelling and encouraging his actors to improvise in order to achieve a brand of stylised naturalism that was readily recognisable as 'Altmanesque'.
Robert Altman is a member of two exclusive clubs. He is one of three directors to have won the so-called Triple Crown of the Palme d'or at Cannes, the Golden Bear at Berlin and the Golden Lion at Venice, having won respectively with M*A*S*H (1970), Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) and Short Cuts (1993). His peers in this regard are Henri-Georges Clouzot, who won Cannes and Berlin with The Wages of Fear (1953) and Venice with Manon (1949), and Michelangelo Antonioni, who achieved the feat with Blow-Up (1966), La Notte (1961) and Red Desert (1963).
Altman also stands alongside King Vidor and Alfred Hitchcock in having been unsuccessfully nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Director. But spare a thought for Clarence Brown who lost on six occasions between 1930-46. In truth, given his jaundiced view of the Hollywood system, it's a wonder that Altman was nominated as often as he was, especially after he punched one studio executive into a swimming pool after he had cut six minutes from the left-field romp, California Split (1974). Intriguingly, Altman had included a similar scene in an unreleased short entitled The Party, a clip of which can be seen in Ron Mann's workmanlike profile, Altman (2014).
Speaking of documentaries, it should come as no surprise to find Altman mentioned in dispatches in both Kenneth Bowser's take on Peter Biskind's bestseller, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and Ted Demme and Richard LaGravanese's A Decade Under the Influence (both 2003), as he was a key link between cinema and the counterculture that had emerged during the 1960s. Yet he was never really part of the 'movie brat' crowd, as he was two decades older than the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese. Moreover, he hadn't been to film school and had very different views on what New Hollywood could and should be. If such a one-off talent could ever really have peers, they would have been the likes of John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols and Peter Bogdanovich, all of whom are well represented among the 10,000 titles at your fingertips whenever you log into Cinema Paradiso.
The critic Pauline Kael claimed that 'Altman's art, like Fred Astaire's, is the great American art of making the impossible look easy.' But nothing came easy to a maverick whose refusal to be categorised or bound by convention meant that he was a perpetual outsider, whose distinctive, naturalistic approach to genre, storytelling, acting and audiovisual technique at times appeared to be consciously 'anti-Hollywood'.
Beating the Odds
Robert Bernard Altman was born on 20 February 1925, in Kansas City, Missouri. His grandfather, Frank, had changed the family name from Altmann after being informed that the sign over his new jewellery shop would be cheaper without the second 'n'. Raised as a Catholic by parents Bernard and Helen, Robert was educated by the Jesuits at Rockhurst High School, although he always claimed that the most important lesson he learned came from his insurance salesman father, whose gambling habit he inherited to the point that risk-taking became second nature.
Having spent much of his youth in jazz clubs, Altman joined the US Army Air Force after graduating from Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington and flew over 50 missions over Borneo and the Dutch East Indies as a bombardier aboard a B-24 Liberator. On being demobbed, he went to California and briefly worked for a publicity firm before promoting identity tattoos for dogs. Indeed, he even took the patented machine to the White House to ink President Harry S. Truman's cocker spaniel, Feller, but the company folded when one of the partners absconded to Ireland with the funds.
Around this period, Altman went to see David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) and fell in love with Celia Johnson, who plays an English housewife enjoying clandestine trysts with Trevor Howard's doctor. In the darkness, Altman realised that films didn't have to be about pin-ups and recognised the value of depicting ordinary people in real situations. He was still tempted by the glamour of Hollywood, however, and teamed with George W. George to pitch a couple of story ideas. They received no credit for Edwin L. Marin's Christmas Eve (1947), but were billed on Richard Fleischer's RKO noir, Bodyguard (1948). Altman also seems to have appeared as an extra in Norman Z. McLeod's adaptation of James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), which was remade by Ben Stiller in 2013, with the director also taking the role made famous by Danny Kaye.
Rather than plotting a career in movies, however, Altman decided he wanted to be a writer and relocated to New York. Eventually, he drifted back to Kansas City, where he blagged a job directing industrial films for the Calvin Company, debuting with Honeymoon For Harriet (1949). He would go on to work for International Harvester, Gulf Oil and Caterpillar Tractors and was given sufficient autonomy as writer, director and editor to conduct stylistic experiments in around 65 shorts, including Modern Football (1951), which resurfaced in 2012. The odd client complained, but Altman stuck to his vision and learned lessons that would stand him in good stead for the next six decades.
Small-Screen Journeyman
American television was booming in the early 1950s and Altman found himself in the vanguard after he made his debut with an episode of Pulse of the City in 1953. After a couple of years, he began hankering after making a feature and Kansas City exhibitor Elmer Rhoden, Jr. spotted him the $63,000 needed to make The Delinquents in three weeks during the summer of 1956. As teen rebellion flicks were all the rage, United Artists bought the rights and annoyed Altman by adding moralising bookends. However, it made enough money for him to reunite with George W. George on a documentary, The James Dean Story (1957). Moreover, his work caught the eye of Alfred Hitchcock, who invited him to make 'The Young Ones' (1957) and 'Together' (1958) for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
A row with a producer prompted Altman to resign from the show, but he had his foot in the door and would spend the next decade churning out episodes of such enduringly popular programmes as Whirlybirds, The Roaring 20s, Bonanza, Maverick, Peter Gunn, and Route 66. It wasn't all plain sailing, however, as he upset the sponsors with the violence and innuendo in the 1961 'The Lion Walks Among Us' episode of Bus Stop, while the 1963 'Survival' contribution to Combat was denounced for its thinly veiled criticism of the war in Vietnam. Furthermore, Altman parted company with Kraft Suspense Theater after his comments about their dramas being as bland as their cheeses made the front page of Variety.
Unfortnately, Altman was stuck with television, as his reputation for being difficult and insisting on doing things his own way meant that the Hollywood film studios wanted nothing to do with him. He had hoped to adapt John Haase's novel, Me and the Arch Kook, as Petulia (1968), but the gig went to Richard Lester, who was on a roll after his collaborations with The Beatles on A Hard Day's Night (1964), Help! (1965) and How I Won the War (1967), which had co-starred John Lennon. Instead, Altman made a handful of ColorSonics, which were the forerunners of the pop video, before Warner Bros. hired him to direct Countdown (1968), which riffed on the space race by sending James Caan to the Moon. However, veteran studio chief Jack Warner loathed the use of overlapping dialogue ('That fool has everybody talking at the same time!') and cut 30 minutes off the running time after having Altman barred from the lot before the picture was finished.
Undeterred, Altman went to Canada to make That Cold Day in the Park (1969), an independent take on a Peter Miles novel that starred Sandy Dennis as a lonely woman trying to help an uncommunicaative young man (Michael Burns) who seems to have nowhere else to go. Like so many subsequent pictures, it became a cult favourite. But Altman was anything but mollified because 'cult means not enough people to make a minority'. Whispers circulated that his opposition to the war was harming his career, but it became a positive attribute when producer Ingo Preminger saw Pot au feu (an unreleased short that Altman had made about pot smoking) and offered the 44 year-old a dark comedy about a field hospital unit that had been scripted by Ring Lardner Jr. from a Richard Hooker novel and had been turned down by 14 other directors, including George Roy Hill, Sidney Lumet, William Friedkin, Bud Yorkin and Stanley Kubrick.
Changing the Cine-Landscape
Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould were far from convinced by Altman during the early stages of the M*A*S*H shoot, as they thought the overlapping dialogue was more chaotic than authentic. But they soon came to appreciate the latitude that Altman gave them to improvise lines and suggest bits of business for the characters of army captains 'Hawkeye' Pierce and 'Trapper John' McIntyre, who work as surgeons at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea in 1951. Altman strove to avoid overt references to the setting, as he wanted audiences to reflect on the experiences of the troops in Vietnam at a time when pictures like Franklin J. Schaffner's Patton and Richard Fleischer, Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda' Tora! Tora! Tora! (both 1970) were glorifying war. Rejoicing at jokes that were in bad taste 'because nothing was in worse taste than that war itself', Altman even used lyrics by his 14 year-old son. Michael, in the theme song, 'Suicide Is Painless', which would hit No.1 in the UK during the run of the spin-off TV series (1972-82), which Altman loathed because he felt it cheapened his intentions.
Despite winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Lardner was furious with Altman for encouraging the cast to ignore his carefully crafted dialogue. But critics and audiences relished the speed and waspishness of the wit, as M*A*S*H added five Oscars to the Palme d'or and became one of the biggest box-office hits of 1970. Unfortunately for Altman, he never came close to these numbers for the remainder of his career, as he continued to defy conventional wisdom by pursuing 'the imperfect moment' in features like Brewster McCloud (1970), which flopped commercially, despite starring Bud Cort as an eccentric recluse living in a shelter at the Houston Aerodrome who makes himself some wings in the hope he can fly.
This offbeat study of cruelty was followed by McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), Altman's first experiment in genre revisionism that teamed off-screen lovers Warren Beatty and Julie Christie (after Elliott Gould and Patricia Quinn had turned it down) in an adaptation of an Edmund Naughton novel about a couple who encounter opposition when they ride into the mining town of Presbyterian Church in 1902 to open a gambling den and a bordello. Impeccably designed by Leon Ericksen to convey the grimness of frontier life, the action was complemented by songs by Leonard Cohen. But audiences struggled to identify with the consciously caricatured anti-heroes and warmed even less to Images (1972), in spite of the fact that Susannah York won the Best Actress prize at Cannes in a disconcerting study of psychopathology that was atmospherically photographed in Ireland by Vilmos Zsigmond.
Fans of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled pulp fiction were familiar with private eye Philip Marlowe from the respective portrayals of Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart in Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). However, Altman and Elliott Gould put a new spin on the character in The Long Goodbye (1973), which was scripted by Leigh Brackett, who had worked on The Big Sleep with Jules Furthman and William Faulkner. Moving the action to the present day and making Marlowe a dishevelled cat lover, Altman stuck closely to the story of a missing novelist's potential involvement in a murder case. But he failed to take viewers along with him, even though he helped set the tone for the rise of the neo-noir thriller in the post-Watergate era.
Moving on, Altman latched on to the Edward Anderson novel that Nicholas Ray had filmed with Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as They Live By Night (1949). For Thieves Like Us (1974), Altman stuck with the original setting, as Bowie (Keith Carradine) and Keechie (Shelley Duvall) target their 37th bank in a robbing spree that has taken them across 1930s Mississippi. But, while the critics raved, audiences still had Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in their minds from Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and the picture failed to set the tills ringing. The same was true of California Split, a buddy movie starring Elliott Gould and George Segal that was notable for Altman's frank discussion of gambling and for his first use of the 8-track recording system that allowed him to place microphones around the set and eavesdrop in the sound mix on numerous conversations at once.
This is one of those rare films that Cinema Paradiso isn't able to bring you on high-qualify DVD or Blu-ray because it's currently unavailable on disc in the UK. But users can rent the masterpiece that is Nashville (1975), which took Altman's audiovisual revolution to the next level. Ensemble dramas had been a Hollywood staple since the early days of the talkies, when Edmund Goulding had won the Oscar for Best Picture with Grand Hotel (1932). But they had become stale and formulaic in bringing doorstop bestsellers to the screen and Altman sought to satirise the bloated format while also poking fun at the political establishment in the wake of President Richard Nixon's resignation. Thus, he dispensed with a traditional narrative in following the fortunes of some two dozen characters during the political rally coincides with a country music festival.
Encouraging the performers to write their own songs, as well as improvise their lines - indeed, Keith Carradine won an Oscar for 'I'm Easy' - Altman gave the impression that he was stumbling across events as they were happening in real time. Keeping the camera moving and making restrained use of zoom lenses, he achieved a technique that he compared to painting a mural in which the horses keep moving. But his primary interest lay in exposing human behaviour in times of contentment and crisis. Consequently, he put the paraphernalia of film-making at the service of his actors in the hope that they would show him something he had never seen before and help the audience reach a greater understanding of themselves and the people around them.
The Stuttering Auteur
Altman was an inveterate gambler, but his love of a flutter wasn't confined to the racetrack or casino. Some of his artistic choices also seemed risky and he developed an almost wilful habit of taking on his most parlous projects right after scoring a major hit. In fairness, his adaptation of Arthur Kopit's myth-busting play about the Old West won some prestigious awards, although he refused to collect them in person after producer Dino De Laurentiis insisted on tinkering with the final cut. But, despite its astute insights into how history gets twisted, Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) seemed an archly provocative picture to release in the year America marked its bicentenary. Moreover, it didn't really suit star Paul Newman, although he would reunite with Altman for the even more critically mauled Quintet (1979), a dystopian drama set in a new ice age that so annoyed Princess Grace of Monaco that she asked 20th Century-Fox to fire Altman for making her friend look so foolish, as a seal hunter who is lured into an elaborate game of chance.
Based on a dream that Altman had while awaiting surgery, 3 Women (1977) was equally avant-garde in its chronicling of the bonds that form between health spa workers Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek and pregnant artist, Janice Rule. Yet, despite Duvall landing the Best Actress prize at Cannes, the sometimes surreal saga failed to find an audience. The same was true of A Wedding (1978), a study of the American class chasm that featured fine turns by Carol Burnett and Mia Farrow as the mothers of the bride and groom, as well as a return to cinema for the first time since Peter Glenville's The Comedians (1967) for D.W. Griffith's muse, Lillian Gish.
Cast aside by the studios, Altman quirkily attempted a computer dating musical with The Perfect Couple (1979) before striving to recapture his mojo with a trademark ensemble satire on the state of American healthcare. However, not even such luminaries as Lauren Bacall, Glenda Jackson and James Garner could resuscitate HealtH (1980) and Altman was forced to close down the Lion's Gate production company that had sponsored such acclaimed pictures as Alan Rudolph's Welcome to LA (1976) and Robert Benton's The Late Show (1977).
Just as he seemed on his uppers, however, Altman was offered an unlikely shot at redemption with Popeye (1980), which producer Robert Evans mounted as a consolation prize after failing to snare the rights to the hit Broadway musical, Annie, which would be filmed by John Huston in 1982. With a script by Jules Feiffer, songs by Harry Nilsson and Robin Williams in the lead alongside Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, this could have been a riotous return to form. But Williams hated workng at 'Stalag Altman' and the joylessness of the shoot seeped into the final film. Contrary to popular belief that this tanked as badly as Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980), the picture actually turned a profit. But it fell way below expectations and Altman not only lost Ragtime (1981) to Miloš Forman, but also had to sell his Malibu home.
Having spent a year away from cinema, he returned with Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), a Super 16mm adaptation of an Ed Graczyk play about the small-town Texan members of a James Dean fan club that boasted memorable performances by Cher, Sandy Dennis and Karen Black. The critics proved unkind, however, and not even the ensemble's victory in the Best Actor category at the Venice Film Festival could entice audiences into Streamers (1983), which reworked David Rabe's play about raw recruits waiting to be dispatched to Vietnam in 1965. Another stage transfer followed, as Altman made Secret Honor (1984) with the students in his class at the University of Michigan. Philip Baker Hall excelled as disgraced president Richard Nixon, but the picture was barely seen and Altman left for Paris after MGM decided to shelve O.C. and Stiggs - an irreverent teen comedy based on a series of National Lampoon stories that starred Daniel H. Jenkins and Neal Barry - which would not receive a release until 1987.
By this time, Altman had returned to his televisual roots and actually reached bigger audiences with such latterly overlooked offerings as The Laundromat (1985), The Dumb Waiter (1987) and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1988), which revisited the story told by Edward Dmytryk in The Caine Mutiny (1954), which had earned Humphrey Bogart an Oscar nomination and given the young Maurice Micklewhite a stage name. There were also big-screen excursions, as Kim Basinger teamed with Sam Shepard for an adaptation of the latter's Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, Fool For Love (1985); the 'Les Boréades' episode in the operatic portmanteau, Aria; and Beyond Therapy (both 1987), which sees shrinks Tom Conti and Glenda Jackson adding to the problems facing patients Julie Hagerty and Jeff Goldblum.
Despite the setbacks, Altman kept trailblazing and he won a Primetime Emmy for Tanner '88 (1988), a collaboration with Pulitzer-winning Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau that pitched Michael Murphy's fictional politician into the 1988 presidential race. The character would return for Tanner on Tanner (2004), when the focus shifted on to the candidate's film-maker daughter, who was played by Cynthia Nixon. Anticipating the docurealist style adopted by shows like E.R. (1994-2008) and The West Wing (2002-05), this dualogy may well be Altman's crowning glory and it's a shame that it's unavailable on disc.
A Maverick Reborn
As the new decade dawned, the release of a feature version of the mini-series, Vincent & Theo (1990), provided a timely reminder of Altman's undoubted talent. Finding suitable outlets remained a problem, however, as he and the major studios viewed each other with mutual suspicion ('I make gloves and they sell shoes.'). But he left Hollywood in no doubt about what he thought of it with The Player (1992), a Michael Tolkin-scripted assault on modern American movie-making that opened with a masterly seven-minute sequence shot that encapsulated Altman's screen career and further found room for 65 celebrity cameos in a story centred around the murderous travails of studio executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins).
Adding a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination to the Best Director prize he had won at Cannes, Altman built on his success by using Annie Ross's lounge singer as a chorus to link the 22 characters inhabiting the clutch of Raymond Carver stories interwoven in Short Cuts. 'I equate films with sand castles,' Altman once said. 'You get a bunch of mates and you go down and you say I'm going to build this great sand castle and you build it.' He also once averred, 'I create an event, then shoot it as if I have no control over it.' But it's clear from this intricate insight into the American psyche that both Altman and editor Geraldine Peroni know exactly what they are doing and it was a scandal that the latter was denied an Oscar nomination.
In another interview, Altman explained how he sought to connect with audiences on an emotional rather than an intellectual level by treating film like a painting or a piece of music that seeks to convey an impression of character and atmosphere. No other American director worked along the same lines, although Altman's influence is evident on the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson, Richard Linklater, Todd Solondz, Michael Winterbottom, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Noah Baumbach. Yet only a few of these acolytes manage to emulate the uniquely iconoclastic empathy with which Altman views the world as a sad place in which men and women are doomed to be flawed, insecure, distanced, mistrustful and cruel.
Restored to his position as the patron saint of indies, Altman assembled another all-star cast for Pret-à-Porter (1994), a leisurely swipe at the fashion industry that failed to find favour, despite enjoyable turns from Kim Basinger as an incompetent TV reporter and Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren, who were appearing together for the 13th and final time. Having taken a sabbatical to recover from a micro-stroke, Altman received a heart transplant after completing Kansas City (1996), a paean to the jazz clubs of his youth that turned around Blondie O'Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her efforts to persuade Hey Hey Club mobster Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte) to release her deadbeat husband, Johnny (Dermot Mulroney).
Keeping the procedure quiet to ensure he was still insurable for future projects, Altman eased himself back into work with The Gingerbread Man (1998), a surprising adaptation of a John Grisham thriller that stars Kenneth Branagh as a Savannah lawyer who becomes obsessed with waitress Embeth Davidtz after she hires him to sue her abusive fundamentalist father, Robert Duvall. Once again, Altman put a revisionist spin on a Hollywood staple, but the reviews were mixed, as they would be for both Cookie's Fortune (1999) and Dr T & the Women (2000), which were respectively headlined by Glenn Close (as a prudish Mississippi pseud trying to make her aunt's suicide look like murder) and Richard Gere, as a Dallas gynaecologist having problems with his wife (Farrah Fawcett), lover (Helen Hunt), sister-in-law (Laura Dern) and daughters (Kate Hudson and Tara Reid), as well as his wealthy patients.
The latter drew accusations of misogyny and some were prepared to write Altman off as a grumpy old man who was out of sync with his time. He had hoped to adapt Another City, Not My Own, Dominick Dunne's novel about the O.J. Simpson trial, but he struck lucky when actor Bob Balaban invited him to direct a lampoon of the country house whodunit that borrowed elements from both Eugene Forde's Charlie Chan in London (1934) and Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (1939). Scripted by Julian Fellowes, (the Oscar-winning creator of Downton Abbey, 2010-16), Gosford Park (2001) entangled 44 characters in 25 separate plotlines and demonstrated once again Altman's peerless ability to bring the best out of a stellar ensemble while disregarding the cinematic rulebook and laying bare human nature and a range of socio-political themes.
He seemed set to win his first Academy Award, but was widely thought to have blown his chance by accusing Hollywood of being partially culpable for the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. 'Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that.' he declared 'unless they'd seen it in a movie.' Neve Campbell retained her faith, however, and asked Altman to direct her in The Company (2003), a fictionalised account of life behind the scenes with Chicago's Joffrey Ballet. The critics weren't impressed, but they warmed to the film version of Garrison Keillor's public radio series, A Prairie Home Companion (2006), which was released shortly after Altman had received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
During his speech, he had mused on the fact that he had been lucky to have always had work and the freedom to create in his own way. He had also joked that he had been honoured too early, as he felt stronger than ever after his heart transplant. However, Altman had been diagnosed with leukaemia and died in Los Angeles on 20 November 2006, while scouting locations for a fictional take on S.R. Bindler's documentary, Hands on a Hard Body (1997), which focused on an endurance contest to win a pickup truck.
Paul Thomas Anderson dedicated There Will Be Blood (2007) to Altman's memory. His career had been as inconsistent as it had been enduring, with one critic suggesting that he had been 'ennobled by failure and oppressed by success'. But he had always had the wisdom to know that 'if I made a film that everybody liked it would be pretty terrible'. Taking the highs and lows in his stride, Altman never ceased to do things his own way and, ultimately, could derive quiet satisfaction from the fact that the studio system he had so despised took on board virtually all of the lessons that his pictures had to teach.
