Nashville is the story of twenty-four characters in the country music capital over four days during a presidential campaign. Most of the characters are involved with the music business in one way or another, and those run the gamut from Winifred, who impulsively leaves her music-hating husband to try to reinvent herself as "a country music singer, or a star," to the king and queen of country music, Haven Hamilton and Barbara Jean.

The characters are all in the same place only at the beginning and the end of the film. In between, they come and go and run into each other in all different combinations.

The movie opens (after a couple of preliminary vignettes, including introducing the sound trucks of independent Presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker, which thread through the film like the PA announcements in M*A*S*H) in a recording studio where Haven Hamilton is recording his ponderous Bicentennial anthem, "200 Years" (the stirring chorus is "we must be doing something right to last two hundred years"). In the smaller studio next door, Linnea Reese records with a Black gospel choir.

Pretty much all the rest of the characters are at the airport soon after that, and from there all the characters head off in their various directions, coming together again only at the end, at the huge Hal Philip Walker rally.

Nashville and Washington

Politics and music are the movie's two most obvious concerns, as Walker's advance man John Triplette moves to sign up talent both for a late-night smoker with local businessmen, and for the rally at Nashville's Parthenon. Robert Altman took a lot of flack after the movie was released, for making fun of country music and country musicians, and his response was that the movie wasn't about Nashville, it was about Washington.

I see the point he was trying to make, but I don't think this is true, nor is it the answer to the question.

The answer to the question of whether he's mocking the music or not is right there in the soundtrack. On one hand, there's Haven Hamilton, with his garish white outfits, his unctuous manner, his fatuous and self-revealing songs, and his croaking voice. As a character, he's almost more of a politician than an entertainer.

But on the other hand, there's Barbara Jean. Her songs are wonderful and Ronee Blakley, the actress who plays her, sings the hell out of them. I don't think anybody could see how Barbara Jean is treated by her husband and manager, Barnett, and then hear her sing "Careless Disrespect" and think the movie or Altman is mocking her. And, it's immediately after she sings that song at Opryland that she breaks down on stage.

The truth is, Nashville is no major statement on politics and government. It is very much concerned with power, but mostly with other kinds of power. I saw Nashville when it was released, and I saw it again a month ago (and many times in between) and in a quarter century my opinion has remained the same. What this movie is about, more than anything else, is the women.

Mr. A. and the Women

Every time I see it, there are three parts which hit me the hardest. The first takes place in Barbara Jean's hospital room. Her public appearance earlier that day at the airport, planned to celebrate her return to Nashville after treatment at a center for burns (this is never explained) ended with her collapsing. All day the hospital room was full of family, friends, well-wishers and hangers-on, but now it's just her and Barnett. Barbara Jean had been supposed to sing at the Grand Old Opry that night, but instead she and Barnett listen on the radio as Connie White, her hated rival, fills in for her.

Barbara Jean throws a tantrum when Barnett won't turn the radio off, and it escalates when he tells her he needs to go to see Connie and Haven and the rest later on, so he can thank Connie personally from Barbara Jean.

When she subsides into tears, Barnett demands to know if she's going to have another nervous breakdown, and then tells her that she'd better shape up, because he won't stand for her having another breakdown.

Barnett: Have I ever told you how to sing a song?
Barbara Jean (quietly): no.
Barnett: Then don't you tell me how to run your life. I've been doing pretty good with it.

He then pressures her into wishing him a cheerful goodbye, and after he's gone, she calls after him plaintively.

It's a harrowing scene, all the more so because there's no physical violence, and in fact she yells much more than he does and is more physically aggressive. But Barnett can afford to be quiet and wait for her to blow off her anger, because he's in charge and they both know it.

Barnett does get a little bit of a comeuppance at the club, where both Haven Hamilton and Connie White completely ignore him. Without Barbara Jean at his side, he's just another functionary, no more important than Delbert Reese, Haven's lawyer. Nobody pays much attention to Del except to make fun of his obtuseness.

The scene in the hospital room is incredible, and we feel Barbara Jean's desire to have the radio turned off, because we've seen the show at the Grand Old Opry, which ran the gamut from bland (Tommy Brown) to phony (Haven Hamilton, singing a song about marital fidelity as his mistress watches from a bench on the rear of the stage) to completely plastic (Connie White).

Keep a-goin'

The next killer scene is Barbara Jean's breakdown on stage at Opryland. Rushed into doing a performance pretty much the minute she was released from the hospital (you don't have to read very far between the lines to see how much of a pattern this is), she sings a couple of songs, then becomes disoriented, telling a long and increasingly pointless anecdote (though the subtext of the anecdote is that she's been "singing for her supper" since she was a pretty young girl) until Barnett comes out and leads her off the stage.

The film was made with a script, by Joan Tewkesbury, but the actors brought a lot to it. There's quite a bit of improvisation, and several key scenes were written by the actors. Barbara Jean's breakdown is one of those, and (as in many of the scenes) Altman set up a few different cameras, started them rolling and told Ronee Blakley to begin. The first time he (or the other actors) ever heard or saw the scene was when she was performing it for the cameras.

In addition, most of the songs were written or co-written by the actors. And, to the delight of all the musicians in the audience, there is no dubbing or lip-syncing. All the music was recorded live.

The real climax of the movie is two scenes which cut back and forth near the end. One is at the smoker that John Triplette and Del Reese have set up. A group of local Nashville businessmen have got together to donate money to Hal Philip Walker, and for their entertainment they'll get to see a stripper. The only problem is that nobody has bothered to tell the "stripper" exactly what she's being paid to do. She's Sueleen Gay, a majestically untalented singer who has absolutely no idea that she's no good (she's sort of the Ed Wood of country music).

When Sueleen begins to realize that these men want more from her than her terrible original songs and her off-key Barbara Jean covers, she initially refuses to strip, but then Triplette, who will say anything to anybody to get what he wants, takes her aside, praises her talent, and says that if she goes ahead with the striptease, he'll give her her big break and let her sing at the Parthenon rally the next day with her idol Barbara Jean.

Altman doesn't throw any winks to the audience about what a lie this is. By this point he doesn't have to. And so, Sueleen goes through with the striptease, even making a sad little flourish out of pulling out the sweat socks she'd stuffed into her bra and tossing them into the crowd.

The scene ends with Del Reese driving her home and clumsily propositioning her on her doorstep, until he's driven off by the arrival of Sueleen's somewhat-boyfriend Wade. Sueleen tells Wade what she had to do, but then she fervently reasserts her belief in her talent, and in the inevitability of her triumph. Nobody learns any big life lessons in this film.

Yes, I do

Meanwhile, while Delbert is being rebuffed, his wife is being seduced. Throughout the film, folk/rock singer Tom Frank (who is in Nashville secretly recording a solo album that the rest of his group knows nothing about) has been seducing every woman he can get his hands on. Most of the liaisons are casual, including groupie LA Joan and "Opal from the BBC," but one is more intense, since the woman is his bandmate Mary, and she's actually in love with him (and not with the third member of their trio, her husband Bill).

But Mary only says "I love you" to Tom when he's safely asleep, and in any case his attention isn't on her, it's on Linnea Reese, who he met at a recording studio. We've seen him call her a couple of times, obviously trying to set up an assignation with her, and at first she rebuffed him, but then the third time she has indicated that she's willing to come see him perform.

The scene at the club is one of those situations where the intensity is only apparent to the musicians and those around them, and is only obliquely seen by the audience. Bill and Mary are there, along with their limo driver and Opal, who is supposed to be interviewing them but is mostly talking about herself. LA Joan is there also, as is Wade.

A lot of things are going on at once. Linnea is attempting to be inconspicuous at a rear table, but Wade immediately starts to make friendly overtures. Meanwhile, Opal is attempting to drop casual hints that she's been having an affair with Tom (or, really, a one-night stand), oblivious to the fact that (for different reasons) Bill and Mary aren't really fascinated (or surprised) by this information.

Meanwhile, Tom is called up to the stage to do a number, and (after doing a song with Bill and Mary) he sings "I'm Easy," which is, in its way, as unintentionally self-revealing as Haven Hamilton's songs. As Mary could tell you, he's anything but easy.

But he's not singing to her, he's singing to Linnea, though both Opal and LA Joan seem willing to think he's singing to or about them. Mary is wise to him, though. She looks around the club, knowing that he's working on somebody, trying to figure out who it is.

And the seduction works, the next thing we see is Tom and Linnea in bed together. Tom is obviously somewhat taken with her, for the first time we see him actually talk to a woman he's in bed with. She teaches him the sign language for "I love you" and for "I'm glad I met you," and he's actually honest enough to use the latter rather than the former.

But then he wants her to stay, and she gets up to leave anyway, and suddenly it's pretty obvious that she's been doing this on her terms, and that for once Tom isn't in charge. He picks up the phone to call his girlfriend in New York, before Linnea has even left the room, but he doesn't succeed in convincing her to come down to Nashville to visit him, and suddenly it seems like Tom Frank is surrounded by women who have figured him out. For someone like him, that's probably the final circle of hell.

So, in each scene, the power has not been quite where the characters thought it was. The men organizing the smoker thought they were getting a stripper, a professional, and instead they got an aspiring singer who they had to lie to in order to get her to humiliate herself. In the other scene, the nearly saintly Linnea (wife of a no-good husband, gospel singer with a Black choir, mother of two deaf children who will never hear their mother sing) has turned out to be quite an efficient adulterer, nothing like the pigeon that Tom Frank thought he was pursuing. The shift in each case is subtle, but the combined effect of the two scenes is tremendous, and each involves a women being exploited (or, for a moment, not being exploited) by men.

After these two scenes, and the two with Barbara Jean that I talked about before, the actual "climax" of the film almost comes as a little bit of a letdown.

Let me be the 1 (one)

The movie is full of wonderful women who have ended up with men who clearly don't deserve them. Barbara Jean and Barnett, Linnea and Delbert Reese, and poor Mary, who's got two of them (Bill and Tom). And the dynamics in each case are very different, and each is also very typical. Linnea is the wife of a pretty successful lawyer, so she can occupy herself with her disabled children (significantly, she understands sign language, but her husband doesn't), her music, and religion. In fact, I suspect that's pretty much what's possible for her to occupy her time with.

Barbara Jean's story is the opposite, on the surface, because she's the breadwinner, the (one assumes) sole asset of "Barnett Enterprises," but of course it's Barnett who runs everything. In point of fact, Barbara Jean has fewer options than Linnea does, and it doesn't take much to imagine that various kinds of breakdowns are (consciously or not) the only way she has of asserting any control over her own life.

Mary is younger and obviously has more options. She sees her husband and her lover pretty clearly, but we're not shown what decisions she's going to make. At the Parthenon rally, she's with Tom (and Bill, amusingly, is with LA Joan), but when the trouble starts, Bill grabs Mary to get her to safety.

But, fortunately, the movie is not all good women and not-so-good men. LA Joan is a shallow groupie, Opal is a nut, Lady Pearl (Haven Hamilton's mistress) is a harridan, and Connie White is a complete phony.

As for the men, Wade's patience with Sueleen is amazing, Mr. Green's entire life seems to revolve around caring for his dying wife, and even Haven Hamilton comes off better than you'd expect at the end. When the crisis comes, he thinks about everybody else, about keeping the situation from getting worse, before he thinks about himself.

Nashville II

Nashville haunts Altman a bit, I think, because it did represent his peak, not only creatively, but in terms of his clout and respect in Hollywood. It was right after Nashville that he was scheduled to direct Ragtime, before being booted off the project in favor of Milos Forman after the producers got a look at Buffalo Bill and the Indians (but that's another story). For years he wanted to make a sequel to Nashville, the only time he has ever wanted to direct a sequel to one of his pictures, as far as I know. And what was Short Cuts but an attempt to do another Nashville, only (for most of it) less satisfying and much more mean-spirited.

I can think of a few movies in recent years that were obviously strongly influenced by Nashville (Lone Star, for one) and I think we have to regard Magnolia as a deliberate homage, since not only is it very similar in structure, but it shares not one but two cast members: Henry Gibson and Michael Murphy.

The July 2000 issue of Premiere Magazine contained a wonderful article about Nashville in honor of its 25th anniversary, including interviews with almost all of the surviving cast members, Joan Tewkesbury and Robert Altman. They reminisce about the making of the film, telling some wonderful stories, including confirming a belief that I've held for a long time, which is that "Opal from the BBC" is a complete phony, and that the reason she can never locate her cameraman is that she doesn't have one. She's not making a documentary for anybody, let alone for the BBC.

So, overall, it's a fascinating slice of twenty-four individual lives over three days. Two people die, but nobody else (as far as we can tell) has been changed in any major way. But we've seen a lot, both big and small, about how life was in the United States in 1975, and now, as well.

Nashville
(1975)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Joan Tewkesbury
 
Cast:
Norman : David Arkin
Lady Pearl : Barbara Baxley
Delbert Reese : Ned Beatty
Connie White : Karen Black
Barbara Jean : Ronee Blakley
Tommy Brown : Timothy Brown
Tom Frank : Keith Carradine
Opal : Geraldine Chaplin
Wade Cooley : Robert DoQui
LA Joan (Martha) : Shelley Duvall
Barnett : Alan Garfield
Haven Hamilton : Henry Gibson
PFC Glenn Kelly : Scott Glenn
Tricycle Man : Jeff Goldblum
Winifred (Albuquerque) : Barbara Harris
Kenny Fraiser : David Hayward
John Triplette : Michael Murphy
Bill : Allan Nicholls
Bud Hamilton : Dave Peel
Mary : Christina Raines
Star : Bert Remsen
Linnea Reese : Lily Tomlin
Sueleen Gay : Gwen Welles
Mr. Green : Keenan Wynn

If you held a gun to my head (and I would prefer that you didn't), and demanded to know my favorite film of all time, I would say "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," by Robert Altman, which I first saw when it was released in 1971. The packaging on the video I just bought says it's a "Western," but that's only true in the broadest sense of the term.

I've been reading a book called "The Films of Robert Altman" by Alan Karp, and one of the interesting points he raises is that Altman's films are often about dreamers and realists, and the dreamers often die or go mad, and the realists almost always survive.

Obviously, this isn't that unusual a way of looking at the world, but what makes Altman's approach unusual is that he has no sentimentality in his view of the dreamers, and, while in most cases he favors them over the realists, there are movies from throughout his career (from "M*A*S*H" to Cookie's Fortune) where he clearly prefers the realists.

The best story he's ever told about a dreamer and a realist, though, is the story of John McCabe (once known as "Pudgy") and Mrs. Constance Miller.

John McCabe is a gambler, and at first he comes to the tiny town of Presbyterian Church to fleece some of the local citizens at games of chance. Presbyterian Church is still being built, the population is almost entirely male, and McCabe very quickly realizes what they want more than poker is women, so he decides to open a whorehouse. This is the best idea he has in the whole movie, and very soon he's one of the leading citizens of the town, such as it is, despite his inexperience in running a whorehouse.

Then comes Mrs. Miller, who proposes a partnership. His ambition and capital, combined with her expertise, because, as she says when they meet, "I'm an 'ore, and I know an awful lot about 'orin'." So, he takes her on as a partner, but he still doesn't understand how vital she is to his success, referring to her as "little lady" and trying to keep her away from their finances, which she obviously understands far better than he does.

They also become lovers, though, until the very end, she always insists that he pay her usual fee (which is the unheard of sum of $5.00). This allows both of them to pretend that they don't care for each other as much as they do.

As Altman has said, many of the elements of this story are very familiar from other, more traditional, Westerns. The gunfighter and gambler, the hooker with a heart of gold (more or less), the frontier town, the men sent to kill the hero. With these elements mostly familiar to the audience, Altman was free to concentrate a lot of his attention on the characters around the periphery.

In fact, we see the birth and growth of a whole town. There's Sheehan, who owns the only other saloon in town. McCabe mocks him throughout the movie, but he is ultimately much smarter than McCabe. And Ida, who comes to town to be Bart Coyle's mail order bride, and who, when Bart is killed, sees pretty quickly what her only other option is. The scene where her eyes connect with Mrs. Miller's at Bart's funeral is priceless.

We see the way the Chinese part of the town is so completely segregated that the only white person who ever goes there is Mrs. Miller (in search of opium), and we never see any Chinese people in the main part of town at all. We see the way the men of Presbyterian Church, obviously bored, seize on McCabe's arrival to speculate endlessly about his supposed "big rep" as a gunfighter, and whether or not he's really "the man who shot Bill Roundtree," though none of them has any idea who Bill Roundtree was. And there's the lawyer from the nearby town of Bearpaw who fills McCabe's head with political nonsense just when McCabe most needs to be thinking clearly. Throughout the movie, Altman shows us the pastor who's building the church that gives the town its name, but at the end we see inside (McCabe has climbed up into the steeple to spy on his pursuers) and it looks like a lumber storeroom. It's obvious that no services have ever been held there, and nobody in the town has noticed the lack.

The movie is full of these small threads, little parts of the life of the town.

The most interesting decision Altman made was to move the traditional elements of the Western forward in time, into the beginning of the twentieth century. The West he shows us is no longer all that Wild, capitalism is now what drives everything. The hooker is a businesswomen, the gambler would like to be a businessman, and the three killers are employees of a large corporation. (The character called "Cowboy," on the other hand, is a complete doofus.)

In both the Long Goodbye and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," the hero is both a success and a failure according to the rules of the genre. This is why regarding Altman as an anti-genre director, one whose interest in Westerns, or detective pictures, is just to deconstruct them, is too simple.

Philip Marlowe is a buffoon and a dreamer, but he does solve the mystery. John McCabe is self-important and not too bright, but he does manage to kill all three of the gunmen who have been sent to kill him. Actually, McCabe is fairly creditable as a man of action. Where he's out of his depth is as a man of business.

McCabe doesn't really understand business, all he understands is gambling, which he's obviously good at. But when two men come to town from the company Harrison Shaughnessy, intent on buying him out, he tries to jack up their bid like they're facing him across a poker table (it doesn't help that he's drunk, either), and they leave town in disgust just as he thinks he's getting the upper hand.

Mrs. Miller tries to explain the realities of the situation to him, that Harrison Shaughnessy will first try to buy him out, but then will move very quickly to Plan B, which is to kill him, but he doesn't get it even then. He only gets it when three hired killers come to town and immediately one of them kills one of McCabe's most enthusiastic customers, for no other reason than that he can.

The irony of all this is that, without meaning to, Mrs. Miller has helped seal her lover's doom. First by helping him be such a success that Harrison Shaughnessy would even be interested in buying him out, and also because one reason McCabe is so stubborn about making this deal on his terms is that he has to prove to her, once and for all, that he knows what he's doing.

Not that she's in any way to blame for what happens, but without her, the whole enterprise might easily have collapsed, and McCabe would have simply saddled up his horse and gone off to the next town to play more poker. In the movie's final shot, the camera focusing directly into Constance Miller's eye as she lies on a bed in an opium den, drawing on a pipe, you wonder about the different feelings she's having to numb right at that moment.

The soundtrack consists of three songs from Leonard Cohen's first album ("The Stranger Song," "Winter Lady," and "Sisters of Mercy"), and they weave through the action of the film so beautifully that if I hear even a fragment of any of them I immediately begin seeing the movie in my head. I don't think it's possible to use music more effectively in a movie.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller
(1971)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman and Brian McKay
 
Cast:
John McCabe : Warren Beatty
Constance Miller : Julie Christie
Sheehan : Rene Auberjonois
Smalley : John Schuck
Elliot : Corey Fischer
Bart Coyle : Bert Remsen
Ida Coyle : Shelley Duvall
Cowboy : Keith Carradine
Eugene Sears : Michael Murphy
Ernie Hollander : Antony Holland
Butler : Hugh Millais
Kid : Manfred Schulz
Breed : Jace Van Der Veen
Clement Samuels : William Devane

As I've said in other reviews, many of Robert Altman's films begin by thrusting us into the middle of a complex story and letting us figure out characters and plots and motivations (and even names) as best we can. The Long Goodbye is the opposite of that. From the beginning, it's clear that this will be a story focused primarily on one man. We first see Philip Marlowe asleep, alone, lying on his bed in his clothes (a whole essay could be written about movie characters who sleep in their clothes), being awakened by his cat. The cat is hungry, but it will only eat one specific brand and flavor of cat food.

Marlowe mumbles and grumbles and lights a cigarette by striking a kitchen match on the wall. From the state of the wall, this is obviously not the first time, and throughout the movie Marlowe will light his matches on any available surface. He doesn't have his cat's preferred brand of cat food, and so, talking to himself all the time, he goes out to buy some, even though it's the middle of the night.

As he leaves the building, he talks with the spaced-out girls who live across the way from him, promising to buy them some brownie mix. He knows why they want brownie mix at three in the morning (two boxes), but as he says, "It's okay with me," which is his mantra throughout the film. One of the girls tells him that he's the nicest neighbor they've ever had, and he mutters to himself as he leaves, "I've got to be the nicest neighbor, I'm a private eye. It's okay with me."

So, in a brief (less than four minutes) and desultory scene, we've learned quite a bit. Altman, when he wants to, can convey a lot of information very economically, without that awkward feeling that comes from raw exposition being forced on the audience just to get it out of the way.

The point is made quite a bit, especially early in the movie, how out of step Marlowe is with the times. The movie is set in the 1970s, but Marlowe seems (in some ways) to be living in the 1940s. He wears an old-fashioned black suit, a white shirt and a skinny tie, he smokes unfiltered cigarettes and he drives a 1940s car. This point is frequently overemphasized in reviews and essays, however, as if he has stepped right out of The Big Sleep or Murder My Sweet.

If that was what Altman wanted to do, he would have cast Robert Mitchum. The studio tried to get him to use Mitchum, but Altman resisted. He wanted Elliott Gould, and there was a very good reason. Gould may have the suit, the cigarettes and the car, but he doesn't wear a fedora, or a trench coat, his hair is too long and curly, and his demeanor is anything but grim. In short, he is Elliott Gould, an actor very much of the 1970s, not Bogart or Powell or Mitchum, and that's the point.

Robert Altman has said that he took Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and stripped away all the phony hero attributes, making Marlowe the loser that a guy like that would be in the real world, without the all-powerful author looking out for him. Marlowe does a favor for a friend, driving his old buddy Terry Lennox down to Tijuana in the middle of the night, but there's no reward, not in money or in honor or in gratitude. He acts like he knows what's going on, but everybody else, including the cops, always knows more than he does. He gets the crap beaten out of him and it never does him any good (and he never gets to even the score later on). He never gets the girl (any girl).

Marlowe's sense of honor is contrasted with other characters time and again. They are all either brutal or dishonest, and he is never either. Marlowe is lied to by Dr. Verringer (who denies he even is Dr. Verringer), by his friend Terry Lennox, and by his client Eileen Wade.

Roger Wade, the famous writer that Marlowe has been hired to find, is a sympathetic character, and mostly (though not entirely) honest, but he's also a bully. He uses his size and his thundering voice to intimidate his wife and his friends. He tries to use them to bully the diminutive Dr. Verringer, but when Verringer won't back down (and even slaps him), he gives in meekly, since he doesn't have anything else left but bluster.

The most alarming scene is with Marty Augustine, the hoodlum who thinks Marlowe worked with Terry Lennox to steal his money. Augustine softly praises his girlfriend's beauty in front of Marlowe, only to slash her face a second later with a broken bottle, turning to Marlowe with the grim reminder that, "That's someone I love, and you I don't even like."

This is the most shocking moment in the movie. Marlowe's "It's okay with me" facade slips, and even some of Augustine's goons are stunned. But Marlowe quickly recovers his poise, and it's obvious that his attitude and his clothes and so on are his armor against a very brutal world. When Roger Wade tells him to "take that Goddamn J.C. Penney tie off and let's have a good, old-fashioned man-to-man drinking party," Marlow agrees immediately to the drinks and the conversation, but he won't remove his tie.

It reminded me of Strange Days, where Max teases Lenny Nero about his fancy wardrobe, and Lenny said, "that's all that stands between me and the jungle." And later, when Mase says that, no matter what filth he moves through, Lenny never lets it touch him, that he just remains the same goofball romantic, he replies, "it's my sword and my shield, Masey."

But, ultimately, despite everything, Marlowe does triumph. He does solve the mystery, and in the end he does reassert his value system. By his standards, he wins, though he has to spend $5,000 to do it. The last shot of the movie recalls the end of The Third Man, where Anna rejects pulp writer Holly Martins for allowing Harry Lime (his friend and her lover) to be killed. Harry Lime deserved it, but that's not the point. The point is that Holly put honor above friendship, and that's why she rejects him. Holly, clueless as ever, thought it might be otherwise.

At the end of The Long Goodbye, Marlowe has chosen honor above friendship, but he's not worried about Eileen Wade's reaction as she drives past him on that long, straight road, since he knows he did the right thing. And again, his demeanor is far from the grim detective of the 1940s, as he cavorts down the road playing his tiny harmonica.

Altman's best endings often put a smart spin on traditional Hollywood formulas. In McCabe & Mrs. Miller, John McCabe actually defeats all three hired killers, like a real Western hero, but then he succumbs to his injuries and dies in the snow, alone and unnoticed. At the end of Kansas City, quite a few of our assumptions are overturned pretty abruptly. Who is the dreamer and who is the realist, who has the power of life and death over who, and so on. (In addition, it probably won't ever be possible to take the phrase, "I can't live without you!" completely seriously again.)

I should mention that, perhaps more than any other Robert Altman movie, The Long Goodbye shows the director's ability to get first-rate performances from people who aren't even known as actors. In this movie, the ensemble consists of a good actor, a great actor, a former baseball player, a movie director, a regular from "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," and a woman best known as the mistress of a world-famous scam artist. And still, every performance is good, and most of them are great.

Also, this is one of the two best-looking movies Altman ever made (along with McCabe & Mrs. Miller), probably because those are the two times he worked with award-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.* This is clear on video, but far more so on the big screen, of course.

Two scenes are particularly striking. The first is a conversation between Roger and Eileen Wade, after Marlowe has brought the writer home from Dr. Verringer's clinic. They are talking in Roger's studio and we see them first through the big glass doors, but we also see Marlowe's reflection in the glass, playing tag with the waves on the beach. And then, as the conversation between husband and wife intensifies, the camera moves into the room, and Marlowe is excluded (the only significant sequence in the movie which doesn't include him, as a matter of fact).

This scene is echoed later on in the film when Roger is passed out drunk after throwing all the party guests out of the house. Eileen persuades Marlowe to stay to eat dinner with her (this is the scene where, if this were a conventional detective movie, they'd end up in bed together). We see them eating, and between them is the window through which we can see the white smudge which is Roger Wade wandering out into the ocean. Then, we see Eileen and Marlowe from outside the window, their conversation no longer audible, and we see her reaction as she sees that her husband is drowning himself.

Both scenes are visually stunning, but the whole film is wonderful to look at.

_____________________
* Vilmos Zsigmond has worked on way too many films to list here (the internet movie database lists 65) but it is worth mentioning that he was the cinematographer on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Deliverance, The Sugarland Express, The Last Waltz, The Deer Hunter and The Two Jakes.

Oh, and also on The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1963).

The Long Goodbye
(1973)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Leigh Brackett
 
Cast:
Philip Marlowe : Elliott Gould
Eileen Wade : Nina van Pallandt
Roger Wade : Sterling Hayden
Marty Augustine : Mark Rydell
Dr. Verringer : Henry Gibson
Terry Lennox : Jim Bouton

The movie Gosford Park takes place during a weekend shooting party on an English country estate during the 1930s. The house belongs to Sir William McCordle, who is very wealthy. He owns several sweatshops, and he supports almost all the members of his wife's family. Even with all this, however, he has no control over who he sits next to at dinner in his own home.

He always has to sit next to his wife's aunt Constance, the Countess of Trentham, although he dislikes her, and he never gets to sit next to his sister-in-law Louisa, whom he likes perhaps a little too much. This has nothing to do with Lady Trentham's age or her relationship to him, it's because, as a Countess, she is the highest ranking woman there, according to the table of precedence, so she is always seated to the right of the host.

This strict seating plan extends below stairs as well, so Lady Trentham's maid Mary gets the place of honor at the servants' dinner table, at the butler's right, even though she is the least experienced servant in the house. And, like all the visiting servants, she is called my her mistress' name when she is below stairs, rather than by her own.

Gosford Park uses the form of a 1930s English country house murder mystery, but the movie doesn't care much about the murder and neither do we. The murder is in the center of the picture, but what's happening around the edges is usually a lot more interesting.

We see the machinery of a huge country house like that, and all the procedures and routines that keep it going. Almost everybody knows what they should be doing and how they should be acting, and the few exceptions, like Mary and a visiting American movie producer, allow us to find out exactly how complex and rigid the whole system really is. All of the duties and responsibilities of the different servants are very carefully researched, and it shows.

We also see some very complex family relationships, both above and below stairs, much of which is just hinted at. As in most Altman films, information is given but not emphasized or repeated.

This is a movie which only has its full effect when you see it more than once, in a way that Altman never would have done twenty or thirty years ago. But in the age of video and DVD, people watch movies again and again, and he knows that. Gosford Park is designed to reward repeated viewings, since some scenes will appear to be one thing the first time around, but on a second viewing will reveal themselves to be something very different.

Freddie Nesbitt: Don't worry, it's nobody.

At the beginning of the movie, we see some of the guests arrive in front of the huge house, and as they enter we expect to enter with them, but we don't. Instead, we abruptly find ourselves entering below stairs, with the visiting servants. We're in the engine room of the ship, not on the main deck, and we see the rest of the weekend from the point of view of the servants. We don't see anything above stairs unless at least one servant is present.

This allows us to see, among other things, how invisible the servants are, because extraordinary things are said and done in front of them as if they're just another chair or lamp. I've seen very similar behavior in the corporate world, in fact, but obviously not to this extent, and certainly not this consistently.

What keeps it all going is not only the economics of it, that William McCordle owns enough sweatshops to run a huge country house and to buy his way into an aristocratic family, but the other thing which maintains the whole structure is that the people involved all end up having a stake in it, to some extent, even the servants (especially the senior ones). They maintain their own hierarchies and protocols just as much as the aristocracy, and they are very aware of the respect they get because of their position in the house.

Service was a job, and for a lot of people it was a very good and desirable job, but it was a lot more. It became your home as well, and, especially since there were few married servants, it tended to become your family. Many people went into service in their early teens, like the hallboys who serve the dinner for the servants, so for them it was a vocational school as well. And it was all, as we know but they do not, about to end, since comparatively few people maintained this kind of house after World War II.

And, as in many families or small towns, everybody knows what everybody else is up to, even if they don't talk about it. Everybody knows about Lady Sylvia and her taste for handsome visiting servants, everybody knows that Jennings, the butler, is a drunk, everybody knows about Sir William and Elsie, the head housemaid, everybody knows about Bertha the kitchen maid and her various liaisons, and everybody knows about Arthur, the gay second footman, who is always hoping to be allowed to dress Ivor Novello, a visiting film star (who doesn't have his own valet), but things are always worked out so that he doesn't get the chance.

In this world, for everyone you encounter there is an appropriate form of address, and an appropriate way to act, and for every part of every day there is an appropriate way to dress. The visiting American film producer, who has several strikes against him (he's American, Jewish, vegetarian, gay, and he produces Charlie Chan movies), never succeeds in saying or doing or wearing the correct thing in any situation, but, being an American, he's usually completely unaware of this.

He's an outsider, like "Opal from the BBC" in Nashville, and Altman uses him to show us interesting information along the way, like the fact that breakfast in a house like that was the opposite of dinner. It was served buffet style, everybody sat where they wanted, people read the newspaper and it was all very relaxed.

Many of the major characters (and there are a lot of them) are supplied with quite a bit of back story, but frequently only in a comment or two. Most of it is not essential to the "plot," so you can absorb as much or as little as you like.

For example, at some time in the past, the Earl of Carton (who we never meet) wanted one of his daughters to marry William McCordle. As happened very often (and still does), the Earl had a title but no money. William McCordle had money, but no "class." So, Sylvia and Louisa cut cards, and Sylvia won, so she married him.

Both sisters now regret how this worked out. Louisa flirts with William, and it isn't clear whether it ever went any further than that, but what is clear is that she likes the idea of somebody playing with her, coaxing her into bad behavior. Her husband, Lord Stockbridge, the very stuffy ex-Army officer, certainly isn't about to coax anybody into anything naughty.

Sylvia certainly doesn't need anybody to coax her into bad behavior, she dallies with visiting servants on a regular basis, if they're handsome enough. What Sylvia finds she wants, though, is somebody she can respect, and there's nothing much (as she sees it) to respect about her awful, vulgar, middle class husband.

I remember in the 1970s two players on the NY Yankees decided to trade wives in mid-season. Needless to say, this was not an option in the English aristocracy, especially in the 1930s.

Mrs. Wilson: Didn't you hear me? I'm the perfect servant. I have no life.

Neither group of people above stairs or below, has a monopoly on goodness, or nastiness, or self-involvement, or lust, or any other human characteristic. The servants don't really have much of a life, though. Not because the masters consciously prevent them from having one (the masters are generally oblivious to the whole question, which is in some ways even worse). It's just because of what's demanded of them by the job (or, really, the life).

One of the most delightful scenes in the movie takes place in the evening, as Ivor Novello (who was a real film and music star of that time, his music is used throughout the film) sits down to entertain people at the piano. Despite the fact that this is obviously why he was invited, all of the guests ignore his playing almost completely. A film star is nothing to them, and it seems pretty clear that they like having him there so they can make that point, to him and to each other.

However, many of the servants, entranced by the music, creep up to the doors of the drawing room to try to listen without getting caught.

Constance Trentham: He produces the Charlie Chan movies. Or does he direct them? I never know the difference.

The film is beautifully balanced, all the real unhappiness set off by some wonderful humor. For one thing, there is a theme throughout of jokes about the movie business. Morris Weissman, the American movie producer, is always on the long distance telephone, conducting his business with the studio and fighting about the casting of his latest Charlie Chan movie, much to the disdain of the aristocrats.

The second thread of humor is provided by the bitchy asides of the women of the family about Mabel, among many other topics. Mabel is the middle class wife of the Honorable Freddie Nesbitt. He is there to try to get money and/or a job from William, mostly by blackmailing him with the knowledge that William's daughter is or was pregnant, probably by Freddie himself. Freddie is awful, and everybody knows it, but he is of their class, and he knows how to dress and how to act and conduct himself, so they put up with him.

Mabel is one of the people who changes during the course of the movie (most of them don't, in fact most of them are barely affected by the murder), and it's one of the great subplots, as she realizes that her husband and most of the other people there may look down on her (even some of the servants dismiss her, because she travels without a ladies maid), but she begins to realize that she has a lot of intelligence and strength that most of them don't have.

The third, and most obvious, source of humor is the detective himself, who is a complete ass. He tries, unsuccessfully, to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy, he obviously has no idea how to solve a crime, and he is a constant source of amazement to the constable who works with him. He is probably the only completely one-dimensional character in the movie.

Only one character discovers who committed the crime(s) and why, and she never reveals this knowledge to anybody else. She thinks, quite correctly, that no purpose would be served by doing so. And, though she doesn't say so, she is aware that the murder was only the culmination of many other crimes, none of them ever punished.

Gosford Park
(2002)
Directed by Robert Altman
Screenplay by Julian Fellowes, from an idea by Robert Altman and Bob Balaban
 
Cast:
Constance Trentham : Maggie Smith
William McCordle : Michael Gambon
Sylvia McCordle : Kristin Scott Thomas
Isobel McCordle : Camilla Rutherford
Raymond Stockbridge : Charles Dance
Louisa Stockbridge : Geraldine Somerville
Anthony Meredith : Tom Hollander
Lavinia Meredith : Natasha Wightman
Ivor Novello : Jeremy Northam
Morris Weissman : Bob Balaban
Freddie Nesbitt : James Wilby
Mabel Nesbitt : Claudie Blakley
Rupert Standish : Laurence Fox
Jeremy Blond : Trent Ford
Henry Denton : Ryan Phillippe
Kelly Macdonald : Mary Maceachran
Robert Parks : Clive Owen
Jane Wilson : Helen Mirren
Elizabeth Croft : Eileen Atkins
Elsie : Emily Watson
Mr. Jennings : Alan Bates
Mr. Probert : Derek Jacobi
George : Richard E. Grant
Arthur : Jeremy Swift
Dorothy : Sophie Thompson
Mrs. Lewis : Meg Wynn Owen
Mr. Barnes : Adrian Scarborough
Sarah : Frances Low
Renee : Joanna Maude
Bertha : Teresa Churcher
Inspector Thompson : Stephen Fry
Constable Dexter : Ron Webster

Seldom Seen: You like picture show?

Johnny O'Hara: I can take it or leave it.

Seldom Seen: Well, I recommend you leave it.

Robert Altman is smarter about race and class than most other directors in Hollywood, but since he's not seen as a "political director," (unlike Tim Robbins or John Sayles, for two examples) it's seldom mentioned in reviews of his work.

But watch the beginning of Cookie's Fortune, and see what tricks he plays on the audience, how he gently tweaks our prejudices. Willis Richland is drunk. We see him leaving a bar, and buying a bottle to take with him. He drops that bottle outside the bar when a patrol car cruises by, so he goes back into the bar to steal another bottle to replace the broken one. On his way home, we see him knock on the window of a van where an attractive white girl is sleeping, and we see her turn out the light, pretending she isn't there. Then we see him climb clumsily into the kitchen window of a rich woman's house.

Nothing big is made of it, but none of these events is what it might seem to be, and Altman is chiding us for the assumptions we're making because Willis is played by Charles S. Dutton, a hefty, middle-aged Black man.

Altman tweaks bad screenwriting (here and in other of his recent movies, particularly the beginning of The Gingerbread Man) the same way David Cronenberg does in eXistenZ. But what he's really getting at is not the screenwriters, but us. He's telling us that we need to think about his movies, not just experience them to be distracted, and, in exchange, he'll give us a movie that's worth thinking about.

This intelligence, specifically about race and class, is especially visible in Kansas City, but it's really just a backdrop for the movie's main concern, which is the movies in general, and how dangerous they can be when used as a guide for life.

Seldom Seen: All that "Amos & Andy." White people just sit around all day thinking up that shit. And then they believe it.

Blondie O'Hara lives for the movies, in fact most everything she says, and how she says it, and even how she stands and walks, comes right out of the movies. Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance was criticized in some reviews for being annoying, but that's exactly the point. It's always annoying when somebody goes through their life acting as though they're in a movie that only they can see.

Blondie's husband Johnny, similarly swayed by the movies he's seen, has come up with a ridiculous plan to rob a successful Black businessman, disguised in blackface. The businessman was on his way to lose his money gambling at the Hey Hey Club. Once Seldom Seen, who runs the club, finds out, his men snatch Johnny almost before he has the burnt cork washed off.

When Johnny's wife Blondie learns what has happened, she concocts a scheme to get her husband back by kidnapping Carolyn Stilton, hoping to force her husband, a big-time political power broker, to engineer Johnny's release.

The miracle of Blondie's plan is that it works even as well as it does, but it's definitely the sort of plan that only a dedicated movie-goer would ever invent. Carolyn Stilton is a drug addict and spends the entire movie doped up on laudanum, but in the end she's far less drugged than Blondie. In fact, amusingly, at one point they kill time in a movie theater showing a Jean Harlow film, and even when they step into the lobby to make a critical phone call, Blondie can barely tear herself away from the film, which she's seen several times before.

The movie comes back again and again to a back room in the Hey Hey Club, where Seldom Seen is talking to Johnny O'Hara, trying to figure out what to do with him (and seeing, in the process, if Johnny is capable of learning anything). Seldom Seen knows immediately that Johnny, like his wife, takes both movies and radio far too seriously, saying that Johnny, "comes swinging in here like Tarzan, into a sea of niggers."

Seldom Seen: Come on, let's go hear some music.

But there's a balance to the cautionary view of movies, and that's the jazz. Altman assembled many of the best young jazz musicians in the country and had them play at the Hey Hey Club. Their music runs throughout the film, which takes place in a single night. It starts with the musicians wandering in and unpacking their instruments in the club in the late afternoon, playing idly, sitting out at the tables, greeting old friends, getting ready for a long night.

Then, as the evening progresses, the band plays for real, including what develops into an incredible cutting contest between two tenor sax players.

And finally, as the movie ends, the sky is light outside but it's still dark in the club, Seldom Seen is counting his money, and a couple of bass players are playing a final quiet melody.

Altman clearly loves jazz, and he knows that it tells a lot more truth, about everything, but especially about Black people's lives in this country, than the movies ever have. And, it's clear that he knows clubs, from the casual time before the doors open and the audience comes in, to the incredible feeling when everything is going right, for both musicians and audience, to the way it can still be the end of a dark, wonderful night in a club long after it's already bustling morning outside.

In fact, I've read that it was over a few drinks one night that Altman got Belafonte to agree to play Seldom Seen, and I'd like to think they were hearing some good jazz at the time. Apparently Belafonte was originally reluctant to take the part of a gangster, a murderer and a drug user. He thought his audience wouldn't accept him in that type of role. Altman looked him in the eye and said, "Belafonte, who started the rumor that you were an actor?"

And, of course, that was that. Like musicians in a cutting contest, some challenges you can't back down from.

Kansas City (1996)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt
Cast:
Blondie O'Hara : Jennifer Jason Leigh
Carolyn Stilton : Miranda Richardson
Seldom Seen : Harry Belafonte
Henry Stilton : Michael Murphy
Johnny O'Hara : Dermot Mulroney