Brudnoy's Index
Brudnoy, David
Altman has stamped his films with the distinctive mark of his personality, which embodies the tension between experience and intellect, between the material of American popular culture and his own...
...It is the old-time farce, and one of the most sophisticated funny films in a long time...
...Newman's eyes are still the bluest blue, his bod's in terrific shape, but the zing's gone out of Harper...
...Love and Death: Woody Allen's funniest movie, about newlyweds (Boris and Sonja) so poor they eat snow for dinner and sleet for dessert...
...Schell's performance is nothing short of inspired, and the film is psychohistory on the grand cinema scale...
...The Fortune: Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty as two ne'er-do-wells who, to avoid transporting a lady 'cross state lines for immoral purposes, transport her across state lines to steal her fortune by killing her...
...Roy Schneider plays The Man of Reason—in this case, improbably, a resort town police chief—who senses danger ahead of the rest...
...America comes alive in this tremendous movie, after which the American cinema can never be unchanged...
...This is not an argument for coterie art (Altman's worst film, Brewster McCloud, is his most esoteric), but merely a recognition that even genius can stretch itself too thin—in the case of Nashville, at least forty minutes too thin...
...The actors wrote their own music and lyrics, improvised much of their dialogue, and carry a deceptively simple tale of country music greats and would-be-greats, and the second theme, of a new party candidacy for President, to heights of sophistication...
...Splendidly contrived hokum, and it should do terrible things to the summer resort industry next season, in reruns, as it has this summer...
...good songs—especially "I'm Easy," by Carradine, and "Dues," by Blakley...
...Alt-man's best films have been his most personal—by implication, least accessible to a mass audience...
...It is unfair to criticize him for making this movie instead of another, but Altman might have succeeded with a less ambitious movie, one in which the complex intertwining of politics, countrymusic, and fundamentalist religion was the subject less of unambiguous allegory than of the subtle suggestiveness characteristic of Altman's best films...
...This is a comedy about adultery, greed, homicide, and the Mann Act, introducing Stockard Channing as the hapless heiress...
...Candice Bergen is A Woman With A Past, who's out to win the race for marital reasons...
...The music is Motown classic, the warmth and adolescent angst rings true, and if you remember "Baby Love," "Stop in the Name of Love," The Temptations, The Miracles, and others of that golden age, this film will bring back pleasant memories...
...Jan-Michael Vincent is the snot-nosed kid who (of course) reforms...
...The failing of Nashville is that its subject matter is too broad for Altman's personal vision...
...Nashville, which seems to have something for everyone, also seems to display a correspondingly diluted sensibility...
...Sonja (Diane Keaton) is fond of Boris, but she marries him only because she thinks he's about to die, which he inconsiderately doesn't, till later...
...This is the best comedy of the season...
...Long before he nearly drowns, the filmgoer's attention has sunk...
...Nashville: Unquestionably the most remarkable American film ever...
...There are superb performances—especially those of Barbara Harris, Lily Tomlin, Ronee Blakley, and Keith Carradine...
...his nebbish puss and bloated belief in his sexual allure are the perfect putdown of our standard romanticized myths...
...Almost everyone is pretty indeed, and the film evokes a fascinated response in the viewer—coupled, as it happens, with revulsion...
...Woody's a film anarchist: his tool to destroy convention is withering satire...
...Altman has stamped his films with the distinctive mark of his personality, which embodies the tension between experience and intellect, between the material of American popular culture and his own personal aesthetic...
...The Return of the Pink Panther: Inspector Clouseau returns, the same bumbling incompetent ninny of the original Panther film a decade ago...
...Peter Sellers is in top form in this merry romp of sight gags, sound gags, pratfalls, slapstick, sophisticated farce, and gentle tease, an elegant, witty delight...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 31...
...Although Nashville is neither the film of the decade nor a mine of political and cultural insights, it is an impressive achievement nonetheless...
...Richard Dreyfuss mugs delightfully through a dream role as a rich hippy icthyologist seeking the big one, and Robert Shaw reincarnates Captain Ahab...
...Cooley High: Black American Graffiti: the mid-60s high school scene as lived by hip urban Negroes, a jivey lot and infectious...
...Roger Vadim, who foisted Brigitte Bardot on a breathless world, here skirts porn, indulging himself in one scene offering a truly new approach to phallic worship, and delves deeply into the psychological makeup of the jet setters involved in this horror story...
...David Bradnoy Brudnoy's Film Index • • ^ Bite the Bullet: 700 miles around the desert, as eight contestants and their nags set off on a grueling endurance race, at the end of which sits the $2,000 pile of gold...
...Robert Altman's two-and-a-half-hour distillation of eight hours of film set in the Athens of the South, containing 24 lead characters and two majors stories in a shocking climax...
...Jaws: A fish story, for those with cast-iron stomachs, about the ones that nearly got away...
...The landscape is breathtaking, individual scenes compel attention, and the horses work hard...
...James Coburn impersonates James Coburn, circa 1906...
...Grand Guignol has nothing on this one for gore, and it is wonderfully scary too...
...The Man in the Glass Booth: Maximilian Schell as an apparently wackledoodoo ex-Nazi abducted from New York for trial in Israel...
...The relationships between our motley crew of adventurers are not always believable, and the film lasts at least a half-hour too long, but in the main, Richard Brooks' writing and directing result in a noble achievement...
...Nashville is a 1975 movie "must"—but the publicity surrounding it must not be permitted to obscure its failings, or its virtues...
...III The Drowning Pool: Private dick Lew Harper (Paul Newman) is back in some meandering monkeyshine about a missing account book, a vile girlchild, a boozy broad (Joanne Woodward), various bad-dies, and more menacing water than anything this season but in Jaws...
...It is a masterpiece...
...Miller, the detective story in The Long Goodbye—has been accessible to Altman's peculiar sensibility the result has been minor cinematic gems...
...Boris hates war, loves to philosophize, and is Sonja's reluctant accomplice in a foiled plot to off Napoleon, who is giving Russia a hard time chasing the elusive butterfly of conquest...
...and the brilliant craftsmanship of Altman, Tewkesbury, musical director Richard Baskin, cinematographer Paul Lohmann, and sound engineers Jim Webb and Chris McLaughlin...
...His latest film puts him in the front rank of those who would liberate us from our pomposities by puncturing them with laughter...
...Even discounting the exaggerated claims made on its behalf by its partisans and exegetes, Nashville is flawed, because its tapestry of characters and themes—which is both the strength and the weakness of the movie—sacrifices insight for irony...
...Gene Hackman stars as the cowpoke with a galloping case of the concerns—for animals...
...When the subject matter—the Western in McCabe and Mrs...
...Charlotte: One of the creepier variations on the old madman and nympho murder story, an ingenious version at that...
Vol. 9 • October 1975 • No. 1
