The Talkies
Asahina, Robert
by Robert Asahina j One interesting cultural phenomenon of the last eight years or so has been the rapidly growing interest in country music; and it is no accident (to use the old Marxist...
...Richard Dreyfuss mugs delightfully through a dream role as a rich hippy icthyologist seeking the big one, and Robert Shaw reincarnates Captain Ahab...
...The failing of Nashville is that its subject matter is too broad for Altman's personal vision...
...To take one example, Elliott Gould and Julie Christie appear in cameo roles as themselves—in a way that seems designed to invite our condescension toward the Nashville celebrities, who fail to recognize them...
...The Return of the Pink Panther: Inspector Clouseau returns, the same bumbling incompetent ninny of the original Panther film a decade ago...
...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...
...his nebbish puss and bloated belief in his sexual allure are the perfect putdown of our standard romanticized myths...
...James Coburn impersonates James Coburn, circa 1906...
...And it is no exaggeration to say that Altman has no rivals—except Felliniwhen it comes to the sheer power of his visual imagery...
...There are superb performances—especially those of Barbara Harris, Lily Tomlin, Ronee Blakley, and Keith Carradine...
...The gaudy haze of a stag smoker, the crushing intimacy of a small nightclub, the sterile impersonality of the (recently constructed, new) Grand Ole Opry—all these are presented in a manner, sometimes stunning and sometimes subtle, which works so effectively to establish the cinematic rhythm that we accept it without being conscious of it...
...Although Nashville is neither the film of the decade nor a mine of political and cultural insights, it is an impressive achievement nonetheless...
...It would be tempting to write a re-"Nashville" view of the reviews of Nashville, pointing out the collective foolishness of Pauline Kael, Judith Crist, and Tom Wicker (George Will has already succumbed to this temptation), but even though the media hype deserves to be dispelled, Nashville is a challenging film that deserves analysis on its own terms...
...Almost everyone is pretty indeed, and the film evokes a fascinated response in the viewer—coupled, as it happens, with revulsion...
...during next year's bicentennial, pre-election summer...
...Newman's eyes are still the bluest blue, his bod's in terrific shape, but the zing's gone out of Harper...
...Nashville is a 1975 movie "must"—but the publicity surrounding it must not be permitted to obscure its failings, or its virtues...
...The opening, a takeoff of those late-night television ads for "greatest hits" record collections, borders on the banal...
...The movie seems to smirk, "See how provincial these Grand Ole Opry folk are?—They don't even recognize Elliott Gould...
...Jan-Michael Vincent is the snot-nosed kid who (of course) reforms...
...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 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...
...She seems to exist solely to provoke our derision...
...Yet the role is exploited for cheap laughs: "Opal, from the BBC" seems entirely unsympathetic—and worse, entirely without aesthetic justification...
...His latest film puts him in the front rank of those who would liberate us from our pomposities by puncturing them with laughter...
...Splendidly contrived hokum, and it should do terrible things to the summer resort industry next season, in reruns, as it has this summer...
...and the brilliant craftsmanship of Altman, Tewkesbury, musical director Richard Baskin, cinematographer Paul Lohmann, and sound engineers Jim Webb and Chris McLaughlin...
...Miller, the detective story in The Long Goodbye—has been accessible to Altman's peculiar sensibility the result has been minor cinematic gems...
...Candice Bergen is A Woman With A Past, who's out to win the race for marital reasons...
...The landscape is breathtaking, individual scenes compel attention, and the horses work hard...
...For Nashville is an extraordinary movie, and its texture is nearly perfect: It is difficult to tell where the screenwriter (Joan Tewkesbury) leaves off and Altman takes over, or where Altman leaves off and the actors take over...
...Alt-man's best films have been his most personal—by implication, least accessible to a mass audience...
...The Man in the Glass Booth: Maximilian Schell as an apparently wackledoodoo ex-Nazi abducted from New York for trial in Israel...
...good songs—especially "I'm Easy," by Carradine, and "Dues," by Blakley...
...Jaws: A fish story, for those with cast-iron stomachs, about the ones that nearly got away...
...The movie revolves around the campaign of the unseen character Hal Phillip Walker, the dark horse candidate of the populist "Replacement Party" who offers "New Roots for the Nation," and around the return to Nashville of Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), the local sweetheart and star of the Grand Ole Opry...
...The commotion overwhelms us, words fly around our heads, and the confusion of crowded rooms we all have experienced seems captured in a timeless moment—and then the room is suddenly empty...
...Love and Death: Woody Allen's funniest movie, about newlyweds (Boris and Sonja) so poor they eat snow for dinner and sleet for dessert...
...And the greatest failing is the ending: It would be foolish to deny its power, yet we feel cheated, as if the only reason that Ronee Blakley is shot at the outdoor rally is to permit Barbara Harris to mesmerize the crowd immediately afterward into singing "It Don't Worry Me"—a song whose lyrics ("You may say that I'm not free/ But it don't worry me") provide a final easy irony, one that dulls the edge of both Harris' stunning moment in the spotlight, and the movie itself...
...This sketch of Nashville is unfair to the movie because, as with most of his films, Altman does not so much tell a story as weave a complex tapestry of characterizations and relationships: The 24 characters move in and out of each other's lives and the texture of the film in a way that invites our total involvement, but resists analysis according to the conventions of plot, motivation, and explanation...
...There is none of the gimmickry that calls attention to itself through its own showiness—only the craftsmanship of a genuine cinematic artist...
...Schell's performance is nothing short of inspired, and the film is psychohistory on the grand cinema scale...
...Gene Hackman stars as the cowpoke with a galloping case of the concerns—for animals...
...In the first, Ronee Blakley lies in a hospital room, surrounded by well-wishers and hangers-on, with policemen keeping out a gang of reporters...
...Roy Schneider plays The Man of Reason—in this case, improbably, a resort town police chief—who senses danger ahead of the rest...
...The bland political pitch of the populists and the syrupy sentimentalities of country music—which both exploit a longing for simpler times and simpler morals, for "roots" which never existed—are blended together by the Replacement Party advance man (Michael Murphy), who is lining up country and western stars to appear as part of the campaign at an outdoor rally—a rally which climaxes at the end of the movie with the bullets of a deranged would-be assassin...
...Grand Guignol has nothing on this one for gore, and it is wonderfully scary too...
...Nashville: Unquestionably the most remarkable American film ever...
...In retrospect it seems to have been utterly predictable—although no one seems to have have predicted it—that the upheavals of the sixties would yield the search for "roots" which seems to lie beneath much of the cultural and political phenomena of the seventies...
...Yet despite all these virtues, Nashville is cinematically flawed...
...In the second, Ned Beatty stands by helplessly inarticulate while his deaf children talk to his wife (Lily Tomlin) in strangled noises and in the sign language which he has never troubled to learn—which she must translate for him, and which forever makes him a stranger to his own family...
...Too often, Altman has yielded to easy irony—by juxtaposing sequences (an example is the opening scene, which contrasts the banalities of a tasteless Bicentennial salute sung by Henry Gibson with the exuberant energy of gospel music sung by Lily Tomlin and a black choir), or by exploiting symbols (the American flag, junkyards, plastic religious figurines, and especially cars and car crashes) in hackneyed fashion...
...Woody's a film anarchist: his tool to destroy convention is withering satire...
...Altman's mastery of the nuances of overlapping dialogue is displayed in two of the best scenes of the movie...
...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...
...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...
...When the subject matter—the Western in McCabe and Mrs...
...There is the feeling of improvisation in all of Altman's films, but there is never a feeling of randomness: All the sequences are realized within careful structures that make the whole movie more than the sum of its individual scenes—a difficult feat to bring off when relying so heavily upon improvisation...
...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...
...This complex narrative style has not saved Nashville from a barrage of publicity—a Newsweek cover story, front page articles in the entertainment sections of the Sunday Washington Post (three weeks running) and the Sunday New York Times—generated by commentators and critics who seem determined to reduce the movie to a media event...
...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...
...This is the best comedy of the season...
...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...
...This is a comedy about adultery, greed, homicide, and the Mann Act, introducing Stockard Channing as the hapless heiress...
...Altman seems to have had in mind this kind of irony in the characterization of "Opal, from the BBC" (Geraldine Chaplin)—a rude and irritating documentary reporter given to lengthy pseudo-intellectual soliloquies—which can only be intended as a put-down of a particular kind of "sophisticated" provincialism...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 31...
...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...
...These are not isolated flaws in the movie: They reflect a larger failing of vision...
...Cooley High: Black American Graffiti: the mid-60s high school scene as lived by hip urban Negroes, a jivey lot and infectious...
...America comes alive in this tremendous movie, after which the American cinema can never be unchanged...
...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...
...Long before he nearly drowns, the filmgoer's attention has sunk...
...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...
...Throughout his career, more than any other contemporary American director, 30 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 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...
...Charlotte: One of the creepier variations on the old madman and nympho murder story, an ingenious version at that...
...Yet a more subtle irony could have been displayed by showing up our provincialism: How many of the movie audience recognize the real Nashville celebrities—Loretta Lynn or Lynn Anderson or Hank Snow—upon whom the movie characters are based...
...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...
...It is the old-time farce, and one of the most sophisticated funny films in a long time...
...Nashville, which seems to have something for everyone, also seems to display a correspondingly diluted sensibility...
...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...
...and it is no accident (to use the old Marxist formulation) that this has coincided with the resurgence of populist politics and fundamentalist religion...
...Director Robert Altman explores these three themes—politics, country music, and fundamentalist religion—in his epic (two hour, 40 minute) new film, Nashville, which concerns five days in the lives of 24 characters in "Music City, U.S.A...
...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...
...Though dialogue and music dominate the film, the visual aspects express Altman's peculiar intuitive and impressionistic genius...
Vol. 9 • October 1975 • No. 1