Screen:

...Despite exposition, proclamation, discussion and this will be another case of the curmudgeon tamed...

...moisture eliminating the sort of zany byplay found in his films...

...bittersweet quality...

...things she does...

...Each glassful is cold The maniacal touches so typical of Altman find their way as ice, and flashes like diamonds...

...Still puts her characters in a more hospitable world than Altman water leaps from the faucets, so we know does, one where it is possible to react to them without all the the shaft of the well vj he has...

...The prize nuttiness seems to drive into a wall on purpose...

...Anyone who grew up on Shirley Temple emotional, intellectual, spiritual background to make sense of movies knows from the moment the boy sets foot on stage that the moment...

...The playwright solves that problem too, lets a few sentences bridge the gulf of years, and before the play ends the sense of family is ANNOTATING ALTMAM reawakened...

...The problem with photographs-except at the hands of ruined...

...She softens Altman's influence on her by to a channel of gray stones...

...In Rudolf s Remember My Name, a moonchildren grown up, Weller at first denied (no playwright woman named Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) arrives in southern wants to wear forever the label of his first success) and then California and begins harassing a journeyman carpenter, Neal admitted the connection...

...The nizable Altman style...

...In the context, however, it is more than that, since-stage turns out, are no more conducive to theatrical truth th4n cliche or not-an aging person, disoriented by the loss of old Thompson's neatly tied package, and the latter at least has the duties, old chores, can find new strength when unexpected virtue of making me refuse to be surprised that V. S. Pritchett, demands are made on him...

...In eight brief scenes we follow Paul and going in for cloning...

...The skull of each actress seems almost coming over the lawns...

...The Well As intriguing as the similarities between these two films are, it is finally the differences which are more instructive...

...converts him to literature (with Swiss Family Robinson), drills GERALD WEALES him in French, and learns teen-age slang in return...

...After the audience-there lies my misgivings about On Golden first trying to establish himself in Hollywood in 1945, he Pond...

...Since then, his career has been a constant without penetrating them...

...Next comes the in his films really is something inherent in his own anonymous call, during which a rock and roll song is played direction-something improvised in the making and editing of into the phone...

...It is an prison...

...only into Rudolf s film...

...In the Indoors, dust /weaves its motes among tautness of the skin across the bridge of the nose, the inner coleus and pepper plants...

...Tew- The creek that all spring is a fat roil kesbury's is, 'I feel, the lesser film, but it is also the less sinks in exhaustion by midsummer derivative of the two...

...Altman's own films are like being plunked down in the middle of a madhouse and then having to grope your way through the plot to the exit...

...Susan from an idyllic romp on a Bali beach in 1970 to a final Two Altman proteges, assistant director Alan Rudolf and farewell in a New Hampshire cabin in 1979, from a principled scriptwriter Joan Tewkesbury, have recently made movies that indifference to conventional success and its material rewards are not only too much like Altman's work, but almost exactly to an accumulation of both...

...Trees file along curbs...

...Emily makes whom things come easy, who had no need to scramble for anonymous phone calls, follows Neal to his job at a housing necessities, but who found their lives no easier for the absence development, sneaks into his yard and destroys the flowerbeds of struggle...

...A crazy old woman who turns up 6 July 1979: 405...

...and in the end she can be reconciled with Mary Oliver one of them where Emily, we knew from the beginning, never could...

...So Norman teaches Billy to fish, at eighty, can write a strong sentence...

...When she at last reveals herself, we figure Ethel in On Golden Pond...

...I went away from the theater with a sense of having been spent two decades wandering in the wilderness of indusamused and even instructed a little, but with no feeling that the trial documentaries and TV assignments before he was able to playwright had done more than suggest depths of character return to Hollywood...

...flurry of activity, as if he were trying to make up for lost I might have assumed that Thompson's staying on the sur- time-to insure that, despite his late start, he will have a face of his characters was largely a function of his desire for a filmography as long as Hollywood greats like Ford and sad-happy ending had I not wandered into the final preview of Hawks...

...It's uncanny...

...In this regard she also distinguishes herself is down in the country of everwetness...

...tension of the woman is betrayed...

...This same, antic quality Bell Weather is so strong in Rudolf s and Tewkesbury's films that they become Altman films too...

...Old Boy- tion that Tewkesbury's scripts are not where Altman's.films friends begins with a car crash on a freeway where someone have acquired such characteristic touches...

...Against his will she overcomes his suspicion and appropriate image for his play since Susan is a photographer, dismay at her re-appearance...

...visible beneath her face, as if the face she showed to the world couldn't quite conceal what she was feeling inside...

...from Paul Schrader, who wrote Old Boyfriends' script in we drink from stone pools so long in the earth collaboration with his brother Leonard...

...as we have, in Rudolf's film, no idea why Emily does the COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Diane (Talia Shire) is obsessed like Emily...

...To those who wondered why the Gate Productions...

...In an unlikely final scene in...

...This last, clearly an easy comic device, is probably also intended by Thompson to indicate the connection between generations not Screen apparent with Norman and his daughter...

...the best artists-is that they are reductive...

...One by every day at the discount store where Emily works, an old man one, she looks up old boyfriends (Richard Jordan, John Be- delivering a drunken monologue outside her apartment buildlushi and Keith Carradine) who don't even remember her, and ing, a recurrent TV news story about a Budapest earthquakemakes them pay for having trifled with her affections in the it is in these details on the fringes of the action and in the past...

...Gradually, Emily's harassment of Weller's acquaintance, it does propose a real subject...

...In Tewkesbury's film she remains true to this across the rug...

...Although the remark suggests the narrowness of so his wife will find them...

...The story unfolds in an intentionally only significance this fact seems to have, though, is its suggesobscure, fragmentary way and without exposition...

...What these events Tewkesbury's and Rudolf s films as being animated by it...

...Comforted SUCCESS came to Robert Altman rather late in life...

...Asked if these characters were his the same...

...His generation, he said, was one to (Tony Perkins), and his wife (Berry Berenson...

...Diane lashes out at the world only near the blue spruce whose needles with her emotions...

...He makes films so quickly that there is sometimes Michael Weller's Loose Ends earlier that day...

...Shrub-faces, Even Shire and Chaplin are rather similar in appearance and lilac ears listen to dusk in screen personality...

...To a question about why he chose to out from her confrontations with Neal that he was married to do the play in fragmentary scenes over a decade, Weller said her back East and was responsible for her spending a: tern in that he saw it as '`eight photographs come to life...

...After that the plot begins as Diane drives to a the films...

...If you know Altman's work, you can't help seeing rendezvous with her first old boyfriend...

...And so it argument, Weller's scenes remain gesture...

...She shatters their difficulty is that Paul and Susan and all their friends and windows in the middle of the night, and sneaks into their house relations never get beyond stereotype, and-for me, at least- in order to stalk from room to room just out of sight of the they are less amusing, less interesting types than Norman and unsuspecting wife...

...To get around this limitation which even the most plays should have no solutions, that his own was "the descrip- ambitious artist usually has to accept, Altman now seems to be tion of a dilemma...

...they catch their Tewkesbury's Old Boyfriends also begins with an anonymsubjects in mid-gesture and expect the viewer to fill in the ous phone call, and then proceeds to revenge by seduction and Commonweal: 404 betrayal...

...Suspense and expecta- Lewis Turco tion are created in the film not by the plot itself, but by the skewed way in which it is presented...

...Having spent a term in prison, breach dawn, noon, dusk and fall Emily is a pretty bristly character, someone who knows how to brawl with another woman or, if need be, stab a man with a into a field of goldenrod pencil to protect herself...

...After the per- only a few months between their releases, and announcements formance, Weller came out to talk to anyone in the matinee of new projects pour from the offices of his company, Lion's audience who wanted to stay...

...There is only so much that one person can play could not end with the reconciliation of the play's central do, however...

...Shire's face is less gaunt and demented than Chaplin's, Gray walks from its mousehole and she has played more purely vulnerable, helpless, sympathetic women...

...Schrader's past scripts they remember neither sun or snow have shown even less compassion for their characters than nor the white clouds-they know only Altman's, though without the sense of humor...

...film...

...There is in Diane's actions nothing of the desperate of stars will spill overhead criminality that Emily's have...

...She seduces him away from his Paul a film director and projections are used to bridge between new wife, and then abandons him as soon as his marriage is scenes...

...There are only so many films Altman could couple (they could make a go of it, one man insisted, if they make in one lifetime with that distinctive Altman stamp on would work at it), Weller said that he had no solutions, that them...

...Like Rudolf s film, Tewkesbury's is done in that recog- background that we feel Altman's presence most keenly...

...She trickles at best...

...This have to do with each other we don't learn until much later, just leaves their work as little more than a footnote to his career...

...which Norman SEND IN THE CLONES temporarily collapses, the play insists on the lurking presence of death, but it is no longer a threat since the reaffirmation has comforted the audience with the primacy of life...

...In the appearance of each Spring slides under the door, actress we see that the woman she plays is crazed...

...This is not to say, though, that Shire and Chaplin look exactly alike, or that and the phone rings once, its bell hung Old Boyfriends and Remember My Name are the exact same in the heart of dim weather...

...darkness and pressure...

...Her revenge on men has a more comic, knit and ravel darkness...

...His loose ends, it is...

...Soon a river pattern...

...The Neal and his wife turns into terrorism...