Verse:
Oliver, Lewis Turco, Mary
betrayal. Diane (Talia Shire) is obsessed like Emily. One by every day at the discount store where Emily works, an old man one, she looks up old boyfriends (Richard Jordan, John Be- ...
...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...
...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...
...In this regard she also distinguishes herself is down in the country of everwetness...
...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...
...visible beneath her face, as if the face she showed to the world couldn't quite conceal what she was feeling inside...
...film...
...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...
...bittersweet quality...
...If you know Altman's work, you can't help seeing rendezvous with her first old boyfriend...
...A crazy old woman who turns up 6 July 1979: 405...
...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...
...things she does...
...darkness and pressure...
...Each glassful is cold The maniacal touches so typical of Altman find their way as ice, and flashes like diamonds...
...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...
...In the appearance of each Spring slides under the door, actress we see that the woman she plays is crazed...
...She softens Altman's influence on her by to a channel of gray stones...
...The prize nuttiness seems to drive into a wall on purpose...
...from Paul Schrader, who wrote Old Boyfriends' script in we drink from stone pools so long in the earth collaboration with his brother Leonard...
...tension of the woman is betrayed...
...The story unfolds in an intentionally only significance this fact seems to have, though, is its suggesobscure, fragmentary way and without exposition...
...The nizable Altman style...
...as we have, in Rudolf's film, no idea why Emily does the COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Her revenge on men has a more comic, knit and ravel darkness...
...Shrub-faces, Even Shire and Chaplin are rather similar in appearance and lilac ears listen to dusk in screen personality...
...In the Indoors, dust /weaves its motes among tautness of the skin across the bridge of the nose, the inner coleus and pepper plants...
...and in the end she can be reconciled with Mary Oliver one of them where Emily, we knew from the beginning, never could...
...Like Rudolf s film, Tewkesbury's is done in that recog- background that we feel Altman's presence most keenly...
...moisture eliminating the sort of zany byplay found in his films...
...Diane lashes out at the world only near the blue spruce whose needles with her emotions...
...Soon a river pattern...
...only into Rudolf s film...
...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...
...The skull of each actress seems almost coming over the lawns...
...In Tewkesbury's film she remains true to this across the rug...
...She trickles at best...
...What these events Tewkesbury's and Rudolf s films as being animated by it...
...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...
...The Well As intriguing as the similarities between these two films are, it is finally the differences which are more instructive...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...This same, antic quality Bell Weather is so strong in Rudolf s and Tewkesbury's films that they become Altman films too...
...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...
...Trees file along curbs...
...After that the plot begins as Diane drives to a the films...
...There is in Diane's actions nothing of the desperate of stars will spill overhead criminality that Emily's have...
Vol. 106 • July 1979 • No. 13
