Analyzing Altman
Never count out the veteran director of this summer's 'A Prairie Home Companion'
By Andy Klein
In the three and a half decades since M*A*S*H made him one of the best known directors in Hollywood, Robert Altman (whose A Prairie Home Companion opens on June 9) has made something like 32 features - it's hard to keep count - as well as numerous TV projects, most notably the Tanner '88 political satire. His films are generally too quirky to get much attention at Oscar time, even as he remains one of the most respected filmmakers alive - to critics and actors, at least. Like Woody Allen, his reputation enables him to get top-tier performers, even though his only films that come close to being blockbusters are M*A*S*H and Popeye (1980).
As is true of most prolific auteurs, the quality of his output can vary hugely. When someone once complained to Ernst Lubitsch, one of the dozen greatest directors of all time, that he sometimes made pictures that were not up to his standard, Lubitsch replied, "It can only be said about a mediocrity that all his works live up to his standard." And Altman is no mediocrity.
The director also has one of the longest film careers on record: It's been 58 years since his first credit, for the screen story of Bodyguard, a 1948 RKO film noir, directed by Richard Fleischer. He received a few more minor writing credits, but he spent most of the next decade making 60 or so industrial and educational films in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri.
In 1957, he managed to locally produce, write, and direct The Delinquents, a youth gang exploitation film featuring future Billy Jack auteur Tom Laughlin and Dick Bakalyan (still going strong in Art School Confidential). That did well enough to come to Alfred Hitchcock's attention. Hitchcock brought Altman to Hollywood to direct for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
For more than a decade, Altman made scores of TV episodes, for everything from Maverick and Bonanza to The Millionaire and The Gale Storm Show, while trying to break into features, every which way. He codirected a quickie documentary about James Dean; an hour-and-a-half episode he did for Kraft Suspense Theater was briefly released theatrically as Nightmare in Chicago (1964).
His first true Hollywood feature was Countdown (1968) for Warner Brothers. This story of American astronauts trying to beat the Soviet team to the moon is of interest mostly for its cast, which includes Robert Duvall and James Caan (together again for the first time), Michael Murphy, and a pre-Ted Baxter Ted Knight. (The IMDB alleges that it also has Mike Farrell, future star of the TV version of M*A*S*H, which Altman despises.) Neither that nor his next feature, That Cold Day in the Park (1969), got much attention.
Then came M*A*S*H, a huge critical and commercial hit, which managed to channel the late-'60s zeitgeist, despite being set in the early '50s. By that time, Altman was 45 - unusually old for a "hot young" director. Twenty-two years of dues-paying and nonstop work paid off handsomely and may have helped toughen him to ride out his many subsequent ups and downs.
If there's one thing the last 36 years have made clear, it's that it's never safe to count Altman out. Has any major American director had quite so many career swings? Many critics who gushed about his work in the early and mid-'70s expressed increasing disappointment as the decade ended. He made a major comeback in the early '90s with The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993). His subsequent work got bad-to-mixed notices until the triumph of Gosford Park (2001) ... which he followed with The Company (2003), one of his weakest films. (It's technically too early to review A Prairie Home Companion, so let's just say that Altman's back in form, albeit with very slight material.)
Even though they all have distinctively Altmanesque stylistic markers, could Beyond Therapy (1987) and The Company (2003) really come from the same man who gave us The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), and Gosford Park? Well ... yes. All are equally recognizable as his work. It's just that his trademark qualities are either less suited to the material or evident in less inspired ways.
A Prairie Home Companion has these qualities in spades, including naturalistically overlapping dialogue, a point of view that never stays too long on one character (despite, in this case, a first-person narration by Kevin Kline's character), and an intermingling of goofy humor with moments of surprising emotional resonance.
It also is an example of Altman's obvious love of music. While he doesn't have an ongoing collaborative relationship with a composer - like David Lynch with Angelo Badalamenti or the late Krzysztof Kieslowski with Zbigniew Preisner - he obviously had more than passing input into John Williams' clever score for The Long Goodbye.
In an era when - despite the occasional fluke like Chicago - musicals remain a woefully underrepresented form, Altman, though not thought of as a director of musicals per se, may have directed more examples of the form than anyone else currently working. Popeye is his one musical in the classic form. Nashville is sometimes categorized as a musical - fair enough - but several other Altman films could just as easily qualify.
In addition to Nashville's cavalcade of stars, wannabes, and hangers-on, there were the jazz players in Kansas City (1996), the dancers in The Company, the rock band in A Perfect Couple (1979). In fact, the romantic conflict in the last of these - not one of his best movies but nonetheless underrated - is expressed by the clash of rock vs. classical music and the lifestyles and audiences associated with those two worlds.
Each of these has numerous musical numbers, most often contributing to story points, mood, or character in an indirect way. It's doubtful that anyone would call Gosford Park a musical, but, when you think of it, Jeremy Northam (playing actor/songwriter Ivor Novello) sings a half-dozen Novello tunes. Maybe not enough to consider the film a musical, but still.
In addition, there was his 1996 documentary, Jazz '34, made as a companion piece to Kansas City and generally regarded as superior to its big brother. He even directed and cowrote the libretto for an opera - William Bolcom's version of the Frank Norris novel McTeague (also the source of Erich von Stroheim's Greed).
Most curiously, one of his earliest credits is for the screenplay of - I'm not making this up - Corn's-A-Poppin, a low-budget 1951 musical. (I don't suppose anyone has access to a copy of this?)
Has any other director working in features dealt centrally with music and musicians more frequently? None that I can think of.
A Prairie Home Companion is yet another. Presented as a supernatural backstage faux film noir comedy, it takes place primarily during the final broadcast of the fictional radio show around which Garrison Keillor's ironic radio show is built. It features more musical numbers than Nashville and Popeye combined. It's another of the director's loving tributes to music and the people who create it.Published: 05/25/2006
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