Friday, Sep 5, 2008
"MASH" introduced audiences, in the most accessible way possible, to the Altman style -- ensemble acting, episodic storytelling, zoom lenses and overlapping dialogue. It also fed them all of the major characteristics of an Altman film: rabid anti-authoritarianism, anti-militarism, black humor (the blackest), sacrilege, delight in decadence, adolescent sexual escapades, hypocrisy revealed and casual drug use.
The movie made stars out of its two leads, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland; started a running story line the TV series "M*A*S*H" would milk for years; and put a giant bulge in Fox's corporate wallet. "MASH" cost a measly $3.5 million to make, but according to Peter Biskind's account of the late '60s and '70s in Hollywood, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood," the film "pulled in $36.7 million ... putting it third for 1970 behind 'Love Story' and 'Airport.'" And that's not counting the loads of cash made from the TV series.
Altman, of course, didn't see any of that money. And he would often complain that his son Michael, who at the age of 14 wrote the film's popular theme song, "Suicide is Painless," made more than he did off of "MASH." But Altman got what he really hungered for: acclaim as an artist. The film struck a chord both with the youth culture and the burgeoning anti-Vietnam War sentiment in the United States and abroad. At Cannes, "MASH" was awarded the Palm d'Or for best film. And it received five Academy Award nominations, including best picture and best director, though it won only one: best screenplay -- for which Lardner got the Oscar.
It's hard to overstate the importance of "MASH" to Altman's career. At 45, he was older than the Young Turks then kicking new life into old Hollywood. But overnight he became leader of the pack, universally hailed as a genius, an auteur, a demon filmmaker and an iconoclast. He took the brass ring and ran with it -- sometimes making bizarre but fascinating failures like "Brewster McCloud" (1970), "California Split" (1974) or "Buffalo Bill and the Indians" (1976), and with other projects crafting literature on-screen in films such as "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971), "The Long Goodbye" (1973), "Nashville" (1975) and "Three Women" (1977). Even his over-the-top 1978 farce "A Wedding" and 1979's often reviled sci-fi thriller "Quintet," though flawed in their own ways, reveal the idiosyncratic brilliance of their creator.
The '70s were very good for Altman, as they were for film in general. Biskind quotes the director as saying of the era: "Suddenly there was a moment when it seemed as if the pictures you wanted to make, they wanted to make." But if art and commerce held hands like hippie lovers during the '70s, the '80s would see them part, with commerce going back to its old whorish ways.
That was when Altman, in the oddest move of his career, directed "Popeye" (1980) with Robin Williams. The result was a creative nadir. The film was a failure at the box office, though it eventually ended up making big bucks in rentals. And whatever its merits for the kiddies, it signaled the end of a victorious, decade-long run for Altman -- put Williams as Popeye beside Beatty as McCabe: It illustrates a sort of spiritual regression, a de-evolution worthy of Mark Mothersbaugh.
He followed the "Popeye" defeat with a series of less-ambitious but still aesthetically satisfying film adaptations of stage plays, "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" (1982) and "Secret Honor" (1984) being the best of these. During the '80s, there was also the raucous "Les Boreades" segment from the opera anthology film "Aria" (1987). But his "Vincent and Theo" (1990), shot originally as a four-hour epic for European TV, was Altman's first true masterpiece in over a decade. A long, mordant commentary on the fate of an artist in society, "Vincent and Theo" proved that Altman, seemingly at will, could invest celluloid with the grandeur and depth of high art.
But Americans want entertainment, and Altman made clear with 1992's "The Player" and "Short Cuts" (1993) that he can deliver it, though not without a satirical price. When Tim Robbins' movie mogul in "The Player" gets away with murder, the audience ends up cheering him. And if "Short Cuts" is filled with crude vignettes, like Huey Lewis peeing on a floating female corpse, we still laugh at it, albeit with a little embarrassment. It's almost as if in both films, Altman is saying in no uncertain terms, "I know what you folks are really like, so let me hold up a mirror and you can tell me if you enjoy what you see." It works. We guffaw at ourselves. And if there's a tinge of self-revelation as we gaze inside Altman's funhouse mirror, we can always shake it off afterward. It's only a movie, right?
"Ready-to-Wear" (1994) didn't click with audiences in that "Short Cuts" way. And "Kansas City" (1996) was more like the old Altman -- a dark, cynical jazz-inspired portrait of his hometown in the 1930s. Yet it's a breathtaking film, with fantastic performances from Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson and Harry Belafonte.
Since then there's been 1998's "The Gingerbread Man," based on a John Grisham short story, which, for the most part, has been consigned to oblivion. But if Altman couldn't make gold out of Grisham's dross, who can blame him? Most recently, in 1999, there was "Cookie's Fortune," a gentle farce of a Southern mystery that almost everyone seemed to love -- even though it disappoints Altman that most people waited to see it on videotape.
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