Robert Altman Movies

Always gets overlooked. No one touches his work except for maybe Hitchcock, maybe Kubrick. Some of the 80s and 90s stuff wasn't great, but this filmography- I'll put up against anybody's:

MASH
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Nashville
Brewster McCloud (partially filmed in the Astrodome!)
Short Cuts
The Player
3 Women
Images
Gosford Park
California Suite
The Long Goodbye
Thieves Like Us
Buffalo Bill
Cookie's Fortune

(how many Director's threads are we going for, anyway?)

 

Not that I agree with all his reviews- he's dead wrong on The Graduate and Raising Arizona- but Ebert does provide insightful reviews- and I totally agree with him on this one:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19991114/REVIEWS08/911140301/1023

It is not often given to a director to make a perfect film. Some spend their lives trying, but always fall short. Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971). This is one of the saddest films I have ever seen, filled with a yearning for love and home that will not ever come -- not for McCabe, not with Mrs. Miller, not in the town of Presbyterian Church, which cowers under a gray sky always heavy with rain or snow. The film is a poem--an elegy for the dead.

Few films have such an overwhelming sense of location. Presbyterian Church is a town thrown together out of raw lumber, hewn from the forests that threaten to reclaim it. The earth is either mud or frozen ice. The days are short and there is little light inside, just enough from a gas lamp to make a gold tooth sparkle, or a teardrop glisten. This is not the kind of movie where the characters are introduced. They are all already here. They have been here for a long time. They know all about one another.

A man rides into town through the rain. He walks into a saloon, makes sure he knows where the back door is, goes out to his horse again, comes in with a cloth, and covers a table. The men are pulling up chairs before he has settled down. He is a gambler named McCabe (Warren Beatty). Somebody thinks they heard that McCabe once shot a man. In the background, somebody is vaguely heard asking, "Laura, what's for dinner?"

This is the classic Altman style, which emerged full-blown in "MASH" and can be seen in "3 Women," "Thieves Like Us," "Nashville," "California Split," "The Long Goodbye," "The Player," "Cookie's Fortune" and all the others. It begins with one fundamental assumption: All of the characters know each other, and the camera will not stare at first one and then another, like an earnest dog, but is at home in their company. Nor do the people line up and talk one after another, like characters in a play. They talk when and as they will, and we understand it's not important to hear every word; sometimes all that matters is the tone of a room.

All of this unfolds mostly indoors, in dark rooms lit by lanterns and log fires. Episodes are punctuated by Leonard Cohen songs, sad frontier laments. The cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, embraces the freedom of the wide-screen Panavision image (this was before screens got narrower again to accommodate home video). He drowns the characters in nature. It is dark, wet, cold, and then it snows. These are simple people. There is a moment when two couples are dancing to a music box in the whorehouse parlor. It comes to the end of a tune, and all four cluster around the box, bending low, peering at its mechanism, poised in suspense. The next tune begins and they spring up, relieved, to dance again.

Life is cheap here. The film shows one of the most heartbreaking deaths in the history of the Western. A goofy kid (Keith Carradine) has ridden into town and visited all the girls in the house. Now he has started across a suspension bridge. A young gunslinger approaches from the other side and cold-bloodedly talks him into being shot to death. The kid knows he is going to get shot. He tries to be friendly and ingratiating, but the time has come. The town looks on, impassive. You don't want to be caught on a bridge facing a guy like that. We realize at the end of the film that this episode on the bridge is the whole story in microcosm: Some people are just incapable of not getting themselves killed.

Study the title. "McCabe & Mrs. Miller." Not "and," as in a couple, but "&," as in a corporation. It is a business arrangement. Everything is business with her. What sorrows she knew before she arrived in Presbyterian Church are behind her now. Everything else is behind her now, too, the opium promises. Poor McCabe. He had poetry in him. Too bad he rode into a town where nobody knew what poetry was but one, and she already lost to it.