The Cinema of Robert Altman

Hollywood Maverick

Robert Niemi

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231850865
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

In a controversial and tumultuous filmmaking career that spanned nearly fifty years, Robert Altman mocked, subverted, or otherwise refashioned Hollywood narrative and genre conventions. Altman's idiosyncratic vision and propensity for formal experimentation resulted in an uneven body of work: some rank failures and intriguing near-misses, as well as a number of great films that are among the most influential works of New American Cinema. While Altman always professed to have nothing authoritative to say about the state of contemporary society, this volume surveys all of his major films in their sociohistorical context to reposition the director as a trenchant satirist and social critic of postmodern America, depicted as a lonely wasteland of fraudulent spectacle, exploitative social relations, and unfulfilled solitaries in search of elusive community.

CHAPTER ONE

Three Dream Films: Explorations of Female Identity

I think I’ve supported the feminists. I’m not showing you the way I think things should be, but the way things are. That is the way women are treated. I got a lot of flak after M*A*S*H in 1970, they said, oh, it’s terrible the way you treat…I say, it isn’t the way I treat women, that’s the way I see them treated. So I’m making my point for you.

– Robert Altman

From its inception to the present day, the Hollywood film industry has been remorselessly male-oriented in its hiring practices, ideology, subject matter and visual strategies. Though innovative in other ways, the New American Cinema did not depart from, or repudiate, phallocentricism. If anything, American films of the 1960s and 1970s were some of the most sexist and misogynist in the industry’s history. In this context it is rather remarkable that Robert Altman made a number of films that actually focus on women: their desires, vulnerabilities and sexual, psychological and emotional problems, most of which arguably stem from a traditionally subordinate position vis-à-vis men. This does not make Altman a ‘feminist’ but it does manifest an easy confidence in his own masculinity and a commendable willingness to step outside the strict confines of the Hollywood code of phony machismo that is in keeping with his generally iconoclastic tendencies.

Persona / Personae

Certainly two but arguably three of Altman’s early films dealing with women – That Cold Day in the Park, Images and 3 Women – have their creative genesis and inspiration in Ingmar Bergman’s enigmatic masterpiece, Persona (1966; released in the US in 1967). In an interview with David Thompson, Altman admitted that Persona ‘impressed me a lot. I’m sure that film was largely responsible for Images and 3 Women. There was a power in Persona, and I think that came from the fact that one woman talked and the other didn’t, more than anything else. We know the situation, and if we know all these situations, then we have a certain expectation of what these situations are going to bring. The trick, to me, is not to bring [about] that expectation’ (2006: 71).

Though largely unknown by American audiences outside of graduate film courses and art-house revivals, Bergman’s Persona remains a key film in European avant-garde cinema. Indeed, its powerful influence on Altman also makes it an important precursor of the New American Cinema as well. Bergman’s scenario is virtually without plot. Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), a prominent Swedish actress, goes mute during a stage performance of Aeschylus’s Electra – presumably because she is depressed by the state of the world and has had her fill of empty roles, whether on stage, as a wife, a mother, or in any other capacity. Her doctor (Margarethe Krook) suggests a long convalescence at the doctor’s summer cottage on the tiny, remote island of Fårö, Northern Gotland. Looking after her is Sister Alma (Bibi Andersson), a naïve young nurse who carries on a nonstop monologue, partly to escape solipsism, partly to try and remedy her patient’s silence. Once Elisabeth seems to shows some signs of attentive engagement, Alma becomes infatuated with her patient and begins to pour her heart out, confessing infidelities, a secret abortion and an unwanted pregnancy. Particularly engrossing is Alma’s vivid description of a sexual encounter with two teenaged boys while she was sunbathing in the nude. The relationship is transformed, though, when Alma discovers an unsealed letter by Elisabeth, which reveals that she has been using Alma as a character ‘study’. At first enraged by the betrayal, Alma soon asks forgiveness. From that point on the two women seem to exchange identities and then, ultimately, merge into a single individual. Nonlinear, surreal, rife with visually and symbolically ambiguous scenes and images, Persona confounds easy interpretation and understanding. Instead the viewer is left with a host of vexing epistemological questions. Is Alma (Spanish for ‘soul’) Elisabeth’s doppelgänger, or vice versa? Or, to put it another way, are they the inner and outer aspects of the same person? Do they embody something like Ego and Superego? Likewise, the term ‘persona’ (Latin for ‘mask’) is pregnant with meaning. In theatrical terms it of course refers to the masks that actors wore in classical drama. In Jungian terms the persona ‘is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual’ (Jung 1953: 192). Clearly, as an actress, Elisabeth specialises in the conscious cultivation of personae but then, according to Jung, everyone is an actor presenting a plausible façade to the outer world. Perhaps Elisabeth has confused persona for self, hence the recourse to muteness – but then other permutations slide into view. Of the two women, which one functions as persona or outward mask of the other? Or do both simultaneously? Is the convergence and ultimate merger of the two identities a kind of salvation or a spiritual death? Are we dealing with psychological realism or a kind of spiritual or philosophical allegory? All sorts of hermeneutic avenues remain open and interpretive possibilities multiply uncontrollably.

For a daring, iconoclastic American director like Altman, long schooled in the mechanics of plot-driven cinematic narratives but hungry for new ideas and approaches, Bergman’s Persona hit like a bombshell. Here was film as postmodern dreamscape; one that vigorously refused closure or resolution or interpretative certainties of any kind – on the visual level, on the aural level, on the level of spoken (and written) discourse. Here, also, was a film that constantly risked absurdity and pretentiousness to tackle the most profound and unanswerable questions regarding human identity, social roles, relationships, communication of meaning and the potentialities of the cinema for exploring these kinds of psycho-existential concerns. For Altman, after Persona, recourse to conventional, plot-driven Hollywood cinema was no longer an option.

That Cold Day in the Park (1969)

Significant as being the first film over which Altman had complete artistic control, That Cold Day in the Park performed poorly at the box office and was generally dismissed by critics. Many Altman scholars dutifully continue to discount the film as an early misstep. Altman himself felt differently. In a 1978 interview with Charles Michener he declared the film ‘one hell of a movie!’ (in Sterritt 2000: 94). Though not without its flaws the film is, indeed, much more accomplished and intriguing than the critical consensus would indicate, and is well worth careful consideration.

In 1967 Altman purchased the rights to That Cold Day in the Park (Delacorte, 1965), a decidedly offbeat novel by child actor-turned-writer Richard (aka Peter) Miles (pseudonym of Gerald Perreau Saussine, 1930–1991). Miles’ novel deals with a wealthy Parisian spinster who holds a seemingly mute homosexual 16-year-old street waif captive in her apartment for companionship and sexual favours. Intrigued by striking thematic similarities to the Persona scenario – muteness and folie à deux – Altman managed to secure $500,000 in funding from his friend, the cosmetics heir, Donald Factor, and $700,000 from the Canadian production company, Commonwealth United. He then hired novelist-screenwriter Gillian Freeman (The Leather Boys) to adapt Miles’ novel to the screen. From the outset, Altman’s interest in That Cold Day in the Park revolved around the fraught and mysterious relationship between the woman and the boy. He instructed Freeman to delete the book’s copious homosexual content, cut ancillary characters and incidents, and just focus on the bare bones of the story (see McGilligan 1989: 281). Altman wanted to shoot the film in London, possibly with Elizabeth Taylor or Ingrid Bergman in the lead, but ultimately opted to shoot the film in Vancouver, British Columbia, with Academy Award-winner Sandy Dennis in the starring role.¹

In Freeman’s adaptation, Miles’ Parisian old maid – a shadowy, underdeveloped character known only as ‘Madame’ – is fully fleshed out as Frances Austen (Dennis), a prim and proper single woman who, by coif, clothing and manner appears to be well ensconced in middle age (though Dennis was only thirty-one at the time). Evidently quiet affluent, Frances lives alone in a large, nicely appointed Vancouver apartment inherited from her deceased parents: an apartment beautifully rendered in shadowy earth tones on a sound stage at Panorama Studios in West Vancouver by set designer Leon Ericksen. Also inherited from her parents are Frances’s housekeeper and ‘friends’: a deadly dull set of bourgeois fogies at least a generation older than she is. During a boring dinner party for these people, Frances observes outside her window a handsome, blonde young man (played by Michael Burns, twenty-one years old at the time) huddled on a bench in an adjacent public park. After her guests leave, Frances brings the young man back to her place, ostensibly to get him out of the cold and the rain, but it soon becomes evident that strong unconscious motivations are at work. Because he is too lightly attired for the weather and does not speak, Frances quite naturally assumes that he is nothing more or less than a post-adolescent mute street urchin, as does the viewing audience. The young man’s youth, good looks, stony silence and apparent vulnerability make him pitiable, safe and therefore desirable to the obviously lonely older woman. She invites him to bathe, dry his clothes, have dinner and even stay the night in his own bedroom, all the while chattering at him incessantly to fill the conversational vacuum created by his muteness. On a deeper level, the young man’s silence makes his personality opaque and cryptic: an empty vessel that Frances proceeds to fill with projected fantasies and desires.² Frances buys her acquaintance new clothes, invites him to stay as long as he wants, and begins, rather ominously, to lock him in at night. Unfazed, the young man makes the first of many nocturnal flights via the bedroom window and fire escape and goes to visit his sister, Nina (Susanne Benton), and her American draft-dodger boyfriend, Nick (John Garfield Jr.). Though they are making love when the waif happens onto the scene, he happily observes until his sister warns him away (a later scene between brother and sister, in Frances’s bathroom, is plainly incestuous). Also revealed in this scene, some forty minutes into the film, is the fact that the supposedly dumb boy can speak. Nina tells Nick that her brother has occasionally feigned muteness, sometimes ‘for days’, since childhood.

Somewhat surprisingly, the young man returns to Frances’s apartment and continues his mute charade, probably because he revels in the elaborate game, likes Frances in a way, enjoys the plush accommodations and perks – he proudly tells his sister, ‘I have my own room and my own bed’ – and is flattered by her attentions. Frances, in turn, becomes more obsessively infatuated. After rejecting the gauche advances of Dr. Stevenson (Edward Greenhalgh), a cloying, desiccated member of her mother’s social set, she visits a gynecologist’s office to be fitted for a diaphragm in eager anticipation of consummating her relationship with her protégé. During this four-and-a-half-minute sequence, Frances is often filmed in long shots and through glass partitions and windows, while most of the dialogue is supplied by three other young women in the waiting room chatting about sex and contraception. The net effect is to accentuate Frances’s discomfort and isolation – and generate similar feelings for viewers. What follows are crosscut scenes of the boy incestuously bathing with his sister and Frances attending a boring bocce match (and being pestered by Stevenson), a juxtaposition meant to underline the extreme sexual divide that separates Frances from her love object. The divide reaches its climax that night, when Frances enters the boy’s darkened room, lies down on his bed and in the film’s most powerful and poignant scene pours out her heart to him, expressing her sexual disgust for Stevenson and offering herself to him. To her shock, Frances discovers that she’s been confessing to an inert form on the bed fashioned from blankets and a pillow that the boy has put together to conceal his absence. Early the next morning, when he sneaks back in, he notices that his bed is remade but shrugs off this new development as of no consequence: unwise complacency, because Frances has nailed the windows shut and the boy’s final imprisonment has already begun. The film draws to a close after Frances flies into a jealous rage and fatally stabs Silvia (Luana Anders), a prostitute she has brought home to service the young man’s sexual needs. In the final scene he stands petrified against a hallway wall while she strokes his face and coos reassuringly; she is in complete control of the situation and now utterly out of her mind.

The facile critical interpretation of That Cold Day in the Park labels the film as an overwrought, misogynistic exercise in Gothic horror featuring the stock homicidal vieille fille in the Bertha Mason tradition. Altman scholar Helene Keyssar takes a far more perceptive tack in arguing that the hippie youth played by Michael Burns is every bit as crazy as Frances Austen, perhaps more so (1991: 201–3). His passive-aggressive bid to control the relationship by feigning muteness is morally untenable and smacks of psychic regression. In a larger sense the young man’s instinctive recourse to manipulative farce bespeaks a dark strain in the 1960s youth counterculture: its knee-jerk contempt for ‘straight’ society, which it views as clinging to old-fashioned, repressive social proprieties and conventions versus the existential freedom, spontaneity, sexual license and playfulness prized by the younger generation. In sum, That Cold Day in the Park is several things: a film about loneliness, a duel character study, a cultural allegory dramatising the endemic generational schism that erupted in the 1960s. Wisely, Altman refuses to validate either side of the cultural-generational divide. Frances Austen’s bourgeois existence is safe and respectable but also bereft of love, joy and emotional intensity. The hippie youth’s life, though freewheeling and fun loving, is ultimately vapid and amoral. Both cultures, Apollonian and Dionysian, dead end in spiritual vacuity because neither one by itself is able to do justice to the complex, multifarious totality of the human experience that requires a delicate balance between freedom and restraint. When these two stubbornly habituated worldviews collide, as they do in That Cold Day in the Park, calamity is the predictable result.

That Altman was not to have good luck with his first film as auteur was augured by what happened at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. Screened out of competition, That Cold Day in the Park was not seen in its entirety because the projector room caught fire (see Cagin and Dray 1994: 115). A short theatrical run generated anemic ticket sales and critical reviews were harsh – for what turned out to be a watered-down version of Altman’s original vision. As Justin Wyatt notes, ‘Against [Altman’s] will, the film was edited by producer Donald Factor to obtain an R, rather than an X, rating. As Factor (or the Max Factor family) was the financier of the picture and Altman had little experience with moviemaking, cuts were made to assure the commercially more acceptable R rating. Distributor Commonwealth United was able to muster little interest for the film, even with the less restrictive rating’ (1996: 54). That Cold Day in the Park probably met with tepid reviews and poor box office because it lacked sympathetic characters while presenting a weirdly sombre tone and a markedly sinister ending. No doubt the film’s mordant perspective on alienation and the wages of sexual repression were out of sync with the weltanschauung of the late 1960s. As Michael Turner notes, ‘Although set in 1968, Cold Day is really about the stodgy 1950s, as personified by the uptight spinster and the world that keeps her chained’ (2006: n.p.).

Images (1972)

While Images was Altman’s fourth film as auteur, conceptually it was his first. It supposedly had its genesis in London in 1967, when Altman had a dream about a woman whose perception of reality begins to warp and fragment as she succumbs to schizophrenia. Some months later, back in Santa Barbara, Altman took up the idea again and soon completed an eighty-page treatment that set the story on the coastline of either California or Maine. As Gerard Plecki points out, ‘most of the ideas and actions of Images’ are there ‘in their barest form’, albeit with different character names (1985: 52). Altman approached every major studio but no one in Hollywood was interested in producing a cryptic, downbeat psychological thriller so Altman had to shelve the project for four years, until the immense success of M*A*S*H suddenly made him a hot property. In the interim Altman rewrote Images at least eight times, making the script the most carefully wrought of his career.

Originally Altman wanted to shoot Images in Vancouver with Sandy Dennis in the lead role but That Cold Day in the Park took its place. He later considered casting Julie Christie as Cathryn and, later still, pondered Sophia Loren in the lead role with the film set in Milan. When these options evaporated, he set out to scour Europe for a lead actress and a suitable location. The first problem was quickly solved when Altman happened to watch Susannah York portray the title role in Delbert Mann’s Jane Eyre (1970), an in-flight movie he watched on Aer Lingus (see McGilligan 1989: 351). The film was mediocre but something about York’s ethereal beauty convinced Altman that she was right for the part. He immediately sent the script to York on the Greek island of Corfu where she was vacationing with her husband, Michael Wells. Bewildered by what she read, York telephoned Altman to turn down the role. Unfazed, Altman insisted on flying the 7,000 miles from Los Angeles to Corfu for further negotiations: an extravagant gesture that made him hard to refuse a second time. York almost dropped out of the picture during pre-production in London when she discovered she was pregnant but Altman...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Three Dream Films: Explorations of Female Identity
• 2. Experiments in Genre Revision
• 3. Large Canvases
• 4. Falling from Grace
• 5. In the Wilderness
• 6. Return to Form
• 7. Final Phase: More Large Canvases and Minor Works
• Coda
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index