MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

Into the impossibly soggy, Pacific Northwestern frontier “town” of Presbyterian Church rides John McCabe. Call him a “gambler” and he’ll gently correct you (“Businessman… businessman,” he’ll say in an attempt to convince himself more than you). Call him a gunfighter and he’ll avoid the subject altogether, but only after you believe that he very well […]

FANTASY GIRLS (1974)

In Alex de Renzy’s Fantasy Girls, the red light district of San Francisco is staked out like a sexual playground while the working stiffs of Ruby’s Massage Parlor trade pleasure for a price. It’s a functional establishment, replete with wood panelling, garish wallpaper, mirrors with gold-vein accents, and a crack staff of eager and enterprising […]

BREWSTER MCCLOUD (1970)

When M*A*S*H unexpectedly became the kind of colossal hit that would allow Robert Altman to more or less write his own ticket for the next ten years, he came face to face with a stark decision. He could go down the road of commercialism and give mass audiences what he thought they might have wanted, […]

LITTLE SISTERS (1972)

Moving from the dusty western setting of Powder Burns, Alex de Renzy and his troupe of lovable weirdos took their action to more bucolic digs for Little Sisters, made and released in the sun-bronzed year that was 1972. A ragged and tough twelve months for the counterculture as they watched George McGovern get dog-walked by […]

MAS*H (1970)

Once upon a time, long before the television block programming of post-Carson syndication would lull my generation to sleep with the medley consisting of the brassy outro end-credit rendition of the M*A*S*H theme song and the recorder-driven opening for Taxi, M*A*S*H was a third-priority Korean War film about which the suits at 20th Century Fox […]

POWDER BURNS (1971)

If there is any other value to be afforded to Alex de Renzy’s Sexual Encounter Group outside its own existence as a funky time capsule, it might make for a fine segue into de Renzy’s equally dull Powder Burns, a primitive narrative feature made the following year that feels constructed out of the kind of […]

THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK (1969)

On a random chilly day in Vancouver, a wealthy woman of undetermined age named Frances Austen spots a boy, teetering somewhere between his late teens and early twenties, sitting on a park bench adjacent to her home. The day grows colder and is then is finally saturated with rain, yet he doesn’t budge from the […]

WEED (1971)

Before saying goodbye to the straightforward documentary film, Alex de Renzy swung hard with Weed, an epic, captivating, and thorough look at marijuana, another taboo subject on the cusp of wider acceptance in the early 70’s. A fascinating stamp in time, Weed was made in the shadow of the ongoing work of the Shafer Commission, […]

COUNTDOWN (1967)

Robert Altman’s filmography is one that lacks heroes in the conventional sense. What it is in no short supply of are people who stumble upwards into some sense of accomplishment or peace. Sometimes it happens a little too late, but it happens nonetheless. For Altman wasn’t all that interested in the white-hatted good guy myths […]

THE DELINQUENTS (1957)

Far from the wide, multi-character canvases he would eventually pioneer and master, one couldn’t ask for a more uncharacteristic debut from Robert Altman than what was delivered with The Delinquents. Shot in 1956 but not released until the following year, the enterprise was the result of Kansas City theatrical exhibitor Elmer Rhoden wanting to get […]