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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

STRAIGHT TIME (1978)

In the cinematic world of Michael Mann, there are two figures who loom the largest. The first and most obvious one is Jean-Pierre Melville, French auteur whose cool visual style, obsession with the relationships between cops and criminals, and strict attention to detail and precision all informed the majority of Mann’s work. The second giant […]

A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (2006)

The first snippet of music in the opening credits for A Prairie Home Companion tricks the audience into thinking the movie is going to be some kind of a light homage for the blue plate special crowd. But within seconds, this all begins to slowly shift as the radio tunes in and out of different […]

DR. T. AND THE WOMEN (2000)

Robert Altman’s Dr. T & the Women is one perfectly decent man’s descent into a seven-layer dip of hell that makes less and less sense to him the deeper he goes. Like a dazed Philip Marlowe plopped into Dallas and taking up trade as an OBGYN, Richard Gere’s Dr. Sullivan Travis (or Sully to close […]

COOKIE’S FORTUNE (1999)

If there was ever another filmmaker who could work as comfortably in any American state on the map as Robert Altman could, I know him or her not. While the Coen Brothers might be able to stake a claim to have traversed the lower 48 with the same kind of bemused charm as Altman, their […]