O.C. and Stiggs aside, if there is another movie in the canon of Robert Altman that has been as torched and reviled as Quintet, first in a pair of films Altman released in 1979, I know it not. Laughed out of the theaters and dismissed upon its initial release, Quintet now camps comfortably at the […]
Read More QUINTET (1979)At the conclusion of Nashville, the camera pans upward into the high heavens and the last image we see before staring off into the ether is the American flag. So it is appropriate that, at the beginning of Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, the film that was released the following […]
Read More BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON (1976)If Nicholas Ray’s 1948’s masterful film noir They Live By Night was the true cinematic template for the “doomed lovers on the run” subgenre of films that eventually led to Arthur Penn’s revolutionary Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, then Robert Altman’s Thieves Likes Us brings it all back full circle. By adopting the Bonnie and […]
Read More THIEVES LIKE US (1974)“Pal… I’m gonna win!!!” So says George Segal’s Bill Denny as he’s being flattened by the pressures of his overdue gambling debts, his irritated bookie, and being stuck in the unenviable position of having run out of personal items to sell for gambling money. It should also be said that he’s been on one hell […]
Read More CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974)Philip Marlowe has been asleep. Whether it’s been a literal and continuous Big Sleep that has lasted since 1946 is unclear. But there are clues scattered about which suggest that it is. First off, genius screenwriter Leigh Brackett is back with another adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel just as she was all those years […]
Read More THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)Robert Altman was once quoted as saying that, to him, his entire filmography was one whole movie with each individual film a chapter. If this is true, Images, the lone horror film in his career, is a very pivotal chapter in that string as it reflects backwards on characters already introduced while also projecting forward […]
Read More IMAGES (1972)About halfway through Robert Altman’s Kansas City, the central metaphor of ruinous play-acting is conveyed in a story about a woman who was so enamored with Kansas City native Jean Harlow that she continued to bathe her hair in peroxide until it eventually died and broke off. In the film, that same woman finds herself […]
Read More KANSAS CITY (1996)
Apollo Twin 