The most advanced American film ever made was released 50 years ago this summer: Nashville, directed by Robert Altman at the end of one of the most celebrated half decade runs in film history, pushed the medium further than anyone else in this country before or since. There have been new waves, rising stars, fallen heroes, but no one else has even tried to do something new with the medium. You can spot an Altman film in two seconds because of the way it looks and the way it moves: long lenses, a camera that’s constantly moving and slowly zooming in, dialogue overlapping, real people mixed in with actors. And show tunes. Altman loved that awful parlor music, and if the scores of many of his films are too chintzy and wacky, it just makes exceptions like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, and Quintet shine even brighter. California Split, his best movie besides Nashville, was never released on VHS, and when it came out on DVD in the early-2000s, many minutes were missing, all because of music rights issues. Man, cut that lady at the piano out of the soundtrack and put in some more Leonard Cohen, or some “fake” songs that are actually pretty good.
The Criterion Channel is running a Altman festival of sorts this month, with more than a dozen features along with Tanner ’88, his metafictional HBO miniseries that recalled the magic of Nashville more than anything else he did after the 1970s. Like nearly all of his New Hollywood peers, Altman spent the 1980s just trying to survive; he directed plays, then filmed the plays, taught a college course that turned into a movie (Secret Honor), and went down some caustic comedic backroads (O.C. and Stiggs, Beyond Therapy). By 1990, the restrained Van Gogh biopic Vincent & Theo lifted him back up to respectability (or viability), setting the stage for his 1992 comeback with The Player, his last great movie. He was trying to make Short Cuts for years, and although it’s far better than anything that would follow, it’s the work of an old, contented man: not toothless, but a bit gummy.
Even at his most insufferably self-indulgent in the 1970s, Altman remained razor-sharp. A Perfect Couple, a good idea with one running joke that’s exhausted long before its two hours are over, is as recognizably real as it’s yet another genre experiment, a mild subversion of the dozen or so ur-myths that Hollywood has given us. A Perfect Couple begins with a long crane shot moving into the crowd at the Hollywood Bowl; at first, we focus on a very chic older couple, the man resembling Paul Newman; they’re having a great night, they have charmed lives, and Altman hangs on them for just long enough to make an unsuspecting viewer assume they’re the “perfect couple.” The camera moves up and to the right, revealing Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin, supporting players who would never be given their own romances, let alone their own movies to star in.
But that “perfect couple” keeps popping up throughout the movie, just like the dog shit in Pret-a-Porter, another running joke that even one of the movie’s stars criticized: “What was up with the dog poop? Once was enough.” Lauren Bacall only worked with Altman once, but she had an okay time for such a notorious sourpuss; Paul Newman, on the other hand, probably wished he worked with Altman more. Quintet is a great movie to put on in the background because the music is great, it looks good, and it makes absolutely no sense. One day—I will know what Quintet is about. If that’s Altman’s nadir, then what a low to hit. 1977’s 3 Women has been reevaluated and now sits safely among Altman’s masterpieces, but it was his 1976 film—Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson—that the wave begins to crest. Because his formal technique was so compelling and unique, anything Altman directed was more interesting than most other movies; at the same time, you look at Nashville or California Split and some of the later films and you resent Altman for reading his own press. By all accounts, he let it get to his head, and his work suffered because of it. Regular collaborators like Leon Ericksen, Vilmos Zsigmond, and Reza Badiyi were gone by 1973; the next generation, among them Alan Rudolph, carried Altman through to the finish line. For a director who only had one mega-hit, it’s remarkable that Altman always had at least one film in development during his entire career; it’s even more surprising that virtually none of his techniques or idiosyncrasies rubbed off on any younger filmmakers.
Paul Thomas Anderson may be the most famous Altman acolyte, but his work doesn’t resemble Altman’s at all. His attitude might be closer to Rudolph’s, perhaps a bit coarser, but he’s not nasty like Altman, nor is he as innovative. Formally, Anderson apes Scorsese more than anyone else, but Scorsese hardly has a style of his own; compared to Altman, they’re all hacks. The only other filmmaker from roughly the same period to play with the basics of cinematic grammar so consistently and successfully was Woody Allen: the silence in Sleeper, the jump cuts in Deconstructing Harry, the entirety of Zelig. Ari Aster may be the most talented Millennial filmmaker in America, but, as much as I liked it, Eddington didn’t advance the medium. It may yet still be our Nashville, but even if its finger is on the pulse of the country, it’s not doing anything new to the fundamentals of the filmmaking process.
Over-lapping dialogue gets talked about more than anything else in Altman’s work, but it’s his camerawork that stuns; just as great actors can make their inner thoughts visible, great directors and cinematographers can bring revelations in a single shot/reverse-shot. There’s no better example than the ending of California Split, where gambling buddies Elliott Gould and George Segal win big; Gould’s ecstatic, whereas Segal’s immediately dejected, suffering the ultimate comedown, and they go off in opposite directions: Gould towards the payout booth, Segal to an empty bar in an empty, adjacent room. The camera first zooms in on Gould, very slowly, jubilant and silly; then it reverses onto Segal way in the background, sitting and staring at the wall. Gould’s final line, “Doesn’t mean a fuckin’ thing, does it?” isn’t necessary: those two cuts are the highs and lows of gambling, of addiction, the entire movie distilled into two slow zoom shots.
This is the level of sophistication and visual communication that was lost in the transition from silent to sound film. It’s ironic that the premiere visual innovator of the last half-century is primarily known for his sound work, but that’s okay, he introduced eight-track multi-recording to film, he still deserves it. The Criterion Channel’s Altman lineup doesn’t even have two-thirds of his movies, with some key texts like Thieves Like Us, A Wedding, and Images missing. But what’s up there now will give you a broader and deeper film education than the collected works of just about any other director, living or dead. I hope the impressionable are watching, because we need movies, now more than ever.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith