Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Young One

She is underage, in the care of her aunt, and remembers a beautiful childhood. “Your mother and father were servants, the lady in chiffon was the mistress of the house.” Her boyfriend can’t be persuaded to take her away.

At a roadhouse called the Woolly Bear, she meets a slightly older man and frames him for the murder of her aunt. This is spoiled by the boyfriend’s discovery of the body just before, when he came to elope with her.

Altman begins with a crane shot down from a sign at the Woolly Bear, “No-one under 21...”, over Tex at the bar and around to Janice and Stan at a table. After a conversation with Tex, she’s walked home by Stan. The camera is on the staircase in the foyer at a down-angle framing the door in the background left and a light fixture on the wall, right, very bright in the dim foyer. She climbs the stairs into a medium close-up, he is at the foot of the stairs in the background between her and the light. A reverse shot as she turns to him leaves the bright fixture (a small floral globe) out-of-focus behind her, and below it a glinting wall ornament.

The scene with her aunt culminates in her recollection, lying on the carpet with its pattern of decorative circles, like Alice in Wonderland amid tuffets.

Carol Lynley has this in a perfect study, with top support turning on stock situations realistically conceived for maximum dramatic significance. Tex is brought home, game but not reckless, the light is out in the foyer. A policeman drops by to check on her, after an encounter at the Woolly Bear. The light comes on, she’s screaming, Tex is standing by the body on the stairs.

Stan arrives, after an agonizing walk. This leads directly to That Cold Day in the Park, after some further television work, and is apparently Altman’s first dramatic effort in Hollywood. The first scene exhibits a delicate use of signs in the background (“No Boisterous Activity”) as components of the various shots.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Together

The supremely eloquent teleplay anatomizes a love affair and murder in a phone call and subsequent meeting. Shelley calls Tony from the office party at Christmas, it’s noisy, she goes into Mr. Courtney’s office as he leaves. Tony is at Charlie’s, he’s spoken to his rich wife, Shelley needn’t. He meets her at the office after the party. She’ll call his wife if he doesn’t. He kills her with a letter opener, takes his signed photo from her purse, and with her keys tries to unlock the door. The key breaks in the lock. The windows lead straight down. He drags the body into the washroom, calls Charlie, who will come after his own Christmas party full of guests.

He tries to push the key out onto a piece of paper, but it slips off. Charlie calls again and drifts away, leaving the connection open. A woman across the way is asked to call a locksmith, but brings police instead. Tony sees a photo, rummages in a desk drawer for a pair of spare glasses, puts on his hat and coat, collar up, greets the police as Mr. Courtney. They break the door in, he’s apologetic, all start to leave as Charlie breezes in, still drunk, looking for Shelley. “She’s really passed out,” he says, and a policeman corrects him.

Bonanza: Bank Run

Before the credits, John J. Harrison outlines his plan to seize a miner’s claim by foreclosure through the simple expedient of declaring his own bank in Virginia City insolvent, leaving the wealthy miner unable to pay for the tools he bought from Harrison’s company (“The man’s a fool!”), and Harrison in possession of a bloc of real estate. Next, the Ponderosa. “I want it all!”

The plan is foiled by Little Joe, with Hoss’s help, after the two take the bank’s negotiable bonds to the Placerville branch for cash to pay the depositors. The Virginia City bank manager and assistant, knocked out by Joe when they balked, declare them bank robbers and follow for the money, “in the spirit of John J. Harrison,” to settle in Switzerland or the South of France.

Ben and Adam arrive in town from a business trip to see Joe and Hoss on a wanted poster. The bank run scene in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is reproduced with Ben promising to sell the Ponderosa if need be. The boys return with the cash, the miner keeps his in a buried tin can henceforth, and Ben tells Harrison where to get off, threatening a trip to Washington to put him in jail if any more schemes are hatched.

Bonanza: The Duke

“The Duke of London”, né Clarence Simpson (Bobo to his brother Harry), is a prizefighter touring the West in hopes of meeting the champion for a bout. He’s a haughty devil with no care of his fists and a taste for women “no better than they ought to be”. His perennial trouble is their laughter at him, which provokes him.

Two major elements of Eastwood’s Unforgiven are thus prefigured. One such lady runs afoul of him, loved by a cowhand and fresh for a new start.

Ben sets up a championship fight on the Ponderosa. The champ fails to show, Hoss fills in, disgusted by the Duke’s ways. The fight is thrilling, accurate and well-filmed on a sound stage representing a night exterior by torchlight, with a square ring of dirt, ropes and posts. The Duke is a professional fighter, whose easy stance parries Hoss with a backhand left. In the second round, dazed Hoss barrels through to body blows and a right to the jaw. The Duke is hurt, but stumbles out in the third and falls.

Ben, who put up the purse, receives one thousand American dollars from the bareknuckled Englishman, who apologizes to the couple and is reconciled with Harry, his manager, as they go off to face the champion in San Francisco.

Bonanza: The Rival

A trifler with women dies at the hands of a lynch mob and the man he wronged, hanged for the murder of a couple wrongly thought to be cattle thieves. He protests a slim innocence to the girl who loves him, and who is loved by Hoss.

Altman opens with hooded men in the foreground approaching a lighted house in the distance at night. The camera watches through the window as the husband is dragged outside. The initial long shot is resumed (long shots pervade the episode) for his hanging in front of the house. The wife is shot and killed, a sign is nailed to the tree, “Cattle Thieves Beware”.

Shy Hoss courts Cameo on her porch with a vertical shadow framing the scene on the left, cast by a post he bumps into.

The trifler has a way of judging the season, “when the swellin’ on my corn goes down, summer’s on,” he says with a smile and a finger on the side of his nose.

His brother’s wife wasn’t missed, it was the first girl, who slammed a window on the abandoned lover’s hand, crippling it. He was one of the hangmen, swears his brother was, too.

The hanged man’s brother leads a lynch mob against the pair of them, who escape from jail. Hoss lets the trifler go and then rescues him from the mob, for Cameo’s sake. The crippled brother finds Hoss supporting the man on the end of a rope with his bare hands. Hoss won’t let go, even shot in the arm, the man in the noose kicks him away, his brother is shot by the lynch mob’s leader and falls dead, his gnarled fist slowly unclenching after thirty years. The trifler’s cut down, admits he was there, thought they were going to scare the couple, and dies.

Cameo leaves the Ponderosa driving her buggy, the camera tracks out on her, then cranes up for a high long shot of Ben and Hoss standing on the porch.

Bonanza: The Secret

John Hawkins’ retelling of An American Tragedy puts the girl atop Indian Leap in the opening scene, her lover is mistaken for Little Joe. A grand jury inquest binds him over for trial.

Altman begins with a long shot of the scene. His astounding inventions are in the best classical Hollywood style as achieved by few. A large sofa and table occupy the foreground at a slight angle while the men stand behind to discuss the murder. The same idea of unwonted activity produces the second shot later of two horses hitched to a post at the same angle, left there by Adam and Hoss captured by the girl’s relatives.

Ben hires the best lawyer in Virginia City, whose daughter is engaged to his junior. The young lawyer is highly ambitious, “at the reception, when Jerome met the governor, it was just as if I didn’t exist.” Altman maneuvers the camera while the couple talk so that his big idea is expressed by a picture frame behind him, her truth by a lighted lamp or window behind her.

Bonanza: The Dream Riders

Altman analyzes the teleplay in two quick movements, and couches the rest in studious conventions of television filming, to express the theme.

An Army major has developed observation balloons, is not encouraged in his vision of transatlantic flight, goes beyond his orders to Nevada for tests with a hydrogen balloon, and robs the Virginia City bank to finance his project.

Papers are placed in the safe, retrieved on Sunday morning with the cash at gunpoint. A sergeant and a private accomplish this while the balloon is filled on the Ponderosa.

The major’s daughter comes from back East by stagecoach, having seen a letter from the Adjutant General. She and the private have broken off their romance. She considers the Atlantic Queen an unworkable proposal.

Hoss’s idealism is set off against Little Joe’s disinterest, of the earth earthy (“I’m a lover, not a flier”), mirroring the “old Army” sergeant who “hasn’t much imagination” and the devoted private who risks his life for the project (and resumes the affair).

The key movement for Altman’s whole reading is a dolly-in to Adam in town on the private’s line, “He’s going into the sky, Mr. Cartwright, right into the sky.” This accomplishes the nineteenth-century Westerner faced with such a string of words, and cuts at once to a shot of the balloon in blue sky and clouds viewed from a sharp angle below.

Altman derives this from the put-and-take of the robbery procedure, and plants a camera in the vault for the second movement, which continues in a POV as Little Joe is elevated for a laugh by Hoss.

The dolly-in ripples several times through the episode. The Great Bank Robbery (dir. Hy Averback) has an escape by balloon, Dr. Miguelito Loveless reflects the theme in certain aspects, by way of Captain Nemo (the major, dying while his empty balloon sails away, confesses he planned to pay the money back). Exactly two weeks before this episode first aired, “The Case of the Misguided Missile” was successfully defended by Perry Mason, in which a visionary scientist resorts to extreme measures on behalf of his invention.

Bonanza: Sam Hill

The son of a sailor is Sam Hill, his father drunk can beat Joe’s time with a girl, he himself can outswing Hoss with a sledgehammer and work at an anvil all night long, “there’s ways o’ restin’ the brain without sleepin’, the brain controls the body, ain’t you learned that yet, Hoss?” He tells a horse to come get shod, Hoss and Joe flee the stable.

His mother’s buried on the hill beside the ruins of their home. Col. Tyson wants the place for pastureland, it’s “hallowed ground” to the son. Tyson has a deed signed by the father passing through Virginia City by way of a hotel room full of objets d’art from the Orient and an endless store of tales, he disremembers signing the thing. “She wouldn’t have you alive,” Sam Hill tells the colonel, “you’ll not have her now.”

Tyson and his “private army” are dispelled, Capt. Hill has a new tale for his collection.

Bonanza: The Many Faces of Gideon Flinch

They are his own (under the incognito Homer T. Cranston), Hoss’s, Little Joe’s and Jake the Weasel’s (a pickpocket thought to be in a Detroit prison).

Thus he outnumbers Bullethead Burke and two helpers out of Chicago, wrathful on the subject of a failed investment.

A couple of ancients gab all day outside the Cattlemen’s Exchange, and so observe the comings and goings from morn till late suppertime.

Gideon’s niece Jennifer (AKA Hephzibah) enlists the “Cartwheels” one by one as stand-ins for him against the wrath, his wallet is found in the possession of Jake the Weasel.

Bullethead breaks a fist on Hoss’s chin and retires satisfied with the truth. Things was not this excitin’ at the Alamo, declares one of the ancients.

Combat!: Forgotten Front

A reconnaissance patrol out at night along the Vire River to locate a big gun uses an empty two-story dyeworks as an observation post and is wiped out by a booby trap. Lt. Hanley sends Saunders, Caje, Kirby and Doc.

They find a lone German soldier in the cellar, middle-aged, versed in English and claiming to be a deserter. They also find some apples, Kirby torments the hungry soldier, finally tosses him a rotten one. “He’s a human being,” says Doc. “He’s a bug!”, says Kirby, smashing the apple with his boot. The sound of artillery fire sends the Americans upstairs, the German scrambles for a fresh apple. Doc comes down to guard the prisoner, loses his footing on the stairs and falls, dropping his carbine to the floor below. The German, apple in mouth, picks it up and hands it to him.

The gun is spotted, its coordinates radioed in. The German hears mention of an American assault to take place on the following day. When the patrol leaves that night, Kirby and Caje opt to kill him.

A German tank forces the issue. Escape must be made through a storm drain in the cellar, then one by one to the river ten yards away, directly under the tank’s machine gun. Caje is left to handle the prisoner, the rest get into position. Caje is exceedingly tense, the man pleads, “I cannot hurt you in any way!” At last he holds up his hand and cries, “Wait!” He puts his cap on over his thinning hair and hides his face in his arm. Saunders hears the shot. The machine gun nips at them as they crawl or dash to the river, Saunders is missed by a shell. On the bank downstream, Doc asks about the German, Caje tells him, “I think the Krauts got him.”

Both are terse at the bivouac, Caje tells Sgt. Saunders he couldn’t do it, “they don’t teach you that, nobody ever taught me that.”

Combat!: Rear Echelon Commandos

A complex allegory of three replacements, Pvts. Gainsborough, Temple and Crown.

Gainsborough is a used car salesman turned Army cook, Temple is a ballet dancer/calisthenics instructor, Crown a radio announcer for the Army as in civilian life.

Recon patrol, French town, six men, Saunders/Crown, Caje/Gainsborough, Kirby/Temple.

The town is empty, Crown fails to notice a second-story machine-gun nest. Kirby is wounded. The Germans move to a higher floor.

Saunders is hit, Gainsborough dies coming to his aid. Crown is pinned down with Saunders (Caje is outside town covering an exit).

Temple dives into the river under fire, swims downstream, climbs a building and walks along the narrow top of the roof, one building to the next. Stymied by fire, he moves hand-over-hand along an eave, it breaks and swings him onto a ledge. He walks on this to the window, tosses in a grenade.

Before the patrol, Saunders throws a towel down in disgust at these green noncombatants, Altman cuts on this to an explosion in the river, grenade practice. He tilts down from Temple on the roof to his reflection in the water. Geese are everywhere in the town. The rapid shots are vigorously composed for ambience on the exterior set.

A high-angle shot takes in the first view of the three with clean field jackets, helmets and M-1 rifles, like a photograph admired by the weary platoon.

The Germans have a basket of kittens and no milk, give them wine in a cupped hand.

Combat!: Any Second Now

Lt. Hanley and Sgt. Saunders go to Division Headquarters at Lore. The basis of the teleplay is laid in a brief scene at a German pilots’ briefing, where the target for tonight is Lore.

A time-delay fuse stalls a bomb that hits the church. A bomb disposal officer from the British Army on leave gives the order to blow it up. The rubble clears a little to one side, Hanley is trapped nearby. The bomb has two other fuses, an anti-disturbance mechanism as well as a booby-trap on the main fuse.

The two men converse during the removal. The Englishman is bolstered by this, his nerves are at an end. Funny thing, he muses, if Hanley saved his life. “Not me, lieutenant,” Hanley replies, “I just talked about it.”

Schrecklichkeit and the apparatus involved are discussed and explained. Altman favors the crane in an adaptation of multiple-point scene construction with a dolly camera.

Combat!: Escape to Nowhere

Lt. Hanley is a prisoner of the Germans, General Von Strelitz appropriates him. In a German officer’s uniform, Hanley is taken to a nightclub and given a message to convey to the singer, who is the general’s daughter. A Gestapo man is in the audience.

Walking in the rain, the two are accosted by French children with rifles, taken to a churchyard and are about to be shot when a French priest intervenes, standing between the men and the children, who shoot him.

The daughter meets them in a train compartment, her father explains. “The war is lost,” he has participated in a failed plot against Hitler and is now fleeing. She gets off the train and reports him. Von Strelitz and Hanley are pursued around the train at the station and escape in the Gestapo man’s car. The general is badly wounded, and dies when they are met by a British patrol.

Altman pays especial attention to the sound track for the rain and the engine. Albert Paulsen in a close-cropped wig and mustache is another person as Von Strelitz.

Combat!: Cat and Mouse

Altman constructs his entire teleplay from a single image or set of images. The platoon is halted (in a hillside graveyard under shellfire) by snipers and land mines so thick “a field mouse couldn’t get through”. A regular army sergeant is joined by Saunders on a reconnaissance patrol that does just that.

The two sergeants are trapped in a mill with an overshot waterwheel as a German platoon sets up a regimental command post occupying the center room of the mill. Saunders and Jenkins observe them from the cellar and the attic or grenier, obtaining a view of German positions on a map that is the objective of the patrol. A cat in the mill precipitates Jenkins’ self-sacrifice, Saunders returns to find the German code broken, his information redundant.

Combat!: I Swear by Apollo

The allegory of Pvts. Gainsborough, Crown and Temple in “Rear Echelon Commandos” is further extended and developed to describe the practical application of the lesson learned in the previous episode.

Here, wounded Temple dies while receiving a transfusion from Crown while Bresson, a Frenchman with vital intelligence for S-2, is operated on by a German military doctor in a convent church under a crucifix, the sign of contradiction or the union of opposites.

Nuns are working in a field, a patrol led by Sgt. Saunders emerges from brush, the wind blows leaves about, Bresson’s papers are scattered, retrieving them he steps on a land mine, Temple is hit in the thorax, Bresson in the back. They are carried to the convent.

Lt. Hanley rushes an army doctor to them, this captain dies en route. Saunders and Caje commandeer the German from an occupied town nearby. Altman establishes the image in a quick pan from a side door in the convent church onto Hanley right foreground, Doc and the patient below the crucifix (with John 19:30 in French around it as a mandorla) in the background. At the opposite wall, nuns pray before an altar. In the center, the transfusion. At this back wall, the operation.

Hanley orders even the altar lights brought for illumination, leaving only a single light above the altar, to one side.

Saunders tells the German he will die if the operation fails. In the town, Caje objects, “He’s a Nazi! What’d you get this for,” he asks, fingering an Iron Cross. “Bravery,” replies the doctor.

Combat!: The Prisoner

Pvt. Braddock, chiseler and scrounge, gets assigned to hazardous duty when the platoon is stymied. He brings this information to Company HQ, where Col. Clyde needs a driver. Braddock takes that job. The jeep goes into a river with the colonel at the wheel (he “used to race midgets”), Braddock is captured in the senior officer’s coat (he has a cold) and helmet (picked up on the roadway after the accident knocked him unconscious), and is mistaken for him.

Braddock offers a German officer one of Col. Clyde’s cigars, from his pocket. “Thank you,” says the captain, “but I do not smoke.” Braddock asks, “You sick?”

He is given food and cognac, as a field-grade officer. He demands the enlisted prisoners be fed as well. The German is cognizant of the Geneva Convention, accedes.

A colonel and an intelligence officer sort out the mess, Pvt. Braddock will be exchanged for a Col. Hoffmann in American hands.

Col. Clyde returns to his office, hears the report of his capture, figures it all out, trades the Germans some enlisted men in the uniforms of Hoffmann and his aide.

Altman films the crash in a second or two, cow on the road, swerve and splash. Braddock is marched off up and around the bend (driving the cow on ahead) in a rising tilt-and-pan left that tilts down again to the submerged jeep in the foreground. After the exchange, German shells explode nearer and nearer to the camera in retaliation.

Col. Clyde is a forceful man. “You gonna stand around suckin’ on a prune pit all day? Let’s go!”

Combat!: The Volunteer

Gene Levitt’s teleplay is an adaptation of The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven. A Nazi flag fills the screen, mud strikes it, the camera pulls back to show it doused with gasoline above and set afire below. A French village liberated, general rejoicing. An orphan boy watches, arms himself with a rifle and kit, goes to join the American Army.

The platoon marches out toward enemy guns, he follows. Amid the casualties is Lt. Hanley, who is helped back to the village by the boy. The inhabitants are gone, a German unit establishes heavy machine-gun nests. Hanley sends the boy to Sgt. Saunders, the platoon destroys the German positions and captures the remaining soldiers, then moves on again.

This is the main action. On their way to the village, Hanley and the boy encounter the German unit. A friendly soldier has a son of the same age, now dead, and gives the boy a piece of chocolate. “Children should have chocolate,” he says in German, “a piece every week.” At the battle in the village, the boy shoots and kills a soldier, who is this very one. At the moment of discovery, the boy instantly recalls the soldier’s laughing face, the shellburst that knocked the boy down, himself lost and running along the road and through the forest under streams of sunlight.

He is unable to comprehend all that, it is a crux successfully addressed much later by John Schlesinger in The Believers.

Levitt writes a demanding, accurate teleplay with little room to maneuver. Altman is, moreover, greatly busy with his young actor and the German, who add still further precision (Serge Prieur, Ted Knight). He ends the sequence of the boy giving his message by dollying in to the speaker as French is heard so fast Caje cannot understand it.

Combat!: Off Limits

The two words of the title appear in hand-lettering on the side of a large pig in the barnyard where the squad sleeps. Cpl. March is awaiting a 48-hour pass to see his wife, a nurse. Kirby (accompanied and abandoned by Crown) has fought “the entire French Resistance” over a barmaid at a village café, and is now in the hospital. March is badly wounded on the daybreak mission in Kirby’s absence.

Moreover, the nurse wedded in England is in love with the medical doctor. Altman adapts a shot from “Any Second Now” to put Saunders in the foreground standing left against hospital beds across the room in the background, where diminutive Kirby receives his rebuke.

“Just about the toughest skull I’ve ever run across,” says the doctor.

Combat!: Survival

Survival means, in Faulkner’s words, not merely to endure but to prevail. A succession of images explicates this in terms of a revelation not unlike the general character of Dreyer’s Ordet, it is a wayside folly to the worldling who lives by it, willy-nilly. “He that hath clean hands”, with fasting, shall see it, and that is Saunders here, burned from fingers to elbows, unable to eat yet able to lift a dead German he takes for his brother Joey, “it’s all my fault, I shoulda taken care of him.”

The image of a tree struck by lightning, fallen and burning, is the enemy in this revelation.

An enemy tank forces the squad’s surrender at the opening, Saunders faces a tank with his burden, the driver emerges to call for a medic.

Countdown

A harrowing film about space flight, a rare record of the culture of its time and milieu (like, in another way, Jewison’s 40 Pounds of Trouble), and the transitional film between Altman’s statement of television possibilities and That Cold Day in the Park, on a theme derived from Lang’s Frau im Mond by way of Poe’s “The Gold-Bug”.

That Cold Day in the Park

This is rather like the king’s sport of shooting blackbirds in The Devils, or like some Goya grotesquerie of a badminton game played with a living shuttlecock of some sort. It might be compared with Losey’s Eva profitably, on the general plane.

This is the film which provoked the New York Times film critic John Simon to use terms even more scurrilous than Ruskin wrote against Whistler. Simple Simon does not care for Losey, either, and now writes for New York Magazine, but taking umbrage profits no-one.

MASH

The triple-headed script is the accomplished, seasoned transformation promised by That Cold Day in the Park, and was inexplicably mistaken for an antiwar protest in some quarters. Welles is the main tributary.

An early tracking shot along the operating tables perhaps reveals that the unit was not responsive at first to Altman’s camera style, which very effectively organizes material propounded by Frankenheimer. Two reports require verification, one that Lardner disowned the script as by another hand, and the other that Auberjonois conceived the blessing of the jeep on the set, a detail of pointed structural significance. Add to this that the loudspeaker voiceovers and the superimposed titles after the credits (“...and then there was KOREA”) were dictated by circumstances in post-production, reportedly.

The point of the film is clearly stated in the final voiceover (“putting our soldiers back together”). Countless details, as well as the overall structure, demand formal analysis. Gen. Hammond’s unit flag is seen as red in the shot that has him proposing a football game to Col. Blake.

The even keel of the democratic, sane mind is placed in contradistinction to the hysterias it encounters. The only serious criticism that might be offered is George Burns’ joke that “the trouble with America is the folks who know how to run it are too busy driving cabs and cutting hair.”

Brewster McCloud

An admirably complex treatment of the theme taken in hand by Beckett on “Recent Irish Poetry”, to wit, “the sense of confinement, the getaway, the vicissitudes of the road, the wan bliss on the rim,” this before making tracks for the Continent (but after “Le Concentrisme”), that is, escapism, “desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.”

Bullitt comes away to Houston for Det. Frank Shaft’s number, registering the false witness before expiring, a suicide, in a parody of Captains Courageous.

The muse of the Castalian spring takes part in the charades and the shenanigans. A tour guide brings about the fall. The muse of Czerny’s exercises is almost visible.

Altman registers the Peckinpah shock of editing. The Lecturer on ornithology amusingly pays homage to Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Renoir’s Partie de campagne is inconveniently recalled at the moment of confession.

Mr. Potter and his spiritual bride appear by courtesy of Capra to provide the utz. The Hammer Codex left Los Angeles in circumstances nearly as mysterious as those in the film, with no questions asked but “Where’s Waldo?”

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Ride the High Country is the principal basis, with a stamp of approval in several places from Mark Twain, which is why the lawyer’s name is Clem. Samuels and seen reversed on his office window from inside. Huston underscores the classic theme in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, it occurs in Chisum and Lawless Range, among others.

The structure is solid as a rock, yet Altman has another film entirely set out on its premises. It’s visible from the first in those dark interiors from Van Gogh in Holland, and there is Postman Roulin, shortly the genius of Dutch painting is trumped by “a proper sportin’ house”, Gauguin arrives as a nightmare sellout, little Dutch boy in tow.

No-one having noticed this subjective vision of Van Gogh’s career, Altman spelled it out in Vincent & Theo.

Quite apart from this monumental care and apposition is the painting, almost abstract, engaged upon by Altman himself (not mentioning Toulouse-Lautrec’s prostitutes and Fragonard’s Girl Reading), calmly descending in a tracking shot on Mrs. Miller at night as she faces the bleak situation, shadowy trestles or lumber articulate this, the camera’s movement recomposes the shot as something other than futility, a lighted door or window, her.

John Frankenheimer paid a distinct homage to this film in Ronin, partly filmed at the famous café in Arles.

Images

Homage to Repulsion, with the vivifying impulse of a greater maturity lending grace to a satire of a middle-class Hérodiade “amongst the cold gems” etc.

The Long Goodbye

The song by Williams & Mercer is a Baudelairean elegy for the lost moment and the missed chance, redeemed happily. The city suffers a sea change which is viewed in three ways, a shipment of money to Mexico City, a murdered wife, a husband driven to suicide.

Marlowe is only himself at the office, a bar where he returns calls from his clients, sifting out divorce cases. “It’s okay with me” is his byword elsewhere.

Thieves Like Us

Altman intends for this to be understood as a close analysis of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, it is eminently serviceable in that respect from first to last, he gives the top hand to Penn so that there is no mistake and he can have a free hand on the one essential problem that interests him above all. Losey may be said to have done this in Secret Ceremony, with relation to Jack Clayton’s Our Mother’s House.

The particular problem Altman has faced is the re-creation of a period already known by its films. Simply put, if you want to know the Thirties, they speak for themselves, Altman regards it rightfully an impertinence to think otherwise. It’s typical of him to formulate more than one independent structure in a film, here there are three. The main framework comes from Penn, the other two are Altman’s and both appear visibly after the manner of Frost’s star-splitter. He formally displays them as exteriors and interiors in the latter part of the film.

The lovers exist outwardly in nothing less than a Thirties film without equivocation. This is hard-won through modern technique, and intermittent, but quite accurate.

Inwardly, they are constructed by the most elemental Altman technique, beginning on the porch where he is placed against a solid, masculine cross of window frames and she against a distant tree at twilight, they are Ma and Pa in their youth, courting or spooning a little. This ghost play is carefully wrought, along with the two other structural viewpoints, to give the drama of their existence a cinematic representation.

Canby has remarked the lucidity of the bank robberies and the dramatic turn of Chicamaw’s jealousy (which is prepared by his brother’s envy of the robbers’ fame).

Bowie dies in his quilt of many colors laid on a mud puddle, Joseph in the well, “a thin stream traduced, death.”

Keechie takes the first train out, to Fort Worth. The film slows to watch the passengers as they climb stairs to the platform out of view.

California Split

The model is Zorba the Greek, applied thereto is the Hitchcockian twist of success, with the same result.

The change of venue paints the picture with speaking force on any number of points, which is the point as much as anything, even for example the analysis.

A complete statement is given in the last shot, which pans successfully right from a Motherwell sequence (black bunting or valences) to a Johns “target” or mandala (wheel of fortune).

Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson

That’s all she wrote for show business, which is just the what and how and wherefore of the trading end of the bidness.

Popeye

The Feiffer-Nilsson-Altman musical is very correct in every degree, having evidently been composed as a labor of love by connoisseurs. Not a contemporization, let alone an update, still less a rehash, just putting on a movie with all the available resources.

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

A play, a dull play perhaps, staged as realism with a camera moving in or out amongst great actresses so as to, what, catch them off guard, doing their stuff? What have they to do with these backwater cults and mysteries, so remote from the freshets of fame and fortune?

O.C. & Stiggs

Just a bit of sport, deflating the sort of gasbags who blamed this film for lacking style, grace, wit, humor, or maybe just an audience. It just goes there from the first frames, facing the broad idiocy of its targets with as much gentlemanly misrepresentation as it can muster with anything like a straight face.

Fool for Love

The main points of departure are Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for the play and Mister Roberts for the film, not counting John Osborne’s The World of Paul Slickey and drawing-room comedies like His Girl Friday, say. All that’s generally speaking and on technical grounds to some extent, leading to a new idea of cinema.

Where that is maybe is the best shot in the whole film, just before the end, some mailboxes along the highway, a shot that recalls Gregg Toland’s opening shots for The Grapes of Wrath. In all the hubbub, Altman fishes out of the flashbacks a whole range of stylizations, approaching verisimilitude by degrees and passing it for better or worse to a kind of poetry.

The credit sequence is a display of spectacular subtlety, you might say.

Vincent & Theo

This quite consciously adds Dr. Gachet to the list of characters in the Van Gogh myth, and he is a prize specimen, painted as a connoisseur-patron who helps artists, and whose grievous misfortune it was Van Gogh’s to meet at the critical time in his collapse.

Short Cuts

The great achievement of this, which seemed to pass unnoticed at the time, is the sound recording. It really registers place and condition as acoustical dimensions, and laid the groundwork for a spectacular effect in Gosford Park, the representation of Ivor Novello singing his own songs at the piano.

Prêt-à-Porter

Like The Player, a film of dizzying technical virtuosities. This is, ultimately, a formulation of thought leading to the threshold of Losey’s Steaming, and arrived at by proving, like Beckett’s Descartes, “God by exhaustion.”

Jazz ‘34

What is most remarkable is the jazz score filmed live to all appearances without music on the stands. Also most remarkable are the long slow pans and sweeps that catch just about all there is of jazz in Kansas City then without much appreciable effort to all appearances, and this also proves greatly advantageous in Gosford Park.

The Gingerbread Man

The title character’s story is told in the manner of Mr. Arkadin’s frog and scorpion. Under the credits, in a shot that vaguely recalls the ending of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the camera views the earth from outer space, or a painting by Laddie John Dill, or the surface of a gingerbread man, no, it’s a river through the swamps with a highway beside it, at last (Charles & Ray Eames are evoked by this). The soundtrack is startlingly subtle, and the surprise party in the first scene strikes the tone in the family reunion of Bonnie and Clyde.

Savannah is facing Hurricane Geraldo, and all but the very ending is filmed under dark skies or rain and squalls. Early on, the quivering of leaves in the foreground of a shot prepares an effect and accomplishes one as well. Jealousy is framed in terms of Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie, through a set of Venetian blinds. Another quotation has Robert Duvall hide behind a door in a split-second homage to Boo Radley (Duvall’s resemblance to Altman in this part is structural).

He appears at a competency hearing with an unmistakable allusion to Miracle on 34^th Street and another to King Lear (or A Thousand Acres). Cape Fear and The Maltese Falcon are variously touched upon.

A spectacular cut to the wet hood of a red Mercedes convertible in motion tilts up to the windshield for the dialogue. An office conference with slatted shadows and car lights or reflections seems a careful allusion to a well-known Nabokov poem.

The technique is at times close to That Cold Day in the Park. Myriad flashes of insight are produced by cutting in or out of the camera. Classic technique is employed as a fertile adjunct that floats between past and present very freely, and within the same shot.

The one about the redheaded stepchild, who’s also a lawyer. There’s a vast inheritance, and a girl with a kook for a father, but that’s par for the course. The lawyer is made to believe his kids have been kidnapped, kills the old fellow, and then finds out he’s been set up. Community service isn’t such a bad thing, he concludes.

Cookie’s Fortune

One of the great tenuous experiences of form in the cinema, like Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, where what you have isn’t pictures so much as records of your material in action, as it were, and when your attention is paid to it you see it dilate, or else it dwindles very far to a diminishment of everything but the rectangle of colored light in your view, and all this amid a story, because there always is a story.

Gosford Park

Vermeer was the obvious choice (but see Mann’s Jane Eyre), with variegations of Degas, Lyly, Bacon (briefly, at the crisis), Whistler, etc. Notorious provides the underpinnings of the camerawork. When it is in motion, it is a ballet of scenes and forms, and when it’s still it gives you two actors sitting at a table covered with a white tablecloth and glasses of wine, and off in the corner a pair of hands.

The screenplay takes in La Règle du Jeu, The Servant, and The Go-Between, and the filming noticeably improves on Renoir (as one must) in, for example, the shooting scenes.

After The Shooting Party, British film has been pretty much left for dead lo these many decades (is it only two?), and it was more than gentlemanly to raise it up onto its feet, as even the hardiest of culture vultures could not be expected to masticate much more Merchant-Ivory Mastuprate Theatre with an ashen smile. On Sunset Boulevard, the matinee audience laughed very politely at first, then uproariously.

The Company

The voiceover tells the tale. Dark screen: Turn off your cellphones, no flash photography. It’s the Joffrey Ballet, that puts on (and digs up) Nijinsky and Massine, a first-rate company. The opening dance seems rather poor all the same, an effort at modernity with streamers that (aha!) become rectangles isolating the dancers.

The old prima ballerina gets compared to Fonteyn, and as soon as she’s gone discussion returns to the dance she’s excused from. “Who can do it?” asks Mr. A (Malcolm McDowell) before the latch has clicked.

Dancers in motion, limbs, joints. Suite Saint-Saëns and a glimpse of the great company. The great outdoor scene placing this all on point as a gradual depiction on film of a live performance. Lightning, wind and rain (blown leaves) convey the physical drama. Afterward, the artist and the artiste.

A danseur does his Bach Cello Suite. There is a question, derived from Apollo, about mimesis. There is a very effective satire, if you will, of the private life. Mr. A criticizes those who are in love with the lyricism of phony ballet, “I hate it.” The danger and difficulty are evoked in a silly ballet on the theme of Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum.

A Prairie Home Companion

Almost every shot is of a kind which in Countdown or That Cold Day in the Park serves as dramatic punctuation. The force of such films doesn’t come from fancy lighting or complicated shooting techniques, which Altman sums up as “bullshit”. The grammar of cinema has found another expression in Altman since Jazz ’34 or thereabouts, one that is related to Godard (in Alphaville) as his Éloge de l’amour figures in a grazing theme. The camera is in constant motion, panning, zooming slowly in or out, not without the occasional reverse shot or fixed POV. This might reflect a famous shot in Hitchcock’s Notorious. The effect is continuous action, like Preston Sturges’ walk around the block. A single shot exhibits finer technique than anybody has ever achieved before, taken together the sum of all the shots is an easy style that rises at moments in an articulation of particular emphasis without rhetoric. This is a signal evolution of Altman’s, and in terms of the musical comings and goings in Jazz ’34, the technique is more focused and to the point, taking in all the interest a set design or a suite of actors can offer. Again, a single shot is a tour de force, the entire film is a continuous record of a live radio show on and off the stage, in spite of a perfectly execrable digital transfer.

A prelude begins with the opening shot of skyline, radio antenna and water tower at twilight. The aurora borealis gradually appears, the camera tilts up into the brightness of it which becomes the lights of Mickey’s Dining Car reflected in a puddle. Guy Noir has just eaten dinner, he leaves the place and goes to the Fitzgerald Theater, where he works as security man for A Prairie Home Companion. A corporation has bought the theater and plans to level it. This is the last performance.

The Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), like Satan, quotes Scripture to his purpose. The Angel of Death is named Asphodel (Virginia Madsen) and was once a fan of the show, until a joke made her laugh so hard her car skidded off the road. Dying, it didn’t seem so funny, the penguin joke as told by Garrison Keillor. Two penguins are standing on an ice floe. One says, “You look like you’re wearing a tuxedo,” the other replies, “What makes you think I’m not?”

This is worthy of Bob Newhart, and deserves to be carved in stone.

Meryl Streep can belt out a country song with the best of them, Lily Tomlin is her sister who puts the sound effects man through his paces. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly are cowboy singers right off the trail. L.Q. Jones can sing, Maya Rudolph is a floor manager, Lindsay Lohan garbles “Frankie and Johnny”, Kevin Kline is Guy Noir. The house band is exceptionally able.