An on-going series dedicated to great directors... great directors who've transgressed. Disappointed. Befuddled. But not bumbled so badly as to deserve being written off entirely.

Frustrating Filmographies explores these great filmmakers' most baffling slip-ups and tries figure out what their motivation might have been in choosing projects that proved questionable, wrongheaded or outright embarrassing. The purpose of this experiment is not to deride the greats for stumbling, but to understand how they ending up taking a faceplant.

"I am not careless. I may be irresponsible, I may strive for things and not always succeed. But that's never the result of sloppiness. Maybe it's lack of judgment."
~ Robert Alman

"The worst trap you can fall in is to start imitating yourself."
~ Robert Altman

What did people want from Robert Altman? It's a question that encapsulated the man's career once the considerable clout from his somewhat miraculously successful run in the first half of the 70's began to dissipate. Riding high on the trifecta of M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville (with half a dozen other films to substantiate his reputation), Altman became even more aggressively auteuristic which, on the one hand, resulted in tantalizingly experimental films while, on the other, further isolated him from studios looking to capitalize on the success of Jaws with potential blockbusters rather than take chances on challenging "little movies." Altman's appeal was waning, and his famous anti-studio stance certainly didn't help. Having effectively burned bridges at MGM, Warner Brothers, Columbia, United Artists and Paramount, Altman swallowed his pride and went back to the company that had been such a thorn in his side during the filming of M*A*S*H. Because he worked cheaply and with a non-union crew, Fox financed a five-movie run between 1977 and 1980 which can, in retrospect, be traced as the most significant blow to the director's critical and commercial acceptance, a period which marked the transition from the Golden Age of Altman to the lamentable 80's era in which he would languish until his revitalizing third act of the early 90's. These five movies - 3 Women, A Wedding, Quintet, A Perfect Couple and HealtH, all commercial flops with critical receptions ranging from reticent to outright dismissive - form the bridge from which Altman, like Keith Carradine's gunned-down cowboy in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, fell from the post-whorehouse high of Nashville to the icy river low of Popeye in five short years.

But there's more to it than that. It's too easy to claim that the magnates of Hollywood simply weren't tolerating the Altman act anymore, absurd to suggest that if he had more money or studio support he would never have suffered a mid-career decline. Considering the progressively lackluster business of each film, it's kind of amazing that Alan Ladd, Jr. kept giving him money (it could be that the inestimable profits the studio reaped from Star Wars and Alien allowed Altman to continue working under the radar.) Besides, even more demanding than the corporate bigwigs the director so vilified were Altman's audience: fairweather fans, adoring critics and cynical detractors alike. Arguably, in the history of great American auteurs, Altman's career is by far the most difficult to determine what about his movies actually works. People point to his innovative use of sound and camerawork, his unconventional storytelling, his emphasizing of background action to the foreground and vise versa, and appreciation of unhailed American underdogs, but these are the same elements that undermined his work the more audiences began to recognize and expect that "Altman thing." Were people really sated by any Altman project that turned out to be a panorama of alternatively tragic and comedic multi-character vinettes which explored Americana within a specific culture, organization or historical setting through invading and retreating zoom shots and overlaping dialogue that felt epic even while they were essentially laid back and heavily improvised? That pretty much sums up the common idea of what a good Robert Altman movie should be, as evidenced by the biggest hits of his early career; even when this "Altman-esque" recipe fell flat, it still gave apologists of failures like A Wedding and Popeye ammunition to mount a defense: "Hey, at least you can feel Altman in this movie." But somehow this complicated surefire formula began to fail him, for a time, after peaking with Nashville.

Alternatively, abandoning this approach didn't work out too well for Altman either: continuing the collective shrug that met movies like That Cold Day in the Park and Images, the fever dream of 3 Women was popularly disregarded as pretentious and self-indulgent. The public seemed to condemn the smaller, more intimate movies for not utilizing the director's signature tools, apparently causing Altman to flip flop from one approach to another before abandoning both for the practically unrecognizable lack of style that ran through his unremarkable 80's oeuvre.* Altman's films after M*A*S*H were never dinosaurs at the box office (Popeye was his highest-grossing movie after 1970), so critical approval was vital to his survival as a director making the kind of movies he wanted to make. But the critics turned against him. Generally speaking, this is the first subject of a Frustrating Filmography where the frustration may lie equally with the filmmaker's audience.**

But let's be fair: one thing nobody would accuse Altman of is pandering to the crowd. It's doubtful that a director as brashly outspoken and headstrong as Altman went into any film with strong consideration of its broad appeal. Altman couldn't make the kind of films he did had he obsessed over test screenings and critical reaction; the films themselves are specifically subversive to traditional filmmaking techniques and narrative conventions. So the question becomes whether it was a case of the director exhausting his audience rather than the other way around: was it his relentless output and critical invincibility that detracted viewers? Altman had 13 movies released in the 70's, pretty impressive even before considering the scope and ambition of some of these projects. Coming off four accepted masterpieces, three unsung masterpieces and two other interesting (even kind of great) films in the small space of six years, as Altman was in 1976, the hubris of any filmmaker - let alone one with as bold and arrogant a streak as Altman - would be bound to overwhelm and capsize him in the public eye. That one approach would be deemed obvious while the other self-indulgent had a lot to do with the director's reputation: aggressive auteurism was effectively ruining Altman's career to the point that, after the five Fox films, the only way to survive was to become essentially invisible and retreat into artless mediocrity. So who's most to blame - the studios, the audience or Altman himself? For now, let's just blame the Indians.

Whether or not you agree with the popular assessment that 1969 to 1975 was unequivocally the very best Altman had to offer, it would be hard to argue that the director hit a wall with Buffalo Bill & the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson. The all-important follow-up to Nashville, it seems on the surface to have been designed as a crowd-pleaser - specifically, an Altman crowd-pleaser. It's a revisionist western (like McCabe & Mrs. Miller) that features a bankable star (like McCabe & Mrs. Miller) and garnishes that familiar Altman touch (ensemble cast, satirical approach) with something Americans have always been inherently aware of and preoccupied by: the history of the nation (topped off with a title that may or may not have been strategically conceived to remind people of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.***) Altman had already used Nashville as a preemptive blow against American values at a period of heightened patriotic pride the year before; coming out the year of the bicentennial itself, Buffalo Bill was clearly intended as a scathing reminder of the ugly reality of the country's foundation and seering exposé of the humilation and exploitation of the struggling Sioux nation years after their mythic defeat of Custer at Little Big Horn. That description recalls Little Big Man, Arthur Penn's parabolist pastoral from earlier in the decade, as well as a number of other "history lessons" from American movie makers in the 70's (including Best Actor refuser Marlon Brando and the scandalous performance of proxy Sacheen Littlefeather at the Oscar podium.) "Telling it like it is" biopics of the American West were becoming as trendy and marketable as they were "cutting edge," which is probably why Dino De Laurentiis decided to bank on the outlaw filmmaker who used country singers to denounce American values as theideal director to exploit White Guilt at the same time fireworks glistened in the eyes of a proud public.

It was the late 70's, and Dino's reputation as Fellini's financier still meant something - riding high off the success of Death Wish and legitimized "art" of Serpico, he had yet to become infamous as a schlock producer who wined and dined star directors only to collaborate on some of their most reviled, stylistically off-beat movies (Bergman's The Serpent's Egg, David Lynch's Dune.) Buffalo Bill can be counted among these frustrating, Dino-financed blots on the filmographies of established masters: its failure stalled both Altman's intention to direct an Alan Rudolph-penned adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and, more significantly, his three-picture deal with De Laurentiis which would have led to helming the film version of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime (which ended up an uninspired movie by Miloš Forman, whose conventional One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest had trumped Nashville at the Oscars.) Dino didn't appreciate Altman's crapshoot approach to movies - maybe this will work, if not fuck it - and for the first time his scattershot style seemed to stall with some of the director's most adamant supporters in the critical circle, most notably Pauline Kael.**** More importantly, the movie interrupted Altman's hottest run: nine films that ran from interesting to outright great from That Cold Day in the Park to Nashville and would have included 3 Women...were it not for Buffalo Bill.

If I had to pick a primary culprit in Buffalo Bill's failure it would be Altman's reputation. Going into it as the 22nd or 23rd Altman movie I've seen, it was clear what to expect from the basic set-up alone and there isn't a single surprise in the movie. Buffalo Bill is Altman's most redundant film, combining McCabe's western setting with Nashville's bicentennial critique of Americana while utilizing all his unusual tricks which, for whatever reason, come off as anything but innovative. This may be because, unlike his better movies, too much of Buffalo Bill is stated rather than implied. Altman's not typically one to hit his audience over the head, but the clear intention of this film is to pull back the curtain on William Cody and reveal him as a sad little king of a sad little circus that symbolizes nothing less than the atrocities committed against American Indians in the second half of the 19th century. To wit, there are two kinds of people in the movie: the pathetic, buffoonish whites and the noble, enigmatic Native Americans. Many of Altman's movies draw a clear line between the enlightened and the hypocrital (hip dissidents v.s. stuffy officers and religious types in M*A*S*H, freewheeling outlaws v.s. fascist law enforcement - we're clearly meant to sympathize with "us" in Thieves Like Us) with the latter side portrayed as blustery, ignorant bigots: proxies of the studio heads Altman often clashed with. The difference is that, before Buffalo Bill, these loathsome types were never the heroes of the director's films. Here, Altman forgets that his characters' charm stems from their basic underdog likability, that despite the shortcomings of Brewster McCloud, Philip Marlowe or Bill and Charlie from California Split, they are essentially lovable losers worth rooting for. Whether it's McCabe's unspoken love for Mrs. Miller or the loss of Marlowe's cat, there's always a moral stand to hang the movie's hat on in the director's early work. When Altman decides to focus on detestable high rankers like Griffin Mill, Tanner, the snooty designers and fashionistas of Prêt-à-Porter or either side of the two ridiculous families of A Wedding, he turns them into tedious satirical weapons against targets so broad the films become the cinematic equivalent of skeet shooting in outer space. When Altman picks an object to demonize, there's no searching involved, and although his obvious mockery is meant to be as incendiary as siding with good-natured characters going up against the establishment, it creates a mean-spirited milieu with no one but vapid, hateable characters to cling to. Of course, some great movies have been made centered around unlikable to straight-up repugnant protagonists, but this approach is one of Altman's most blatant weaknesses, although it has been misidentified as a strength by his admirers as well as the director himself. Buffalo Bill is the only script Altman wrote in collaboration with ingenue/poor man's Altman Alan Rudolph, and it has the feel of imitation mixed with heavy reliance on something erroneously thought to be, probably based on Nashville, one of the director's staples: exposing this group of smug winners for the ridiculous fools they really are.

So then why did critics who would go on to slam Buffalo Bill heap praise on Nashville, the film that planted the seeds for the director's callous scrutiny of American society? The two films have a lot of the same qualities, and a lot of the same problems, that arise from Altman's loose style applied to a complicated, non-linear narrative featuring lots of characters. Altman's sliding structure can result in either a pleasant flow or a frustrating lack of focus. His encouragement of improvisation is just as likely to result in genuinely honest and surprising moments as an intolerable clusterfuck of actors talking over each other incomprehensively. His famous zooms have the power to punctuate a moment or tendency to pull the audience right out of a scene. Specific examples would be extraneous because again, it really comes down to the characters. Buffalo Bill could have seriously used a Joan Tewkesbury to bring out the humanity in the story and supply it with characters who weren't there to simply serve the satire, someone like Lily Tomlin's mother struggling with two deaf children or Keenan Wynn's frustrated old timer trying to get shallow niece L.A. Jane to visit his sick wife. Buffalo Bill offers reflections of the 24-member Nashville ensemble without giving them any substinence. Harvey Keitel's dim nephew*****, blindly adoring of his famous Uncle Bill, is a pale imitation of Scott Glenn's starstruck country singer super-fan soldier. Cody himself is a prima donna like Henry Gibson's Haven Hamilton, a womanizer like Keith Carradine's Tom Frank, who looks to humiliate Sitting Bull by carting him out for the crowd to jeer in a less-affecting redux of the talentless singer forced to strip for leering businessmen to realize her dream of singing with her favorite country star. Both films hinge on the arrival of a political bigwig, but in Buffalo Bill it's not the never-seen Hal Phillip Walker, fictional populist outsider/presidental hopeful on the Replacement Party ticket, but none other than Grover Cleveland himself (played by Pat McCormick, paired up with Shelley Duvall's First Lady like he was with Carol Burnett in A Wedding...apparently, Altman finds stick-thin ladies coupled with towering, walrus-looking dynamos hilarious, which may explain his decision to direct Popeye.) That Cleveland is included as an actual character represents not only the stakes of the plot but the aim of the satire: America - history - itself! Walker is literally, as described, a "mystery man" - a ubiquitous amalgram of fanfare and slogans. But Cleveland is as much a pompous windbag as Cody, with an aide literally whispering in his ear like a living 19th century teleprompter. It's hardly an unrealistic portrayal of a president, and probably seemed particularly appropriate to the Jimmy Carter era, but to set sites on the most famous man in America and portray him as a supercilious moron is to limit what in Nashville had (at least) been unfettered, ambivalent mockery...the use of Cleveland plays out like Elliott Gould and Julie Christie's "aren't celebrities brainless boobs?" cameos from the earlier film. Buffalo Bill is simply too obvious about what it's sending up.

As in Nashville, the American flag turns up again and again. If the level of satire isn't apparent from Bill's Dr. Strangelove-evoking subtitle, it is from the constant surfacing of red, white and blue all over the picture. Altman considered himself an outlaw and a jokester, so in his movies he singled out self-serious targets. The army and medical fields are ultra-serious, so he satirized them with irreverent military doctors; the founding of the American West is glamorized with heroes, so he made McCabe a pitiful coward. So it makes sense that Bill Cody is represented as a racist, ego-maniacal prima donna and the ongoing massacre of Native Americans, so recent to the events of the film, would be the sensitive, decidedly unheroic reality the director intended to present to audiences of the 70's. But to be that specific was a disservice to his own style. Altman's open style, loose form, characters who run into each other, music and sound taking the narrative by the hand and lending it structure, unexpected zooms, improvisation...it's all so specifically non-specific. So when he tried to say something in one of his films or target someone, he lost that looseness by the very trappings of syntactic responsibility to the satire. It's something that hurt his later movies like The Player (more on that one in a minute), and in the 16 years between those two films Altman would struggle with how to present his protagonists (look no further than Popeye, a straight-uphero in a movie that went way too far trying to appeal to everyone: kids, musical fans, comedy lovers, E.C. Segar purists, etc.)

Since Buffalo Bill implicates not only American history but the Hollywood western for its part in aiding the demonizing of American Indians and glorification of white conquerors, the constuct of the William Cody character becomes a critique of the movie hero. This must have felt to Altman like he was really sticking it to the studios, who at the time were done with the Popeye Doyle's and Travis Bickle's and were staging a comeback for classic heroes like those found in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Rocky. Clearly people must have been turned off by the fact that Cody is so unremittingly deserving of the audience's spite. He's an epic liar. He's a womanizer, moving from one company opera singer to another, who is rendered impotent by his frustration over the "truth" that Sitting Bull represents. He can't even muster the competency to do what he's supposed to be good at when he fails to track Sitting Bull after the chief and his tribe have vacated the grounds. And he does nothing to redeem himself. Most of Altman's effort goes towards making Buffalo Bill small - his trademark zooms take away his benevolence, especially in the last shot of the movie, but this shouldn't be confused with humanizing the character...it's more like humiliation. But Altman is always best at depicting losers who want to make a splash in the world. Attacking those at the top is boring, although ironically he decided to use an actor at the very top to do it.

Buffalo Bill could just as easily be considered a Frustrating Film on the filmography of Paul Newman, whose iconic presence made him an auteur among actors. His best films were helmed by expert journeymen like Robert Rossen (The Hustler), Martin Ritt (Hud), Mark Robson (The Prize), Jack Smight (Harper), Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke) and George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy, The Sting, Slap Shot) and are defined more by Newman's signature on the project than that of their modest filmmakers who were generous and smart enough to allow the films to hang on what Newman brought to the table. Some of his worst films were made by heavy hitters like Otto Preminger (Exodus) and Hitchcock (Torn Curtain), directors who tried to apply Newman to their stylistic sensilibities rather than the other way around (the actor had better luck later in his career with Sidney Lumet and The Verdict, winning an Oscar with Scorsese, and giving one of his funniest performances for the Coens, although Hudsucker Proxy is popularly considered a failure.) But at the same time, there was a humbleness to Newman's persona that set him apart from the aggressive, self-applied "artist" tag of a thespian superstar like Warren Beatty. Beatty's assumed importance worked well playing the role of a king among miners who finds he can't compete with real world rollers and shakers in McCabe, and he probably would have been a more suitable Bill Cody had he been able to keep his vanity in check long enough to acceptthat he'd be sending up the image of "the star."

For Newman, it's an awkward fit from the start - not because it's an unglamorous part. One of if not his best role ever was Reggie Dunlap in Slap Shot,* a movie that sold itself by sending up his agreeable image with the tagline "You'll see Paul Newman doing things you'd never expect him to do... saying things you'd never expect him to say!" It's because Newman is one of the worst possible people Altman could have chosen as an example of a spoiled star (although you have to admit, the large caricature of Cody** looks a lot like the illustration of the actor on those Newman's Own jars.) Newman had already done a few irreverent westerns (Butch Cassidy, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean), but was just too believable a personality to play someone with trick guns to help him seem the marksman, with a phoney background as a tracker that gets embellished to the point that people confuse the dignity with "master gunfighter" and "champion Indian fighter," a man offended at being off-handedly referred to as "a mere impersonation of a patriot" who spouts unconvincing lines like, "Us whites are smart enough to know an injun always turns down the first offer!" Just the fact that he's the undisputed star of the movie conflicts with Altman's typical structure. Buffalo Bill has 26 major parts, two up from Nashville, but is centered around Newman. There's a reason for there not being any huge A-listers in the cast of Nashville, A Wedding, HealtH or even something later like Short Cuts or Gosford Park: it's impossible not to focus on the biggest star (hence Julia Roberts' incredibly distracting presence in Prêt-à-Porter; see Appendix for my attempt to categorize Altman's movies by the structure of his casts.) There's a contradiction in Altman trying to take away Newman's star power even while recognizing his celebrity: Cody is a foolish, conceited, talentless star surrounded by a pandering entourage, but he still seems important.

The self-delusion and hypocrisy of Altman's Bill Cody - of Altman's America - aren't successful in and of themselves, but they do supply the film the hint of an underrated Altman trait: the theme of "what is real?" Prevalent in movies like Images and 3 Women (the female psyche was clearly a mystery for Altman and made his exploration of it more interesting) are the characters delving into the charade of the world around them, ultimately finding that, in a parallel to the artificiality of the film itself, things they thought were dangerous are actually completely safe with no cause for alarm...and the other way around. The setting of Buffalo Bill provides an absurd scenario: an articifical Wild West Show performing while the Wild West was technically still in existence. Cowboys and Indians race around the stage, but while the program promises authenticity the guns are loaded with blanks and the indians are played by black men. Rumors of real world threats are summarily denounced. The real Sitting Bull is hardly a menacing warrior - he's tiny like Yoda. When he raises a gun to Grover Cleveland, everyone freaks out until they realize he's just "making the horse dance" by firing a shot off in the air. Geraldine Chaplin's crackshot Annie Oakley is like her Opal from Nashville, they're both phonies using fake/stage names. Even Cody's gun is loaded with buckshot so he can't miss the targets thrown up in front of him, a deceit revealed by Sitting Bull much to Bill's humiliation. But the very environment still portends danger: the ultimate reality v.s. fantasy confrontation comes when Annie accidentally shoots her husband Frank in the arm during a demonstration and both carry on like nothing happened to appease the audience. The movie ends with the symbolic act of "scalping" Sitting Bull, who has already met his real life fate off-screen. This diverting aspect of the film almost trumps the broad satire...until Altman makes the same mistake by spelling out his intentions.

A visual favorite of the director, especially in his examinations of reality listed above, is his conflicted/confused protagonist gazing introspectively into a mirror. Not only does Cody have two scenes where he stares down his reflection, Burt Lancaster's Ned Buntline actually has a line about it to juxtapose with a later shot ("Stars spend so much time in front of mirrors, to see if their good looks can overcome their judgment.") It's just a reminder that Altman sees himself akin to Lancaster's Buntline, sitting alone smugly in the bar removed from the main action, the only one with a sense of truth and perspective over the events playing out around him, drawing the ire of the blissfully ignorant. But like Buntline (whose name in this movie should be Bluntline), Altman undermines the film's themes by outright stating them through the dialogue. "Buffalo Bill - it's been the thrill of my life to have invented you," Buntline tells Cody before riding his horse into the darkness; the haughtiness of this send-off could come from the director, pleased with himself for crafting a film to knock Buffalo Bill off his podium, proud to pontificate by unmasking all the fakery and tell off these idiots who buy into the malarkey they read in history books before, like Buntline, riding off, jumping a fence into the darkness and obscurity of his own self-satisfaction.

If Altman could have made the Indians more sympathetic, rather than making them cryptic and self-righteous (when Cody confides to his producer "I think I gave back the same kind of murky logic he offered me" after making a poetic statement to Sitting Bull, it's one of the movie's rare funny moments), Buffalo Bill might have been better. But again it's not about the little guy, it's not really about how we all sell out in little moments like some of the subplots in Nashville, and it's not a sympathetic tale of the struggle between free enterprise and corporation like McCabe. More than any of his films, Buffalo Bill is like The Player - it's practically a dress rehearsal for the director's 1992 critical darling of a comeback. Quick, which movie is this line from: "No ordinary man would realize what huge profits could be made by telling a pack of lies like it was the truth"? That could describe Newman's Cody or Robbins' Griffin Mill, unscrupulous showmen and exploitive entrepreneurs with delusions of importance beyond the superficial. Both are limp charlatans surrounded by spineless yes men who use their power to crush weakier yet morally stronger men who both end up dead, chiefly out of fear that the true nature of their triviality will be exposed. The way the Buffalo Bill cast is credited in the opening, by title rather than character name - The Producer, The Publicist - you can see "The Player" fitting right in there. Bill and Player are about the phoniness of show business, not exactly deep but Bill at least works better at exploring that angle than it does examing and criticizing history. Bill condemns the events of the past as if Altman were any more removed from the legacy of white America than the film industry satirized in The Player, but covers his bases in both films with bookends that acknowledge that the movie itself is a manufactured product, winks intended to say "I'm not with these guys" and, simultaneously, "I'm just messing around." The opening crane shot of The Player demonstrates Altman's natural artistry while also making a statement about its "show-offy movieness" echoed in the final scene where Tim Robbins considers making a movie called The Player. Buffalo Bill also incorporates framing devise fakeries, the first an assault by warring, whooping Indians on a farmhouse straight out of any generic western that turns out to be rehearsal for the Wild West show, a reflection on reality and show business and a chance for Altman to quip "Any asshole can make a boring western, but now watch and see MY take on it!" The last - a repetition of the first - is Cody's hokey, staged "triumph" over "Sitting Bull," who has already been murdered in real life and is played onstage by Halsey (Bull's former right hand man, a more intimidating-looking and therefore crowd-accepted evil redskin.) This phony "happy ending" of Buffalo Bill defeating his enemy is exactly like Player's parody of a happy Hollywood ending, with the added connection of Will Sampson's Halsey selling out similar to the producers of Habeas Corpus(although it's implied that he's doing it for more noble reasons - to help the starving tribe without the benefit of celebrity that his fallen leader had to fall back on.)

Like the Habeas Corpus duo, the Indians are presented as too noble and self-assured, nearly to the point of mockery. Interestingly, in both films, the one person who maintains their integrity throughout the movie is a woman - Annie Oakley in Bill, Cynthia Stevenson's jilted story editor in The Player - and both are humiliated in ways that come off as cynical character bullying by the director. They seem like characters we should side with, so why does Altman clearly detest them? Aren't these the people we used to root for in Altman movies? And while we're asking question, an even more pertinent one than "why did people praise Nashville and hate Buffalo Bill?" is "how come Buffalo Bill didn't work for people and The Player did?" What changed between 1976 and 1992? My guess would be that, although both are easy targets, it's easier for people to enjoy mocking a selective clique they're detached from and think should taken down a peg like, say, Hollywood executives rather than something they feel somewhat complicit in at some level such as the eradication of Native Americans. Or maybe Altman just enjoyed such retrospective honor by an American cinema revitalized by smaller, independent movies in the early 90's that anything harking back to a time when he wasn't shilling unimaginative stage adaptations to a disinterested public was instantly canonized. That's the whole trick: it's what audiences want from Altman. When Buffalo Bill didn't work, he tried something different. The Fox films bombed, which led him to try something safer: theatrical adaptations. But returning to what didn't work before suddenly did work for him, and led to his comeback.

In the intro to her Images review, Kael pointed to the fact that Altman was "almost frighteningly nonrepetitive." That ended with Buffalo Bill, a film that brought back the M*A*S*H loudspeakers in the form of Joel Grey announcing the acts through a primitive megaphone, made the "people talking at a gathering" an official go-to Altman device and re-stated, in less interesting fashion, the director's irreverence to something Americans were proud of. Altman cried studio interference on Buffalo Bill, explaining at the time that it was overly explicit rather than implicit because, "Well, I don't know. I really don't. There was a lot of struggling going on between Dino and myself all that time. I was trying to accommodate him and still serve the film." This alleged tension between Altman and his producers would lead to him shooting Quintet far away from the studio (he'd try the trick again by shooting Popeye in Malta; anyone who blames Altman's failings on his paranoia over studio interference can pinpoint these, arguably his two most hated films, as proof), the first of several ways Altman's method changed based on his experience on Buffalo Bill. The ensuing Fox Five would be much more experimental; anything to get away from the conventional structure that critics deemed too safe for a filmmaker who should be taking risks. Admirers have since found ways to defend the movie, mainly blaming its failure on the fledging western genre of the late 70's that culminated with Heaven's Gate, thus fulfilling the prophecy set in place by Altman himself, who just before the film's release stated, "I think it's probably the best film I've made...I think that this film will get picked up. It isn't going to be successful I don't think. But I think it'll get picked up in a couple of years, and it'll be looked back on."

Essex: Do I misunderstand the word 'killing?'
Grigor: Not if you understand Quintet.

Despite its best efforts, I think I understand Quintet fairly well - enough to see why it didn't make a "killing" at the box office. Altman and Newman had failed traveling back to the past, so they looked to succeed by heading into the future: a future where people do nothing but play an abstractly-designed board game. In fact, there are several scenes of characters playing an abstractly-designed board game, whiling away the hours in the dilapidated remains of a city in the middle of a frozen, post-apocalyptic tundra. The film that anyone who hasn't recently seen O.C. & Stiggs considers Altman's worst movie, Quintet appears almost tailor-made to turn off an audience. Between its oft-described "glacial" pacing and combination blaring white and muted gray cinematography seemingly designed to put to sleep anyone who makes the mistake of looking at the screen, it's as demanding visually as it is narratively obstinate. It's as if Altman was practically daring critics to find something in the movie to defend, but unlike Buffalo Bill there are no tropes to point to: even retrospection has not endeared it to viewers (just check out the A.V. Club's Altman Primer, in which they have good things to say about every major movie BUT Quintet - they even look to salvage HealtH and Prêt-à-Porter by pointing out their respective "fleeting moments" and call the terrible Dr. T and the Women "full of life and imagination, and funny to boot.") Gaudy, grandiloquent, underplayed, overstated, nihilistic, anti-climatic...if Buffalo Bill & the Indians was a miss for the director, Quintet was a disaster.

But it's not exactly a failure: although he deemed it "passionless," Vincent Canby was at least willing to admit that Altman ended up with the movie he set out to make. Buffalo Bill had failed at what it set out to do by utilizing the director's most recognizable tools, and Quintet is almost a "fuck you, here's an effortless exercise in lethargy and lugubriosity...next time you decide you don't want a fun Altman romp, just remember this movie!" Altman was, perhaps defensively, developing a pattern of going from Altman-esque comedy to self-indulgent art film. Just as 3 Women was a quiet artist's retreat after the epic debacle of Buffalo Bill, the humorless Quintet, free of any hint of irony, seems a conscious 180 from the bawdy excess of A Wedding. And since Altman is terrible at broad comedy, Quintet's lack of humor is almost a good thing. The movie's prevailing abstraction is the exact opposite of Buffalo Bill's force-fed commentary and it's a relief that the film opens, like Images, with an arty yet subtle title card without the boisterous, clever in-joke of Nashville's introduction with the credits laid out like an ad for a record, or Buffalo Bill's fanfare brochure tauting "Robert Altman's Absolutely Unique and Heroic Enterprise of Inimitable Lustrel!" (these gimmick titles got stale pretty quickly after the fun "cast read over the loudspeaker" end credits from M*A*S*H.)

This was the third of the five Fox films, and each seemed to surgically deconstruct one successful aspect of Nashville and reuse it: hopefuls and hangers-on populate 3 Women, the gigantic cast and awkwark "comedy" practically suffocated A Wedding, the running musical acts were reworked in A Perfect Couple and the politics/satire revisited in HealtH. Quintet didn't pick at Nashville the way the other movies did, like a pack of hungry dogs feeding on dead bodies in the snow, but it arguably borrowed some of its better qualities. There's the theme of losing a family member, with Newman suffering the loss of his companion just like Keenan Wynn (this also informed the best subplot of Short Cuts, the death of Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell's son and the harassment of Lyle Lovett's local baker in the wake of the tragedy). While Quintet's political agenda is surprisingly simple (you'd think a dystopian society would be a concept Altman would want to play around with), the invisible hand that manipulates the bottom "players" stands in for the Michael Murphy character collecting singers for the Walker rally. But for the most part Quintet was as stylistically far away from what was becoming known as a typical Altman movie as the production was physically from its financial backers. The actual setting of the story is never revealed: since the entire world is assumed to be frozen, it could be taking place anywhere on the globe, not necessarily Altman's home country that had been the boundless aim of his most recent satire. Since it's an original screenplay, the film isn't informed by its source material (The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us) or historical events (Buffalo Bill). Altman was artistically adrift and it's reflected in the film itself, with a murky plot that never takes time out to explain exactly what's going on and leaves a lot for the audience to determine for themselves. It doesn't hang low and hit you over the head like Buffalo Bill; quite the opposite, the movie is an impossibly high, unreachable ceiling. But should Quintet be let off the hook simply for not being ambitious or milking any kind of obvious satire?

Popular science fiction B-movies had run their course by 1968, when two films by notable directors determined Hollywood's two different approaches to the genre for the next decade. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 - high-minded, slow-moving, visually-explorative - convinced other filmmakers that literary sci fi could be successfully transposed to the big screen. Meanwhile, Roger Vadim and Terry Southern's Barberella - gleefully pulpy, knowingly campy and thoroughly unpretentious - embraced the escapism of fantasy fiction without setting its goals any further than scoring with the horny nerd crowd. In the 70's, auteurs obviously preferred the more contemplative, literary road of A Clockwork Orange or The Man Who Fell to Earth while even some of Paul Newman's old, less-showy directors tried their hand at bringing literary sci fi to the screen (George Roy Hill with Slaughterhouse Five, Jack Smight with The Illustrated Man and Damnation Alley). Everyone in Hollywood was reading Borges' application of Zeno's paradoxes to the work of Franz Kafka and figured themselves learned experts in literary science fiction, so each film had nothing less ambitious in mind than the intention to Examine Man. Protagonists were set apart from society, either in defiance of some futuristic oppression (Logan's Run) or disillusionment with universally-accepted dehumanization (Rollerball), and there was usually a heavy dose of religious symbolism thrown into the mix (The Omega Man). This humorless bid at importance guaranteed that most of these kind of movies were hampered by self-indulence and pomposity, not to mention the inherent hokiness which haunted even these high-minded projects: the pitfalls of cheap sets and cheesy costumes. The most blatant example from the era is John Boorman's Zardoz (1974), its philosophical ambitions subverted by the visual image of Sean Connery wearing nothing but a red diaper and knee high boots. Zardoz was a Fox release and, like Quintet, was set in a bleak, post-apocalyptic society littered with ambivalent assassins centered around the cheery idea that death is a better alternative to life. But the studio still managed to score big with sci fi when a young director whose high-minded epic, THX-1138, had flopped earlier in the decade brought them Star Wars, the ultimate low-reaching, crowd-pleasing, serial-evoking space saga in the Barberella mode, in 1977. By 1979*** Fox had another success with Alien and was prepping Empire Strikes Back - which opens, funnily enough, on a desolate ice planet covered in snow with its lead character almost freezing to death - so Altman's crack at the genre couldn't have been viewed as anything but a risk worth taking. The studio was also taking chances on auteurs: Bernardo Bertolucci's La Luna and Werner Herzog's Nosferatu were both released in '79 with Argento's Inferno and Kurosawa's Kagemusha coming out in '80. Although Altman's last two Fox films had fumbled, his name still meant prestige that the studio was, at the time, happy to be associated with.

Perhaps aware of the Get Out of Jail Free card he held with Alan Ladd, Jr., Altman abandoned the Altman-ness of A Wedding to try something completely different (he also rushed into production, just in case the Fox brass changed their minds once A Wedding's meager earnings were announced). The director fell for the high-minded science fiction concept...and fell into the same well as those who had found themselves unable to escape the genre trappings before him. From the goofy character names - Essex, Grigor, St. Christopher, Ambrosia, Goldstar, Redstone - to the wardrobe that makes the cast look like actors from Shakespeare in the Park; Kael's dig that the movie is like "a Monty Python show played at the wrong speed" seems like a specific dig at the silly costumes. But one difference Altman deserves credit for is Quintet's disciplined structure, a departure from his recent slapdash epics: he explained to an interviewer at the time that, "Because of the game qualities of the film it has to follow a certain order."

The order is as follows: Returning to the disorganized melange of civilization he'd abandoned years before to hunt seal in the south, Essex and his pregnant companion Vivia (Brigitte Fossey, who played the little girl in Forbidden Games so she should be used to all this death and misery) find that every citizen who hasn't become a frozen popsicle treat for roving dogs is playing the hip new game Quintet. Essex is looking for a job, but is told that nobody's motivated enough to work - there's "nothing left but the game!" In this hopeless world, the game has taken over and become every form of distracting entertainment rolled into one: television, video games, any sort of time-wasting preoccupation. People even collect tschotkes that serve as game pieces, so by extension the game fills in for idle hobbies such as stamp collecting or displaying pez dispensers. All the technological furtherments supposedly made before the "icing" have been foresaken, the city is run down and nobody appears to be in charge. Everyone is amusing themselves to death, even allowing themselves to be killed because they're so busy with Quintet. No sooner has Essex located his estranged brother that his obsessed sibling insists on a game; Essex's reluctance to indulge saves his life when a grenade kills everyone gathered around the board, including Vivia. The assassin is quickly dispatched himself, leaving Essex with nothing to go on but a list of names that turns out to be a group of expert Quintet players engaged in a private tournament overseen by Grigor (Fernando Rey). At this point it becomes a revenge movie, complete with a cross-off kill list, as Essex enters a tournament of Quintet played without a board in which the people are the pieces and the goal is to wipe each other out. The players on the list, including the conflicted but ambitious expert Ambrosia (after Images and 3 Women, Altman got to indulge his Bergman obsession further by casting Bibi Andersson), with whom Essex strikes up an unlikely allegiance. Naturally, alliances turn out to be unreliable and everyone is after Newman...making him yet another science fiction hero boldly striking out against the established system.

In Buffalo Bill, Altman cast Newman as a pathetic charlatan playing a hero in a romantic setting (the old west); in Quintet, Newman is a reluctant hero in an unromantic setting. Cody is a womanizing lout whose sexual impotence is symbolized in a scene where he unsuccessfully shoots at a tiny caged bird. Essex is established as virile despite his age (he has a young, beautiful companion, miraculously pregnant in a society where all women are thought to have become barren) and marvels when he sees a majestic bird in flight: a sign of hope that's soon to be extinguished. Both are failed trackers - buffalo and seals respectively - but whereas Essex, an optimist, is a man who "hunts seals where there are no seals" (is that like the plane in North by Northwest that dusts crops where there ain't no crops?), Bill, an opportunist, can't find an Indian who is right in front of him ("Any tracker will tell you if you don’t know what you’re after you’d best stay home," Ned Buntline offers.) By all evidence, Essex was a more traditionally heroic role for Newman, although if Buffalo Bill turned the lovable Newman into an impotent, racist, delusional cad, Quintet drains him of all discernable charm, and this time it doesn't come off as playing against type. Even his blue eyes that shone so brilliantly in Buffalo Bill have turned a milky gray to match the desolate lighting design- he looks like he's aged twenty years in the three since Bill. Once he loses his companion, he betrays nothing beyond the motivation to discover what's going on. It's understandable why Newman would want to be in the movie - it's an off-beat premise and without a huge ensemble he is unequivocally the focus of the film - but his character's job is to do practically nothing until the end of the movie, when he doesn't so much take revenge as defend himself from being killed. There are plenty of characters but no familiar faces from the director's stable: besides Newman and Vittorio Gassman (who was in A Wedding), these are all first-time Altman actors. It's as if Altman warned his usual merry pranksters like Elliott Gould and Shelley Duvall away from the project to protect them from its unmerciful bleakness, although ironically his giant casts in films like Nashville and Buffalo Bill never threaten to mechanize the characters in a way that Quintet purposely sets out to do. The performances of Newman and the other actors are so subdued and defeated, and they're shot in such dark tones as to literally blend in with the neutral backgrounds, that they practically disappear in Quintet's remote world rather than stick out as Altman's characters so often do. The zoom shots that find the characters are confining where they are usually liberating, although, through one dubious and glaring stylistic choice, Altman actually focuses on actors here more than ever...

Like 3 Women, Altman claimed that Quintet was based on a (presumably pot-infused) dream, and like that previous Fox release its aesthetic is honed into the disconnected unpredictablity of a fever dream. Notably, Buffalo Bill features an actual fever dream of Cody being visited by the spirit of Sitting Bull that doesn't feel anything like a dream; 3 Women, the proceeding production, maintained a hallucinatiory sense throughout. It works better in 3 Women, where Altman could manipulate the familiarity of modern sets and make something like a swimming pool seem otherwordly - Quintet had to establish a world salvaged from the former "Man and his World" exhibition at the abandoned Expo '67 site in Montreal where Altman and his crew set up shop. Both films have lots of scenes set in hotel rooms, but the term is loosely applied to what look more like frozen storage closets in Quintet. Warping the commonplace to seem surreal is an easy way to captivate an audience and guide them into the weird world of the film, but it takes work to create a futuristic setting out of a bizarre "found" location (Altman had utilized the best of both worlds by turning the Astrodome into the labyrinth habitat of Brewster McCloud.) So to help visualize the dreamlike tone, Altman made the questionable decision to smear the corners of his camera lens with vasoline, creating a weird soft gel around the image so that the characters are constantly encircled in a foggy iris shot. This has the double effect of making it seem like the world is so cold even the camera has iced over, but even that angle doesn't make the movie seem any less dated. Soft focus was a staple of the 70's, and to suffuse DP Jean Boffety's already hazy photography - blown out in the white exteriors and muddy in the dark interiors - with this lens effect was sure way to ensure the film would never transcend its place in time. Not to mention of course that it's a chore on most viewer's eyes to try to compensate for the blurry edges of the screen. It's also out of Altman's comfort zone: instead of having free reign to locate a face in the crowd or emphasize a moment, the director's zooms slide in and out of the foggy edges to take the shot to what's already been established as its focal point by the bright bullseye framing.

Not that there isn't plenty worth looking at. The impressive production design by Leon Ericksen (who also did McCabe and Images and worked in different positions on six other Altman movies including special makeup effects artist in Brewster McCloud, which must mean he was the one responsible for turning Rene Auberjonois into a bird) makes good use of the location and adds a number of pre-made props and weapons. It's admittedly a little gaudy - in fact, it's surprising that De Laurentiis didn't produce this movie considering the garish art direction. A directory of mirrors, suspended and spinning off the floor, is a cool concept until you realize it's little more than an arty mall map; still, the webs of shattered glass is a great touch. A "found" piece of set decoration that's hard to accept with a straight face are the enlarged photo tapestries of various stages of human suffering, pretentious photojournal snapshots adorning the holy chamber (leftover from the "Man and His World" exhibit) that serve as background to Grigor and his harangues on humanity (Woody Allen appears to almost parody this production design in Stardust Memories, released the following year.) I'm willing to cut Altman slack since finding these admittedly neat drapings must have proved too great a temptation not to include, but they are distracting (he ended up transporting them back to his New York apartment after production.) Buffalo Bill is set largely outdoors but feels confined to Cody's office where the character constantly returns to retreat into his "real" self, but the indoor enclosures of Quintet seem limitless as Altman traverses his mammoth indoor set, seeking out the civilization confined to the tiny areas of the city, one reduced to abstract images and fading sculptures - the fragments of memory. Forget Zardoz - Quintet is more like Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, which came out the same year: in terms of pacing, production design and approach to character, the two films have a lot in common (although the way Tarkovsky bills actors under occupation rather than their character name - Stalker, Writer and Professor - is something that movie shares with Buffalo Bill.)

Speaking of similarities, although Buffalo Bill is the western, Quintet is the movie more akin to McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Set in a half-built/half-disappeared town in the middle of a desperate, unwielding winter where people do what they can to forget their miserable existence, it's almost a sequel to McCabe set in the far future. Altman said of Quintet, "It's the same thing as a western.* The guy comes into town after being gone for a long time and the town's changed and he's the hero." Of course McCabe opens with its hero riding into town, and the first sound we hear, over the Warner Brothers logo, is a chilling wind (the constant, overwhelming ambience of Quintet's soundtrack), followed by the first lyrics of Leonard Cohen's "The Stranger's Song": "It's true that all the men you knew were dealers who said they were through with dealing every time you gave them shelter." Essex is a former "dealer" in the Quintet circle, the stranger who wants to "trade the game he plays for shelter" for his miraculously pregnant companion, the religious connotations of which perfectly match Cohen's lyric describing "Joseph looking for a manger." Once he's in town, the first thing John McCabe does is wordlessly introduce poker to the miners; afterwards there are constant games being played, serving as the same sort of distraction from the desolate living conditions of avid Quintet competitors. Both films were shot in Canada (McCabe in British Columbia, Quintet on St Helen's Island off Montreal); interestingly, the town of the past was built for the film (new), the town of the future was found and salvaged (old.) Altman filled the town of Presbyterian Church with actors of various backgrounds and allowed them to use their natural accents to highlight the founding of America by multiple nationalities. Quintet is similarly peopled by international stars from Spain, Italy, France and Sweden, presumably because Altman wanted to show that survivors of whatever holocaust befell the earth would come from different parts of it. The most unmistakable visual connection between the two films is the snow**, the world of each practically lost beneath it. As are people: just as a mortally wounded McCabe is swallowed up by the blizzard, a bloodthirsty St. Christopher meets his end in a sudden avalanche that buries him in the oppressive whiteness (this also sets up a surprising character moment: just when you think Christopher's death is shown to be accidental by the director to avoid having Essex do the deed himself - surely he's too noble for that kind of thing, even in self-defense - in the very next scene Essex slits Ambrosia's throat without hesitation before she can pull her own knife; like McCabe unexpectedly dispatching his assassins before succumbing to his wounds.) The threat of death is directly tied into the cold, indifferent landscape of both movies, and danger is pervasive (moreso in Quintet: McCabe, like Nashville and Buffalo Bill, ends with a violent death while Quintet opens with one and is followed by several others as the stakes go up.) St. Christopher and the other "hunters" playing the game are like the similarly fur-clad assassins in McCabe - in fact, the first victim of assassination in Quintet is Thomas Hill, the actor who played lead killer Archer and performed the final assassination in McCabe. In what almost seems like a foreshadowing of the ubiquitous pack of dogs feasting on frozen bodies in Quintet, after the killer "Breed" is shot in the back by McCabe and crawls across a patch of snow to his demise on the cold floor, a large dog ominously approaches his corpse. The most innocent individual of each respective film, Keith Carradine's Cowboy and Brigitte Fossey's Vivia, end up in the icy drink, baptised in the bitter cold. McCabe, vague about his true name, and Essex, who goes undercover using a false one, are both reluctant heroes, as opposed to Bill Cody who wants so desperately to be one...it makes them more likable. Furthermore, Quintet doesn't feel like it's trying to remind the audience of McCabe the way Buffalo Bill does - all those two movies have in common are a weird emphasis on a music boxes.

Whether or not he was consciously trying to recall McCabe, Altman had other intentions going into Quintet...not all of them exactly worthwhile. Ambrosia accuses Essex of "trying to find a meaning where there is none," applicable enough to a filmmaker trying to use a movie about a board game to make a Big Statement. Had Quintet been successful, could we have expected a hospital melodrama set around a group of people playing Operation, or a movie about gluttonous fat dudes who occasionally break out a beat-up box with Candyland inside? (I guess we're now expecting a ton of board game adaptations like Ridley Scott's Monopoly, but I doubt any of the characters in the film will actually be sitting around rolling the dice and buying up property.) During a speech to his congregation, St. Christopher breaks life down into five parts and flatly states that "life is a game of stages with a 'limbo' center you can comfortably stay in without risking anything" (the limbo center being an actual part of the board game itself), boldly stating the theme with which Altman wants to tie his movie together: what's the point of a safe and sheltered life free of danger? Yes, that's the ultimate board game subtext of Quintet, that fear of death is what keeps us all going. The idea of taking risks and the thrill of danger is relevant to Altman and his image as an outsider against the studios, but as the subject of a science fiction movie it's kind of obvious and - sorry to use this word to describe a theme centered around a board game but - played. In this sequence, Quintet becomes the same kind of portentous sermon as Buffalo Bill, transparent and tedious. You also have to wonder, if Altman really did equate the elation derived from life's perils with the risks he took in his own career, does that mean he was pro-Quintet? While he undoubtedly sees the death of Vivia and her unborn child as tragic, does he shrug at the same time and admit "Dem's the shakes?" Does he admire the game or condemn it?

I'd say it's both, because Altman's interest in life and board games isn't too far from his obsession with gambling, so thoroughly explored in the great California Split. As in that movie, Altman acknowledges the ultimate emptiness of risking it all for the thrill of the game - and the hollow dissatisfaction of actually winning - while simultaneously appreciating the reason to play, for "the heat of the adrenalin rushing through your body!" Altman loved gambling and took a risk with every project he was involved in during that glorious decade; it makes sense that Quintet would come at such a critical moment in Altman's longest losing streak, and the fact that he didn't compromise and do something safe was at once courageous and practical, since the Altman version of playing safe (Buffalo Bill, A Wedding) wasn't working and gambling on his next project was his only option. That he crapped out with this approach is what ultimately led to his string of ultra-safe 80's output, low-budget theatrical adaptations that took no risks and remained blissfully, unremarkably in the "limbo" zone. That's why it's hard not to be disappointed by Altman's return to glory in the 90's, where he essentially moved up only one space back to normal "safe Altman" instead of two spaces to "risky Altman" (with the exception of one late career film, written about in our Little-Loved Altman series.) Quintet's tagline is "One man against the world," which is how Altman saw himself at the time it was made: like Essex, he was forced to jump through the hoops of the establishment. Altman used to be a junkie for making movies and his extreme rolls of the dice - Brewster McCloud, Images, 3 Women - are for all their flaws thrilling to experience. As for a movie like Buffalo Bill, which has a specific agenda and hits all the right strings in its obvious aims, it's hard to credit it with anything beyond the feeling that yeah, it more or less hits all the right chords...but so what?

As something of a postscript I have to admit, if I haven't already made it obvious, that I'm something of a closet Quintet fan. It doesn't come near the shore of the inarguable mastery of California Split or Thieves Like Us, but I'm willing to say it taps into the same unique strangeness of 3 Women and in a way I prefer it over the overblown epics like Nashville. Also it would feel wrong to try and justify my love of Brewster McCloud in all its disheveled glory without admitting that Quintet is itself an interesting mess. Sure, I wish the acting was better, that the costumes weren't so cheesy, that it was 4 hours long instead of just 2 and that it wasn't designed to be so brutally, unflinchingly painted in despair. At the end of the day, you've got to admire the balls it takes to expect an audience to sit and watch people play an abstract board game with weird rules for two hours, and as much as I watch the movie thinking "jesus, this is so fucking stupid," watching it again for this article made me realize there are a lot of things I thought I hated that actually work when you think about them. Like the little scroll on which the kill list is written and ye old calligraphy the names are spelled out in - ridiculous, but then I realized: this is just pre-dating the D & D and Magic the Gathering geeks whose lives revolve around a stupid roll-playing game. These guys are gaming nerds! Of course they're going to have stupid-looking Renaissance Fair props and costumes! They even collect trinkets, the losers. The stupid character names could possibly relate to the playing tokens - one from Redstone's collection looks like a red stone, there could very well be one in the shape of a gold star, and St. Christopher and Grigor in this context makes me think of medallions or trinkets in the semblance of the namesakes. So they're precursors to the skyrimruler669s of the world who self-apply the most unabashedly nerdy names you can imagine (this doesn't excuse the ridiculous character names, but at least it makes them seem relevant; I can't explain or excuse "Essex" or "Ambrosia.") Even the much-derided foggy framing works as a homage to the iris shots of old silent movies, blurring the edges of the film so that you can't see who might be sneaking up on a character because the audience's peripheral vision has been compromised ("interior claustrophobia" is how Altman once described it.) It's not as successful a gamble as flashing the negative of McCabe (the result of which also works for some people better than others), but it's still a gamble, gotta respect that. I still struggle with the presence of the Man and His World murals, although they do look cool, I guess.

Since I enjoy board games and probability games in particular, it's hard not to be intrigued by the one Altman invented for Quintet (Fox allegedly intended to release an actual board game, those plans were obviously scrapped in light of the film's stinky performance; the rules of Quintet are posted online.) I love the aesthetics of the board itself, that there are a variety - nice ones for the "rich" people, makeshift ones for "poor" people - and its pentagonal shape, modeled after the city itself. The most interesting aspect of the game is its inclusion of a "Sixth Man," a player who sits out during the main stage of the game yet tries to manipulate the others so that the remaining player - who must face the Sixth Man once his opponents are defeated - will be the easiest to defeat. The subtle twist of the film is that Ambrosia has been the "sixth man" all along, that she's surmised that Essex is the weakest player and therefore pits the theoretically most dangerous (St. Christopher) after him, possibly knowing that an experienced seal hunter has a better chance out in the ice than a pedantic prophet, and saves Essex for her last victim. What she couldn't guess is that Essex is in fact ready to kill, in order to survive: what hope remains inside of him prompts him to kill to live. Quintet is also probably the closest we'll ever come to a film realization of Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, about a 25th century society centered around playing a game that is so elusive and sophisticated it takes years of study just to understand the rules - in particular, the study of music. The score of Quintet, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra (prominently featured in A Perfect Couple), seems an odd choice at first considering the movie's lack of tension or action, until you realize (or read about it, since I don't know shit about music) the recurrence of five within the rhythm. Altman's five Fox films make up a quintet, and to examine them is to ask which Altman you prefer: crowd-pleasing, scrawling epic or pretentious art movie? Again there's that frustration: what about Altman works? Quintet lacks the little moments of brilliance that make his more popular films stand out, but I think it might work better overall. Like Brewster McCloud or A Perfect Couple, I think I kind of love it, but would never leave the statement at that without several tedious minutes of "but I acknowledge that this and that and such are indefensible." I'm sure there are people who feel the same way about Buffalo Bill, in fact probably more than those willing to go to bat for Quintet. Buffalo Bill has its defenders. I'm not sure that's the case with Quintet.

The director: Robert Altman
The movie: Buffalo Bill & the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976)
Why so out of place in director's filmography? An obvious and uninteresting satire that relies too heavily on elements from the director's previous work.
Why the director strayed: Playing it safe and repeating what worked in the past may be a smart move for most filmmakers, but for one willing to explore and risk the way Altman did in the 70's this turned out to be the worst possible mistake.
Scale of embarrassment for the director: 6/10, and only because it's the one movie Altman made in the 70's that I don't really like.
His triumphant return to form: His next film, 1977's 3 Women (although from a critical and commercial consensus it wouldn't be until The Player in 1992.)

The director: Robert Altman
The movie: Quintet (1979)
Why so out of place in director's filmography? A self-indulgent, humorless science fiction drama notably lacking in "that Altman feeling."
Why the director strayed: As with all the Fox films, an attempt at trying something different to relieve frustration over that old Altman magic failing him following a progressive series of flops.
Scale of embarrassment for the director: Quintet has its haters. I'm not one of them. 0/10.
His triumphant return to form: His next film, 1979's A Perfect Couple (although from a critical and commercial consensus it wouldn't be until The Player in 1992.)

Ensemble (gathering or group or town/city), no clear lead character:
Nashville
A Wedding*
HealtH*
Short Cuts*
Pret-a-Porter*
Cookie's Fortune
Gosford Park*
A Prairie Home Companion

Ensemble (gathering, group or town/city), centered around lead character(s):
M*A*S*H
McCabe & Mrs. Miller*
Buffalo Bill & the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson*
Popeye
The Player
The Company

Focus on lead character, large supporting cast:
The Long Goodbye
A Perfect Couple*
O.C. and Stiggs
Tanner '88
Tanner on Tanner
Kansas City*
Dr. T and the Women

Intimate, fewer characters:
That Cold Day in the Park
Images*
Thieves Like Us*
California Split
3 Women*
Quintet*
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
Streamers
Secret Honor
Fool for Love
Beyond Therapy*
Vincent & Theo
The Gingerbread Man

* = Altman credited as writer

The Company by Eric Pfriender
Dr. T and the Women by Marcus Pinn
HealtH by Stu Steimer
O.C. and Stiggs by Christopher Funderburg
A Perfect Couple by John Cribbs
Popeye by Paul Cooney
Prêt-à-Porter by Christopher Funderburg
A Wedding by Christopher Funderburg