In order to attain power, every nation, group, large culture or what-have-you has to have a slave class. And the slave class of America is the middle class.
– Robert Altman
Though it was not readily apparent at the time, A Wedding marked the beginning of the end of Robert Altman’s most fertile filmmaking period. His sinking fortunes coincided with the waning days of the Hollywood Renaissance, already effectively done in by ‘high concept’ blockbusters (e.g. Spielberg’s Jaws and George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977)), right-wing, crypto-racist feel-good movies (e.g. John G. Avildsen’s Sylvester Stallone vehicle, Rocky (1976)), and the rise of the new studio movie mogul (e.g. Paramount’s Barry Diller, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner). The twilight of the New American Cinema was also coincident with the dissolution of the American counterculture from which it derived its iconoclastic energy and artistic verve. Trends in the filmmaking industry reflected larger socio-economic shifts emerging in the late 1970s. By this point the politico-cultural progressivism of the 1960s was already a distant memory, nullified by post-Vietnam disillusionment, protracted economic doldrums, deindustrialisation, the concomitant decline of the labour movement and the faltering presidency of Jimmy Carter – all of which were setting the stage for a reactionary-corporatist Thermidor fronted by former B-movie actor and GE pitchman Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan’s ascendancy would steer the country hard-a-starboard politically and render the cultural climate increasingly inimical to subversive, visionary filmmakers like Altman who refused to make formulaic genre pictures.
Quintet (1979)
As the country quietly but inexorably moved to the Right at the end of the 1970s Altman spent the last years of the pre-Reagan era digging himself deeper into a hole, career-wise. Always an embattled figure within his industry, and increasingly disenchanted with mainstream America, Altman was in a decidedly sombre mood in the early months of 1978, as his 77-year-old father, B.C., lay dying of cancer (Altman’s mother had died in 1976).
1 It was in these circumstances that Altman hatched his next film after
A Wedding: in his words, ‘a grim Grimm’s fairy tale’ (in Sterritt 2000: 90) entitled
Quintet. The idea for the movie came to Altman in a hotel room in Rome. He later told Richard Combs and Tom Milne that he overheard an indistinct conversation in the suite next door while peering out on a distant courtyard where two men were conversing: ‘So I was watching one thing and hearing something else; and the idea came that if these people were plotting an assassination, and those I was watching were its victims…where did that put me?’ (in Sterritt 2000: 102). Altman initially envisioned
Quintet as ‘a kind of surrealistic thriller’ set in ‘the underbelly of Chicago, looking kind of like
Odd Man Out or
The Third Man’ (ibid.). He wanted Walter Hill to write and direct but, as he told Charles Michener, ‘it became more about life and death, and how you can’t have one without the other.
It deals with the death of a culture’ (emphasis added) (in Sterritt 2000: 90).
As was by now his customary modus operandi, Altman sold the film to 20th Century Fox based on nothing more than a short treatment which would soon be rendered unrecognisable or, more likely, discarded altogether. He then had his new agent, Sam Cohn, hire a writer to develop his rather nebulous conceit into a script. Accordingly, Lionel Chetwynd, a British-Canadian screenwriter best known for his adaptation of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), was contracted to pen a novella on which a screenplay could be based. Altman hated Chetwynd’s work, castigated and fired him, replacing him with A Wedding co-writer Patricia Resnick, who found herself baffled by murky subject matter that no one could quite understand. Altman also rejected Resnick’s version as unsatisfactory. Ultimately, the script was overhauled and finished by Frank Barhydt, the son of an old Calvin Films associate from Kansas City. What finally emerged from such a tortuous and confused gestation process can best be described a post-apocalyptic-existentialist sci-fi fable set in a new Ice Age that may or may not be happening on planet Earth. As John Kenneth Muir notes:
The underlying idea for Quintet’s post-apocalyptic world arises out of the scientific and media history of the 1970s. In the early years of the disco decade, scientists began to become aware of a cooling trend on Earth, one that existed between the years 1945 and 1975, roughly. Popular news outlets jumped on the idea that a new ice age could be dawning, replete with a re-glaciation of the planet. In summer of 1974, Time magazine featured an article called ‘Another Ice Age,’ and worried about a ‘global climactic upheaval’ as the ‘interglacial period’ that had nurtured and nourished mankind for all his history came to an abrupt end. In 1975, Newsweek followed-up with an equally alarming article called ‘The Cooling World.’ A hot seller at book-vendors in the same era was called The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of a New Ice Age [Ballantine Books, 1977]. (N.d.: n.p.)
As
Quintet evolved into a kind of futuristic-primeval science fiction opus, Chicago ceased to be a suitable shooting location. Associate producer Allan Nicholls, a Montreal native, suggested his hometown in the dead of winter as a setting more amenable to the dystopic vision Altman was seeking. Locations were scouted there and Altman finally opted to shoot most of the film in and around the crumbling remains of the ‘Man and His World’ pavilions of the 1967 Montréal World’s Exposition (aka ‘Expo ’67’).
2 Under the supervision of Altman’s trusted production designer Leon Erikson, crews were able to transform the dilapidated Expo structures into a convincingly bleak cityscape in its snowy death throes. To further enhance the sense of a world long submersed in deep cold, streams of water were continually sprayed on the buildings in sub-freezing temperatures to keep the ominous set draped in thick layers of ice (making for an usually dangerous set). To accentuate the desolate mood supplied by the setting, Altman and his French New Wave cinematographer, Jean Boffety (who shot
Thieves Like Us) avoided an anamorphic format in favour of a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. They used diffusion filters and specially made filters (dubbed ‘O’ filters) on zoom lenses in order to create a circular deep-focus area in the centre of the lens while the periphery remained blurred: an iris effect ‘to keep you in a kind of interior claustrophobia’, as Altman put it (in Delson 1979: 35). The film’s opening and concluding scenes were shot in thirty-degrees-below-zero weather amidst the Arctic wastes near Frobisher Bay in the Northwest Territories now known as Nunavut (see Delson 1979: 24).
While creating a convincing and deeply evocative
mise-en-scène, Altman was able to assemble a first-rate international cast: Paul Newman, Vittorio Gassman, Fernando Rey, Bibi Andersson, Brigitte Fossey and Nina Van Pallandt. Unfortunately these formidable resources are placed at the service of a largely incomprehensible storyline based on a board game invented by Altman. Paul Newman plays Essex, a seal-hunter returning to his icebound home city after an absence of twelve years with his pregnant companion, Vivia (Brigitte Fossey) in order to reunite with his brother, Francha (Thomas Hill). The reunion proves to be short-lived, however. A gambler named Redstone (Craig Richard Nelson) throws a bomb into Francha’s apartment, killing Francha, his family and Vivia. Redstone is, in turn, killed by another gambler named St. Christopher (Vittorio Gassman): a murder witnessed by Essex, who then assumes Redstone’s identity and ventures into the Hotel Electra, a gambling resort in another sector of the city, to try and discover why Vivia and Francha were murdered. Thereafter Essex is caught up in Quintet, a complicated pentagonal board game for six players that is the culture’s central pastime and fixation – evidently the way that inhabitants of a dying society generate some semblance of existential purpose and urgency in an otherwise spiritually annihilating landscape. But Quintet is more than just a game. Essex soon discovers that moves on the board dictate parallel moves in the real world and that the object of the game is to kill or be killed; the last player left alive ‘wins’. After a bewildering series of complex cat-and-mouse manoeuvrings that take up most of the picture, the stalwart (and largely affectless) Essex does indeed emerge alive and victorious. A far more desolate version of Luigi Corelli at the end of
A Wedding, Essex opts to leave the dying and death-obsessed Gesellschaft of the frozen city and venture back out into the open tundra from which he emerged. Grigor (Fernando Rey), Quintet’s chief referee, warns Essex, ‘You’ll freeze to death.’ Essex replies, ‘You may know that. I don’t.’
Though it sounds intriguing in the abstract, Quintet makes for an excruciatingly dull viewing experience – so visually and emotionally austere, so dreary, uninvolving and glacially paced that it is virtually unwatchable. Few critics could find anything good to say about it. Pauline Kael (hitherto an Altman fan) characterised Quintet as unintentional self-parody, ‘like a Monty Python show played at the wrong speed’ (1979: 100). David Denby deemed the film ‘awesomely bad…a muffled, private, proudly inexpressive movie, with monochromatic acting, a grating musical score, and metallic-and-gray sets, all dripping wet, as if the entire movie had been staged in a sewer that was being defrosted’ (1979: 82). Stanley Kauffman pronounced the movie ‘paralyzing stupid’ (1979: 24). Critically, Quintet fared better abroad. French film critic Alain Masson was respectful in his assessment, terming the film ‘a philosophical fable which reminds us of Babylon Lottery by [Jorge Luis] Borges and also confirms the judgment of St. Thomas Aquinas: “If the game were an aim in itself, we would have to play ceaselessly, which is impossible”’ (1979: 2). Likewise, Brazilian film theorist Marcos Soares chose to ignore the film’s abject failure as dramaturgy and take it seriously ‘as an allegory of the system of Hollywood filmmaking (a theme which, understandably became an obsession with Altman), but it can also, of course, be more widely seen as an allegory of the market and the contemporary regime of the global division of labor; in this dystopian world, the forces of production are frozen (literally, in this case), immobilized, driven by invisible and irrational forces which can, indeed, lead to the death of those involved’ (2007: 74–5).
Soares’ interpretation is not without merit;
Quintet conjures the twilight of capitalism as postmodern hell, perhaps post-nuclear, but presumably after the military-industrial-consumerist complex has metastasised over the entire planet, resulting in ecological Armageddon, catastrophic species population decline and a new Ice Age. At the end-game stage of civilisation depicted in the film, after all production and reproduction has ceased, the pathocratic political machinations that inexorably led to disaster are now pursued in their purest and most thanatoid form. Why not? At this point ‘there’s nothing left but the game’ as Francha puts it. Robert Kolker rightly sees
Quintet as ‘the pessimistic, indeed nihilistic extension of
McCabe & Mrs. Miller’, i.e. a vision of the ultimate Hobbesian Gesellschaft: a desperately atomized pseudo-society literally and figuratively devoid of warmth that perversely affirms life by affirming death through the lethal gambling obsession at its centre (thus also evoking and extending the nihilistic compulsiveness that also animates
California Split) (2011: 333). Kolker’s interpretation is confirmed by Altman’s own explanation: ‘We’re showing the destruction of what I consider human, when everything gets down to the smallest set of rules and emotions disappear’ (in Sterritt 2000: 101).
Bleak future: postmodern civilization goes to the dogs in Quintet.
Philosophical conceits notwithstanding, Quintet is indisputably Altman’s least entertaining film, probably one of the least entertaining films ever made. Obsessed with creating a visually stunning world, Altman failed to develop a story commensurate with the setting. In the words of film critic Robert C. Combow, the film takes ‘an unoriginal, lumberingly obvious, altogether hokey script’ and couples it ‘with a visual and audial atmosphere so overpowering that one wishes to forgive the film its lack of narrative integrity out of respect for what it does to the perception and the nerves’ (1979: 47). For Patrick McGilligan, Altman was ‘his usual magnetic self on the set’ but nonetheless displayed ‘vindictiveness…in pushing this film past the money people and his own cast and crew…egomania that that was also self-destructive’ (1989: 470). A less judgemental interpretation: in making Quintet Altman lost control over his creative obsessions or was perhaps offering an unwitting disclosure of his own personal anguish and alienation. The movie exceeded its original budget by almost $1 million for a final production cost of $7.6 million – all a dead loss, as the film made next to nothing at the box office (see Wyatt 1996: 56).
A Perfect Couple (1979)
Making a fiercely pretentious and solipsistic movie that turned out to be as bad as
Quintet probably would have resulted in permanent banishment from the film industry for a less esteemed director. But Altman still had two movies left in his five-picture deal with 20th Century Fox and a modicum of credibility at his disposal; he was able to soldier on with several more offbeat movies before Hollywood stopped returning his calls. The first of these projects, a romantic comedy/musical entitled
A Perfect Couple, would thankfully be a far cry from
Quintet in mood, setting and theme. It had to be; as a resolutely uncommercial work of abstract postmodern negation,
Quintet marked an aesthetic terminus. Altman’s only choice was to move back toward something resembling commercial filmmaking. Usually he started with an idea; this time Altman began with actors and built an idea around them. While he was making
A Wedding Altman was struck by the refreshing contrast between Paul Dooley’s hangdog face and his considerable acting talent and decided that he would create a starring vehicle for him. Initially Sandy Dennis was envisioned as the female lead – the part was written for her – but she had to drop out after it was discovered that Dooley was severely allergic to the dander of Dennis’s many cats. The role was offered to Shelley Duvall but she declined, so it ultimately went to Marta Heflin, who had a small role in
A Wedding. As Dooley explains: ‘Altman wanted to do a film about people who weren’t conventionally pretty people or the right age or just the way Hollywood would do it. He does most of what he did to say “Fuck you” to Hollywood. He didn’t like conventional, formulaic movies [and] was cynical about the idea he was supposed to do things a certain way. It might be anti-authoritarianism or something’ (in Zuckoff 2009: 333, 334). The film’s musical orientation reiterates
Nashville but actually derives from the involvement of Allan Nicholls, a longtime Lion’s Gate stalwart who had organised Keepin’ ‘Em off the Streets, an amateur soft-rock band (six musicians and nine singers) comprised of former cast members of the musicals
Hair, Godspell and
Jesus Christ, Superstar. Altman filmed performances of the band in Los Angeles just before shooting
A Wedding and decided that he would use a fictive version of the band’s communal life to counterpoint the Dooley/Heflin romance. Accordingly, he and Nicholls developed a story idea ‘about two people meeting from different walks of life. And yet two people firmly involved in family. [For] one of them, the family was a band. For the other, the family was their heritage’ (in Zuckoff 2009: 333). While Altman set out to fashion a more realistic romance that would circumvent Hollywood romantic comedy genre clichés, he also sought to create a variation on
A Wedding by exploring the dramatic possibilities (and ideological implications) in the collision of another two kinds of Gemeinschaft, from different social classes and cultural coordinates. In this case, the communities at odds are a tradition-bound patriarchal Old World family and a counterculture musical commune, i.e. a ‘family’ of unrelated persons who coalesce around a common passion and purpose. These two cultures exert opposing pressures that keep the lovers at bay
à la Romeo and Juliet and present another version of the Apollonian/ Dionysian conflict previously explored in
That Cold Day in the Park.
Alex Theodopoulos (Dooley) meets Sheila Shea (Heflin) through a computer video dating service called ‘Great Expectations’: a plot device that points up modern society’s increasing commodification of romance (while allowing for a punning allusion to Dickens, suggesting ‘Dickensian’ cultural impoverishment).
3 A lonely, fiftyish antiques dealer, Alex still lives at home in protracted pre-Oedipal thrall to his autocratic father, Panos Theodopoulos (Titos Vandis) and to the rigidly Puritanical codes of conduct that govern his aristocratic Greek family. Sheila is a pop singer. Far younger (early thirties) and poorer than Alex, she hails from a seemingly very different world: a raucous musical commune of young performers living together and practicing their music in the loft of a former industrial building in the Little Tokyo district of Los Angeles. But there are overarching commonalties. Ostensibly free-spirited, Sheila’s band has its own despotic patriarch, Teddy (Ted Neeley), an egotistical taskmaster who rules over his troupe by dispensing a steady stream of orders and insults. The Theodopoulos clan also revolves around music – but of a very different sort; Panos is passionate about the classical variety and Alex’s younger semi-invalid sister, Eleasua (Belito Mereno), is a cellist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Alex and Sheila quickly fall in love but, in keeping with ineluctable romance genre imperatives, they separate and reunite a number of times before the film’s
dénouement. As one would expect, Alex finds it difficult to adjust to Sheila’s allegedly plebeian musical tastes and hippie lifestyle while she finds Alex’s timorous and stodgy conservatism tiresome. Alex’s father’s stern disapproval of Sheila makes matters worse. In the end, though, Alex is liberated from his father’s repressive clutches by the sudden death of his sister, Eleasua, evidently from a heart ailment. He quits the family mansion (shades of Luigi Corelli in
A Wedding) and the film comes full circle as Alex and Sheila reunite at a Philharmonic concert: site of their first date.
The central conceit of the romantic comedy is, of course, the notion that love conquers all. This is especially true as regards differences in social class, which are supposedly nullified when lovers from disparate backgrounds unite, e.g. It Happened One Night (1934) or more recently, Saturday Night Fever (1977), Overboard (1987), Working Girl (1988), Pretty Woman (1990) and Maid in Manhattan (2002). Hollywood wants audiences to have their cake and eat it too; typically the poorer but usually wiser and more virtuous member of the couple surmounts the snobbery and class prejudice of his/her lover (and/or rivals and would-be in-laws) and is ultimately assimilated into the romantic partner’s wealthy world: a wish-fulfillment fantasy of circumventing the class structure by marrying into money that bears almost no relation to reality. In uniting people from markedly different class origins, the inter-class romantic comedy also attempts to nullify a host of tensions associated with those differing class positions (e.g. stark inequalities in autonomy, dignity, comfort, health, schooling, etc.): a move that serves the dominant American ideology of class denial by effacing the reality of class altogether. To Altman’s credit, A Perfect Couple repudiates the utopian ideology of the inter-class romance genre by reversing the standard assimilation motif. In the end, Alex forsakes his wealthy family to join Sheila’s bohemian counterculture; both can have love but neither can have love and money. A Perfect Couple also refuses to nullify the cultural differences embodied by Alex and Sheila’s respective ‘families’; in contradistinction to hegemonic ‘melting pot’ mythology, those differences remain intact, abrasive and seemingly impervious to change.
As Gayle Sherwood Magee points out, A Perfect Couple was one of a spate of films developed to cash in on the popularity of quasi-disco-style musicals in the late 1970s after Saturday Night Fever and Grease (1978) scored huge box office successes and their soundtrack albums went platinum (2014: 134). But like those other films – The Wiz (1978), Thank God It’s Friday (1978), Sgt. Pepper (1978) – A Perfect Couple garnered tepid reviews and did poor box office. Though interesting as an anti-genre exercise, the movie fails to cohere, mostly because the relationship between Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin lacks the necessary chemistry to bring the story alive; as more than one critic noted, Heflin’s performance was decidedly lacklustre. Furthermore, Altman and Allan Nicholls constantly interrupt the flow of the romance narrative with too many musical numbers that are merely innocuous at best. In the final analysis, A Perfect Couple remains a minor film in Altman’s oeuvre – mildly amusing but not distinctive or distinctively Altmanesque.
Having ventured into science fiction and revisionist romantic comedy Altman made HealtH, his fifteenth feature project, and after Nashville and A Wedding, his third stab at a large-ensemble satire of the contemporary American scene. Quintet’s script doctor, Frank Barhydt, who also worked as a freelance journalist, developed the idea while working for a health magazine. Written with help from actor Paul Dooley, HealtH is allegedly about the election for the president of a health food convention but is really a filmic allegory about American electoral politics. With the 1980 presidential election looming when it was made, the film parodies its own historical moment but also references the 1952 and 1956 elections that pitted conservative Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower against liberal Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson (Eisenhower trounced Stevenson in ’52 and won by an even larger popular vote and electoral margin in ‘56). The scion of an aristocratic Illinois family, Stevenson was a Princeton-educated lawyer, an articulate intellectual offering lofty ideas for progressive social change, but the American people much preferred Ike’s unassailable war record and plain-speaking, folksy pragmatism. A liberal Democrat who subscribed to Stevensonian ideals, Altman saw Stevenson’s electoral defeats as evidence of deep-seated American anti-intellectualism – the triumph of shallow charm over substantive policy positions – and an early sign that American politics was being inexorably fused with, and degraded by, the phony populism of show business spectacle, a process that would accelerate with the full emergence of television in the 1960s. By early 1979 Altman could see that history was likely to serve up a dichotomy similar to the Eisenhower/Stevenson rivalry, with the somewhat remote and cerebral Jimmy Carter, a liberal Democrat, likely to run for re-election against an allegedly charismatic Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, the former Hollywood B-movie actor well-schooled in media-constructed populism camouflaging an elitist and pro-corporate agenda.
Nashville had already dramatised Altman’s politics-as-theatre conceit, so Altman needed a different setting to revisit the issue. Barhydt’s health food convention was deemed as good as any and more topical than most, as the country was in the midst of a health food fad. As he had done for the second half of California Split, Altman confined all the action to a grand hotel – the traditional site for large conventions – in this case, the Don CeSar Beach Hotel at St. Pete Beach on Florida’s Gulf Coast: a palatial 40,000-square-foot edifice in Mediterranean and Moorish styles opened in 1928 and dubbed ‘the Pink Palace’ or ‘Pink Lady’. Converted into a VA hospital during World War II, the Don CeSar was a vacant and graffiti-strewn derelict by 1969 but was saved from demolition and rehabilitated to its former splendor in the early 1970s. As had been the case with the Houston Astrodome, the ‘Mayflower Campus’, the Mapes Hotel, the Armour Mansion, etc., the Don CeSar Hotel functioned as a gigantic, self-contained theatre space that was also another kind of synecdoche for America. As critic Jim Ridley has noted, ‘Altman didn’t tell stories so much as he built ecosystems on film’ (2015: n.p.).
Despite the unflagging support of studio head Alan Ladd Jr., Altman was in trouble with 20th Century Fox over the commercial failure of his last three pictures. He therefore rushed
HealtH into production as quickly as possible, fearing that the studio would soon pull the plug on his financing. Nonetheless, care was taken to accurately replicate the feel of a real health food convention in the movie; co-writer Barhydt and art director Bob Quinn visited a health food conference in Boston before shooting began and over one hundred health food companies were afforded free product placement to contribute to the authenticity of the
mise-en-scène. Principal photography began on 20 February 1979 and continued until late May.
As one would expect in a large-cast Altman mosaic, a carnivalesque atmosphere, constantly roving camera eye, overlapping dialogue and episodic structure are much in evidence. To accentuate the centrality of television exposure to the political process, the film starts poolside at the Don CeSar Beach Hotel with talk show host Dick Cavett (playing himself) doing a TV interview with two women who are vying to be elected president of an organisation called HealtH (an unctuously self-reflexive acronym for ‘Happiness, Energy and Longevity through Health’) at its Florida convention. The underdog candidate is Isabella Garnell (Glenda Jackson), a serious and self-righteous health advocate who inveighs against commercialism and materialism in the manner of Jimmy Carter and Adlai Stevenson. Indeed, she actually quotes Stevenson in her speeches. The front-running candidate is Esther Brill (Lauren Bacall), an 83-year-old virgin afflicted with narcolepsy who nonetheless calls herself ‘the first lady of health’. Smug but intellectually vapid, seemingly robust but actually in dubious health, Brill evokes an aging and tired Dwight Eisenhower (who had a heart attack during his first term) while also suggesting the obtuse but supremely self-assured Ronald Reagan, who would become the oldest president in U.S. history (almost seventy when he took office). During her interview Brill suddenly raises her arm in an involuntary salute and falls into a narcoleptic torpor. Brill’s infirmity, which portends a fundamental detachment from reality, forces Cavett to suspend his show.
4 Also running for president of HealtH ‘on the independent ticket’ is Gil Gainey (Paul Dooley). Gainey represents those occasional third party aspirants who mount a merely symbolic challenge to two-party hegemony (and may also be a specific reference to John B. Anderson, a former Republican who ran as an Independent in 1980 but didn’t win a single precinct in the election). Frozen out of official media coverage, Gainey tries to remedy his status as a nonentity by feigning drowning in the hotel pool – twice. Observing the election process is Gloria Burbank (Carol Burnett), a high-minded and highly-strung White House deputy health advisor acting as the President’s liaison to the convention. Burbank tries to maintain a neutral stance toward the candidates but leans toward the obviously more articulate and principled Isabella Garnell. Gloria Burbank’s foil is Harry Wolff (i.e. ‘hairy wolf’, played by James Garner), Esther Brill’s campaign manager and Gloria’s philandering ex-husband. In a comic-romantic subplot, the lecherous Wolff is always available to come on to his ex-wife at her most vulnerable moments (Gloria suffers from an odd affliction: anxiety causes her to be sexually aroused).
On the evening of the second day of the convention, Colonel Cody (Donald Moffat), a cynical, bombastic right-wing businessman who claims to ‘own’ the entire organisation, arrives at the Hotel to size up Isabella Garnell. The two smoke cigars in Garnell’s suite and engage in a heated partisan debate about political principles (or, in Cody’s case, lack thereof).
5 In the end, Cody concludes that Garnell is rigidly sincere in her left-wing beliefs and therefore hopelessly ill-equipped to engage in the sort of amoral flim-flam indispensable to political success in America: ‘Lady, you have just told me exactly what I want to hear. You are for real. That means you’re no threat to anyone.’ To hedge his bets, though, Cody has hired political dirty tricks specialist Bobby Hammer (Henry Gibson) to deprive Garnell of governmental support. Knowing that sexual scandal is always the
bête noir of liberals, Hammer, masquerading as a transsexual, tries to convince Gloria Burbank that Garnell is also a woman who was born male.
Not content to vet and dismiss Isabella Garnell and to engage in dirty tricks, Cody also mounts a frontal assault on the psyche of Gloria Burbank. On the evening of the third day of the convention, Cody channels business mogul Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) from Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) when he meets privately with Burbank and schools her on the true state of things, i.e. that government is the handmaiden of American business interests, not vice versa: ‘You got no goddamn idea what you’re dealing with…I make policy. I swing elections. You think you got the vote. I control what goes in the ballot boxes…Your work is meaningless. You’re not going to change a thing.’ Cody also implies that he had Dr. Guffy, the most recent president of HealtH, assassinated and issues a thinly veiled threat to Burbank in the same vein. Deeply distraught, Gloria rushes to Harry Woolf’s room for solace and Harry takes full sexual advantage of her disillusionment and terror.
On the morning of the fourth and last day of the convention, Dick Cavett reconvenes his show poolside to televise the announcement of the election results. To no one’s surprise Esther Brill is elected in a landslide. Gloria Burbank and Harry Wolff watch from the balcony of the hotel room where they have just shared the night. Gloria wonders aloud why no one believed (in) Isabella Garnell and Harry sagely replies that ‘no one understood her’. The couple then observe Colonel Cody speaking with Bobby Hammer, who is still in drag. When Cody tries to pay off Hammer for his services with a stock certificate rather than money, as promised, a scuffle ensues. Cody punches Hammer and knocks him into the pool. Harry Wolff identifies Hammer, now sans wig, as a political operative and explains to Gloria that ‘Colonel Cody’ is actually Esther’s crazy but harmless younger brother, Lester Brill. Incensed that Harry didn’t disclose these facts earlier, Gloria curses him and storms off. With their business concluded, the HealtH convention participants disperse while Isabella Garnell makes an unctuous concession speech to which no one pays any attention. A symbolically appropriate hypnotists’ convention (hosted by TV personality Dinah Shore, playing herself) supplants the HealtH convention and the farcical parade that is America’s socio-political culture continues.
Lester Brill’s shrill imitation of William F. Cody mocks right-wing nostalgia for America’s ‘golden age’ of misogynistic individualism and roughshod entrepreneurial agency. It also obviously references
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, to update to the contemporary scene that film’s condemnation of America as the pure show business of empty spectacle, always and only advertising itself as the best of all possible worlds. Robert Kolker observes that the ‘great liar and owner of all things historical proves, in his reincarnation in
HealtH, to be still a fraud. He is not the right-wing lunatic he sounds like, but rather Esther Brill’s crazy brother pretending to be a right-wing lunatic. Everything, finally, is…a perfect illusion, a manipulation of words, images, and individuals in a great, silly game’ (2011: 365). In its sweeping depiction of American politics and culture as now a holographic network of artifices,
HealtH anticipates Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra and simulation: a hyperreal world of signs and images beyond the merely fake to the point of being untethered from reality altogether, whereby the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulacrum, and authenticity becomes a totally meaningless concept. But therein lies the problem;
HealtH relentlessly deconstructs and nullifies itself by featuring a bevy of cartoonish characters behaving foolishly and chewing the scenery – with the notable exception of Sally Benbow (Alfre Woodard), the hotel’s African-American public relations director who observes the convention participants’ antics with the kind of equanimity can only come from long experience with such narcissistic buffoonery. At any rate, Bertolt Brecht’s
Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect) is too much in evidence here; the willing suspension of disbelief that would foster viewer engagement is insistently undermined by the film’s garish, carnivalesque content. Furthermore, an election campaign for a health food convention president at a posh Florida hotel is too localised, static and trivial an affair to convincingly figure for a modern US presidential election campaign which requires prodigious fund-raising, organisation building and endless publicity events all over the country.
Obviously intending the film as a political intervention, Altman wanted to have HealtH in wide release before the 1980 presidential campaign but Alan Ladd Jr., his champion at 20th Century Fox, left the company in a management shake-up and the film was initially shelved. Test screenings in April 1980 in San Francisco, Sacramento, Houston and Boston yielded audience-comment cards that Fox’s new studio head, Norman Levy, characterised as ‘the poorest I’ve ever seen’ (Anon. 1980: 84). After a brief, unsuccessful run in Los Angeles, Fox deemed the film hopelessly uncommercial and opted against any further exhibitions. Incensed at Levy and the new management at Fox (except for Sherry Lansing, who loved the film), Altman took it upon himself to exhibit HealtH at a number of film festivals: exposure that prompted the studio to reconsider and hold another round of preview screenings at the UA Theater in West-wood, Los Angeles in September, 1980. Sparse attendance and negative reviews decisively precluded national release and Altman finally conceded that the film was a lost cause. Though occasionally shown on television and later released on DVD, Altman’s most topical and timely film forfeited its raison d’être because almost no one saw it when it was meant to be seen. HealtH was the last of Altman’s five contracted films for 20th Century Fox: a disappointing association for both parties. Altman’s reputation suffered badly and Fox probably lost at least $10 million on what turned out to be a string of flops – not inconsiderable losses but sustainable in the wake of Star Wars, which eventually earned over $775 million. The studio could withstand a few minor setbacks but was no doubt relieved to have Altman leave the stable.
Popeye the movie had its genesis on 13 May 1977 when Robert Evans, head of production at Paramount Pictures, attended a performance of the hit Broadway musical Annie at the Alvin Theatre on W. 52nd Street in New York City. Enthralled by what he experienced, Evans immediately called his studio in Hollywood to start bidding on the film rights. Columbia Pictures, equally avid to bring Annie to the screen, eventually won a bidding war with Paramount to the tune of $10 million. Disappointed, but undaunted in his desire to make a live-action musical based on comic book characters, Evans learned that Paramount still held all theatrical rights to the Popeye character because the studio had released Popeye cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios (and later Famous Studios) from 1932 to 1957. Evans promptly hired cartoonist-screenwriter Jules Feiffer to write a script but the choice of lead actors and a director would prove more elusive quarry. Evans’ original plan was to have Dustin Hoffman play Popeye opposite Lily Tomlin as Olive Oyl, with John Schlesinger of Midnight Cowboy fame directing. Soon Hal Ashby replaced Schlesinger, Hoffman and Tomlin dropped out, and then Ashby left the project. To replace Hoffman, Evans secured Robin Williams, a young stand-up comedian enjoying phenomenal popularity playing a fast-talking, impish alien on Mork & Mindy, an ABC-TV sitcom that premiered in the fall of 1978. The Olive Oyl role was offered to Gilda Radner of Saturday Night Live fame. As for directors, Paramount wanted Evans to hire a ‘box office director’ – Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols were considered – but, through the auspices of Sam Cohn, Altman’s name was put forward, Evans concurred, and Altman signed on as director in mid-April 1979 (see McGilligan 1989: 491–7).
Altman wasted no time in making
Popeye an Altman film. Of the more than fifty characters that populate Popeye’s adopted village, Sweethaven, eleven were played by performers that Altman had worked with before, most prominent of which were Shelley Duvall, who supplanted Gilda Radner as Olive Oyl, Paul Dooley as Popeye’s hamburger-loving friend, Wimpy, and Donald Moffat as the Taxman (a figure invented by Jules Feiffer – not one of E. C. Segar’s original comic strip characters). Altman stalwarts Allan Nicholls, Robert Fortier, Dennis Franz and David Arkin had smaller roles while Julia Janney, Patty Katz, Diane Shaffer and Nathalie Blossom, i.e. the Steinettes, an
a capella doo-wop quartet featured in
HealtH in vegetable outfits, appear as the baleful Walfleur sisters: Mena, Mina, Mona and Blossom respectively. Altman even pressed his own infant grandson Wesley Ivan Hurt into service, to ‘play’ the foundling baby, Swee’pea. Ray Walston (best known for the TV series
My Favourite Martian) was cast as Popeye’s father, Poopdeck Pappy/the Commodore, and Paul L. Smith, who played the vicious prison warden in
Midnight Express (1978), was cast as Popeye’s brawny nemesis, Bluto. Altman also utilised members of San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus (founded in 1974): Bill Irwin (playing Ham Gravy), Larry Pisoni (Chico), Geoff Hoyle (Scoop) and Peggy Snider (playing Pickelina and credited as Peggy Pisoni). Linda Hunt makes her film debut as Mrs. Oxheart, the ‘mudder’ of Oxblood Oxheart, the fighter (Peter Bray). As for the crucial appointment of musical composer, various composers were considered – Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney, John Lennon – before Altman heeded the urging of Robin Williams and settled on Harry Nilsson, a kindred spirit who was also in a career slump and with a similar reputation for hedonistic excess that had rendered him dubiously employable in Hollywood (see McGilligan, 497–8).
Sweethaven could have been built on a sound stage at Paramount studios in Hollywood but Altman opted for a remote location shoot, this time on the Mediterranean island of Malta, a popular site for movie-making some 6,700 miles from Los Angeles, chosen for a huge salt water tank built there for a prior production, its climate, and sheer distance from meddling studio executives.
6 Working from June to December 1979, an international construction crew of 165 workers supervised by Robert ‘Egg’ Eggenweiler, C. O. ‘Doc’ Erickson and Wolf Kroeger built the seaside village of Sweethaven: nineteen fully enclosed and slightly surreal wooden buildings including a hotel, a schoolhouse, a store, a post office, a church, a sawmill, a tavern and a casino. Attendant structures included sheds, gangways, boardwalks and timber chutes (see McGilligan 1989: 501). Because there is no indigenous lumber on the island, hundreds of logs and several thousand wooden planks had to be trucked across Europe from the Netherlands and then shipped to Malta from Italy. Wooden shingles used in roof construction were brought in from Canada. Eight tons of nails and two thousand gallons of paint were used in the construction process. To protect the set from high seas, a 250-foot breakwater was built around the mouth of Anchor Bay while set dressing involved sinking a number of actually seaworthy vessels to festoon the harbor (see Plecki 1985: 118–20). A new road had to be built to the location. On the bluff above the village workmen constructed the film’s production complex: a plaster shop, make-up and carpentry labs, a wardrobe unit, a rehearsal hall, an editing suite, a production office, a projection room for viewing dailies (flown in from a processing lab in Rome) and a state-of-the-art recording studio where Harry Nilsson and his musicians recorded the dozen songs he wrote that make up the film’s musical score (see McGilligan 1989: 503).
Filming began on 23 January 1980 and wrapped twenty-two weeks later on 19 June (three weeks over schedule and $9 million over-budget, mostly due to construction overruns and delays caused by inclement weather). Cast and crew lived at the Mellieha Holiday Centre, a resort hotel in the nearby village of Mellieha, put in long hours on the set, and, as always, watched rushes and socialised together, seldom leaving the island during principal photography.
7 Robin Williams jokingly called it ‘Stalag Altman’, but among Altman productions, the
Popeye shoot was probably Altman’s most fully realised and intensive approximation of the artists’ Gemeinschaft ideal, achieved extra-diegetically, and a sly realisation of oppressive, infantilising corporate Gesellschaft within the world of the movie. In an interview with Richard Combs and Tom Milne at the time of the film’s release, Altman said that making
Popeye was ‘a chance to create my own environment, which I’d done with
Quintet but that hadn’t worked with audiences or critics’, adding that the denizens of Sweethaven were like America’s docile and bamboozled middle class, ‘being exploited by a dictator [the Commodore] they’ve never seen’ (in Sterritt 2000: 100, 103).
At first blush the small, quaint and otherworldly realm of Sweethaven bears the earmarks of a close-knit peasant community (Gemeinschaft) but signs that it is actually nearer on the societal spectrum to Gesellschaft are amply evident. The film begins with a doctored eighteen-second clip from Max Fleischer’s old black and white cartoon in which Popeye protests that he’s in ‘the wrong movie’: an admonition to viewers to jettison their cartoon genre-associated expectations. Likewise, the film proper (all live action) begins with a long shot of Popeye rowing an open dinghy in dangerously heavy seas and when the film’s title appears on the screen, it is accompanied by lightning and thunder crashing – strangely ominous atmospherics for what is supposed to be innocuous children’s fare. Self-reflexive allusions to two other Altman films provide further hints of a subtly subversive agenda. An initial pan of the village shows that the church perched above it bears more than a passing resemblance to the Presbyterian Church at the centre of its namesake hamlet in
McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Indeed, Popeye arrives at Sweethaven as a seeker, alone and unknown, much like John Q. McCabe when he turns up at Presbyterian Church. As soon as Popeye docks his rowboat at the village pier, a garage door rattles up and the officious Taxman, riding a motorised tricycle (sporting a pennant that resembles the American flag), rolls out to accost the stranger with a long list of petty tariffs. The ascending garage door evokes a theatre curtain rising while quoting a similar image in the opening scene of
Nashville, when a garage door rolls up and a loud-speaker truck for the Hal Phillip Walker campaign emerges to roam the streets. But between the two films, similarity and difference are rendered in equal measure. In
Nashville the canned speech emanating from Walker’s sound truck inveighs against government excess and lack of accountability. In
Popeye, the Taxman on his tricycle is synecdochal for corrupt government bureaucracy in all its confiscatory rapaciousness.
8 Further establishing an image of Sweethaven as a polity closer to Gesellschaft is Nilsson’s ‘Sweethaven Anthem’, which accompanies the opening scene and conveys the sense of an ocean-isolated populace rife with harebrained eccentrics who are happily oblivious to their own entrapment and oppression (i.e. America writ small). Sung by a solemn chorus, the anthem proudly intones that ‘God must love us/ We the people/ Love Sweethaven/ Hurray hurray Sweethaven/ Flags are wavin’/ Swept people from the sea/ Safe from democracy…’ Clearly referencing America with ‘We the people’, the ‘Sweethaven Anthem’ predictably posits religious faith as the ideological foundation for patriotic fervour. More obviously satiric is the bowdlerised catchphrase from Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 war speech about making the world safe for democracy; Sweethaven prides itself on being ‘safe
from democracy’. Much like ‘It don’t worry me’, the Alfred E. Neumanesque refrain at the conclusion of
Nashville, ‘safe from democracy’ is really nothing to celebrate.
The sense that Sweethaven is an exclusionary society of childish and self-centred individuals plays out in Popeye’s interactions with the locals. Numerous ‘Keep Out’ and ‘No Trespassing’ signs greet him at the dock, as does the aforementioned Taxman, and most of the townspeople either ignore him or are overtly hostile – at least during the first half of the movie. Olive Oyl initially treats Popeye with impatient gruffness when he rents a room at the Oyl residence; the Oyl family and their guest boarders (Wimpy and Geezil) gorge at the supper table while Popeye is ignored; a gang of toughs taunt and physically accost Popeye at breakfast at the town café the next morning; the celebrants at Olive Oyl’s engagement party to Bluto that night shun Popeye as if he were an untouchable; later, an angry Bluto attacks and pummels Popeye after Olive Oyl breaks off her engagement with him.
Inasmuch as Sweethaven remains intractably indifferent to him, Popeye must take heroic measures to integrate into its world while also maintaining his own sense of identity and moral integrity. Popeye’s assimilation into the Sweethaven community begins when he tentatively bonds with Olive Oyl over the foundling infant, Swee’pea, left in a wicker basket like some sort of cartoon Moses. This incident occurs right after Olive has rejected Bluto as her suitor, compromising her own heretofore favoured status in Sweethaven and bringing Bluto’s wrath upon her family; he smashes up the Oyls’ house and directs the Taxman to pauperise them. An opportunity for Popeye to publicly prove his worth presents itself soon thereafter when Olive’s brother, Castor Oyl (Donovan Scott), steps into a boxing ring with a gigantic local heavyweight boxer, Oxblood Oxheart (Peter Bray), in a feeble attempt to win a hefty cash prize and redeem his family’s fortunes. Oxheart easily knocks Castor out of the ring, prompting Popeye to take on and defeat the outsised boxer: a feat of athletic prowess and heroism that wins the respect of Sweethaven’s citizens.
If the first half of the film depicts Popeye’s pusillanimous efforts to merely fit into the society of Sweethaven, the second half deals with the growth of his private self, showing Popeye achieving self-integration and maturity by: (i) forging a family with Olive and Swee’pea; (ii) finding and reconciling with his long-lost father, Poopdeck Pappy (aka, the Commodore); (iii) and defeating his nemesis and Shadow Figure, Bluto, once and for all. Popeye’s coming of age thus has psychological, moral and political dimensions.
Having defeated Oxheart, Popeye reprises his role as rescuer and further demonstrates his moral fibre by defending Swee’pea against exploitation. When it’s discovered that Swee’pea can predict the future, Wimpy takes the infant to the ‘horse races’, a carnival game, and uses the baby’s clairvoyance to win money – a selfish violation of childhood innocence that enrages Popeye, who rebukes Wimpy and the townsfolk with the manifesto-like song, ‘I Yam What I Yam’, which includes lines like ‘I never hurts nobodys and I’ll never tell a lie’. Popeye takes Swee’pea out of the Oyls’ house and down to the docks so that he can better protect him there.
9 But Sweethaven isn’t done with Swee’pea (the epitome of innocence) just yet; Bluto snatches the boy, takes him to the Poopdeck Pappy’s ship, and presents him to the curmudgeonly Commodore, promising that he is worth a fortune. Touting his buried treasure as all the wealth he will ever need, the Commodore demurs, prompting the always irascible and now mutinous Bluto to tie him up, kidnap Olive Oyl along with Swee’pea, and set sail for Scab Island, site of the Commodore’s coveted buried treasure. Enter Popeye, in pursuit of Bluto, who encounters the Commodore and realises that he has found his elusive father, Poopdeck Pappy. After initially denying paternity, Pappy effects an uneasy rapprochement with his son, thereby granting Popeye a tentative resolution to what has amounted to a protracted Oedipal crisis. Popeye, Pappy and the Oyl family board Pappy’s ship and pursue Bluto to Scab Island, where a final showdown takes place. During Popeye’s duel with Bluto, Pappy recovers his treasure chest to reveal not pirated gold and jewels, but a collection of sentimental objects from Popeye’s infancy, including a few cans of spinach. At a crucial juncture in the fight with both Bluto and a giant octopus, Pappy supplies Popeye with spinach – a substance he has heretofore abhorred. This time it provides the Herculean strength he needs to vanquish Bluto and the octopus. In the end, Popeye is able to revel both in his victory and the reconstitution of his family, ultimately refusing the interpellation of others, to finally interpellate himself as ‘Popeye the Sailorman’.
Abetted by Harry Nilsson’s wry musical numbers – which are rife with double entendre and full of subversive political sentiments – Altman plays around the edges of the movie to lampoon the squeaky-clean pieties of the cartoon-based musical. He also sneaks in an artful critique of the ethical and political complacencies of Gesellschaft society by characterising Sweethaven’s populace as ignorant, passive and only concerned with the rote satisfaction of daily appetites. Yet the film’s dissident energies are ultimately contained and neutralised by Jules Feiffer’s conservative script, which attributes any social malaise to individual corruption (e.g. a bad apple like Bluto) and recuperates the figure of the Commodore as another version of Daddy Warbucks, i.e. sequestered plutocrat to caring father, as if to suggest that within every rentier-oligarch there is always a rank sentimentalist clamoring to get out. But, of course, a safe and formulaic version of Joseph Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’ is what Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Productions demanded – and got. Altman was hired for his experience and technical expertise, not to make any sort of personal statement.
After four commercial failures in a row, Altman hoped that Popeye would be the kind of unequivocal success that would return him to favour with the major studios. The film grossed $6 million on its opening weekend in the United States (12–14 December 1980), made $32 million in thirty-two days, and eventually earned almost $50 million in domestic box office and $60 worldwide – more than double its budget but nowhere near the blockbuster numbers that Paramount and Disney had expected, so was therefore considered a ‘flop’. Except for a friendly review from Roger Ebert, critical response ranged from tepid to hostile. In the immediate aftermath of Popeye, Altman’s already shaky fortunes plummeted. MGM’s new president, Norbert Auerbach, understandably skittish after the resounding box office fiasco that was Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), cancelled Altman’s next film project, an adaptation of an off-Broadway comedy by James McClure entitled Lone Star after he and Altman quarreled. Another Altman movie project, a woman-centred mystery entitled An Easter Egg Hunt (scripted by That Cold Day in the Park screenwriter Gillian Freeman) had to be abandoned when independent financing from Canada and the UK fell through. Summarily rejected by the major producers and studios as unbankable, Altman was forced to sell Lion’s Gate Films (for $2.3 million) to a production group headed by Jonathan Taplin in July 1981. A few months later, to add injury to insult, Paramount filed a $250,000 lawsuit against Altman for breach of contract for going $9 million over Popeye’s $13 million production budget.
Notes