I don’t know which comes first. Is it the political content that I’m interested in showing? Or is the political content simply the subject of the drama? So it’s a little bit of both of those situations com[ing] together.
– Robert Altman
At the nadir of his fortunes in the film industry, Altman took what he euphemistically characterised as ‘a sabbatical’ from Hollywood and returned to the theatre. He leased (and eventually sold) his home in Malibu and re-located to New York City, where he and his wife, Katherine, had been renting a pied-à-terre at 128 Central Park South as a second home since 1978. Altman’s actual transition to the theatre came about when Leo Burmester, one of the actors involved with Lone Star, brought Altman Rattlesnake in a Cooler, a one-act play by a 32-year-old actor-playwright-performance artist named Frank South. Liking what he read, Altman met with South in New York City and then opted to direct two of his one-act plays – Rattlesnake in a Cooler and Precious Blood – at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater (now known as the Los Angeles Theater Center). Both plays were essentially slice-of-life monologues that explored American Dream aspirations and delusions and involved only four actors (Alfre Woodard, Guy Boyd, Leo Burmester and Danny Darst), a far cry from the massive and costly undertaking that was Popeye. Encouraged by strong reviews in LA, Altman opted to take ‘2 by South’ back to New York as an off-Broadway production at a small venue, St. Clement’s Theater, in the autumn of 1981. Once again the Frank South plays met with acclaim, prompting Altman to videotape them as Two by South for ABC’s Cable Arts Network.
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
Though he had a number of different plays under consideration, Altman’s next theatre project was to stage
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, a 1976 woman-centred memory play by Ohio-based playwright Ed Graczyk that explores the emotional ravages wrought by patriarchy and the perennial human need to dwell in self-protective delusion. For his mostly female cast, Altman turned to several actors he had worked with before – Karen Black, Sandy Dennis and Marta Heflin – but also drew on fresh talent: Sudie Bond, Kathy Bates and the pop singer and TV star, Cher, who had never done any serious acting. After a dozen previews the play opened at the 1,400-seat Martin Beck Theater (now the Al Hirschfeld Theater) in New York City on 18 February 1982. Though he liked ‘2 by South’,
New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich (1982) judged
Come Back to the Five and Dime ‘gimmicky’, confusing and poorly paced. Other notices were equally damning. Probably owing to Cher’s star power, attendance started at about eighty per cent (1,100 per show) but soon dropped off to less than forty per cent (600 per show), forcing Altman to close down the play on 4 April, after just 52 performances. Despite waning attendance and critical savaging, Altman felt that Graczyk’s drama would translate well to film. He had also invested $200,000 of his own funds in the play (25 per cent of the overall production budget) and was anxious to recoup his money. So while the play was still running, Altman made another $800,000 deal, this time with the play’s production executive, Peter Newman, Mark Goodson Productions and Viacom Enterprises, to air
Come Back to the Five and Dime on cable television’s Showtime network.
Utilising the same cast as the stage play, the film was shot sequentially in Super 16mm (blown up to 35mm) in nineteen days in April 1982. As was always the case, Altman gave a lot of thought to the dramaturgical and symbolic implications of the
mise-en-scène. He had production designer David Gropman construct two adjacent interior sets in a midtown Manhattan studio that were mirror images of the Woolworth’s five and dime store in west Texas where all the action transpires. The moments that take place in the present are confined to one side, the past to the other side. What appears to be an ordinary mirror behind the store’s soda fountain counter is actually a large Mylar window that both divides and links the two sets. When lit from just one side, the plastic sheet remains opaque and functions as a mirror. A pan to the mirror, fade-out, and cut to the other side, brightly or dimly lit, signals transitions back to the present or past.
1 At other times, though, the ‘mirror’ is lit from one side, then another, creating a superimposition effect, or both sides simultaneously, making it a transparent window between the sets. Both visual tropes link past and present in the same moment and suggest the enduring and powerful influence of past events.
2 As Robert Kolker has noted, ‘often in Altman’s films, a window is used as a barrier to direct emotional contact’ (2011: 347). In
Come Back to the Five and Dime the mirror that is sometimes a window is a more complex Lacanian device that seems to confirm the unambiguous solidity of the subject’s identity but more often functions as a portal into backstories that complicate and contradict that identity.
Come Back to the Five and Dime is set in the mythical Texas town of McCarthy on 30 September 1975, the twentieth anniversary of the death of film star and youth idol James Dean in a car crash.
3 The Disciples of James Dean, a fan club formed in the spring of 1955 (not long before Dean made his third and last film,
Giant, in nearby Marfa, Texas) are holding a reunion at the Woolworth’s five and dime, where they held their meetings twenty years before. Sissy (Cher), a sexy, seemingly irreverent free spirit who still works at the store alongside Juanita (Sudie Bond), her sanctimonious, bible-thumping boss, welcomes the arrival of other fan club members: Edna Louise (Marta Heflin), somewhat dimwitted, poor and perpetually pregnant; Stella Mae (Kathy Bates), the bawdy, venal wife of an oil millionaire; Mona (Sandy Dennis), the fan club leader. Also a clerk at Woolworth’s, Mona is the neurasthenic single mother of a mentally defective grown son – called Jimmy Dean, of course – that she keeps sequestered out of embarrassment. Later, a mysterious, elegant woman who identifies herself as Joanne (Karen Black) arrives from LA in a yellow Porsche. She soon reveals that she is a transsexual formerly known as Joe (Mark Patton), the effeminate boy who swept out the store but was fired by Juanita’s bigoted husband, Sidney, and raped by the town bully, Lester T. Callaghan. As Robert T. Self observes, Joanne’s sex change (‘a dramatic retreat from the phallus’) has afforded her special wisdom: ‘Becoming female, she is not simply the castrato but the Tiresias, the truthsayer, the seer that has lived both lives’ (2002: 164). Joanne’s self-revealing becomes the catalyst for a series of revelations showing that her fellow ‘Disciples’ are not what they seem or who they think they are – but these moments of truth are imperfectly realised and won only after considerable resistance.
After Joanne reveals that she was once Joe, she tries to force pious Juanita to confront the fact that her late lamented husband, Sidney, was an alcoholic and a homophobe who fired Joe without just cause and cheered on Lester T. as he sodomised the boy. Juanita angrily denies that Sidney was a drunken lout. To admit otherwise would be tantamount to rejecting the rigidly partisan fundamentalist-heteronormative Christianity that forms her identity and to concede that her life has been a lie. Repulsed by Joanne’s gender identity heresy, Juanita can easily dismiss her truth-telling as corrupted at the source, at least initially. But as the day wears on and alcohol loosens inhibitions, pretences begin to reel and fall like dominoes. (A further development: Mona’s son, Jimmy Dean – who never appears on screen – absconds in Joanne’s sports car; his flight out of town hangs over the second half of the work and lends the play its plaintive title.)
Unlike Juanita, Sissy is not beholden to a hypocritical religiosity that will admit no flaws. Furthermore, Joanne’s disclosure of identity conversion based in bodily transformation inspires Sissy to make a surprising disclosure that concerns her own, altered body and sexuality. She admits that her prized ‘bazooms’ are fake; cancer has forced her to undergo a double mastectomy, a feminine catastrophe that caused her husband (and Joe’s rapist) Lester T., to abandon her. Yet Sissy’s ideological disinvestment is not total. Even after revealing her secret she still clings to the forlorn hope that Lester T. will one day return to her.
Sissy’s honesty sets the stage for the play’s most profound and shattering realisation, which belongs to Mona. For twenty years she has laboured under the near-psychotic delusion that her feeble-minded son was the product of sexual intercourse with James Dean when she was an extra on the set of
Giant in the summer of 1955. Pursuing her self-appointed mission as truth-teller, Joanne forces Mona to confront the fact that it was he as Joe, not James Dean, who impregnated her and that (s)he is the father of Jimmy Dean, not the famous movie star. Rather surprisingly, Mona accepts the truth, professes mortification and explains that she ‘just wanted to be noticed…chosen’. Joanne embraces Mona and assures her, ‘
I chose you’, a declaration of love tragic in its belatedness.
Still another domino falls when Mona’s concession to reality compels Juanita to soften and admit that her own, self-abnegating investment in hegemonic ideology has been just as delusory: ‘Believin’ is so funny, isn’t it? When what you believe in doesn’t even know you exist.’ Once again, though, ideological disinvestment has its limits, lest the interpellated subject implode altogether. Juanita admits she has been forsaken but cannot entertain an even more harrowing possibility: that the god of her ideology never existed in the first place.
As Robert Paul Holtzclaw notes, the two most conventional members of the ‘Disciples’, Edna Louise and Stella Mae, ‘function as opposites, two extremes of behavior that bookend the range of recognizable and somewhat acceptable behavior’ (1992: 37). Neither experiences an epiphany; having escaped McCarthy to marry, they adhere fully to the dominant ethos, which renders such moments of self-illumination impossible. Though alike in their conformism, these two women stake out destinies at opposite ends of the capitalist patriarchy, one precluding wealth and the other precluding family, suggesting that the attainment of both is a cherished cultural ideal heavily advertised but rarely achieved. As the simplest and least conflicted member of the group, Edna Louise has nothing to confess or reveal; inner self and persona are nearly identical. A loving woman of modest ego and intellect, she accepts Joanne’s radical otherness just as she passively accepts her own meagre wages from the patriarchal order because she cherishes her role as a working-class wife and mother of a large brood (she’s expecting her seventh child). Her life of maternal self-sacrifice and hardship is not to be despised but it nonetheless forecloses the possibility of attaining individual freedom and deeper self-realisation. Edna Louise’s polar opposite, Stella Mae, might be considered the most tragic of the five women because she remains the most superficial and ideologically intractable. Though childless and in a loveless marriage, she clings to the pretence that she is happy; she must be happy because her husband is rich. When Edna Louise calls her bluff, Stella Mae angrily retorts, ‘I’m happy, goddamit!’ – thus inadvertently declaring the poignant truth of her situation without admitting it to herself.
Their secrets revealed and illusions shattered, the ‘Disciples’ disperse; but before they do Sissy, Mona and Joanne join together to reprise a favourite old routine; they sway and snap fingers in unison as they sing the 1955 McGuire sisters chart-topping hit, ‘Sincerely’. A song about undying love for an unfaithful lover, ‘Sincerely’ functions as ironic commentary on the staying power of ideology. Even after it has been demystified and hollowed out, it retains its constitutive force; it can never be abandoned because there is nothing imaginable to take its place. While they sing, Pierre Mignot’s camera pulls back from the mirror that frames them and the trio soon fades to black. As the song continues on the soundtrack, the camera roams the interior of the five and dime, now an abandoned and dusty ruin in some future moment that will never see another reunion of the Disciples of James Dean.
For the Disciples themselves, their reunion was supposed to be both a nostalgic commemoration and a ritualised conjuring of a kind of Second Coming of James Dean: sanctified pop cult icon as martyred Christ-figure who will bring renewed meaning to their banal lives. Intended as a gesture toward the apotheosis of their idol, the anniversary gathering unexpectedly becomes a long-overdue exorcism of Dean’s musty ghost. In parallel terms
Jimmy Dean functioned as a kind of cinematic exorcism for Altman, who was aware, no doubt, that his own James Dean documentary,
The James Dean Story (1957), co-directed with George W. George, contributed to the self-pitying adolescent death-cult that sprung up around Dean, postmortem. Altman made
Jimmy Dean, at least in part, as self-reflexive atonement for making the earlier film. He also understood that Graczyk’s play constituted another exploration of the ravaged female psyche under patriarchy that would complement
That Cold Day in the Park, Images and
3 Women.In a larger sense Come Back to the Five and Dime also serves to contrast the state of the American zeitgeist in the post-Vietnam era to what it had been in the mid-1950s. The epitome of an emotional vulnerability and romantic yearning that could only have flourished in the relatively innocent and depoliticiced era of Eisenhower, James Dean died just as an ebullient youth counterculture emanating from his own films, the Beat apostasy, and rock ‘n’ roll was being born. Subsequent events – the Civil Rights struggle and racial turmoil, the assassinations, the bitterly divisive war in Vietnam, the rise of a drug culture, Watergate, etc. – cast a disillusioning pall on American youth and fractured society as a whole, rendering it coarsened and cynical. The play/film does not need to cite or allude to the socio-political cataclysms that occurred between 1955 and 1975; their influence is everywhere implicit in a pervasive aura of spiritual desiccation and loss.
Usually discussed by film critics as an exploration of abnormal psychology, Come Back to the Five and Dime is ultimately more concerned with the influence of the corporate Gesellschaft, especially the modern culture industry, on the ideological shaping of the female self. Despite its melodramatic excesses, one of the signal strengths of the film is that it unmasks many of the key discourses of repressive patriarchy – homophobia, stereotypical gender roles, conventional religiosity, movie cult-hero worship, cloying top-forty romance songs, even 1950s nostalgia – as infantilising pablum for the consumerist denizens of Middle America that encourages bigotry, escapism and self-deception. Beholden to a disempowering imaginary, James Dean’s self-appointed ‘Disciples’ cope poorly with the actual conditions under which they live and labour. As Kolker notes, Come Back to the Five and Dime ‘deals with the crisis of women confronting the oppressions of patriarchy by dissolving them into neuroses. Unable to struggle, these figures first collapse within themselves and then extrapolate their delusions as protections against the world that surrounds them’ (2011: 371). The spiritual sterility of the hegemon is figuratively borne out by the group’s severely skewed record of reproduction. Edna Louise breeds like a rabbit but the rest of the group is barren – except for Mona and Joe/Joanne, who can only manage to sire an idiot son. A bad seed with a stunted mind and a tendency to steal cars as a means out of town, Jimmy Dean marks the chasm between Hollywood’s meretricious dream of perfect romance and libidinal power and the pitifully quotidian reality of its deluded subscribers.
A sombre, claustrophobic actors’ tour de force,
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean was only intended for cable TV release but Altman persuaded Showtime to let him take it to a number of film festivals in 1982/83: Chicago (where it premiered on the 27th anniversary of James Dean’s death and received a ten-minute standing ovation), Montreal, Knokke-Heist (Belgium), Venice, Deauville (France) and Toronto. Altman also arranged for limited theatrical distribution. Avoiding the major studios after the problems he had with 20th Century Fox over
HealtH, Altman opted to let Cinecom, an independent distributor in New York City, exhibit the film at a few arthouse theaters (e.g. the Thalia in New York City) in November 1982. During its entire four-week run the movie grossed $841,000, essentially breaking even. Though Altman was no longer reaching wide audiences, he was at least proving that he could turn stage plays into absorbing movies for less than a million dollars each at a time when big-budget Cineplex blockbusters were all the rage.
Streamers (1983)
Having made a nearly all-female film, Altman experimented in the opposite direction with an all-male drama.
4 His next venture into theatre-to-film adaptation was
Streamers, the last installment in Vietnam veteran David Rabe’s so-called Vietnam Trilogy after
The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and
Stick and Bones. The title,
Streamers, does not refer to patriotic banners; it is, in fact, a death term: military slang denoting parachutes that fail to open because their lines have become hopelessly tangled. After opening at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut,
Streamers enjoyed an almost year-long off-Broadway run in 1976/77 (478 performances). Directed by Mike Nichols, it won the 1976 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, the 1976 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play, and was also nominated for a 1976 Tony Award for Best Play. Producers Robert Michael Geisler and John Roberdeau brought the play to Altman, who liked it because it was an anti-war drama that eschewed combat depictions altogether and approached military culture in psychological and emotional terms, especially regarding male psychosexual identity and the divisive politics of race and social class. Altman conducted casting in New York, hired an all-new troupe of actors and then had an authentic barracks cadre room, designed by
Popeye set designer Wolf Kroeger, constructed on a sound stage at Los Colinas Studios in Irving, Texas (a Dallas suburb). Altman had already begun shooting scenes in July 1983 when he discovered that Geisler and Roberdeau did not have any money. Forced to buy the rights from them for $500,000 Altman quickly found a new financial backer in Nick J. Mileti, a successful lawyer, owner of the Cleveland Indians, and a founder of the Cleveland Cavaliers franchise, who had begun to dabble in motion picture production. Altman later admitted that Mileti ‘saved my bananas’ (in Thompson 2006: 131).
Always cognisant of the importance of establishing interpretive context, Altman employs an evocative framing device for
Streamers. The film begins and ends with a crack drill team performing a complex series of precision manoeuvres involving close order marching and the synchronised twirling and exchange of rifles.
5 Shot in impressionistic fashion – shadowy helmeted figures silhouetted against a backdrop of hazy white light – the members of the drill team are rendered depersonalised automatons: the military ideal of perfect order and discipline.
Inside the dreary, claustrophobic confines of a barracks room at a Virginia army base in 1965 it is a very different story for Richie (Mitchell Lichtenstein, an openly gay actor playing a more-or-less openly gay character: a remarkably courageous casting choice in 1983), Billy (Matthew Modine), Roger (David Alan Grier) and Carlyle (Michael Wright): four young soldiers with the 83rd Airborne Division nervously awaiting deployment to Vietnam. African-American (Roger and Carlyle) and white/ college-educated (Richie and Billy), gay (Richie) and straight, upper-class (Richie), middle-class (Billy), working-class (Roger) and lumpen (Carlyle), the four men stake out a cross-section of the 1960s-era military and American society that upends one of the principal clichés of the World War II combat film: the ethnically diverse but always all-white, and always implicitly heterosexual squad of GIs that coalesces in combat to form an effective fighting unit representing the harmoniously unified nation for which it fights.
Rabe and Altman also problematise another traditional war film cliché: the gruff and battle-weary but kind-hearted non-com who mentors and protects his young charges (e.g. John Wayne’s Sgt. John Stryker in Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)). Streamers features two staff sergeants haunting the barracks – Rooney (Guy Boyd) and Cokes (George Dzundza) – but far from being fatherly role models, both men are full-blown alcoholics prone to maudlin outbursts and childish horseplay who present an abysmally grim future in the military to their younger comrades, one filled with melancholy, inebriation and death.
Having yet to experience a tour of duty in Vietnam, Rooney is a loud, boastful cigar-chomping buffoon, also something of an emotional sadist who revels in hectoring the younger men: ‘All you slap-happy motherfuckers are going [to Vietnam.] Gotta go kill some gooks!’ Cokes, who has just returned from Vietnam, tries to match Rooney’s bluster but comes off as a more doleful figure. He struggles with PTSD (termed ‘gross stress reaction’ at this time), guilt over killing a trapped enemy combatant with a hand grenade, and his own looming mortality in the aftermath of a leukemia diagnosis. Both men are lost souls, deeply dependent upon each other for companionship and emotional sustenance. The vain and rowdy Rooney displays all the earmarks of a narcissistic personality disorder, while Cokes, who oscillates between despair and rage, is clearly a broken man, a borderline personality who gains his sense of self-worth by being the more circumspect member of a fragile partnership. In the play’s title scene, the sergeants drunkenly sing ‘Beautiful Streamer’ to the tune of Stephen Foster’s ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, a song, explains Rooney, ‘a man sings when he’s going down through the air and his chute don’t open’. Intended as nothing more than fatalistic gallows humour, the song produces profound discomfort in its young listeners, who understand its literal and metaphoric truth. For Cokes, it conjures a wide-eyed vision of his own approaching demise – a vision so vivid he faints at its conclusion. Once revived, Cokes speaks of his leukemia diagnosis and admits that it is probably accurate (‘Rooney, my mother had it. She had it’) but, abetted by Rooney’s instinctual avoidance of truth and feeling, he quickly lapses into denial. Coming near the halfway mark of the film, the incident decisively invalidates Rooney and Cokes as moral guides, leaving the younger soldiers alone in their uncertainty.
Broken warriors: Sgts. Cokes (George Dzundza) and Rooney (Guy Boyd) sing their drunken death hymn, ‘Beautiful Streamers’.
Conventional war films offer cathartic combat heroics that extol the military Gesellschaft of cold-blooded machismo and physical courage.
Streamers turns the war film paradigm inside out by staying indoors and stateside as it nullifies patriarchal authority and explores the nihilistic dread that manly posturing seeks to conceal but inadvertently expresses. The angst that permeates the barracks – which is a kind of purgatorial anteroom to hell – is made manifest at the outset by Martin (Albert Macklin), a closeted gay recruit who slits one of his wrists in a half-hearted suicide attempt to get himself ejected from the army: a ploy that succeeds. Richie, also gay, but an upper-class Manhattanite who has enlisted, comes to Martin’s aid by bandaging his wound. Though he empathises with Martin’s plight, Richie chooses to rebel against the prevailing code of military machismo in a different way: by flaunting his homosexuality. Partial to Greek fisherman’s caps, kimonos and Japanese platform sandals for his casual attire, Richie flounces around the barracks and teases Billy, with whom he’s infatuated, with a constant stream of lascivious innuendo. Billy fends off Richie’s provocative gibes, sometimes with threats of physical mayhem, but shows signs of increasing agitation, probably because he is uncertain about his own sexual orientation. Indeed, the attraction may be less one-sided than it appears.
Roger and Carlyle (who is an interloping ‘transient’ from nearby ‘P’ Company) initially contend over the interlocking questions of race and class identity. A desperately lonely, racially angry – ‘fuckin’ officers is always white, man’ – but deeply frightened street tough, Carlyle is a profanity-spewing outcast who wants to befriend Roger but also suspects that Roger is too respectable, too friendly with his white barracks buddies, to find any common ground with a black brother from the lower depths. Carlyle’s bitterly conflicted intensity makes Roger wary of him, ultimately forcing Carlyle to cross race, class and heteronormative boundaries to pursue a sexual liaison with Richie. But before that occurs, several scenes emphasise sexual identity conflicts as the play’s latent but abiding concern. After Rooney and Cokes leave the barracks room and turn off the lights, Roger plaintively councils Richie to cure himself of homosexual tendencies by ‘doing pushups’. Billy matches Roger’s naiveté with a story about a putatively heterosexual friend who became ‘hooked’ on gay sex as if it were a highly addictive drug (but Richie comes to suspect that Billy is really referring not to ‘friend’ but to himself). Later Carlyle, desperately drunk and filled with hysterical self-pity, bursts into the barracks to seek comfort and ends up sprawled on the floor. Richie, always compassionate, covers him with a blanket. A day or two later, Carlyle returns to the barracks looking for Roger. Encountering Richie instead, Carlyle proceeds to deny his earlier display of extremely neediness and vulnerability – a rank violation of machismo – and begins to menacingly interrogate Richie as to whether or not he’s the barracks room ‘punk’. Witnessing Carlyle’s sociopathic verbal assault on Richie, Billy vows ‘to move myself out of here if Roger decides to adopt that son-of-a-bitch!’ To Billy’s chagrin, Roger
does adopt Carlyle as a friend and even persuades Billy to join them in a visit to a brothel on a stormy night. Disaster ensues upon their return to the barracks. Carlyle, quite drunk and still wrongly convinced that Richie is the barracks sex slave, decides that he wants to satisfy his libidinal urges. Seeking to arouse jealousy in Billy, Richie begins to play along but Richie’s gambit backfires – or works too well; an infuriated Billy flies into a towering homophobic rage and hurls vicious insults at Richie (‘You wanna be a faggot, a goddamn swish-sucking cock-sucker taking it in the ass? Be my guest!’). But when Billy turns on Carlyle, calling him ‘nigger’ and ‘Sambo’, Carlyle spontaneously reacts by fatally stabbing Billy in the stomach with Cokes’ serrated trench knife. Shortly thereafter a drunken Rooney appears on the scene and attempts to disarm Carlyle but Carlyle stabs him to death as well. Summoned by Richie, MPs swarm in, remove the corpses, apprehend Carlyle, and interrogate and quarantine the survivors. Soon thereafter Cokes breaks in through a window, looking for Rooney, with whom he was playing hide and seek. Not knowing what has just transpired in the room, Cokes drunkenly regales Richie and Roger about the wild night he just had with Rooney in nearby Washington, DC. Richie begins to weep, prompting Cokes to ask why. When Richie deflects the horrible truth by simply confessing he’s ‘queer’, he finds Cokes surprisingly sanguine about his disclosure. The play/movie ends with Cokes mournfully singing his ‘Beautiful Streamers’ song in some made-up approximation of an Asian language, to impersonate the Viet Cong soldier in a ‘spider hole’ he killed with a grenade: an expression of genuine sorrow and empathy for the dead that can only be realised by a man like Cokes, who now fully understands death and all its existential and moral implications.
Trusting the inherent power of the material, Altman kept the emphasis on the performances themselves by having Pierre Mignot film
Streamers in ways unusually conventional for an Altman film: almost no overlapping dialogue, a relatively static camera with lots of medium- and medium-long shots, shot/reverse-shots, two-shots and the occasional close-up for dramatic emphasis. The result was a startling
tour de force that constitutes a radical critique of military culture: a world suffused by patriarchal Gesellschaft ideology in its purest, most violent and most authoritarian incarnations. In the barracks – society writ small and intensified – sexual repression and psychic torment are so deep and lacerating that fratricidal catastrophe ensues long before there is any chance for martial glory: a scenario that predates a similar scenario in the first half of Stanley Kubrick’s better-known Vietnam movie,
Full Metal Jacket (1987). A bitter denunciation of degraded masculinity,
Streamers was too disturbingly downbeat and gritty to ever reach a wide audience. It did however garner a remarkable and singular honour: the
entire cast was named ‘Best Actor’ at the 1983 Venice Film Festival.
Secret Honor: A Political Myth (1984)
At the invitation of theatre impresario Bill Bushnell (Scotty Bushnell’s ex-husband), Altman attended a performance of Secret Honor: The Last Testament of Richard M. Nixon, a one-man play at the tiny Los Angeles Actors’ Theater in the summer of 1983. Written by activist-playwrights Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone (an ex-national security adviser), directed by Robert Harders and starring the then-little known actor, Philip Baker Hall, Secret Honor strays far from historical fact to present a caustic but oddly sympathetic portrait of the nation’s 37th president. The play’s premise is intriguing but far-fetched; that Nixon contrived his own downfall in order to deliver himself and the country from greater corruptions being plotted by his oligarchic handlers. Fascinated by what he had seen, Altman resolved on the spot to take the play to New York as an-off Broadway production and film it thereafter, as he had done with Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. True to his word, Altman acted as producer for a run of the play at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village in the autumn of 1983. Though it received a respectful review from New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow, Secret Honor lasted only forty-seven performances (8 November to 18 December 1983). A spell of rainy weather, the play’s sheer length (two hours, cut down from two and a half), its disagreeable subject matter (a disgraced and widely reviled ex-president) and the lugubrious reputation of one-man shows on famous personages – all conspired against its success on the New York stage.
Undaunted, Altman took the play to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he had accepted a temporary position as Visiting Professor of Film in the Communications Department. Though he was at a low point in his fortunes, Altman put up nearly $100,000 of his own money to finance a week-long shoot, 23–30 January 1984 (see Makuch 1984). While having to pay his actor, Philip Baker Hall, his cinematographer, Pierre Mignot, his assistant director, Allan Nicholls and a few other professionals, Altman minimised production overhead by relying on the unpaid services of some two dozen graduate film students who were learning the craft – a ploy denounced by the manager of a local theatrical union as a way to avoid paying union members their standard $8.20 an hour but defended by the University of Michigan as a ‘goodwill gesture’ and by the students themselves as an exciting opportunity take part in professional filmmaking (see Anon. 1984: 14). The University further accommodated their famous faculty member by having its Contemporary Directions Ensemble perform George Burt’s musical score. It also provided Altman with a film set, free of charge: the stately Red Room, a student lounge in the Martha Cook Building, a 1915 Tudor-style women’s dormitory with leaded glass windows and elegant wood paneling. Dressed with oil paintings (portraits of Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, Eisenhower and Henry Kissinger), heavy furniture, and
objets d’art by set designer Stephen Altman (Altman’s son), the room exuded the pomp that one would associate with the residence of an ex-president.
While embellishing the set, Altman left the play unaltered. As he notes in his director’s commentary to the 1992 Criterion DVD, the play Altman filmed was virtually the same play that Philip Baker Hall and Robert Harders had perfected on stage: ‘I feel my creative input was getting it done. This was pretty much the piece that he did. I did not interfere with it much at all…Bob Harder was really the director of this play.’ What Altman did add, to convert the play into a film, was a much more elaborate set and Mignot’s extremely fluid camera work; facilitated by a custom-designed short boom, his roving camera provided the drama with more visual interest and kinetic energy. Altman also added a side-by-side bank of four black and white closed-circuit television monitors on a side table in Nixon’s study: a prop that points up Nixon’s paranoid obsession with security and an ingenious solution to the problem of devising cutaways that would lend some variety of perspective on his monologue. When Altman wanted to shift tone and point of view he would cut to one of the monitors, which had the additional effect of reminding viewers that they mostly knew Nixon through mediated images all the way back to his infamous ‘Checkers Speech’ in 1952.
Secret Honor starts slowly. During the first ten minutes Nixon enters his study, changes into a smoking jacket, pours himself a copious glass of Chivas Regal scotch whiskey, removes a fully loaded nickel-plated revolver from a wooden box (hinting at suicidal intentions), and then begins to fiddle with an expensive tape recorder he does not know how to operate. A solitary actor on stage interacting with a tape recorder will remind more erudite viewers of Samuel Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape (1958): a melancholy monologue featuring a lonely and broken old man reviewing his life and trying rationalise it, or at least make sense of the choices he has made that rendered him isolated and loveless in his twilight years. Viewers unfamiliar with Beckett will certainly be reminded that audio tapes were Nixon’s bête noire. On a dramaturgical level, his ineptitude with the tape machine generates some mildly comical moments and is also sound characterisation; Nixon was notoriously clumsy (see Volkan and Itzkowitz 1997: 86–7).
Once he more or less masters the machine, Hall’s Nixon begins to tape-record a rambling confessional monologue about his political demise that he evidently wishes to have transcribed and released after his death, as a last testament that will exculpate him. Characteristic of the lawyer he had been, Nixon frames his statement as a defence attorney’s plea to a judge on behalf of his client (himself). The judge to whom Nixon appeals is his own tortured conscience but also seems to be an amalgam of transcendental signifieds: God, the People, Posterity, even his late, beloved, but emotionally detached mother, Hannah (Milhous) Nixon – his ultimate moral arbiter.
By turns angry, maudlin, self-righteous, despairing and self-pitying, an agitated and progressively more inebriated Nixon manifests personality disintegration as he gesticulates and spouts profanities, meandering from one tangent to another.
6 Declaring that ‘the whole story [of Watergate] could not be told during my lifetime because the nation could not have stood the whole story’, Nixon is reminded of the JFK assassination: another event whose underlying causes are allegedly too disturbing for public disclosure. Thinking of the Kennedy brothers associatively reminds Nixon of his own four brothers, two of whom (Arthur and Harold) died young from tuberculosis (‘Goddamn TB up and down both sides of the family’). The lingering sorrows of a lonely and emotionally barren youth soon give way to numerous, bitter resentments: toward Eisenhower, who snubbed him because he was ‘not to the manor born’; toward his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, whom he characterises as a ‘slimy, two-faced, brown-nosed, ass-licking kraut son of a bitch’; toward the press and liberals (‘they’re yellow’). But Nixon reserves his deepest antipathy for the ‘Committee of 100’ (a group of prominent Republicans who drafted him to run for Congress in California’s 12th congressional district in 1945), along with the oligarchs who congregate annually at an exclusive resort in Monte Rio, California known as the Bohemian Grove. As Nixon tells it, his backers – the powerful war profiteers who comprise America’s ruling elite – wanted him to ‘continue the war in Vietnam until 1976. Whatever the cost…Accept a draft in ’76 for a third term [and] seal the deal with China against the Soviets and then carve up all the markets of the goddamn world’. Overcome with moral revulsion at the notion that thousands more will die in Vietnam to fill the coffers of the plutocrats, Nixon contrives his own removal from office, a gambit he describes as ‘secret honor and public shame’. In the end, some time after his resignation and pardon by Gerald Ford, Nixon judges America’s body politic thoroughly rotten and corrupt: a ‘world [that] is nothing more than a bunch of second-generation mobsters, and the lawyers, and the PR guys, and the New Money crooks who made theirs in the war and the Old Money crooks who made theirs selling slaves and phony merchandise to both sides during the Civil War…That is what public life is all about.’ Brought to the point of suicide, Nixon puts the gun to his head but angrily rejects the idea as exactly the outcome his puppeteers would prefer. ‘Fuck ‘em!’ he shouts, as he jabs the air with a fierce uppercut: an image of heroic defiance successively repeated on the TV monitors for final emphasis.
The central conceit of
Secret Honor – that Nixon deliberately instigated the Watergate crisis to escape an irredeemably corrupted presidency – is startling theatre but a rank falsehood, especially egregious in light of persuasive evidence that Nixon committed treason to get elected president.
7 Secret Honor does, however, contain deeper and more elliptical truths. Though he does not resemble Richard Nixon or sound like him, Philip Baker Hall brilliantly captures Nixon’s distinctly paranoid brand of narcissism: gnawing insecurity and low self-esteem, stemming from humble origins, family trauma and a lack of parental love and nurture that drove him to overcompensate by striving for the highest levels of success, whatever the means or the cost.
8 In a more generalised way
Secret Honor is also on target in its depiction of Nixon as a pliable and amoral front man for America’s ruling class, as are all modern presidents – an unpleasant insight concerning concentrated capital’s domination over American life long shared by Altman and dramatised, in various ways, in
Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville and
HealtH. In his Criterion commentary, Altman observes: ‘Nixon was doing a job for these people who took him and groomed him and sent him into the Congress and steered his way, all the way up to the presidency…We misconstrue what the office is; we don’t elect these people, we hire them.’ Though Altman abhorred Nixon’s politics, he obviously identified with the plight of a once-powerful man brought low by an unforgiving, duplicitous power structure and his own eccentricities. When he describes Nixon as ‘a tragic character…trapped by the system’ and ‘duped by himself’, Altman is perhaps unconsciously referring to his own situation as a once-esteemed filmmaker with a now tarnished reputation, reduced to tiny budgets and desperate expedients to continue working. Responding to critics who thought the film was too sympathetic to Nixon, Altman refuted the charge in an interview with Pat Aufderheide: ‘They don’t want to deal with the truth of the matter, which is that [Nixon] is a human being…You have to give someone their humanity in order to hold them accountable’ (in Sterritt 2000: 119). Screened at a few film festivals in 1985 (Portland, Oregon; Cleveland; 3 Rivers, Pittsburgh) and exhibited at a few art cinemas (e.g., the Thalia in New York City),
Secret Honor did not reach many viewers or recoup its very modest production costs. It did, however, garner mostly strong reviews and several film critics ranked it among the best films of 1985. Vincent Canby termed it ‘one of the funniest, most unsettling, most imaginative and most surprisingly affecting movies of its very odd kind’ (1985: n.p.).
The Laundromat (1985)
After Secret Honor, Altman and his wife, Kathryn, decamped for Paris, where they would live from 1984 to 1989. Effectively banished from Hollywood and self-exiled from Reagan’s America – though Altman’s work would bring him back to the United States and Canada for extended periods – he continued to work prodigiously across several media (theatre, television, opera and film), albeit on a much smaller scale, for considerably less money and with minimal fanfare. Altman’s first project as an expatriate was for HBO: an hour-long film adaptation of Third and Oak: The Laundromat, a 1979 play by Marsha Norman (the 1983 Pulitzer Prize winner for her play ‘night, Mother). Filmed over a ten-day period at Studios Éclair in Paris, The Laundromat is another woman-centred Altman film that stars Carol Burnett – in her third and last Altman role – as Alberta, a starchy middle-aged teacher, Amy Madigan as Deedee, a restless and very talkative twenty-year-old housewife, and Michael Wright (Carlyle in Streamers) as Shooter Stevens, a swaggering black disc jockey who briefly enlivens the proceedings. Once again, Altman opted not to open up the play with exterior shots; all the action takes place within the lonely confines of the laundromat, which becomes a kind of character in its own right – and thematically significant. As Grace Epstein notes, ‘the laundromat not only represents an intersection for differing social groups of women, but also, of female-associated activity with male-identified public space’ (1996: 32).
Alberta and Deedee meet in the middle of a rainy night in a laundromat and begin to converse. Like the women in
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, both women are in denial about their lives and the laundering of dirty clothes becomes an obvious metaphor for self-revelation and emotional cleansing. After a while Deedee discloses her angry desperation; her auto-worker husband, Bob, is a philanderer who makes her feel like she’s ‘a TV set and he’s changed the channels’. Initially frosty toward a woman she deems inferior, Alberta comes to empathise with Deedee’s plight and is moved to reveal her own loneliness and sense of desolation. She finally admits that her husband, Herb, is not away on business, as she previously claimed, but has been dead for over a year. Thus gender commonalities trump generational and social class differences and two lonely women form a bond outside of the patriarchal order.
The Laundromat aired on HBO on 3 April 1985 and reviewers lauded the strong performances given by Burnett and Madigan.
Fool for Love (1985)
In mid-January 1984, just as Altman was preparing to shoot Secret Honor in Ann Arbor, he received a handwritten letter from distinguished playwright Sam Shepard, praising Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean as ‘amazing’ and inquiring if Altman would be interested in filming Fool for Love, his new play about a fading rodeo rider and his half-sister/lover locked in a torturous on-again, off-again relationship, then in rehearsals with Ed Harris and Kathy Baker before its premiere at the Magic Theater in San Francisco on 8 February 1984. That summer Altman saw the play during its second run, at the Circle Repertory Theater in New York, and was impressed by its power. He did not, however, commit to a film version until two other projects subsequently fell through: Biarritz, a Robert Harders-scripted romance that was never made, and Heat, a Las Vegas thriller written by William Goldman, starring Burt Reynolds, ultimately directed by Dick Richards and Jerry Jameson, and released in 1986 (see Thompson 2006: 139).
Toward the end of 1984 Altman managed to secure a generous $6 million production deal with Israeli cousins Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan, owners since 1979 of the Cannon Group, a film production company known for making low-budget cinematic trash (e.g.,
The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood (1980),
Death Wish II (1982) and
The Delta Force (1986)). The arrangement was mutually beneficial, inasmuch as Altman needed the money and Cannon was anxious to polish its brand name by working with a famous director. As for the crucial role of Eddie, Altman persuaded Sam Shepard himself to take it on. The idea that the author would appear as an actor in his own material Altman found ‘irresistible’ but initially Shepard
did resist; he felt that Ed Harris, who was great in the play because he was not as close to the material, would also do a better job in the movie version. Rising star Kim Basinger, fresh from her steamy role opposite Mickey Rourke in Adrian Lyne’s controversial
9½ Weeks (shot in the summer of 1984 but not released until February 1986), lobbied Altman for the part of Eddie’s half-sister, May, and won it after Shepard’s partner, Jessica Lange, dropped out at the last moment. The other three main parts – the Old Man, Martin and the Countess – went to Harry Dean Stanton, Randy Quaid and Deborah McNaughton, respectively. Stanton’s emaciated, craggy looks made him eerily believable as a spectral, lovelorn proletarian Westerner, a role similar to Travis Henderson, the lead character he played in Wim Wenders’
Paris, Texas (1984).
Since most of the action in
Fool for Love takes place at a fictive motel called the El Royale on the edge of the Mojave Desert, Altman and his son, Steve, scouted motels all over the Albuquerque-Santa Fe, New Mexico area but could not find one that exactly matched their requisites: a small, rundown, pastel-coloured adobe motel on an otherwise deserted highway, facing West, toward the sunset. In the end, Altman decided to do what he had done with
McCabe & Mrs. Miller and
Popeye; build his own set on location. Over a six-week period in the spring of 1985 construction workers built a neon-accentuated motel office-café and six cottages arranged in a semi-circle around it on Route 285 in El Dorado, just south of Santa Fe. In back of the motel Altman created a sprawling junkyard filled with derelict automobiles, all manner of refuse and scrap metal and some old house trailers.
9 The motel complex was so realistic that travellers regularly pulled in to inquire about renting rooms, much to Altman’s amusement.
10With
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Streamers and
Secret Honor Altman adhered closely to the original playscripts and kept the action under psychological pressure by confining it to prescribed, claustrophobia-inducing interior settings. With
Fool for Love Altman decided to open up the frame to the wider world, to make the movie markedly more ‘cinematic’ and to accentuate its western themes. Accordingly, the film’s first ten minutes crosscut between shots of May and the Old Man at the motel with following shots of Eddie driving his pickup and horse-trailer rig on the highway toward the motel, circling it, finally stopping and then prowling the grounds on foot looking for May. While much of the subsequent action at the El Royale takes place in May’s cottage – after Eddie literally dives through her locked front door – and at the motel café, there are numerous exterior scenes, including occasional crane shots of the motel and environs. These shots keep the drama immersed in a stark desert landscape that recalls
3 Women’s depiction of the American West as a vacuous spiritual wasteland. Altman took further advantage of the superior representational capabilities of film over theatre by dramatising Eddie’s, May’s and the Old Man’s conflicting memories, not as dialogue but as fully realised flashback scenes, shot with wide lenses to give them a distinctive look. He then added another level of complexity by having the action depicted often contradict voice-over descriptions of it. ‘I can pretty much say that everybody does lie, all the time – but not maliciously,’ Altman says in his director’s commentary, by way of explaining why he constructed dissonance between the various accounts and between words and imagery; our memories morph and evolve over time in mysteriously self-serving ways, eliding, distorting or wholly inventing details that reconfigure or repress painful truths. Altman also employed another innovation: staging flashbacks of past moments that occurred at the El Royale in the same frame as the present action: ‘I turned this thing around on itself. In other words, there are scenes at that motel where you see the Old Man drive in twenty years previous and you see May [as a child]. And I mixed them with real time…So it was kind of a thing inside of a thing. It was very incestuous, which is what the play was about.’
11 Altman’s final bit of tinkering had to do with enlarging the character of the Old Man. In the play Shepard situates the Old Man in a chair on a platform to one side of the stage, commenting on the action like a Greek chorus, the stage directions indicating that he ‘exists only in the minds of May and Eddie’. In Altman’s opened-up film version, the Old Man is afforded physicality and movement. He emerges from his small house trailer in the junkyard to steal liquor from Eddie’s truck and to challenge May and Eddie over their conflicting renditions of past events at the motel café. Until the film’s closing moments there is no indication that the Old Man is anything less than a real human being.
As had been the case with Come Back to the Five and Dime and many other memory plays, the Freudian-Gothic principle of the Return of the Repressed determines the shape of the narrative. Riven by festering sins and secrets that always reemerge with a vengeance, psychologically damaged individuals either explode or implode, as do afflicted families and relationships. Likewise, the present collapses under the gravitational pull of an overburdened and unresolved past. (As William Faulkner puts it in Requiem for a Nun, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’) Such is the case with Fool for Love. As is eventually revealed, Eddie and May are the victims of a cruel twist of fate that continues to govern their lives. Experiencing an irresistible sexual attraction the moment they meet, they fall in love with each other as teenagers, despite their awareness that as half-siblings – the offspring of different mothers but the same, bigamist father (the Old Man) – they are breaking a primal taboo.
In the first third of the film Eddie, always shielding himself in the stereotypical persona of the macho cowboy, attempts to reconcile with an emotionally exhausted and wary May, who is ensconced in her own stereotypical persona, as the alluring blonde bombshell. Eddie makes aggressive overtures and May parries them with acerbic banter but she soon tires of it all. After softening him up with a passionate kiss, she knees him in the groin. The backstory behind all this
Sturm und Drang begins to unfold when Martin, a local handyman (also, the audience’s surrogate), shows up at the motel to take May on a date just after Eddie’s latest lover, the Countess, wheels by the motel in a black limo and shoots up the place in an evident fit of jealous rage. Anxious to sour Martin on May, Eddie reveals his actual relationship to and with her. (May and the Old Man are also present in this extended, concluding scene at the motel café and all are drinking heavily.) Eddie’s version of the story is that he met May when he accompanied his father on a surreptitious visit to her mother’s house on the other side of town. May dismisses Eddie’s account as ‘crazy’ and offers her own version, i.e. that her mother tracked down her elusive husband with his other family and made a bid for his exclusive attentions, still unbeknownst to Eddie’s mother. She claims the Old Man resided with May and her mother for a couple of weeks but then disappeared altogether, never to be seen again. In the meantime, recalls May, she and Eddie fell in love – an incestuous affair that deeply distressed May’s mother. She begged Eddie not to see her daughter. When that failed, she went to Eddie’s mother with her plea. Previously unaware that her husband had another family and that her son and his half-sister are now lovers, Eddie’s mother succumbs to horror and despair and blows her brains out with the Old Man’s shotgun. Hearing all this, the Old Man angrily refutes May’s account, claiming to know nothing about the suicide. Trying to enlist Eddie on his side, he angrily blames May’s mother for going ‘out of her way’ to draw him in against his best intentions: a threadbare rationalisation that is obviously transparent to Eddie and May, so much so that they come together and embrace, not as lovers but as half-brother and sister wronged by the sins of their heedless father. Long in thrall to a repetition compulsion that had him returning to May and then repeatedly abandoning her for other women – a cycle of libidinal self-indulgence and guilty self-punishment that is also an unconscious acting out of his father’s duplicity and elusiveness – Eddie is finally able to let go of the Old Man’s archetypal ghost. At that moment,
Deus ex machina, the Countess returns and shoots up Eddie’s truck. It explodes in flames, spreading symbolically cathartic hellfire through the motel and junkyard. Having been lured out of the Unconscious and finally repudiated, the Old Man’s forlorn spectre leaves the café and enters the Armageddon of his burning trailer in the junkyard. Eddie rescues his horses, mounts one and rides off trying to lasso the Countess’s car as it speeds down the highway. Evidently freed from her own repetition compulsion, May packs a suitcase, leaves the motel and begins to walk down the highway after refusing a ride proffered by Martin.
In his reminiscences concerning the film, Sam Shepard damns Altman with faint praise – ‘Bob did a commendable job’ – while reciting a litany of regrets, complaints and negative judgements that make it clear that he remains disappointed with the final product. Shepard begins by characterising Altman as having dragooned him into the project when it was Shepard who approached Altman. He goes on to mention his reluctance to play Eddie and offers the opinion that the film doesn’t work as well as the play because its spatial diffusion waters down the play’s ‘intensity and the presence of the actors [so that it] comes across as kind of a quaint little western tale of two people lost in a motel room…It doesn’t have the power. In the theater it was right in front of your face, it was so intense it was kind of scary’ (in Zuckoff 2009: 391). (In Altman’s defence, opening up the mise-en-scène seems the logical and appropriate choice for a film version of the play; an entire movie confined to a tiny motel room is hard to imagine.) Shepard also complains that he was told he would be involved in the editing process but that ‘Altman kind of took the film and went to Paris and cut the whole thing there and that was it’ (ibid.). Still, Shepard admits that he ‘was spoiled to a large extent by working in the theater…with great directors…who know actors inside and out. Who have dialogue with them, who spend weeks in rehearsal. You don’t have that luxury in film’ (in Zuckoff 2009: 392). It’s clear from these remarks that, even though he wrote the play and knew Eddie’s character better than anyone, Shepard would have preferred an intensive collaboration with his director, i.e. the kind of hands-on acting direction that Altman always categorically refused to do. The result was an uneasy creative vacuum at the movie’s centre that manifests on the screen as a slight staginess and lack of verisimilitude, despite or perhaps because of the lurid intensity of the material. Furthermore, the film’s closure by literal fireworks is a resolution too grandiose and mechanical for its own good. Reviews were mixed and, after a short and very limited run, from December 1985 to February 1986 (widest release: 57 theatres), Fool for Love closed $1.2 million in the red – another noble Altman experiment that was a commercial flop.
What followed, in the midst of other undertakings, were two abortive projects of note. Altman was hired to do a film version of the Ernest Hemingway novel, Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), supposedly with Roy Scheider and Julie Christie slated for the lead roles. Altman and Robert Harders, stage director of Secret Honor, developed a script but the funding ultimately fell through (see McGilligan 1989: 545). Shortly thereafter Nashville producer Jerry Weintraub approached Altman with a proposal to make a sequel that would be titled Nashville 12 (i.e. another Nashville film released in 1987, twelve years after the original). Altman agreed but wanted a sequel more politically incisive and darker in mood than its predecessor. After Altman and Joan Tewkesbury, the original screenwriter, could not come to agreement on the direction of the sequel, Altman brought in Harders again, who worked full-time for two years on a script and produced some two-dozen drafts. In Harders’ sequel Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) runs for governor of Tennessee; her ex-husband (Ned Beatty) is now the local District Attorney married to the tone-deaf singer, Sueleen (Gwen Welles); country music impresario Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) is now a cable TV mogul; folk singer Tom (Keith Carradine) is now married to LA Joan (Shelley Duvall). Like the first Nashville, the sequel would also end with an onstage death – that of the elderly woman who had saved Barbara Jean from a fire and whose son, Norman (David Arkin) would later kill the singer. Eventually, Harders even resurrected Barbara Jean herself, as a Barbara Jean female impersonator! But a Nashville sequel was not to be. Lily Tomlin wasn’t sure she could carry a picture in the lead role and contrary to Altman’s usual methods Jerry Weintraub wanted a script that would be followed to the letter. He also wanted something less grim than Harders’ sequel, from which no character survives undamaged. Though never officially cancelled, the project petered out and expired by 1988.
Basements (1987)
Altman and British playwright Harold Pinter – who would win the Noble Prize for Literature in 2005 – became acquaintances in 1984, after Pinter expressed his admiration for
Secret Honor. So when Gary Pudney, vice president in charge of specials and talent for ABC Entertainment, afforded Altman the opportunity to do a TV theatre special, Altman reciprocated Pinter’s admiration by choosing to do teleplays of two Pinter ‘comedies of menace’:
The Room (1957) and
The Dumb Waiter (1960).
12 Presenting dark, enigmatic dramas to American television audiences weaned on puerile fluff might seem foolhardy or deliberately perverse but Altman, true to form, never shied away from a risky endeavour. Besides, in a broad sense, Altman and Pinter were kindred spirits, i.e. artists whose principal theme is social alienation; their works examine the dehumanising forces of Gesellschaft modernity on hapless individuals caught in its crushing hierarchical structures, whether they are rich or poor, comprehending or oblivious, rebellious or conforming. How these characters react to their oppressive circumstances is what matters in terms of dramaturgy and philosophical import.
Altman’s attraction to these plays likely also owed to their lonely settings, redolent of obscurity, powerlessness and quiet desperation. Except for brief exterior establishing scenes added to make them more cinematic, both plays take place in claustrophobia-inducing rooms: a broken-down bedsit in a rundown rooming house (
The Room) and the windowless basement of a café (
The Dumb Waiter). As one critic has noted: ‘Pinter’s rooms are stuffy, non-specific cubes, whose atmosphere grows steadily more stale and more tense. At the opening curtain these rooms look naturalistic, meaning no more than the eye can contain. But, by the end of each play, they become sealed containers, virtual coffins’ (Cohn 1962: 56). Except for
Fool for Love, all of Altman’s play adaptations take place in similarly closed and confining spaces – conveniently cheap to stage but also, obviously, spatial metaphors for
anomie-inducing social isolation and entrapment. Altman even enhanced the effect by showing a basement room only alluded to in the playscript of
The Room and by locating the basement setting of
The Dumb Waiter in an isolated, rotting and seemingly abandoned country house in winter. He further emphasised the Dostoyevskian nature of the settings (and lowly status of their occupants) by ultimately presenting the two plays together as one special entitled
Basements.
The Room, Pinter’s first play, is both naturalistic and symbolic and Altman’s production preserves that duality. The room’s drab furnishings, the characters’ shabby clothing and their desultory speech patterns – all are clear markers of dreary British working-class life in the 1950s. The teleplay’s two main characters are Rose (Linda Hunt, Mrs. Oxheart in
Popeye) and her husband, Bert Hudd (David Hemblen), middle-aged denizens of a nondescript upstairs flat in a city rooming house. On a cold winter day near nightfall Rose serves Bert a meal and then paces around the room while carrying on a dialogue that is really a monologue because Bert is too intent on pursuing his solipsistic leisure passion – building ships in bottles – to converse or to evidently even listen (in the playscript he is reading a magazine).
13 Soon Mr. Kidd (Donald Pleasance), the landlord, calls on the Hudds and peppers Bert with questions about when and if he will leave the room – questions answered by Rose while Bert continues to remain silent. The ensuing ‘dialogue’ between Rose and Mr. Kidd is not really a dialogue; the subject is always elliptical and changes frequently. The two speakers are on different wavelengths, avoiding subjects and not really listening to each other, making for a bewildering exchange that is cryptic, irrational and vaguely menacing. At the end of the scene Bert, who appears to be a truck driver, leaves to drive off in his van. Thereafter, Rose’s attempt to take out the garbage is interrupted by a young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Sands (Julian Sands and Annie Lennox, of Eurythmics fame) who tell her they are looking for a flat and have been told by a man in the basement that the Hudds’ flat is vacant. After they leave a blind black man named Riley (Abbott Anderson), who has purportedly been waiting in the basement according to the Sands and Mr. Kidd, suddenly arrives at the Hudds’ room to deliver a mysterious and disquieting message to Rose: ‘Your father wants you to come home.’ Bert suddenly returns and delivers a sexually-suggestive monologue about his experience driving his van – which he refers to as if it were a woman – on the icy streets and returning safely. Finally noticing Riley, Bert screams ‘Lice!’ while smashing one of his bottles over Riley’s head, possibly killing him. Rose, now evidently blind, carefully locks the door against the outside world.
As astutely noted by Pinter critic Leonard A. Stone,
The Room is, in the final analysis, a ‘(re)presentation of late-1950s [British] working-class consciousness’ – a consciousness that is insular, disjointed, irrational, non-communicative and intensely privatised:
In terms of solidarity it bears none of the hallmarks of class loyalty and by de facto antagonism toward the bourgeois ‘higher class’. Pinter’s depiction of working-class consciousness is far removed from collectivist rhetoric. His conception of working-class consciousness is one of fragmentation, of particularism. More over, Pinter’s working-class characters take this particularism to its extreme. It follows that working-class consciousness has not only been fragmented but also taken one stage further and extinguished. Pinter’s working class – like D. H. Lawrence’s working class – are not engaged in class conflict. They also lack any form of political consciousness. Working-class characters in Pinter’s plays are oppressed. This oppression is taken a stage further with Pinter in that it now takes the acute form of mental anguish…[T]here is no longer a working-class consciousness as class consciousness. Instead, only private consciousness exists along with its petty bourgeois connotations. (2003 n.p.)
Antisocial and apolitical, Pinter’s self-estranged characters exist in the absolute solitariness of their agonised private worlds. Because they lack a shared, congruent vision of life, their attempts to express themselves or communicate with each other inevitably devolve into absurd utterances. From an allegorical perspective, the Hudds’ hermetic room is the embodiment of alienated working-class consciousness: a blinkered survivalist mentality unable to understand itself, form genuine human bonds, comprehend or deal with a menacing Gesellschaft, or come to terms with temporality and the consciousness of mortality – the latter allegorised by Riley’s emergence. Dreaded basement-dweller from the Id, Riley’s appearance is the Return of the Repressed that must be neutralised so that Rose and Bert Hudd can maintain their existential blindness (a now literal condition for Rose at play’s end).
The Dumb Waiter features hit-men Gus (Tom Conti) and Ben (John Travolta) waiting in a cluttered and filthy basement room for their next assignment. Like the characters in
The Room, Gus and Ben while away the time with off-kilter repartee that often devolves into the absurd but here the conversation acts out an implicit power struggle; Gus, the elder partner, must parry Ben’s rhetorical attempts to upstage him. Meanwhile the play’s title prop, a dumbwaiter, descends to retrieve occasional food orders: mysterious and puzzling occurrences because the basement is no longer a working kitchen. Ben has to explain to the people above, via the dumbwaiter’s speaking tube, that there is no food – except for the provisions the two have brought with them, which they send up. Just after Gus leaves the room to get a drink of water in the bathroom, the dumbwaiter’s speaking tube whistles, indicating a message. Ben listens and responds in such a way that the audience infers that their intended victim has arrived and is on his way to the basement. Ben shouts for Gus. When the door that their target is supposed to enter from opens, it is Gus who enters, minus his gun (which he has accidentally sent upstairs in the dumbwaiter). A gunshot is heard, Ben leaves alone, and a van marked ‘Compleat Cleaning Service’ pulls up to the house – details added by Altman to make Gus’s fate obvious.
The Dumb Waiter bears resemblance to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), another absurdist comedy about two men waiting in a universe seemingly devoid of meaning or purpose. One could argue, though, that The Dumb Waiter goes Beckett’s essentially existentialist scenario one better by adding an illuminating political dimension to the proceedings. Gus and Ben aren’t waiting for some transcendental signified that may or may not appear; they are poised to fulfill an actual task (murder) assigned to them by their real but unseen underworld bosses. As members of the criminal underclass, Gus and Ben are both ‘dumb waiters’, i.e. disempowered subjects relegated to Gesellschaft society’s basement, receiving orders from above that they can neither fully comprehend or fulfill without succumbing to (self-)destruction. Accordingly, Pinter critic Michael Billington interprets the play as being ‘about the dynamics of power and the nature of partnership. Ben and Gus are both victims of some unseen authority and a surrogate married couple quarrelling, testing, talking past each other and raking over old times…[The Dumb Waiter is] a strongly political play about the way a hierarchical society, in pitting the rebel against the conformist, places both at its mercy [and] a deeply personal play about the destructiveness of betrayal’ (2007: 89). Both teleplays were shot in Montreal in February 1987. The Dumb Waiter aired on ABC on 12 May 1987 and The Room aired on 2 December 1987. Both films subsequently aired together under the title Basements on 10 February 1988.
O.C. and Stiggs (1987)
The one Reagan-era feature film Altman made that was not based on a play was
O.C. and Stiggs (filmed in the summer of 1983 but not released until July 1987). Featuring two characters in the last of a series of stories by Ted Mann and Todd Carroll (‘The Ugly, Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs’) in the October 1982 issue of
National Lampoon,
O.C. and Stiggs was supposed to be a teen exploitation comedy about the misadventures of two high school delinquents from Phoenix, Arizona who wreak havoc on the Schwabs, a suburban family described by Patrick McGilligan as ‘bloated with all-American pretense’ (1989: 528). Through the auspices of producer Peter Newman, MGM execs Freddie Fields and Frank Yablans hired Altman, who needed the work, and afforded him a $7 million budget on the promise that he would stick to the script and not badmouth the studio in the press. Altman, who hated teen exploitation films, proceeded to rewrite the script, styling it as a satire of the genre, much to the chagrin of co-screenwriters Ted Mann and Donald Cantrell, who were kept off the set during principal photography. Predictably, despite a strong supporting cast (Paul Dooley, Ray Walston, Tina Louise, Cynthia Nixon, Melvin van Peebles, Dennis Hopper, Martin Mull and Louis Nye),
O.C. and Stiggs did poorly in test marketing with its teenage target audience; so poorly that MGM shelved it for four years after Altman refused to recut the picture. When it was finally released in 1987, it played in only eighteen theatres for a week, earning less than $30,000 against a production cost of $7 million. Reviews were likewise dismal. Altman deemed it ‘a suspect project from the beginning’ (in Thompson 2006: 134).
Beyond Therapy (1987)
The last of Altman’s many play adaptation films was of Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy (from 1981), a light-hearted comic farce that focuses on Prudence (a highlystrung neurotic) and Bruce (a somewhat prissy bisexual): two lonely Manhattanites seeking romance with the help of their psychiatrists, Stuart and Charlotte, each of whom suggests their patient place a personal ad in the newspaper. Despite a fine cast – Jeff Goldblum as Bruce, Julie Hagerty as Prudence, Glenda Jackson as Charlotte, Tom Conti as Stuart and Christopher Guest as Bruce’s live-in lover, Bob – Altman reverts too often to slapstick for a cheap laugh. Consequently, Beyond Therapy is ‘killed by whimsy’, in the astute words of Roger Ebert (1987: n.p.). It is arguably Altman’s worst film.
Recalling his experience of working with Altman, Christopher Durang blamed him for taking over too much and for subverting any subtlety the play allegedly possessed:
When he doesn’t make a good film [Altman] goes very far off sometimes – and this was [for me] a very unhappy experience and outcome. Altman wrote his own adaptation of the play before I even started to write mine – which certainly wasn’t the agreement. Then I wrote mine, which he pretty much ignored. And he was hurt I didn’t like his version. Eventually I requested that we have a shared credit (since his version still had chunks of the original play in it), and I secretly hoped that the actors would improvise a lot, as was known to happen in Altman films. However, the finished film is pretty close to what Altman wrote. His version, in my opinion, throws the psychological underpinnings out the window, and people just run around acting ‘crazy’. I think the play would have made a good commercial comic film if the track-able psychology from the play had been kept. As well as more of the play’s dialogue.
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The Rake’s Progress and Aria (1987)
Always the restless experimenter, Altman even tried his hand at opera in the 1980s. At the invitation Paul C. Boylan, Dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Altman directed Igor Stravinsky’s
The Rake’s Progress (1951, libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, based on eight William Hogarth paintings and engravings, 1733–35) at Ann Arbor in the fall of 1982 and again at the Opéra du Nord in Lille, France in May 1986.
15 Altman departed from the original script in several ways. He concentrated the action by turning three acts into two. Instead of the many locations specified in the libretto, Altman decided to use just one location: London’s Bedlam, a massive, phantasmagorical stage set configured by
Popeye set designer Wolf Kroeger as combination prison, insane asylum and hell. Altman’s other innovation was to split Anne Truelove, the female lead/soprano, into two roles, to signify a schizoid personality. As Paul C. Boylan later noted, Altman’s interpretation of
The Rake’s Progress set off ‘a firestorm of controversy’; academics condemned his revisionist re-staging ‘as an inexcusable distortion of Stravinsky’s intent [while] most of the professional critics, the vast majority of the public who attended performances in Ann Arbor and France, and Altman himself, of course, viewed his conception of this work as a re-animation, a unique perspective, that allowed the audience to gain new insights into an opera that many had previously considered dated and anachronistic’ (1993: 55).
Altman also contributed a seven-minute segment to Aria, a 1987 British anthology film produced by Don Boyd consisting of ten short films of opera arias by a variety of directors (among them Ken Russell, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Bruce Beresford and Nicolas Roeg). For his segment Altman re-created the opening night of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Abaris ou les Boréades (Libretto by Louis de Cahusac) at Paris’s Théâtre Le Ranelagh in 1734. Instead of showing the opera, Altman kept his camera on the audience, consisting of a few bored aristocrats in their boxes but mostly filled with a louche assortment of inmates from a local asylum – a trope that allowed Altman to recycle costumes from The Rake’s Progress, which dates from the same period. As Gayle Sherwood Magee notes, ‘By focusing on the inmates extreme, irrational, raunchy, and absurd reactions to the sophisticated and refined opera soundtrack, Altman invites viewers to experience Rameau through the lens of madness’ (2014: 153).
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1988)
Another made-for-television movie project involved remaking Herman Wouk’s celebrated and oft-staged The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1953), adapted from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951). Altman initially demurred but took on the assignment after watching the Iran-Contra Hearings, televised in the spring and summer of 1987. He told an interviewer, ‘If the [TV] audience liked Iranscam, they’ll like this’ (Hanuaer 1988: 33). His production – not a remake of the 1954 Edward Dmytryk film, The Caine Mutiny starring Humphrey Bogart, but of the Broadway play that focuses only on the court-martial – was shot in December 1987 in an old gym at Fort Worden, a decommissioned army base in Port Townsend, Washington: a somewhat rustic venue compared to the more august setting specified in the playscript (‘the General Court-Martial Room of the Twelfth Naval District, San Francisco’). As is customary in such proceedings, long tables were arranged on three sides of ‘the stand’, actually just a chair in the middle of a large room allotted for the deposition of witnesses, with the court martial judges sitting directly opposite the isolated chair, and the prosecution and defence attorneys facing each other at tables on either side. Running counter to his usual modus operandi, Altman decided to ‘de-dramatise’ the drama, hoping that a TV-viewer who suddenly flipped to The Caine Mutiny Court Martial on his TV dial would think ‘he’s tuned into C-SPAN by mistake’. To make what was a wordy courtroom drama visually engaging, Altman often shifted focus and altered perspectives while he had his cinematographer, Jacek Laskus, keep the camera subtly moving into, away from and across speakers and listeners. Altman also took care to cast young actors, as most of the naval officers would have been in their twenties and thirties.
Starring Brad Davis of
Midnight Express fame as Capt. Queeg (Keith Carradine turned down the part), Jeff Daniels as Lt. Stephen Maryk, Queeg’s second-in-command, performance artist/actor Eric Bogosian as Maryk’s defense attorney, Lt. Barney Greenwald, Peter Gallagher as Lt. Com. John Challee, Kevin J. O’Connor as Lt. Thomas Keefer, and Altman stalwart Michael Murphy as Captain Blakely,
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial dramatises the prosecution of Lt. Maryk, who is accused of mutiny for forcibly relieving his commanding officer, Capt. Queeg, during a typhoon. Eventually, under Barney Greenwald’s expert cross-examination, Queeg disintegrates on the witness stand and Maryk is acquitted, but Greenwald is not entirely happy with the outcome. He pities Queeg, views Maryk as fundamentally decent and well-meaning, but loathes Lt. Keefer, a patrician intellectual snob who did everything he could to turn Maryk and the rest of the crew against Queeg. At a post-acquittal party, a disgusted Greenwald denounces Keefer and throws a glassful of yellow wine into his face (echoing the insulting nickname of ‘Old Yellowstain’ the crew members had given to Queeg), before walking out of the now ruined party. Aired as a CBS special in May 1988,
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial garnered solid reviews as an intelligent drama, skillfully executed and featuring almost uniformly strong performances.
Notes