Tag: Sally Kellerman

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: READY TO WEAR <PRÊT-Á-PORTER> (1994)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Opening on an image that links fashion with death (“Poison”) and the purchase of two gaudy Christian Dior ties, an acerbic tone is immediately set for Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear (initially titled Prêt-á-Porter, which it retains in its opening credits). After all, a film that promises to take a gander at the world of the vacuous fashion industry through the eyes of Altman, one of filmmaking’s keenest observers of human nature no matter how ridiculous, comes front-loaded with delicious possibilities. Unfortunately, everyone (Altman included) looks like they’re having too much fun and in too good of spirit for any of it to land with much weight. Ultimately, this is a movie where looking good is primary. The inability to match any piece of clothing with the stupid tie at the beginning of the movie is the catalyst of the perpetual conflict in the film which is also its greatest flaw. Nothing matches and nothing fits. In the end, clothes become meaningless. Yeah, the world of fashion is all stupid and gouache but, honestly, who gives a fuck when time is short and life is so much fun? Fair enough. But if everything is such a trifle, why should I care about any of Ready to Wear and devote 132 minutes to it if it doesn’t say anything beyond the obvious?

Ready to Wear, like many other Altman films, is an ensemble, wide-canvassed affair in which a multitude of characters mill around a central location and we traverse the course of their lives over a fixed amount of time. In this instance, we find ourselves in France during Paris Fashion Week where armies of journalists, designers, models, photographers, and schmoozers will crawl all over each other and a bunch of dog shit to get the front row seat for a glimpse at the germination of what will be the style for next season. If the financially hectic and cacophonous world of commodity futures seems baffling but fascinating, the world of fashion seems eerily similar, just pitched on the other side of the spectrum. Instead of utilizing information and guesswork to set monetary benchmarks for certain products, what we wear today was based off of something high-end yesterday which got its idea from something ultimately unwearable and ridiculous that was salivated over and ambulated across a catwalk during Paris Fashion Week.

Like Nashville (1975) and HealtH (1980), Ready to Wear builds towards a Big Event conclusion. Unlike those two films, the road to that conclusion is fun but entirely inessential. Beginning with the choking death of the tremendously disliked fashion mogul, Olivier de la Fontaine (Jean-Pierre Cassel), and ending with the unveiling of Simone Lowenthal’s (Anouk Aimée) newest clothing line, the creme filling of Ready to Wear is sometimes rich and sometimes delicious but also messy beyond the point of charming and, curiously, not very filling. For Ready to Wear is a tapestry of various vacuums lacking a feeling of true integration for all of its parts. As bickering newspaper reporters full of as much piss and vinegar as they are devoid of professional or personal integrity, the two (Julia Roberts from the Houston Chronicle and Tim Robbins from the Washington Post) end up falling into a French mini-comedy that sticks them in the same hotel room they cannot seem to ever leave as drinking and fucking become the primary activities that rule supreme in their orbit. As cute as this bit is, it feels completely disconnected from the rest of the film.

And this is double ditto for the thread involving Teri Garr and Danny Aielllo which is only worthwhile for the appearance of both actors appearing in the same frame. In this thread, Garr is set up as a secret paramour to Aiello but the punchline that eventually arrives lands like a big “so what?” while trying to get more mileage out of a (better) visual gag from 1974 with Bert Remsen in California Split. In the instances of these two character couples, I can’t help but feel like both stories are loose strands that would have been better off cut from the whole picture which may have also tightened up the narrative, created more focus, and put this in the company of Altman’s sharp and unjustly maligned, aforementioned HealtH. As they stand, both give the game away and tip Ready to Wear more in the direction of a grand party on the edge of the end of the century and less a wickedly biting satire on the fashion industry. And, consequentiallly, their pieces bloat the project and dilute it of its venom.

I can also say the above applies to Kim Basinger’s arch performance as hick reporter Kitty Wells. Forever out of her depth and highlighting the world of high fashion as steeped in all kinds of invented eruditeness, her “cultured” subjects always juxtapose with her ridiculous, bumpkin patois (both syllables of Dior are blasted out of her mouth like a shotgun and given equal weight). Cute, but she’s just Opal from the BBC in a hillbilly skin and adds nothing to the project other than giving the then-in-demand Basinger a chance to work with Altman again.

While excess is the name of the game in Ready to Wear, Altman seems downright undisciplined in parts. The MacGuffin of hunting for the “murderer” of Cassell’s character feels lazy and, like the threads mentioned above, it would be relatively easy to excise. After all, we still have quite a bit of structure left regarding some palace intrigue surrounding Simone’s business due to the machinations of her ambitious son (Rupert Everett) and a comedy of errors regarding three fashion editors (Sally Kellerman, Linda Hunt, and Tracey Ullman) trying to court a pretentious and self-satisfied photographer (Stephen Rea). In both cases, these two pieces of Ready to Wear are the ones that bring out some of the film’s richest and funniest characters, both primary and secondary. Of course, it’s entirely possible that there is more footage that exists that would go a long way better integrating some of these elements (Kellerman said as much in the press at the time of the film’s release). Given that this is a Miramax film of a certain vintage, it would shock me none to find out that Altman learned the lesson that most all learned when passing through the now-disgraced House of Weinstein and that creative control was all illusory. In the end, this was the only time he worked with the company, taking his action to other, smaller indies for the remainder of his career.

The 90’s were more or less as if the hedonistic 70’s had returned from a vacation in the money hungry 80’s and Ready to Wear ultimately finds Robert Altman caught up in the giant spectacle of colorful and loud vapidity that colored the decade. In fact, this movie is probably the closest in spirit to a celebration of the 90’s that there ever was. In highlighting the outlandish and garish nature of the world of fashion, Altman unveils a shallow culture that doesn’t give a shit about politics, gender, sex, or anything else. Everything is a hustle in the pursuit of a good time which, obviously, runs on money. This is a film that says those things with some elements of criticism but this is also a film that was also a multi-media product generator as it was released alongside its mass market screenplay book from Hyperion Press (almost a staple with any Miramax film released in the 90’s) and its uncommonly hip (for an Altman joint) soundtrack, the latter a crass idea satirized by Altman in the opening credits of Nashville all those years ago.

Not without its own certain charm, Ready to Wear is by no means a bad movie. It’s just a phenomenally inconsequential one. For all of its light callbacks to previous Altman films, its charming moments (mostly all belonging to Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroiannni), and is heavy emphasis on 90’s excess, the film feels like a soft confection wrapped up in opulent packaging. The end is explicitly articulated as the closing of a circle and Altman is a little ahead of the curve, but Ready to Wear’s denouement is a little more satisfyingly nihilistic than it is laugh-out-loud funny. If the idea of a clothing line that features no clothes seems like an unthinkable thing not worth considering, let me tell you about the vulgar game show host from Queens, New York who one day became the President of the United States.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: BREWSTER MCCLOUD (1970)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

By Patrick Crain

When M*A*S*H became an unexpected monster hit that would allow Robert Altman to more or less write his own ticket for the next ten years, he came face to face with a stark decision. He could continue down the road of commercialism and give mass audiences what he thought they might have wanted or he could continue being an iconoclast who would blow apart any good will he may have previously accrued by prospectively indulging in projects that meant the most to an audience of one, namely Robert Altman. Within nine months of the release of M*A*S*H, this question would be answered very clearly with the release of Brewster McCloud.

Continuing his trend of doing unwelcome prostate exams on the studio suits, Brewster McCloud may have been even more damning and reprobate than M*A*S*H and it’s evident within the first three minutes. Though MGM’s Leo the Lion title card had been sent up before, never had his maw opened to reveal a mistake (specifically, Rene Auberjonois sheepishly saying “I forgot the opening line” is laid over the roar), announcing the artificiality of the movies before we even see a frame of the actual film. Soon after that, Altman takes center aim at opening credit sequences by calling attention to it while setting up the players in this mad, modern fairy tale (and if audiences thought the verbalized roll call of actors that posed as the closing credits M*A*S*H was audacious, they were likely to be just as delighted at the end of Brewster McCloud and, perhaps, even more so).

Brewster McCloud, on the surface, is a social observation wrapped up in a narrative regarding a bizarre murder mystery. The town of Houston is suddenly plagued by the mass stranglings of some of society’s upper crust, including a wealthy miser who owns a string of rest homes (an unrecognizable, hilarious Stacey Keach) and a gaudily spangled, tone deaf, and miserably loud Marge Schott-like matron all things white in her beloved city (a fabulous Margaret Hamilton). To help solve these murders, hotshot San Francisco detective Frank Shaft (Altman day-player Michael Murphy in his first plum role) and his glorious assortment of turtlenecks are called in to assist and he immediately runs afoul of the local police investigation headed up by acerbic Captain Crandall (G Wood, pretty much playing the same character he did in M*A*S*H). Weaving in and out off this mystery is Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort, charming audiences a year before he really made an impression in Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude), a lonely and shy young man who lives in the fallout shelter of the Astrodome and is in the process of building a massive set of wings so one day he can fly far far away. Also, mixed into the craziness is a subplot regarding the widow of a dirty cop (Bert Remsen in his Altman debut), a dizzy yet radiant Astrodome tour guide (Shelley Duvall, an absolute doll in her film debut), a local political bigwig (William Windom), and a great deal of bird shit.

There are a great deal of elements in this very specific stew that makes it such an enticing curiosity and quite unlike anything else in Altman’s filmography. Along with its relentless torching of everything stupid and ugly about American culture (racism, corruption, sleazy politicians), the film takes some pretty hip weed humor out for a stroll along with more than a few homages to the Wizard of Oz and cop films of the day (most especially Bullitt and Shaft). Likewise clever and curiously amusing is the film’s continuous monologue by the lecturer (Auberjonois) whose theories on man and bird prove to be so potent, he slowly transforms into an overstuffed winged creature as the movie unfolds.

But, amid the almost surreal, carnival atmosphere that perfumes the film, there are deeper and more serious themes at play in Brewster McCloud. Bud Cort is not unlike his character in Harold and Maude in that he’s engaged in a strange relationship with an older woman and is also unable to connect to the real world. But in Brewster McCloud, the audience doesn’t much know what has caused him to give up on humanity to the point he would retreat into such a cockeyed fantasy. Sally Kellerman’s mysterious, trench-coated, doting, mama bird/angel of death character of Louise hangs about in the background and cuts a figure that Altman would return to with just a little less amusement in the last hour of his career when mortality was watching his every move. And not unlike Sandy Dennis’s Frances Austen in That Cold Day in the Park, Brewster is a sexual cripple. Taught to believe that the closest experience to flying at man’s disposal is the pleasure of sex and that, once one has been deflowered, man settles and loses his desire for flight, his sex life is relegated to him doing an insane amount of chin-ups while his girlfriend (a hilarious Jennifer Salt) masturbates under the covers.

Brewster McCloud is a very singular, madcap moment in Altman’s career that feels something like a palate cleanser that was splashed into the audience’s face to repel the squares who had hitched onto M*A*S*H for all the wrong reasons. Where he would give flesh to some bottom shelf National Lampoon characters some fifteen years later with his underrated O.C. and Stiggs, Altman here looks to be crafting something that feels like it escaped from a movie parody right out of MAD Magazine. And while the final moments of the film drive home just what an actor’s movie the film is, the real star of Brewster McCloud may very well be the Astrodome itself. A scant five years after it was completed, Altman saw it as one of the best metaphors for the day; a monument to the fact that the human race eventually became far more risk-adverse and less adventurous and would opt to nest in the reliable creature comforts one got from living in a cage. And it was a cage Altman would continue to rattle as if doing so were a personality trait.

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: M*A*S*H (1970)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

By Patrick Crain

And then there was M*A*S*H.

Once upon a time, fifty one years ago to be exact, long before the block programming of post-Carson syndication would lull my generation to sleep with the overly familiar, brassy theme song “Suicide is Painless” before drifting into the recorder-driven opening for Taxi, M*A*S*H was a third-priority Korean War film about which the suits at 20th Century Fox barely cared. For their eyes were collectively on both Tora! Tora! Tora!, a multi-helmed, transcontinental production and Patton, a star vehicle for George C. Scott. Over the hill in Calabasas, California and amongst the knotty hills of brown and olive was Robert Altman and a ragtag bunch of nobody actors making a picture about a war that was already mostly forgotten. He brought it in on time and under-budget so the suits were happy.

Well, they were happy until they saw what Robert Altman had done to Ring Lardner Jr’s adaptation of Richard Hooker’s novel about Army surgeons. A structureless mess of anarchy one would have to have been a detective to recognize as “not Vietnam,” M*A*S*H was everything the aging brass at Fox would have rather avoided. In fact, to drive home the point that it was set in Korea, the suits demanded Altman include a post-credit crawl making explicit that THIS was a film about a PREVIOUS war, implying that this was not at all to be misconstrued as to be sending up the current administration and our involvement in the conflict in Vietnam.

I mean… ok. But it’s Vietnam. And that’s probably a good thing because the core audience that lifted M*A*S*H to its dizzying heights of financial and critical success was the cynical Boomer generation who was more than ready to pick up what Altman and company was putting down. The late and lamented father of a buddy of mine used to speak about seeing M*A*S*H in the theater in tones so reverent, they were probably better suited to stories about the birth of his son. “We had to go back and watch it again immediately to pick up the stuff we missed,” he said.

And, of course, M*A*S*H is really where Altman’s style blossomed which caused one to want to go back and watch it again. And maybe that’s not by choice but accident. After all, his previous three films all seemed much more tightly bound by story and plot. Regardless of whatever the screenplay was or the source material from which it sprung, Altman decided M*A*S*H was a mood and not a story and all but chucked the script; something that made Lardner none too pleased until, ironically, he picked up an Oscar for his troubles. Bracketed by the arrival and departure of Col. Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt) to and from the 4077 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit which is mere miles from the front, M*A*S*H zips through its running time dividing itself between the zany antics of the irreverent surgeons and the horrendous detail of their gruesome work. When the film settles down into the operating rooms, the film turns shockingly gory and, additionally, gets awash in so much overlapping dialogue regarding surgical procedural and other ephemera that the audience never once thinks that Sutherland and Skerritt (and Elliott Gould who shows up as ace chest surgeon “Trapper John” McIntyre), aren’t actual doctors.

It is in this busy canvass of toil and work that Altman can let his focus run free and drift in and out of clusters of people, all engaged in their own private worlds. The multi-tracked soundtrack he’d perfect in Nashville gets its first workout here as stacked conversations force the viewer to choose one and stick with it only to realize you’ve drifted into another conversation that somehow seemed adjoined to the other. That Altman could do this at will and almost any film was pure magic and the biggest reason his films have such long legs in terms of their conduciveness for revisiting. And M*A*S*H is Altman’s first film to have the wide and warm tapestry of supporting players who fade in and out of the scenery in half-measures but all of whom we feel as if we know by the time the closing credits run. It is around this time that Altman begins to toy with building communities within his films. A practice that would run to the release of Popeye (and non-release of HealtH) in 1980, Altman’s productions became something of a communal experience with actors being chosen as types and then asked to flesh them out on the screen while using the script only as a loose framework (most notably in the following year’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller). In M*A*S*H, we come to adore secondary characters such as Major Frank Burns (the extra dry Roger Bowen), Father Mulcahy (Rene Auberjonois, having a ball), Painless Pole Waldowski (John Shuck, making history by dropping the very first instance of the word “fuck” in a scripted motion picture by a major studio), and Corporal Radar O’ Reilly (Gary Burghoff, the only cast member to make the transition to the television adaptation).

The film might have a cruel misogynistic streak by today’s standards and there are plenty of people who will impose all the current social values and norms to a fifty year old movie without applying much context to the discussion. But while it would be silly and irresponsible to cancel it outright, M*A*S*H shouldn’t be let off the hook completely. For it is true that the kind of cruelty heaped upon Major Margaret “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman, bringing a fire to the role that nabbed her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress) is of an aggressively sexual and misogynistic nature but Altman wants to make sure that it’s not entirely at the hands of the hands of men. In what is seen as the most overtly crude humiliation (namely the shower scene), it’s clear that the other women in the camp have as much disdain for her as the men and are likewise in on the prank. In M*A*S*H, the camp isn’t simply a “boy’s club,” but a “club for open hedonists.” Nobody cares that the aggressively hypocritical Frank Burns (a terrific Robert Duvall) and O’Houlihan are having sex, what they care about is Burns and O’ Houlihan’s attitudes about everyone else who are having sex. But, all of that said, that women are in on the prank in the movie cannot erase the fact that none of the filmmakers were women. In this world, O’Houlihan is tasked with the binary choice of dumbing down and shutting up or resigning her commission which everyone knows means everything to her. This is where the film’s aim to drag all authority down to a very low level, strong career women like O’Houlihan become collateral damage and its hard not see the the undermining of similar women characters of the era as a feature and not a bug. Luckily, Altman would get much better at this in a very big hurry.

So, for certain, M*A*S*H is a product of its time but it’s hard to overstate what a dynamite product it was. Nothing seemed scared after M*A*S*H. Hell, even the holy game of football, as American as war, gets pulled through the ringer in the film’s final act (with some footage courtesy of future trash auteur and Wide World of Sports pioneer, Andy Sidaris). At a time in which norms were crumbling by the second, M*A*S*H took dead center aim and laughed all the way to the bank as it stomped through all that we took seriously as a nation. The combination of our cathartic exhale and the film’s black humor proved quite therapeutic. And while the film launched a whole cottage industry of similar comedies in which anti-authoritarianism is taken to a sophomoric and perverse level, (it’s difficult to watch something like National Lampoon’s Animal House without seeing much of M*A*S*H’s DNA), Altman, now a superstar director with a monster hit under his belt, would be displaying his brand of fully-committed anarchy by the year’s end as the next trick up his sleeve would both equally dazzle and confuse and put on full display the fearless maverick that he truly was.