Movies for Mood or Money?

Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us opens with a gentle pan from the hazy skyline of a Mississippi morning across a field of grass along the tracks where a chain gang's flatcar rolls through a thicket, and to the pond where two convicts paddle a boat ashore and escape into a car which pulls into view as the camera completes its circle. All the way around, it pans a whole expansive environment, a distance of soft green and damp air which will dominate the film, cushioning the violence of its bank robber heroes like their own lonely needs and sentiments.

Thieves is the finest work to date by a director who is arguably the most skillful to emerge in this country during the last ten years. Thieves Like Us, based on Edward Anderson's novel, concerns a trio of bank robbers in Mississippi in the 1930s. It is the Depression and more than ever, people have to steal from each other to live. The banker, of course, steals with his pen and his brain, and when the bankrobber steals from him, the banker inflates the amounts missing to get more insurance. The world is in a mood to make heroes, which it does with radio programs like Gangbusters or the election of F.D.R. (a broadcast of his second inaugural provides background for one of the gang's robberies.) Their families depend on the robbers to get through the hard times and members of the gang become like members of a family--until finally they are forced to prey on each other as well and a wife betrays the young hero Bowie to the police in return for leniency toward her imprisoned husband.

French cinematographer Jean Boffety has helped give this world a pale damp beauty. Critic Pauline Kael compared the effect to the mood of Faulkner, but there is something lyric and almost painfully beautiful which could exist nowhere outside of film. There are wonderful details of gas stations and motor courts which recall Walker Evans, like the shots taken through screen doors to which bits of a painted bread ad still adhere or the recurrent presence of Coke bottles with their pale green glass, and Coke signs, even at the entrance of the state prison. But the effect of this carefully calculated atmosphere belongs not to the individual details but to the flow of the film from one to the other, their cumulative building-up, and also to similarity among different modes of things. Something like the way a distant shot of characters is set off by the sound of their voices from a microphone obviously close at hand, or the way Chicamaw, one of the robbers, enacts a play bank robbery with the children of a cohort and then breaks into real, dangerous anger when one of them refuses to go along.

It is this large effect, the sense of an atmosphere and a mood, which Altman asserts is his primary goal. John Simon '46 has accused him of being a director who can boast of every great director's qualification of skill and sense--except that of having something to say. But Altman resists that intellectual demand: "I don't have anything to say to anybody except to show them what I see. I can't draw their conclusions," he told me. "Of course all the material is filtered through me, and is going to have some shape of mine, but that is inevitable... I don't think you can have a hard moral line unless you're going to be a politician or a philosopher."

Altman is something of a maverick among Hollywood directors. Since his first widespread recognition with M*A*S*H, he has found himself too often making movies which threaten to have to wait ten or twenty years for recognition because of ineffectual studio backing. When I talked to him earlier this week he was at his office at "Lionsgate Productions," a studio he started simply "to make my own films, in my own little studio." He is determined "to keep away from the atmosphere of studios and keep the people I work with away from them. Because all that stuff rubs off."

"All that stuff" includes a swarm of commercial irritations and handicaps against which Altman has been straining for years. Thieves, for one, is a film which suffers by them. For instance, cinematographer Boffety would have been unavailable had the film been made in New York or Los Angeles; the union would have prohibited him from working. Boffety, distinguished by his work on European productions like The Things of Life, joins Vilmos Zsigmond, who worked with Altman in McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, on the list of the world's expert cameramen used in Altman films.

Moreover, laments Altman, Thieves was mishandled in its promotion by United Artists. "I hate 'em," he growls. "The picture is down the tube already. It's gone, it's a lost cause, because they've already pulled the money out of advertising." Part of the problem is that in a system which most respects big films like the catastrophic Lost Horizon or successful Love Story, a production like Thieves is "small"--which means small-budget.

There has been a movement recently for studios to give freer rein to some promising young directors. This has been based for the most part on the enormous success of George Luca's low-budget American Graffiti. Now other young directors--Marty Scorsese, Terry Matlick, Steven Spielberg,--have made successful first films. But, Altman says, there are not enough. And the studios are still trying to keep their hands on the director's shoulder. "There should be room for more than just these," he says. "And Spielberg, for instance, is still under contract to Universal for about five more years, and as long as he's there he's going to have to come out of the underground because they're going to try to make him shoot their kinds of films."

Altman says he doesn't have time to direct and oversee distribution and advertising, but he did intervene in the strange commercial career of The Long Goodbye, released last year. The Long Goodbye, was based on the Raymond Chandler novel, with Elliot Gould playing Philip Marlowe. It dealt with an author untouched since Bogart's formidable version of the hero. Last spring United Artists opened the film at several locations across the country, avoiding the usual New York premiere. The critics reacted with dismay. "The truth is," Altman says, "that most of the reviewers across the country have the New York reviews to guide them." And so it bombed. Altman, furious that the promised New York premiere had been denied his film, managed to get it released again in the fall with a new ad campaign featuring ironic posters by a former Mad magazine artist. It did better, but still didn't pull the audience Altman knew it could. The first billing, as a hard-boiled detective flick, was completely misleading, but the public didn't seem to understand the light spoof Altman was actually trying to achieve, which the second-release publicity emphasized.

The thing about Hollywood, in Altman's view, is that it can only sell films according to category. And most of his films, from McCabe's special version of the Western to The Long Goodbye's innovations in the Chandler tradition, seek to break out of or enlarge genres. Thieves, with all its similarities to Bonnie and Clyde--robbers enjoying their descriptions in the papers, the shoot out at the motor court--cuts a new trail as well. Altman hopes it will do better when he takes it to the Cannes Festival, where M*A*S*H was a grand prize winner.

But not all of the problem can be blamed on the studios. Altman finds that there is a reluctance among current audiences to "go for anything that's new and exciting. They sit back and say we can't do anything about it anyway and so just giggle and give in." What they're giving in to is, in part at least, the Nixon administration's campaign to change the public mind. "And it's worked," Altman commented, "even with younger people, the Nixon campaign has worked much more than we sense. The whole attitude of the country has taken an aesthetic back-step of about fifteen years."

How seriously Altman takes his film-making is indicated by some of the stories surrounding the filming of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. On location in the wilds of British Columbia, Altman had the entire cast work on constructing the set--a whole town at the edge of the late frontier--to bring the cast together. He put objects in drawers that would never be opened to heighten the actors' sense of authenticity. He has used a similar care in the choice of his actors: many of those in Thieves are non-professionals. These include the producer's wife, and star Shelley Duvall, who plays Bowie's girlfriend Keechie. Duvall is a gentle-looking woman with large eyes, large teeth and a peculiar beauty in her homeliness. Altman met her at a party in Houston while shooting Brewster McCloud and cast her in the film. She has never had any professional training, but it was not the simple story it appears at first glance. "We worked with her a long time and shot a lot of film on it before putting her in Brewster. And then she worked for three months on that little part in McCabe." (In McCabe, Duvall plays the young woman who joins Mrs. Miller's whorehouse after her husband's death and loves a lanky young cowboy who is shot by a gunslinger--played by Keith Carradine, Bowie in Thieves.

But, Altman says, he much prefers the professional actor or actress if available. Rarely have Hollywood or the acting schools appreciated someone of Shelley Duvall's gentle, engaging plainness and authenticity. And yet a more conventional star, Julie Christie, whom Altman used to brilliant advantage in McCabe, would normally be beyond the budgets he now has to work with. In planning his latest feature, Nashville, to be shot beginning in July, Altman recognized that one of the parts "is really her."

"But we didn't have the money," he sayd. "So we hired somebody else. And now she wants to do the part for no money and I'm pissed off."

Nashville, a study of the country music business, will follow a film Altman has already finished shooting, California Split, starring George Segal and Elliot Gould. California Split, in Altman's words, "is an atmospheric film about gambling. It has no story, no plot, but it does have a progression. It may put a lot of people off, but I'm just trying to deal with film where I reach somebody emotionally."

Altman has definite favorites among the pantheon of established directors: Huston, Bergmann, Bertolucci "with his tremendous eye," and Passer ("Intimate Lighting is one of the best movies I've ever seen.") "These are people I can never touch," Altman says.

For the future there is at least one ideal film he has in mind. It would be called The Belle Epoch and concern "a very wealthy family at the turn of the century in France, a large family up to the first World War. It's the beginning of the mechanical age, and it's about the society at that time and its amazement at its own failure. The family ends the way animals become extinct: They become so perfected to their own environment that when their environment disappears, they have to, too."

The topic hardly sounds like typical Altman, if only because it is not American. For Altman is classically American in his interests, his settings, his skills--and also his faults. He is inconsistent, and each of his films has spots which are left as gaps, where a character turns flat, where a good idea is carried into exaggeration. It is as if Altman were too full of ideas, and in too much of a hurry to get them on film, to make the full balanced works of the European masters. But through it all there is a sense of such vitality and interest, a feeling of place and mood, an atmosphere of light and detail, that one can overlook so much of defect in the spirit of the whole.