Blu-ray Review: Kansas City (1996)

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From the stirring ballads of McCabe and Mrs. Miller to the country yearning of Nashville and soulful blues of Cookie's Fortune, music in the movies of Robert Altman comes in many forms. Complementing the high and low notes sung by his characters — in the vein of the overlapping dialogue that has become an Altman trademark — with his clever use of music to set the dramatic stage, the maverick filmmaker wields sound impressionistically, the way a painter swirls color around a canvas with a brush.

Regularly usurping his film scores, whether it's in the drawing room sing-alongs of Gosford Park or the vaudevillian numbers of A Prairie Home Companion and beyond, Altman uses the public performances of songs to not only create a mood but also transplant us into the heart of each work. Much more than just a single filmmaking tool he has at his disposal, frequently in his oeuvre, music becomes the most important one. Transcending the screen to have as much of an impact on him as it does on us, it informs his subtly ever-changing filmmaking M.O. And nowhere is this approach more evident post-Nashville than in his jazz fueled, forgotten '96 effort Kansas City.

Using jazz's signature improvisational riffs to build its narrative structure, the movie takes a look at vice, music, politics, and corruption over a twenty-four hour period when Missouri is set to hold a consequential 1934 election. While initially it plays like the latest in a long line of Altman's meandering ensemble dramedies, we quickly learn that, although they sound great jamming together, each character we meet in Kansas City doubles as an instrument and all will get their chance to solo.

Anchored by '90s Altman regular Jennifer Jason Leigh as a desperate woman who holds a politician's laudanum addicted wife hostage to secure the release of her hoodlum husband from a jazz club gangster, Kansas City is a crime film that — true to the director's work — is far less interested in plot than it is captivated by its characters.

Performing depression era slang in the hard and fast key of screwball (regardless of the scene's tone), Leigh tries her best to sell lines like "don't try to high-hat me," "park the body, sister," "and put some snap into it" which, when taken cumulatively, land far less than they detract from the goings-on. A Jean Harlowesque Girl From Missouri who's just wild about her man, as intriguing as Leigh's spunky Blondie O’Hara seems to be, we never get a true sense of who she is as a person from one outburst to the next. And although Leigh's Blondie dominates the scenes she shares with her hostage Carolyn Stilton (Miranda Richardson) in the film's first half, she disappears into the chorus once Richardson's increasingly curious victim takes over the bass line later on.

While Kansas City’s women propel forward a majority of the film's plot, the rest of the action is found in the booze soaked, testosterone heavy, smoke and sax filled world of the Hey-Hey Club. A jazz joint located on 18th Street where some of the '90s most talented instrumentalists bring to life the legendary sounds of Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins, for a music buff like Altman who grew up listening to blues in Black clubs, City's performances feel like he's stepping back in time to show us the place he calls home.

A dynamic showcase for Harry Belafonte in a daringly against-type role as an underworld gangster who holds court at the Hey-Hey, the actor commands every scene he's in right from the jump. Like a bandleader introducing the musicians keeping the beat behind him, he uses the frame like a microphone and reaches through to tell us exactly what we need to know. From where he sits in the center of the screen, Belafonte reveals, "what's gonna happen at dawn tomorrow going to depend on what happen when the sun go down tonight. You can believe that shit," just as events kick into high gear for Blondie and Carolyn and the music that is Altman's Kansas City starts to play.

Going off on what the director refers to as "jazz riffs" throughout the film where its characters wander away from the plot like a clarinetist backing away from the melody in order to stand up and jam on their own, occasionally the dropped notes and tempo changes distract rather than enhance the musicality of its plot.

Touching on some of his favorite issues like race, class, and gender roles amid the intersection of politics and vice, Kansas City feels like a thematic cousin to his musically minded 1975 masterpiece Nashville. A flawed yet still fascinating opus that rarely comes up in a conversation about the filmmaker's most beloved works that span his fifty year career, Kansas City is additionally dwarfed by the popularity of his other ‘90s output, in the form of the brilliant films Short Cuts and (my personal favorite) The Player.

Seeing it for the first time in twenty-four years however, in this stunningly remastered, special features loaded new Blu-ray from Arrow, Altman's movie proves itself not only worthy of a second look but a second listen as well. Filled with scene-stealing soloists like Leigh, Richardson, Belafonte, and Steve Buscemi ready to grab their trumpets and blow, Kansas City is a vital reminder that nothing — absolutely nothing — sounds quite like an Altman led band playing in 4x4 time.

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Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review: Nashville (1975) -- Dual Format Edition #683

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In the work that would ultimately define Robert Altman’s filmmaking carrer both as a process behind-the-camera and a style onscreen, Altman takes a cue from Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” using “ideas as… [his] maps” to guide us through his version of Nashville (and by extension America) as he saw it post-Watergate in 1975.

A freewheeling epic piece of cinematic portraiture that leaves “the obligatory scenes out” to follow dozens of characters and set a specific time and place onscreen, Nashville seems like quintessential Altman to fans looking back today but in understanding its chronological place in his filmography – it’s a piece of filmic tapestry built from the ambitions and experimentation explored earlier in his career.

 

From the oral credits that echo M*A*S*H to the motif of character sacrifice that began with The Long Goodbye and would continue on up through his sardonic Sunset Boulevard infused Hollywood roast The Player, Nashville captures the filmmaker at the very peak of his directorial powers.

Recognizing the truth – as in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil– that sometimes you make your best work under the gun, Nashville began as a compromise by Altman, promising Paramount a country western movie in exchange for the greenlight to make Thieves Like Us.

 

Given a garbage script he refused to shoot, he relied upon the most Altman of traits – loyalty – in collaborating with longtime friend and Thieves scripter Joan Tewkesbury who traveled to Nashville with a journal at her side.

A stranger in a strange land, Tewkesbury culled many of the film’s most memorable sequences from personal experience including the opening traffic jam that turns into a neighborhood block party and establishes the vital idea that the characters will be vehicles themselves, occasionally colliding and passing one another both accidentally and on purpose.

While in the end Tewkesbury’s 140 page opus was distilled to its very essence by Alan Rudolph and a large amount of the film’s dialogue and action was discovered during its extensive rehearsal period, Tewkesbury’s sense of gender balance and outsider appeal lives on in the final cut as Molly Haskell beautifully describes in her Criterion Collection essay.

 

Given the most control he’s ever had over one of his films, Altman took advantage of the absence of studio interference, amusingly joking in one of the Criterion’s three supplemental filmmaker interviews that by not having power, he had power indeed, paving the way for other directors like Clint Eastwood to go off and make films on their own, outsiders be damned. And in doing so, he released what the vintage trailer promises was “the damndest thing you ever saw,” in a film that defies genre label or any other traditional categorization by celebrating the very cast that helped create it.

 

Avoiding the surrealism, impressionism or expressionism found in foreign films of the past in favor of his own brand of heightened realism that had more in common with a great American novel than the docudramatic work of contemporaries like John Cassavetes or Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman paved the way for not only Paul Thomas Anderson but early 2000 Mexican New Wave filmmakers like Alejandro González Iñárritu as well.

In a similar vein, in this – my fourth viewing of the film – and the first time not on VHS, it’s impossible to watch and not see how much inspiration has been taken from the work in other mediums, with HBO’s The Wire and Treme feeling like long-lost descendants as well.

Yet as influential as it is, it remains just as vibrant as ever, merging together the plights of more than 20 distinct characters, over an hour of musical performances and an ever-present political van where a disembodied voice manages to alternately engage, provoke, confuse and empower everyday citizens to participate in government across a five day period.

Without any main characters or archetypal heroes or villains (at least that we can see coming the first time around), everyone is given equal footing. This idea makes Nashville timelier than ever as a refreshing celebration of the everyman and woman from magician to groupie in a post-modern world with a 24 hour celebrity news cycle that has turned America into a bit of a caste system of ninety-nine percenters taught that they don’t matter unless they are “seen”... even in an un-heroic light.

Similar to another ‘70s era multi-character (although more traditional) masterpiece The Godfather, I manage to find new things to love and a new main character to become fully invested in with every viewing.

 

Nonetheless, the two individuals who have always stood out in Altman’s classic were both last-minute casting changes in the form of Lily Tomlin’s gospel singer (replacing Louise Fletcher) and Henry Gibson’s initial country stereotype who later manages to put people before himself in the work’s bravura ending in a role that was (coincidentally) originally slated for Godfather's Robert Duvall.

While Gibson’s selfless act at the end marks a big surprise that makes you reevaluate your perception of the character and check your own stereotypes at the door, Tomlin’s character’s actions are surprising on a far subtler level when the married mother of two deaf children finds herself tempted by Keith Carradine’s lothario folk rocker.

The seductive lead-in to their tryst – deliciously unsentimental by the effect that his performance of the Oscar winning Original Song has on (at least) three women who believe he’s singing “I’m Easy” to them – is one of the high-points of the movie, managing to convey multiple thoughts from and about the perspectives of several characters at the exact same time.

And although we see Carradine bed a multitude of beauties, the effect that Lily Tomlin has on him is just as powerful as the song he’d previously sung has been on her. Yet true to life, we’re the solitary witnesses to the facts of just what goes on behind closed doors between men and women as the full weight of Tomlin’s scene is felt after she closes the door behind her and leaves him alone onscreen.

While Altman always intended the obnoxious BBC reporter played by Geraldine Chaplin to serve as a sort of stand-in and bridge from the film to the audience with the way she gets into people’s faces, establishes their history and asks some of the questions we want to know, I’ve always felt like the truest guide to Nashville is Scott Glenn’s unnamed Vietnam veteran soldier.

 

A man whom we recognize only in regard to his uniform and the name “Kelly” adorned upon it, Glenn’s sensitive soldier is present at most of the film’s most vital scenes and it’s in his ambiguity that Altman truly invites us to confront our thoughts, hopes and fears in the post-Kennedy, Vietnam War and Watergate America as Altman’s Nashville opened just two months after the war ended. And it's in his interactions with others where people are often at their emotionally truest for better or worse.

Brilliantly restored for its Criterion Collection debut, the 683rd series release serves up the film in a Blu-ray and DVD combo pack, offering the 160 minute work separately on two discs in each format and boasting a bonus DVD of standard definition extras already included on the high definition disc.

In addition to the traditional keepsake book featuring Haskell’s well-researched, thoroughly engrossing essay and the three interviews with the late filmmaker from 1975, 2001 and 2002, Criterion’s gorgeous Nashville collection also offers a brand new feature-length documentary, vintage behind-the-scenes footage, live Carradine musical demos along with Altman’s 2001 DVD commentary.

Since it packs quite an audible punch and in soundbar tests, I did notice a distinct lack of clarity, Nashville is best experienced on a big screen television in high definition complete with 5.1 DTS-HD surround sound to fully appreciate Jim Webb’s breakthrough multi-track sound system capable of picking up the subtle nuances of layered voices in a way that makes them all understandable.

As weird, witty, wonderful and wild in its wandering style as it was the first time I ever saw the film – Altman’s cinematic novel is most often remembered for its influence on the auteurs that followed. But perhaps its biggest impact was on the filmmaker himself as Nashville was not only birthed from Altman films of the past but – thanks to the ideas in it that he mapped – would likewise go on to birth some of the best Altman films of the future from The Player and Short Cuts to Cookie’s Fortune and Gosford Park.    

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

DVD Review: Brewster McCloud (1970)

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Released into theatres eleven months after Robert Altman's M*A*S*H turned the director into a household name back in 1970, the wildly free-flying Brewster McCloud took the filmmaker's experiments with classic movie structure to even greater extremes with this self-consciously goofy, slapstick and nonsense infused trippy motion picture experience.

And aside from the words of critics like Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert, I have no idea exactly how audiences reacted to such a bizarre yet oddly fascinating work forty years ago. However, I can say that to fully appreciate Brewster in the scheme of the way it helped cement the filmmaker's unique style and method of presenting information onscreen, it's quite beneficial to have seen a fair share of Altman's movies before you attempt to soar like a bird through the Houston Astrodome along with Bud Cort's titular character.

The first film to feature one of the director's most cherished and often utilized actresses, Shelley Duvall, Brewster McCloud which just landed on DVD thanks to the Warner Archive Collection is classic Altman right from the beginning. From its bold decision to insert a line of dialogue instead of the MGM lion roar along with its joyous anti-establishment credit sequence that gets interrupted by a character's insistence to start again to the filmmaker's trademark wandering camera, we move around the film's Houston landscape in search of a plot, following more than a dozen characters, each of whom are stranger than the previous one.

Although some characters vanish fairly quickly, the main players consist of the odd eponymous hero who is training himself to fly like a bird, Brewster's possibly murderous guardian angel Louise (Sally Kellerman), his new daffy Astrodome museum tour guide love interest Suzanne (Duvall) and Michael Murphy's Bullitt inspired San Francisco detective Frank Shaft who is invited to Texas to help catch a strangling serial killer who may indeed be Louise.

Yet to simply focus on that particular quartet isn't enough for Altman who likes shaking things up with more roles for supporting players than you can find actors to inhabit including a bird expert lecturer, an evil landlord whose wheelchair spirals out of control in one of the film's first outrageous chase sequences set on the Texas roadways, a health food store employee who gets turned on by Brewster's chin-ups, along with more police and local politicians.

And while it needs to be said that the film isn't always coherent, it is always compulsively watchable, even if unlike that lusty health food store worker, we find ourselves turned off by the frequent usage of bird droppings and other tasteless jokes.

Similar to other Altman efforts of his prolific '70s era, it's hard to give a solid recommendation of the film to the average movie fan especially if they haven't seen some of his decade masterworks like Nashville, M*A*S*H and The Long Goodbye but if you're an adventurous viewer who loves their auteurs, you'll definitely want to give Brewster at least one chance to fly in your living room.


Text ©2010, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

The Gingerbread Man

Director:
Robert Altman

After three decades of releasing such masterpieces as M*A*S*H, Nashville and The Player, director Robert Altman realized there was one genre he’d never pursued and with The Gingerbread Man he finally jumped at the chance to helm his first official thriller (IMDb). Based on an abandoned work from one of the 1990’s most popular authors, legal mystery novelist John Grisham, this southern tale of lust and mayhem tries hard to channel the sultry and hazy toxic combination of adultery and scams utilized in Lawrence Kasdan’s brilliant Body Heat to lukewarm effect in this atmospheric character drama that benefits from a stellar cast. Shakespeare veteran Kenneth Branagh adopts a Savannah, Georgia gentlemanly drawl as successful, smooth and morally questionable shark of a lawyer Rick Magruder who spends the time he isn’t winning in the courtroom or mugging for the press, being a slightly disinterested father of two small children during the divorce proceedings from wife Leanne (Famke Janssen).

Prone to a fast lifestyle of drinks, laughs and flirting with anything in a skirt including loyal girl Friday Lois Harlan (Daryl Hannah), Rick finds himself caught in a web of passion and intrigue after he plays knight in shining armor on a rainy night, offering the waitress of a catering company that had been hired for a party in his honor a ride home in his sports car after her vehicle was stolen. When Mallory Doss (Embeth Davidtz) climbs into his car with a cigarette and fishnet stockings, film fans who have seen more than one vintage film noir know precisely that this femme fatale will lead him down a wrong path and after the two fall into an impulsive one-night stand, Rick overlooks one of literally several warning signs that all magnify the fact that Doss is trouble with a capital T. It seems her deranged, schizophrenic, barefoot woodsman father Dixon (a menacing Robert Duvall) is stalking his daughter and Rick, wanting to once again assert his masculine control, intervenes by getting him picked up from his cult of wandering misfits and brought in for mental observation, before he’s (of course) bailed out of the joint by his crew and decides to get even on Magruder, Mallory and Magruder’s children as well.

While there are some gaping plot holes large enough to drive a truck through that make the final and admittedly predictable act go far beyond our ability to suspend disbelief, the moody visuals and terrific ensemble featuring the regular charms of Branagh and Hannah as well as a endearing and fresh mischievous turn from character actor Robert Downey Jr. as the private investigating sidekick of Branagh’s keep one amused. However, it doesn’t stand up to other films in the genre including the neo noir Body Heat nor will it stand the test of time as a memorable entry in Altman’s impressive career—there’s plenty of thrills to be had in some of Altman’s other pictures to leave the genre trappings of Gingerbread Man aside. Note: according to IMDb, dismayed at the amount of off-color language added in Altman’s screenplay revision, John Grisham adopted a pseudonym and the film’s script is credited to Al Hayes.

The Long Goodbye

Saluting the Master of Anti-Genre, Mr. Robert Altman

In looking back on the career of a legend, I turned back to the 1970’s and Robert Altman’s Anti-Establishment experiments in genre. During the decade, he made the opposite of a war film with M*A*S*H, the opposite of a western with McCabe and Mrs. Miller and revisited Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to make anti-noir with The Long Goodbye.

The film is one of the most bizarre and curious entries into noir that one will ever see—Elliot Gould plays Marlowe as an easygoing slob, obsessed by finding the right food for his cat in the middle of the night, helping a friend without thinking of the repercussions, and buying brownie mix for his topless, stoner yoga bimbo neighbors. Simply put, he’s the 40’s and 50’s Marlowe that’s become an anachronism in the 70’s—he no longer fits in with the surroundings and tries to make sense of this wild Los Angeles. The film’s dialogue is clever and fun, penned by Leigh Brackett of Rio Bravo fame and the film’s decidedly un-Marlowe like ending left devotees of Chandler cold but the “hooray for Hollywood” feel of it seems very tongue-in-cheek. Overall, Altman’s cinematic choices are surprisingly odd, such as his decision to only have one song in the film (the title tune) played under as many different arrangements as possible. It must’ve been a shocking neo-noir for fans to behold in the 70’s but has grown in reputation over the years, for example film critic Roger Ebert was both in awe and bewilderment upon its release and gave the film three stars until twenty years later including it in his legendary tome of criticism, his “Great Movies” series when he changed its rating to four out of four.