Robert Altman; Telegraph obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Last Updated: 1:56am GMT 22/11/2006 Telegraph
Robert Altman, who died on Monday aged 81, was a
film-maker renowned for experimentation and innovation.
He had an uncanny ability to recover from critical and
box-office disasters, staging a comeback four times - with
M*A*S*H in 1970, Nashville in 1975, The Player in 1992 and
Gosford Park in 2001 - after years in the doldrums. In an
industry in which a succession of flops can make a director
unemployable, Altman was famously prolific. As each film
appeared, he was usually shooting another and in
pre-production on a third. He dabbled in many genres -
Westerns, science fiction, comedy, psychological drama - but
was especially drawn to what might be termed kaleidoscopic
movies, in which a huge number of characters and sub-plots
interact to form a composite picture of a particular setting
or moment in time. Nashville, set in the capital of Country
and Western music, had 24 leading roles, Short Cuts (1993)
even more. A Wedding (1978), Health (1979) and Prêt-à-Porter
(1995), about the rag trade, were in the same mould.
His trademark, developed out of pioneering work by
Orson Welles, was the use of multiple soundtracks and
overlapping dialogue. With an 8-track sound system and
microphones all over the set, he was able to pick up several
unrelated conversations taking place simultaneously and to
mix them at will. It was a remarkable, if controversial,
advance in realism, though some found the effect
disorientating.
Altman regarded screenplays as blueprints and often
invited actors to improvise dialogue. In Nashville, they
were also encouraged to write their own songs. This approach
was not universally welcomed. On the set of M*A*S*H, Donald
Sutherland and Elliott Gould were so disconcerted by what
they considered confusion that they tried to have him fired.
His skills were primarily those of a metteur en scène.
He had a recognisable signature (even a bad Altman film was
distinctive). But only twice - in Nashville and Short Cuts -
did he find a script in which the theme transcended the
material. In the former, in which a large number of
characters converge on Tennessee on the eve of the American
centennial and tragedy leads to a new beginning, the plot
seemed to stand for more than itself, pointing to the
possibility of national renewal. Short Cuts, based on a
collection of Raymond Carver short stories interwoven into a
connected narrative, achieved a similar quality. These were
the closest he came to being an auteur as French critics
understood the term.
The son of an insurance broker, Robert Bernard Altman
was born in Kansas City on February 20 1925. He was of
English-Irish-German extraction and as a Catholic (later
lapsed) was educated in Jesuit schools. The family name had
originally been Altmann, but his grandfather dropped the
second "n" when he opened a jewellery store and was told
that the signboard would cost less if it was only six
letters.
Enlisting in the armed forces at 18, Altman served as
a pilot during the war and flew on more than 50 bombing
raids over the East Indies. Later, he admitted that he never
thought about those he killed and doubted whether it would
have bothered him if he had.
After studying Engineering at the University of
Missouri, he was engaged in a number of entrepreneurial
ventures, including marketing a device for tattooing
animals. The company went bankrupt, but not before Altman
had travelled to Washington to tattoo President Truman's
dog.
With a friend, George W George, he wrote a script that
was sold to RKO and became Richard Fleischer's 1948 film The
Bodyguard, but attempts to follow it up were unsuccessful.
For a number of years, Altman made industrial films for the
Calvin Company and International Harvester - 65 in all. His
first feature film was The Delinquents, shot in 1955 with
help from a local backer and released through United Artists
two years later. A tale of teenage rebellion, it grossed
nearly $l million.
Temporarily it made Altman a hot property, with the
clout to film what he pleased. He chose a documentary, The
James Dean Story (1957), but it offered no fresh slant on
the actor's short life and was a commercial failure. It
might have wrecked Altman's career, but Alfred Hitchcock
liked it and hired him to direct on his Alfred Hitchcock
Presents series for CBS Television.
Altman remained in television for a decade, learning
to work fast and efficiently to tight schedules and limited
budgets. In 1966 he re-entered the Hollywood mainstream with
a low-budget film for Warner Bros about space flight,
starring James Caan and Robert Duvall. Called Countdown
(1968), it underwent extensive revision because the studio
boss, Jack Warner, could not understand the overlapping
dialogue. Some 30 minutes were cut, including all the scenes
in which two or more characters were speaking
simultaneously.
A modest psychological thriller set in Vancouver, That
Cold Day in the Park (1969), was followed by Altman's first
big hit - M*A*S*H (1970), an acronym for Mobile Army
Surgical Hospital. Set during the Korean war, it was an
episodic black comedy about surgeons operating in atrocious
conditions close to the front line. The lyrics for the theme
tune, Suicide Is Painless, were written by Altman's
14-year-old son Michael. The film won the Golden Palm at
Cannes and earned $30 million in its first year of release.
Altman had no connection, however, with the TV series spun
off from it.
Once again he had carte blanche. And once again he
squandered the moment by settling for small personal
productions made for his own Lion's Gate company. None of
his films of the early 1970s was successful. They included
Brewster McCloud (1970), a fantasy about a young man who
attempts to fly with the aid of mechanical wings; McCabe and
Mrs Miller (1971), a mournful Western with Warren Beatty and
Julie Christie; and The Long Goodbye (1973), with Elliott
Gould as a sloppy, unheroic version of Raymond Chandler's
private eye Philip Marlowe. All three rapidly disappeared
from cinemas.
Other films of this period were Images (1972), a
pretentious psychological thriller set in Ireland; Thieves
Like Us (1974), a version of Edward Anderson's novel of love
on the run during the Depression; and California Split
(1974), a comedy-drama about gambling that tapped a
compulsive strain in Altman's own character, inherited from
his father.
Nashville (1975), his first masterpiece, was a hit
when he needed it most and secured him a three-picture deal
with the producer Dino De Laurentiis. With customary
recklessness, he threw away this opportunity, too. Buffalo
Bill and the Indians (1976), based loosely on a play by
Arthur Kopit, debunked the legend of Buffalo Bill and
contrived to make Paul Newman look foolish in the leading
role. De Laurentiis recut the film for distribution in
Germany and when, surprisingly, it won the top prize at the
Berlin Film Festival, Altman declined the award on the
ground that it was no longer his work.
The De Laurentiis contract was dissolved and Altman
switched to making small pictures such as Three Women
(1977), the idea for which allegedly came to him in a dream
while his wife was awaiting surgery; Quintet (1979), a
sci-fi movie set in a future ice age; and A Perfect Couple
(1979), a modest romantic story about an unprepossessing
couple who meet via a computer dating service. Through
Lion's Gate, Altman also fostered the careers of several
protégés, including Alan Rudolph with Welcome to LA (1976)
and Robert Benton with The Late Show (1977). The studio was
eventually sold in 1981 for $2.3 million.
On his own account, Altman made two more pictures in
the Nashville vein but without that film's ability to rise
above its ostensible subject. A Wedding (1978) was a
brilliantly organised account of a big society wedding and
Health (1980) a study of slightly loopy delegates to a
health food convention in Florida. The latter was little
seen because the top management at 20th Century Fox changed
and the incoming team dumped it to discredit their
predecessors.
With Popeye (1980), Altman changed tack. A musical
based on the cartoon character, it starred Robin Williams in
the title role and Shelley Duvall as his inamorata, Olive
Oyl. Yet the public did not respond, and for much of the
1980s Altman was reduced to shooting inexpensive adaptations
of stage hits, such as Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy
Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), Streamers (1983), Secret Honor
(1984), the Sam Shepard play Fool for Love (1986) and Beyond
Therapy (1987).
He also worked extensively in television, for which he
made versions of The Dumb Waiter by Pinter (1987), The Caine
Mutiny Court Martial (1987) and a much admired political
series, Tanner '88, which he judged to contain some of his
best work. All in all, however, it was a lean decade for
Robert Altman, marked by scant critical or popular approval.
Few, for example, liked his "youth" picture OC & Stiggs
(1987) and nobody's career benefited from working on Aria
(1987), a portmanteau picture in which celebrated directors
were invited to illustrate an aria from their favourite
opera. Altman chose Rameau's Les Boréades.
Just when he seemed a spent force, Altman's luck
turned again. A decent, if dull, account of the life of Van
Gogh - Vincent and Theo (1990), made in two versions for
film and television - was capped by a return to form with
The Player (1992), a satire on movie-making with Tim Robbins
and 66 cameo performances from Hollywood superstars, ranging
from Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts to Andie MacDowell and
Whoopi Goldberg.
Jet black in tone, malicious in intent (thanks to a
superb script by Michael Tolkin), it was a formidable
stylistic achievement. The opening sequence, introducing
nearly all the cast in a single 10-minute take, with the
camera prowling in and out among a variety of incidents, was
a tour de force as brilliant as anything Altman had done
since Nashville.
Its successor, Short Cuts (1993), was even better and
one of his finest works - a 1990s portrait of America as
resonant as Nashville had been in the 1970s. An attempt to
repeat the formula with Prêt-à-Porter (1995), however, was a
disaster. Like Short Cuts, it boasted an enormous cast,
including Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Julia Roberts
and Lauren Bacall, but it fell into the trap of being banal
by depicting banality. In America the title was deemed too
highfalutin and changed to Ready to Wear.
Altman went back to his roots with Kansas City (1996),
a dramatic evocation of the 1930s, when his home town was
the Mecca of jazz, and a documentary, Robert Altman's Jazz
'34. Several flops followed: The Gingerbread Man in 1998,
Cookie's Fortune the following year and 2000's Dr T and the
Women, before Altman made his greatest comeback with Gosford
Park.
A classic English country house murder mystery, it was
also an acute observation of social class and featured an
outstanding cast, including Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith.
Altman received his fifth Oscar nomination as best director,
and the film picked up six further nominations, winning the
best original screenplay award.
His last film was A Prairie Home Companion, with
Garrison Keillor, which came out in May this year. Earlier
in the year, he had received a lifetime achievement Oscar.
Robert Altman was married three times: first (1947-49)
to Lavonne Elmer, by whom he had a daughter; second
(1950-55) to Lotus Corelli, the mother of two sons; and
third (from 1957) to Kathryn Reed, by whom he had another
son. A further son was adopted.