Word: altmans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Seven years later, through Director Robert Altman's camera eye, we can see that Streamers is only incidentally about Viet Nam. Men do not need a war to touch their heart of darkness, Rabe seems to suggest; the threat of human intimacy is provocation enough. Are they men like Billy (Matthew Modine), a fresh-faced lad with a college education? Or Richie (Mitchell Lichtenstein), an upper-class homosexual with a taste for taunt? Or Roger (David Alan Grier), a sweet-natured black who deflects each insult with a shrug? Or Carlyle (Michael Wright), the slum-bred black spoiling...
...Altman's principal actors won (and deserved) an ensemble award at last month's Venice Film Festival; but Wright's is the star presence here. He curls his lips around Carlyle's jive slurs until they are twisted into madhouse poetry. He glides through the barracks like a hipster on a death mission. Charlie Parker, meet Charlie Manson. Carlyle is the creepily irresistible spirit of all wars, hot and cold, global and interior, war without end, amen . - By Richard Corliss...
Duvall's own career has been a Cinderella story of sorts. At the age of 20, she was plucked out of Houston by Director Robert Altman, who was on location for the movie Brewster McCloud. Duvall, all lollipop eyes and stringbean legs, was recognized by Altman as a strong, but flighty American original whom he could fashion to his needs. He cast her in a variety of roles in seven of his films, including Three Women, Nashville and McCabe and Mrs. Miller...
...long before Altman woke her from her pre-Hollywood slumber, Duvall had been collecting antique illustrated fairy-tale books. She was charmed by the stories, but bewitched by the pictures: dreamy Maxfield Parrish landscapes, bold N.C. Wyeth seascapes, puckish Arthur Rackham characters. While in Malta in 1980, playing Olive Oyl opposite Robin Williams in Altman's film Popeye, a vision of the rubbery Williams as a vain and manic frog prince leaped into her head, and the notion of Faerie Tale Theatre was born. Each tale would have different players and be colored by the visual style...
Before it became a television series, M*A*S*H had been a mildly successful novel (1968) by Richard Hooker and a surprise hit movie (1970) directed by Robert Altman and written by Ring Lardner Jr. Most of the TV show's major characters were sketched in by the movie, but the tone was '50s frat house, and the emphasis was on the safety-valve sexual high jinks that the heroes perpetrated on some of their uptight colleagues. These droll humiliations would have been too raunchy for TV and too alienating for audiences in search of a weekly...