Word: altmans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sandy Dennis, 44 (The Four Seasons), Cher plays a garrulous cocktail waitress who is hired on as an extra in the 1956 James Dean-Liz Taylor movie, Giant, when it is filmed in her small Texas town. The play also marks the Broadway bow of Film Maker Robert Altman, 55 (M*A*S*H, Nashville), who anticipates no star-director skirmishes. "She won't be wearing her snakeskin suit," says Altman. "She'll be acting. And she's come into this on the same terms as everyone else-no limousines...
This last is provided by the smart, ambitious title character (Burt Reynolds, in his tough-romantic vein), who is a detective being disciplined with a tour of netherworld duty. What sets them all in muttering motion-in its best passages the movie sounds like a Robert Altman film, full of cynical asides and loopy observations-is the brutal murder of a call girl. Since one of the conventions of up-to-date murder mysteries is that pillars of the community must always have a slimy underside, she turns out to have been the victim of sexual perversity among the local...
Analysts are generally expecting perhaps the most sluggish Christmas since the recession of 1974, a year in which sales in real terms were actually 4.5% lower than the previous year. Said George Hanley, vice president of Manhattan's B. Altman: "It has been a long time since we have gone into Christmas with the momentum slowing. It's going the wrong way, and that's scary...
...admonition, "It is never right to play ragtime fast"-reduced a pageant to an anecdote, and sacrificed sweep for nuance. Grateful as one is to have this Ragtime, with its many thrilling performances and its spurts of emotional grandeur, one would now like to see the adaptation Altman might have made. And after that, if you please, the silent version. -By Richard Corliss
Forman, who inherited this project after Robert Altman was removed by Producer Dino De Laurentiis, is an actor's director. In Ragtime he has .elicited many fine performances: from Olson and Steenburgen, models of rectitude and discreet strength; from Rollins, who carries the film with a heroic charm that sours into fatal righteousness; from Debbie Allen as Walker's doomed love; from Ted Ross and Moses Gunn as two eloquent veterans of injustice who try talking sense and restraint to Coalhouse; and from James Cagney, back on-screen after a 20-year lapse and cool as a leprechaun...