Word: altmans
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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...
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...
...latest film, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean, director Robert Altman weaves these themes into an intricate plot as he depicts the twentieth reunion of the Disciples of James Dean--a small club of James Dean fans--in the one-room Five & Dime in a barren town in Texas. Altman borrows the best qualities from the live theatre of precisely staged movements and vocal patterns and merges them with the best potentials of the cinema--fluid-flashbacks, close-up shots and angular filming. The setting of the tacky small-town corner Five & Dime, with...
...ALTMAN FILMS FLASHBACKS with the characters in the same positions as they are in the present, enabling the actresses to reveal even more sides of their characters. Without changing makeup or costumes, Altman does away with the pretentious attempts at shifting back and forth 20 years by forcing the actors to make up the different times with their voices and movements...
...plot is reminiscent of Tennessee Williams' plays, grounded in the Deep South and illustrating unusual contrasts between the stagnation of the environment and the unique depravity of the characters. Altman manipulates the setting and the characters in a similar way by having the demoralization and depravity of the external world converge with the stagnant heat and aridity of the South. The brutal backdrop of the heat-filled environment sets off the characters' sweaty breathlessness as if the storm that hasn't come for 20 years was about to burst. And the film drowns out any potential for platitudes and mundaneness...