Word: altmans
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Consider, for example, Altman's 1971 film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In one scene, a young, rangy, buck-toothed cowboy (Keith Carradine) who has just spent the night in McCabe's frontier whorehouse, starts across a footbridge to purchase supplies for his trip home. He is confronted by a young gunman, one of three sent by a business conglomerate to coerce McCabe into selling out. The gunman, blond, boyish, and innocent-looking, asks Carradine what kind of gun he has. Carradine tells him, sheepishly admitting that he really doesn't know how to use it. "Come...
This scene lasts only two or three minutes, yet, like the movie as a whole, it fatally undermines the American romantic vision of the frontier West. Carradine's half-drawn gun technically fulfills the requirements of frontier etiquette, but it's a false fulfillment--a fraud. And so, Altman is suggesting, are the conventions of the Western. Justice didn't triumph on the frontier, brutality and greed did, and that's the real story of the growth of America...
...McCabe and Mrs. Miller undermines the modern mythification of the American past, The Long Goodbye (1973) exposes the improbability of a more contemporary American hero: the private eye, as created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Altman's Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) is an anachronism. His stocks in trade--intelligence, independence and integrity--are pitifully inadequate weapons with which to confront modern, large-scale, organized corruption...
...Altman certainly is not the first director to make films that mock the fraudulent elements of his culture. One thinks immediately, for example, of Luis Bunuel, whose films consistently expose the sham and hypocrisy of latin bourgeois culture. Bunuel's attitude towards his subjects is different from Altman's, however, and the difference says something about the directors themselves, and about the societies that have produced them...
...Altman's myth-shattering, by contrast, seems almost regretful. He recognizes the populist element inherent in so many American myths--the belief that the determined individual can succeed in the face of opposition by large organizations--and he seems to wish the myths were true, even though he knows they aren't. Latter-day Icarus Brewster McCloud falls to his death in the Houston Astrodome; McCabe is killed by the corporate goons; Philip Marlowe plays the sap; the gamblers in California Split lose. Maybe that's not the way you'd like it, says Altman, but that...