Word: altmans
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...gonna Cody-fy the world!," Joel Grey promises in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Robert Altman's parable for the Old West that tells us how a handful of big-mouth lily-livers made up their own myths as they went along. Grey, the weazy sycophant behind Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, certainly found his modern counter-parts in the New York film critics crowd, a bunch that seems to want to "Altmanify" the world, and did their damndest to verbally contort this pleasant but rambling work into a masterpiece...
Only in a place like Cambridge can a theater keep bringing back a film like Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The Hollywood sharpies who financed it nearly walked out on the rushes. They should have let it all seep in instead, because one doesn't throw words around in calling this movie "haunting." The look and feel of a real old West mining town are both perfect, from Warren Beaty's cowardly lion of a gunslinger to the orientals segregated across the tracks. And if you don't understand why it moves so lethargically in spots--many...
McCabe and Mrs. Miller. You may react like Warren Beatty, who was pissed at Altman for smothering all his lines with wilderness noise and human babble. Or the scenery may get to you--fog and snow turning into literal shrouds, raw timber buildings sitting squalid like open wounds in the woods. It's a movie that jello-quivers your mind--the death scenes just kinda fester up there afterwards, shake, rattle, and roll. Choose your poison...
...aging frontiersman is surrounded by an entourage of relatives, managers, flacks (Harvey Keitel, Joel Grey, Kevin McCarthy) who are devoted about equally to managing his affairs profitably and to seeing that his egocentric whims do not cut too deeply into those profits. As usual in Altman's films, the minor characters are hilariously venal, conning themselves relentlessly, the better to con the public. The film's best running gag has Geraldine Chaplin as sharpshooting Annie Oakley, sniping closer, ever closer to Frank Butler, her husband, who must hold her targets steady while fighting against growing fear...
Moviemakers and playwrights love to employ a show as a metaphor for the world; customarily the works that use this device are impossibly pretentious and unpersuasive. As Altman presents it, this tatty wild West show is ill-choreographed and never delivers all it promises. Yet on the whole, it is an extremely graceful journey over ground that has tripped many in the past...