Word: altmans
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Directed by ROBERT ALTMAN...
Screenplay by CALDER WILLINGHAM, JOANTEWKESBURYand ROBERT ALTMAN...
...Robert Altman's recent movies (M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye) are like model kits. Each one comes in little pieces, some of which are lovingly and intricately fashioned. Each is made to scale for a specific genre: the service comedy, the western, the private-eye melodrama. Altman encloses no instructions, though. That is the challenge and the catch, and accounts in part for the appeal his films exercise for many critics. It is not that Altman movies are open-ended so much as that they are any-ended. They can be assembled...
...Bonnie and Clyde, but Thieves Like Us has an even more direct ancestor. It is a remake of Nicholas Ray's excellent They Live by Night (1947), which, along with Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once, set the model in the first place. As usual, Altman supplies not an answer but an alternative to the styles and conventions of the genre...
...Altman omits what is expectable in movies of this sort and includes the scenes that other film makers have left out. Bowie (Keith Carradine) is a young con who busts out of prison with a couple of older buddies (John Schuck, Bert Remsen) into the grim realities of the Depression South. Because they figure it to be no more antisocial than starvation, the trio start to rob small-town banks. They do it with matter-of-fact efficiency, and Altman treats them in the same even way. He is not concerned with the mechanics of the heist but the social...