Word: altmans
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McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Robert Altman (M.A.S.H., Brewster McCloud, Images, The Long Goodbye) directs this gruff hearted Western story and turns the tables on who's who as hero--this time it is a tough talking opium smoking prostitute (Julie Andrews) who has a business sense shrewd enough to muddle the head of the small time gambler (Warren Beatty) by teasing the needs of his gullible ego. Altman has done something radical with the use of sound--the voices mingle indiscernibly to effect a new sort of realism. Brattle Theatre...
Directed by ROBERT ALTMAN...
...movie opens with a rasping fanfare, a blast from an old record of Hooray for Hollywood. It very neatly sets the tone for this travesty of Raymond Chandler's superb novel about honor and friendship, two subjects among a great many that Robert Altman cannot bring himself to take seriously...
...screen play is credited to a woman who worked with two other scenarists of some renown (William Faulkner, Jules Furthman) on Howard Hawks' adaptation of Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep, released in 1946 and by now a sort of touchstone in the genre. But Altman is no friend of fleet dialogue, especially when it can be replaced by a stumbling, windswept improvisation; other niceties of the writer's craft, like character and coherence, are similarly disdained...
...Altman's lazy, haphazard putdown is without affection or understanding, a nose-thumb not only at the idea of Philip Marlowe but at the genre that his tough-guy-soft-heart character epitomized. It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire...