Word: altmans
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Last week, as the legal machinery was apparently moving to exonerate both Schrager and Priolo, a New York judge revealed that for nearly a year he had been using a neat double-check system on eyewitnesses. In ten cases where identifications constituted virtually the only evidence, Judge Benjamin Altman permitted defense attorneys to seat a look-alike beside the defendant in court. In only two cases did the previous identification hold up. "Asking for a fair and accurate system of identification is often connected with some kind of bleeding-heart thing," says Robert Kasanof of New York's Legal...
...ALTMAN'S MARLOWE is a big-hearted schlemiel who would never have thought of being a cop, or of holding any faith in old-time concepts of personal honor (or America, for that matter). The people he works for are a generation further advanced in their amoralities than Chandler's, and Marlowe's new goal is just to keep alive in their company and enjoy himself. He protects his friends as a side-issue (we have no idea of how his friendships are fashioned) but if his friends double-cross him he shoots. He is so inarticulate that even...
...always interesting when a director tries to teach an old culture-figure new tricks, but what Altman takes from Chandler doesn't fulfill his new needs. Chandler's Long Goodbye focused on all the obstacles put between Marlowe and the truth about a friend's suspected murder (and later suicide)--the political interests of important businessmen, the links between quack doctors and paid-off police, and the duplicities of crooked accomplices to his friend's "crimes." Altman doesn't want to concentrate on the intelligence and shrewd stratagems which Marlowe uses to overcome denizens of the closed frontier; he doesn...
HOWEVER, EVEN IF ALTMAN can't rewrite a script (mostly written by a hack, Leigh Brackett), or restrain the mugging of top-billed Elliott Gould, he is such a gifted director that his visuals and tossed-off stage business alone hold our interest. He crams his frames with different people doing interesting things, like gangsters taking off their clothes as a sign of group solidarity, or a Malibu Colony security guard impersonating Hollywood stars. If some of the shtiks misfire, Altman keeps on coming with others that don't. And aside from Gould and a stoned-out Sterling Hayden (Altman...
...stupid pretensions, Altman thus stays in the mind as an unfinished, unruly, but alive and experimenting talent. But until such camera-happy folk start flashing signals of full human relationships, (some of which I thought I caught in McCabe and Mrs. MiHer), my heart will belong to the Chandlers...