Here’s an Altman I haven’t see yet. It’s reputation precedes it, but given your thoughfulness and strategy with your picks I’m definitely going to approach it with an open mind. Great intro, Brad.
Thanks House! An open mind is all any of us can ask for.
Exceptional take on this film Brad.
I LOVE Brewster McCloud. I was so happy that I wasn’t disapointed in it (it took a long time for me to finally see it)
Bud Cort, Sally Kellerman and, especially, Michael Murphy are great. And, considering how she was discovered and thrown into the film, Shelley Duvall is astonishing.
Altman pays tribute to a lot of other films, ranging from THE WIZARD OF OZ to BULLITT to his own M*A*S*H…it’s so clever it hard to believe it was actually written by the same lunatic who wrote Preminger’s SKIDOO.
I found a lot of laughs in Skidoo, and none in Brewster. I love Altman. This Countdown, Cookies Fourtune, Beyond Therapy, Short Cuts, Streamers, The Perfect Couple The Company and That Cold Day in the Park are the only real misfires for me. I am not voting in the match since it directly affects mine as it is in my group, but I do wish Altman great good luck. He is someone who worked in the Hollywood system, rarely made them a dime but managed to keep working. One has to admire that.
I can appreciate what you think Altman is trying to do here, but my personal preference is to watch something with some more structure. I like a movie that subverts traditional structure, but still in a kind of structured way. This film feels very slapdash to me, which was a bit off putting. Also I couldn’t be interested in too many of the characters.
Like I said in another thread as well, it seemed like Altman thought an unfunny gag would somehow get funnier if he turned it into a running gag. There were a lot of them that were pretty grating on me.
I didn’t hate it though. It was a riddle to try to figure out if anything. And there were times I felt oddly attracted to Duvall, but not too much by the end.
>>It was a riddle to try to figure out if anything.<<
“Flight of birds, flight of man, man’s similarity to birds, birds similarity to man. These are the subjects at hand. We will deal with them for about an hour or so and hope we draw no conclusions, elsewise the subject will cease to fascinate us and another dream would be lost. There are far too few.”
- The Lecturer, Brewster McCloud
Actually it’s very easy to believe that it was written by the same lunatic who wrote “Skidoo.”
Doran William Cannon defines weird. That he had any sort of career at all is remarkable. Speaks to the times. In any event Altman was read hot thanks to MASH when Brewster went into production, and so he ran happily amok — discovering the wonderful Shelley Duvall in the process.
“Flight of birds, flight of man, man’s similarity to birds, birds similarity to man. These are the subjects at hand. We will deal with them for about an hour or so and hope we draw no conclusions, elsewise the subject will cease to fascinate us and another dream would be lost. There are far too few.”
Exactly
Most quotable film of the cup so far. Very funny, too. Good pick, as far as I’m concerned.
Bumped for today’s Director’s Cup match
Brad S.
In 1970, MASH provided Robert Altman with his one and only mega-hit. His choice as a follow up, and he had the freedom to choose anything, turned out to be the strangest and most idiosyncratic film of a career that would always be unconventional.
Which leads to the question, what kind of film is Brewster McCloud? Is it a modernization of the Icarus myth as commentary on the soon to be former idealism of the sixties? Is it a juvenile comedy with a lot of bird shit jokes? It may be kind of both, but I believe it’s also a blueprint, a rough draft of the kind of filmmaker Robert Altman wanted to be.
If Robert Altman would spend much of the seventies deconstructing different film genres, Brewster McCloud would be his “comedy”, but as an Altman comedy, it wouldn’t play by the rules. Its bone dry humor would not come into fashion until Wes Anderson became its spokesman. With a loose structure, it was broad enough to directly parody the Steve McQueen’s then recent hit, Bullet, and provide such Altmanesque touches as using a connective device (here, the lecturer) and introduce such quirky characters as Shelly Duval in her movie debut.
A tight film it is not, but it announces that fact immediately in the opening credits, which Altman often utilizes to instruct an audience how a particular film should be watched. In “A Cinema of Loneliness,” Robert Phillip Kolker describes it in detail:
“The MGM logo appears, but instead of the expected lion’s roar, there is a voice saying, “I forgot the opening line.” The film cannot quite get itself started. No smooth entry into the story is promised. A rather strange man appears, a lecturer who talks to us about birds, men, the dream of flight and environmental enclosures. As he is about to speak of the last, there is a shot of the Houston Astrodome and in it Margaret Hamilton, the wicked witch of The Wizard of Oz attempting to lead a marching band of black musicians in the national anthem. The credits begin. Hamilton stops the band and attempts to get them to sing on key. The credits begin AGAIN, and the band breaks into gospel, completely out of control. This film, which will concern itself with the conflict of freedom and constraint announces this conflict from the beginning, not only in its images, but in the difficulty it has getting its images started. Brewster McCloud parodies itself, its existence as a controlled formal structure from the very start.”
By extension, Kolker seems to suggest that Altman might not just be deconstructing comedy, but film itself. Before we ponder this too deeply, bird shit jokes soon follow. However the low comedy does give way to a consistent Altman theme, the individual’s place in the community. While MASH posited that a sub-culture of hedonists could make wartime bearable, Brewster (played coldly by Bud Cort of Harold and Maude fame) chooses to isolate himself from any sense of community, denying even his guardian angel and single mindedly following his dream of individual flight at all costs. This certainly hints of tragic undertones beneath the silliness.
It is the interconnectivity, both stylistically and thematically, of Robert Altman’s films that most appeal to me. It lends itself to this year’s cup format of allowing at least three films shown from each director. My first three choices will emphasize genre deconstruction and isolation from the community. Should I move forward, I’ll have the chance to show the contrast to some films in which community is embraced. All these Altman elements are present in Brewster McCloud, but in a rudimentary form. It’s a director as his own work in progress.