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Director Robert Altman made more than thirty feature films and dozens of television episodes over the course of his career. The Altman retrospective currently showing at MoMA is a treasure trove for rediscovering Altman’s best known films (M*A*S*H, Nashville, Gosford Park) as well as introducing unreleased shorts and his little-known early work as a writer.

Every Altman fan has her or his own list of favorite films. For me, Altman’s use of music is always so innovative, original, and unprecedented that a few key films stand out from the crowd based on their soundtracks. Here are my top five Altman films based on their soundtracks:

1.   Gosford Park (2001): The English heritage film meets an Agatha Christie murder mystery, combining an all-star ensemble cast and gorgeous location shooting with a tribute to Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (1939). Jeremy Northam plays the real-life British film star and composer Ivor Novello. Watch for the integration of Northam/Novello’s live performances of period songs with the central murder scene, in which the songs’ lyrics explain (in hindsight) who really committed the murder, and why.

2.   Nashville (1975): Altman’s brilliant critique of American society in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate. Nashville stands as an excellent example of “Altmanesque” filmmaking, in which several separate story strands merge in the climactic final scene. Many, although not all, of the songs were provided by the cast, which includes Henry Gibson as pompous country music star Haven Hamilton, and the Oscar-nominated Lily Tomlin as the mother of two deaf children drawn into a relationship with sleazy rock star Tom Frank (Keith Carradine, whose song “I’m Easy” won the film’s sole Academy Award).

3.   M*A*S*H (1970): Ok, I will admit it. It took me a long, long time to appreciate M*A*S*H. Growing up in 1970s Toronto, I couldn’t accept Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould as Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John — familiar characters from the weekly CBS TV series (but played by different actors). Looking back, I realize that M*A*S*H really did break all the rules of filmmaking in 1970, not least of which because it appealed to the anti-Vietnam generation. Like so many later Altman films, what appears to be a sloppy, improvised, slap-dash film is in fact sutured together through the brilliant, carefully edited use of Japanese-language jazz standards blared over the disembodied voice of the base’s loudspeaker.

4.   McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971): Filmed outside of Vancouver, Altman’s reinvention of the Western genre stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. The film uses several of Leonard Cohen’s songs from his 1967 album The Songs of Leonard Cohen, allowing the songs to speak for often inarticulate characters. Watch for how the opening sequence, showing Beatty/McCabe riding into town, is closely choreographed to “The Stranger Song” as is Christie/Miller’s wordless monologue to “Winter Lady” later in the film — all to the breathtaking cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, who worked with Altman on Images (1972) and The Long Goodbye (1973) as well.

5.   Aria (segment: “Les Boréades”) (1987): Made during Altman’s “exile” from Hollywood in the 1980s, this film combines short vignettes set to opera excerpts by veteran directors including Derek Jarman, Jean-Luc Godard, and Julien Temple. Altman’s contribution employs the music of 18^th-century French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. The sequence was a revelation to me personally, since it contains the only feature film documentation of Altman’s significant contributions to the world of opera. One of the first film directors to work on the opera stage, Altman directed a revolutionary production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at the University of Michigan in the early 1980s: the work was restaged in France and used for the Aria Later, Altman collaborated with Pulitzer-Prize winning composer William Bolcom and librettist Arnold Weinstein to create new operas (McTeague, A Wedding) for the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Rounding out the top ten would be Short Cuts (1993), Kansas City (1996), The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), and Popeye (1980) — Robin Williams’ first film, and definitely an off-beat but entertaining musical.

Headline Image: Film. CC0 via Pixabay

The post Top five Robert Altman films by sound appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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This Day in World History

February 28, 1983

Final Episode of TV Series M*A*S*H Airs

On February 28, 1983, at the end of its eleventh season, M*A*S*H said goodbye to television. More than 105 million Americans in about 51 million homes watched the series finale, a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie directed by star Alan Alda, that featured the show’s characteristic blend of comedy and drama.

M*A*S*H debuted in 1972, two years after the release of the Robert Altman movie of the same name and four years after the publication of the Richard Hooker novel that was the original for both. Set in a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War, the show featured an ensemble cast that included three regulars — Alda as doctor “Hawkeye” Pierce, Loretta Swit as chief nurse Major Margaret Houlihan, and William Christopher as chaplain Father Mulcahy — who appeared in all eleven seasons.

In its first few seasons, the show’s Korean War setting made it a commentary of sorts on the Vietnam War. Even after Vietnam ended, the series examined the tragic personal cost of war and the extent to which people will go to try to maintain sanity in war. The last episode, set around the close of the Korean War, included storylines reinforcing those themes.

The show made several innovations, including use of multiple storylines in an episode, the mixture of comedy and drama, the way the camera was used to shoot scenes, and the fact that the characters developed over time.

M*A*S*H remains one of the most highly regarded of all television series. Though the records the final episode once held for number of households tuning in and total number of viewers have been surpassed by Super Bowl broadcasts, that last show remains the single most watched episode of a television series in US history. Its Neilsen rating of 60.2, which means that more than three-quarters of all televisions were tuned to it, makes it the highest-rated television show of any kind.

“This Day in World History” is brought to you by USA Higher Education.
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…BEING A CONTINUATION OF THE POSTS ON MASS, MESS, AND THEIR KIN

By Anatoly Liberman

Mash has nothing to do with mass or mess, but it sounds like them, and since I have been meaning to write about masher ‘lady killer, etc.’ for a long time (see the last sentence of the previous post), I decided that this is the proper moment to do so.  Some of our best dictionaries say that the origin of masher is unknown.  However, if we disregard a few insupportable conjectures, the conclusion at which we will arrive won’t surprise anyone: masher is mash plus -er.   Only mash poses problems.  Masher enjoyed tremendous popularity during the last two decades of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century, before it more or less faded from people’s memory.  However, those who read old books will have no trouble recognizing the word: it crops up in the literature of the late Victorian era, in American novels written before World War I (this is where I first saw it), and in such popular British publications as Punch’s Almanac, The Daily News, The Sporting Times, The Weekly Dispatch, and The Illustrated London News, among others.  The Piccadilly Masher was the title of a popular music hall song of the day.  While comparing swell, dandy, beau, and such nice synonyms for “a flamboyant man about town” as Corinthian and macaroni, all designating approximately the same type of person, knowledgeable correspondents to magazines said the following in 1882 (the year, in which, according to the OED, the word was very much in vogue, though, as Stephen Goranson has pointed out, it had some currency already in 1871):

“A masher is usually a ‘swell’, but every swell is not a masher.  To be ‘awfully mashed on’ a young woman is equivalent… to being ‘terrible spoons’ or ‘very hard hit’.  The masher proper is a young gentleman… who, having become a devout adorer of some fair actress, nightly frequents the house where she is engaged, that he may feast his eyes upon her beauty.”

The adoring youth, we are told, becomes the actress’s mash, “like the favorite food of a highly-fed horse.”  Thus, to be mashed means ‘to be dead nuts on’ or ‘hotly in love with’ a girl.  This is the passive.  In the active voice, to mash is ‘to make a girl dead nuts on oneself’.  I have something to say about going nuts and about nuts and spoons as participants in the amorous game but will say it another time.

The condemnation of highbrows was unanimous: this barbarous addition to our slang, this precious contribution to our vocabulary, a detestable cant word, this horrible word in common and certainly vulgar use, and so forth, but in retrospect (in 1943, when one would have thought there were more pressing things to discuss) mash, masher, and mashing, the admission came that “ugly as [they] were, [they] expressed shades of meaning hard to replace exactly by more elegant equivalents” (this is of course why slang exists!) “the masher was thought of as well dressed, and offensive, but extreme villainy was not impute

Even though yesterday was Labor Day, I worked the whole time! So I'm taking today as my Labor Day and doing a slacker's job on my blog post. Here's a fun (and, near the end, slightly gross) video about the game M.A.S.H.



If you don't know the game M.A.S.H. then you were clearly never an elementary school or junior high girl. Wikipedia has a nice basic entry about the game and so does Like Totally 80s. There's even an online version you can play (if you feel like channeling your inner tween).

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OH. MY. GODS. (available now!)
GODDESS BOOT CAMP (coming June 2009)
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