BEFORE: Warren Beatty carries over again from "Town & Country", for the first of TWO films this week directed by Robert Altman. I still don't feel like I have much of a handle on Altman's work, outside of "M*A*S*H", "Short Cuts" and "The Player". I mean, I did watch "Dr. T & The Women" earlier this year, but that film was terrible. Last year I did watch "The Long Goodbye", though, and before that I watched "Popeye" and "A Prairie Home Companion", but once again, I'm wishing that I had organized films by director more often, I think that could have given me more insight than linking through actors does.
This one's on the list of the "1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", which increases my total of films on that list which I've seen to 404.
THE PLOT: A gambler and a prostitute become business partners in a remote Old West mining town, and their enterprise thrives until a large corporation arrives on the scene.
AFTER: It feels sometimes like there's always another Western on my list - whenever I watch the last one, another one pops up, like now I still have "The Outlaw Josey Wales" to watch, but I guess I'll get to that one next year, along with another Clint Eastwood film. I also have "Appaloosa", but that links to a different set of films.
This one came into my possession in February, as part of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and the host introduced it by talking a bit about Altman's improvisational style - I'm glad he did, because after watching "Town & Country" it probably would have been very easy for me to confuse improvisation, or the lack of writing, with bad writing - there's a very fine line, I think. Warren Beatty, known for acting in films that were based on plays, reportedly had difficulty working with Altman, since he was used to memorizing dialogue in advance and not coming up with it on the spot.
The IMDB says that after this mock Western town was built outside Vancouver, Altman told his 50 or so extras that they should each decide the type of person they would like to be in that town - a bartender, barber, housewife, etc. - and then they could each pick out their own wardrobe based on that, and to wander around the town as that character for the next three months. Many of the carpenters on the set were also young American men who were fleeing America so they wouldn't have to serve in the Vietnam War, and one imagines that's another whole set of stories.
Unlike most films, this was allegedly filmed mostly in sequential order, which turned out to be a smart move - it snowed in Vancouver when there were only a few scenes left, but since all of those films were at the conclusion of the film, continuity was maintained. Otherwise they would have had to reshoot the earlier scenes, or add falling snow to them somehow in post-production. I thought that the snow at the end looked very fake anyway - I was willing to believe that the snow was an effect added later, but apparently it was all real.
Other than that, it was a little hard for me to tell what was going at any particular point in this film, and I think a lot of that problem stems from the improvisation. Without an exact script to tell me what exact challenges Mr. McCabe and Mrs. Miller are facing as they set up and run their bordello, I was sort of left to wonder. Much of the drama stemmed from McCabe's horrible negotiating tactics as the mining corporation from the next town sought to buy him out, and he felt that rejecting their offer would then cause them to increase their offer, when in fact they gave up negotiating and proceeding quickly to Plan B, which was to send three bounty hunters to take him out of the picture. I think part of this film's status as an "unconventional" Western stems from the resulting scenes, which don't resemble classic Western gunplay at all.
But what was it REALLY like in the Old West? Do we believe that gunfighters walked out into the middle of the streets to face off against each other, counted to three and shouted, "Draw", or is that really just a Hollywood invention, along with white hats and black hats? Was there really some kind of code of honor involved with killing, or was there just killing, as in winning a gunfight by any means necessary, like hiding in a building or shooting someone in the back. I'm willing to entertain that the latter took place much more often than we've been led to believe, and that it was difficult to determine who were the heroes and who were the villains, or at least that those labels depended on who you were and where you stood.
Also starring Julie Christie (last seen in "Reds"), René Auberjonois (last heard in "Planes: Fire & Rescue"), Michael Murphy (last seen in "They Came Together"), Antony Holland (last seen in "Narrow Margin"), Bert Remsen (last seen in "Maverick"), Shelley Duvall (last seen in "Popeye"), Keith Carradine (last seen in "Hard Time: Hostage Hotel"), Corey Fischer, William Devane (last seen in "Interstellar"), John Schuck (last seen in "Midway"), Jace Van Der Veen, Hugh Millais, Manfred Schulz, Elizabeth Murphy, Jackie Crossland, Thomas Hill, Linda Sorenson, Carey Lee McKenzie, Elisabeth Knight, Janet Wright, Maysie Hoy, Linda Kupecek, Wayne Robson, Jack Riley (last seen in "Catch-22"), Rodney Gage, Lili Francks.
RATING: 4 out of 10 town drunks
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