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Robert Altman
A director/producer whose work arouses deep passions among filmgoers. Those who love Robert Altman's work perceive a courageous individualist who disdains the usual requirements of form and structure and, instead, makes movies that meander meaningfully toward a striking intellectual honesty. Those who abhor Robert Altman's films see him as a self-indulgent moviemaker who has rarely been able to tell a story with a discernible beginning, middle, and end. And even his best works, his critics would contend, often lack any emotional punch.
Actor's director
Whatever might be said of Robert Altman, though, it is clear that he is very much an actor's director. His loyal performers tend to appear regularly in his movies, and a great many stars such as PAUL NEWMAN and Carol Burnett have actively pursued the opportunity to work with him because of his improvisational approach to performing, allowing actors an uncommon freedom to interpret their roles. This willingness to improvise causes overlapping dialogue in Robert Altman's films (because actors don't know when someone has finished with their lines), and the result is a naturalism that is a fresh, if sometimes disconcerting, addition to modern Hollywood movies.
Like many a director's background, Robert Altman's was technical; he studied engineering and was a pilot during World War II. His entrance into the movie business came via work on industrial films in the 1950s. By 1957, he ventured into commercial moviemaking with a teenage exploitation film he wrote, directed, and produced called The Delinquents, starring the future Billy Jack, Tom Laughlin. After making a documentary on JAMES DEAN that same year, Robert Altman drifted into television work, which enabled him to hone his craft. A decade later, in 1968, he left TV to make the feature film Countdown, a highly regarded movie about astronauts that resulted in Robert Altman receiving more directorial assignments. But it wasn't until 1970 that he made his big breakthrough with M*A*S*H, a movie that excited the critics and public alike.
Altman's work
During the next eight years, Robert Altman made a series of films that constitute the bulk of his best work. It was a period when generally he was both critically and commercially viable. Not all of his films were hits during this time, but his successes far outweighed his failures. Among his better efforts were McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), California Split (1974), Nashville (1975), 3 Women (1978), and A Wedding (1978). 1978 was a watershed year for Robert Altman during which he was involved in an astounding five films either as a producer or as a producer/writer/director. Rightly or wrongly, there was a sense among critics that his work couldn't be that good if he could generate it so prolifically. But the film that crippled his career was Popeye (1980), a big-budget musical that was based on the comic strip character and starred Robin Williams as the title character and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl. It was a perfectly cast movie, and by all rights it should have been a major hit. But it wasn't, and Robert Altman received the blame for the rambling, uninvolving box-office disappointment.
Soon thereafter, Robert Altman found it difficult to find financial backing for his projects, and he retreated to the Broadway stage, directing Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. The play received good reviews, and he then brought it to the screen in 1982 (giving Cher her first big acting break both on the stage and in the movies). During the rest of the 1980s, he gained a modest reputation for filming stage plays, most notably Streamers (1983), but none of these films have had much commercial success. He received particularly poor reviews and box-office response to his film version of Christopher Durang's play Beyond Therapy (1985).
Come-back
During the 1990s, Robert Altman bounced back into prominence thanks to several outstanding and career-defining pictures, starting with his take on Van Gogh and the relationship between art and commerce, Vincent and Theo (1990), followed by his Hollywood satire The Player (1990), the loopy narrative experimentation of Short Cuts (1994), and his tribute to the town where he was raised, Kansas City (1996). Less successful, perhaps, were Cookie's Fortune (1997), The Gingerbread Man (1998), and Dr. T and the Women (2000). Robert Altman's triumph after the turn of the 21st century was Gosford Park (2001), evocative, perhaps, of Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939), but innovative and original nonetheless.
Robert Altman earned a Golden Globe for this film and was named Best Director of 2001 by the American Film Institute, the National Society of Film Critics, and the New York Film Critics Circle. In the case of such films as Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park, the central components of Robert Altman's “signature” style, the overlapping dialogue and the interconnected plot structure in particular, were so effective that even skeptics were persuaded that Robert Altman was not only a master craftsman but a strikingly original talent, and an American original, at that.