Robert Altman was an American original and a moviehouse treasure whose work spanned generations. He was the great gadfly filmmaker who shook up the Vietnam era in 1970 with the classic movie “M*A*S*H,” and then kept provoking and entertaining audiences for the next 36 years with a string of outrageously personal and often scaldingly irreverent movies.
Altman, who died Monday in Los Angeles of complications from cancer, was 81.
“He had lived and worked with the disease for the last 18 months,” the director’s Sandcastle 5 Productions in New York said in a statement Tuesday. “His death was, nevertheless, a surprise: Altman was in preproduction on a film he had planned to start shooting in February.”
It figured. Altman always said he could never stop working. Nominated for five best director Oscars, he never won. He finally was awarded a life achievement Oscar last March at the Academy Awards ceremony, where he revealed that he had a heart transplant in the 1990s. The prize was long overdue.
“No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have,” he said while accepting his Oscar. “I’ve never had to direct a film I didn’t choose or develop.”
That last sentence wasn’t quite true, at least in the beginning. Altman, after the critical and commercial success of “M*A*S*H” in 1970, did become the kind of filmmaker he described. From then on he conceived or initiated most of his projects and reshaped the rest to his liking.
In the process he created a string of almost defiantly non-mainstream classics, including his lyrical, melancholy anti-western “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971), his kaleidoscopic country-and-western music epic “Nashville” (1975), his scorching inside look at Hollywood studio amorality and murder “The Player” (1992), his massive multistranded L.A. ensemble drama “Short Cuts” (1993) and his brilliant British blend of Agatha Christie country manor mystery thriller and social drama “Gosford Park” (2001).
But, for the two decades before the worldwide smash hit of “M*A*S*H,” Altman was primarily a directorial gun for hire. He began his moviemaking career with industrial films in his native Kansas City, Mo.
Dad an insurance salesman
He was born there on Feb. 20, 1925, the only son in a socially prominent German-American family with three children. His father was an insurance salesman who, Altman later said, “devoted a lot of his energies to gambling and women”–as Altman himself later did.
After a couple of independent features in 1957, Altman worked mostly in television through the ’60s, on shows like “Combat!” and “Bonanza.”
Finally, he took over the reins on 1970’s “M*A*S*H,” an adaptation of a comic novel about ultracompetent but sassy and fun-loving combat surgeons in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit during the Korean War. More than a dozen of his colleagues had turned down the Ring Lardner Jr. screenplay. But Altman grabbed it and ran, encouraging his cast–it included Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould–to violate the rules, with overlapping talk and flights of wild, brilliant and often inspired improvisation. They turned the film into a dark, buoyant satire on the Vietnam War–and on the horror and madness in all wars.
“M*A*S*H” won Altman the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, became a hit with the American public and critics, and ignited the second, more brilliant and exciting part of Altman’s career.
In his later films, his manner often remained fun-loving but his themes were piercing. Altman showed the dark side of America and elsewhere in the film noir domain of “The Long Goodbye,” in the gambling duchy of “California Split,” in the entertainment-political kingdom of “Nashville,” in the dark center of power with Nixon in “Secret Honor,” and in his own crime-ridden hometown in “Kansas City.”
Perhaps it’s in “Short Cuts,” which he sometimes cited as his best movie, that we can best see the darkness of his vision. Based on interweaving Raymond Carver stories transplanted to L.A. and environs, the movie keeps showing how many lives are blighted, false and going nowhere in this would-be American paradise on the edge of an earthquake. And he showed all this because he was, like his “M*A*S*H” heroes, a jock, a lover and a can-do guy soured on the way the establishment had screwed up.
Altman became legendary for his ability to shepherd offbeat projects, tackle meaningful themes (often dealing with corruption and deception), attract gifted ensembles and encourage actors to their most daring and memorable work. Only this year, in “A Prairie Home Companion,” a film in which Garrison Keillor imagined the last night and corporate destruction of his long-running public radio show, Altman guided another great cast –including Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and Keillor–to another set of actors’ coups. The movie, which would turn out to be Altman’s last, was as much about mortality as it was about radio.
“Mr. Altman loved making movies,” Keillor said on Tuesday. “He loved the chaos of shooting and the sociability of the crew and actors–he adored actors. . . . When he was working, he was in heaven.”
Altman was a maverick to the end and also at the beginning. He was a young reveler who loved to sneak out at night as a boy to hear jazz from Kansas City’s storied Swing Era clubs. He left school at 19 to enlist in the Army Air Forces.
After World War II, Altman returned to make his first feature, “The Delinquents” (1957). With his next movie, the low-budget 1957 documentary “The James Dean Story,” he was off and running.
Liked Chicago as a venue
In the last few years, Altman spent a lot of time in Chicago, where he shot the independent dance drama “The Company” (2003) with the Joffrey Ballet and star Neve Campbell and where he also directed, for the Lyric Opera, William Bolcom’s operatic version of “A Wedding,” Altman’s much-underrated 1978 ensemble comedy-drama set at a frenetic wedding reception in Lake Forest. He kept working on “A Prairie Home Companion,” one of this year’s great films, despite ill health that sometimes had him to a wheelchair.
He was married three times, to LaVonne Elmer in 1947, to Lotus Corelli in 1954 and to Kathryn Reed in 1959. He had five children, Christine Altman Westphal, Michael, Stephen, Robert and Matthew Altman and a stepdaughter, Konni Corriere.
“Filmmaking kept him ageless,” Bob Balaban, Altman’s producer-actor on “Gosford Park,” said Tuesday. “Watching him direct was like watching a kid in a candy shop. It gave him that kind of joy.”
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The essential Robert Altman
Here are the 10 Robert Altman movies you have to see. But after you do, you should see all the others too.
1. “M*A*S*H” (1970)
A cockeyed masterpiece. Madcap Korean War Army medicos Hawkeye, Trapper John, et al. show what wars are like to those who fight them. In the process, they demystified Vietnam.
2. “McCabe and
Mrs. Miller” (1971)
Leonard Cohen’s songs, the bitter cold Northwest, Julie Christie’s bordello, Warren Beatty’s death in the snow. Altman’s most beautiful film.
3. “Nashville” (1975)
America through the prism of the country music capital and a crazy political campaign. A great ensemble movie with a wondrous cast.
4. “A Wedding” (1978)
A wedding reception becomes a microcosm for the private world of the rich and careless.
5. “Tanner 88” (1988)
His witty mockumentary about an alternative-world presidential race, with Michael Murphy as good-guy candidate Tanner.
6. “The Player” (1992)
A cautionary murder thriller about the dark side of Hollywood; one of the great “inside movie” pictures.
7. “Short Cuts” (1993)
Altman makes Raymond Carver’s world his own, moves it to L.A. and gives us the sad, wasted side of Los Angeles like no one else.
8. “Kansas City” (1996)
The jazz city of his youth becomes a film noir dream.
9. “Gosford Park” (2001)
An Agatha Christie country manor murder mystery beautifully mixed with the social comedy-drama of Jean Renoir’s French classic “The Rules of the Game.”
10. “A Prairie Home Companion” (2006)
He told us it was about death. He made us laugh at it. That’s the kind of guy he was.
–Michael Wilmington
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mwilmington@tribune.com
