Word: mccabe
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...McCabe and Mrs. Miller undermines the modern mythification of the American past, The Long Goodbye (1973) exposes the improbability of a more contemporary American hero: the private eye, as created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Altman's Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) is an anachronism. His stocks in trade--intelligence, independence and integrity--are pitifully inadequate weapons with which to confront modern, large-scale, organized corruption...
...many American myths--the belief that the determined individual can succeed in the face of opposition by large organizations--and he seems to wish the myths were true, even though he knows they aren't. Latter-day Icarus Brewster McCloud falls to his death in the Houston Astrodome; McCabe is killed by the corporate goons; Philip Marlowe plays the sap; the gamblers in California Split lose. Maybe that's not the way you'd like it, says Altman, but that...
...Altman has rendered ludicrous some overused Hollywood techniques of establishing mood and tone, he has developed and refined others. His use of color is particularly striking. The monochromatic brown shading of McCabe and Mrs. Miller conveys the cold bleakness of the northwestern frontier, and the blue tones of The Long Goodbye are appropriate to the twilight world inhabited by Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Altman's most effective, moving use of color to establish mood is in Thieves Like Us (1974), a beautiful, elegiac story of innocent young love in the Depression-era South. He saturates his images with green and yellow...
Thieves Like Us is an appropriate note on which to end an appreciation of Robert Altman's work; Altman couldn't have made this lucid, subtle film--which altogether ignores American movie myths--without first shattering those myths in films like M*A*S*H*, McCabe and The Long Goodbye. In retrospect, it's clear that Altman has helped American movies move beyond the stifling conventions of the genre to focus on ordinary people whose lives are important in their own right. He's given American movies room to breathe...
...Institute of Contemporary Art continues its retrospective series on Robert Altman this week, showing two of his lesser-known films--California Split and Thieves Like Us.Small businessman WARREN BEATTY and his partner, JULIE CHRISTIE, plan great things for the town of Presbyterian Church, in this scene from "McCabe and Mrs. Miller...