Short Cuts

The argument is still open over the group of films as a whole. Nashville--much praised in its day by Pauline Kael, who lashed herself to Altman’s uncertain mast (thereby guaranteeing her subsequent betrayal)--looks like a perilously chic contrivance, with twenty-four characters for the sake of that many, vivid in performance but very sketchy in writing, and in a languid circus that needs the sudden intrusion of assassination to give it shape and an ending. So Nashville may be overrated. On the other hand, The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs. Miller are surely among the most beautiful and musical films ever made. Altman loved music, and jazz especially (see the jam session movie that goes along with Kansas City), and Goodbye and McCabe are eccentric musicals--with one refrain all through the first and Leonard Cohen’s mutterings in the other. Moreover, Altman had reached a visionary insight that while Warren Beatty was a piercing but neurotic movie star, Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe was quite simply one of the hippest pieces of acting in the annals of film.

The Altman of those years was like Ingmar Bergman in the way he had gathered a creative family. It was a gang of oddball actors who had never quite found themselves elsewhere: Gould, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Henry Gibson, Shelley Duvall, Jeff Goldblum, and Lily Tomlin, awkward in everyone else’s films, but stunning for Altman. And he had his team behind the camera too, variously co-producers, co-writers, co-friends, and enablers--Tommy Thompson, Joan Tewkesbury, Robert Eggenweiler, Scott Bushnell, and Alan Rudolph. He was a producer for friends--and so he helped such valuable people as Alan Rudolph (Remember My Name) and Robert Benton (The Late Show), and much later there was a friendship and artistic alliance between Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson. It seemed a happy family until, all of a sudden, Bushnell sought more power and all was upheaval. Both McGilligan and Zuckoff do pretty well at tracing the internecine politics and the odd escapism with which Altman was a capricious emperor who would distribute favors and then give you the back of his hand.

He was not always an easy or safe man to like, or take for granted. The two books show very different experiences. Zuckoff was hired, he says, near the end of Altman’s life, to help write a memoir that would make a nice payday. (Altman was always short of money.) It was to be a book about the work, not the life. They had long sessions of talk and smoking. They became friends, and Zuckoff succumbed to comradeship with an old man who was frail but persevering. Altman’s great kindness to Zuckoff was in dying, for that took away any chance of chagrin and dismay in an abused author. But Zuckoff was persuaded by Altman’s loyal and long-suffering third wife, Kathryn, and by opportunity, to do a book about the life, too--and to do it as an oral biography, adapting to the director’s habit of a circular form and letting everyone have his or her say, even if it comes down to Faye Dunaway’s official kiss-off--"I don’t have anything to say about Mr Altman. I never worked with him. I don’t have any time to give you on the subject"--instead of deep dish on the temperature of their implausible affair.

Zuckoff is a good interviewer and a better editor of the results. But his circle of contacts is smaller than McGilligan’s, and it does not carry the bitterness of McGilligan’s discovery: that the self-serving haze of forgetfulness in Altman’s life often demanded a painstaking readiness to track down the small people who could give the lie to the great man’s lofty and sentimental version of things. The McGilligan book is finally more revealing, because its author was never taken in by Altman or smothered in his embrace.

In the end there is room for both books, because Altman’s best films and his rather chilly elegance have entered our imaginary existence. Very few directors have been so good at detecting the lonely people in the crowd. Beatty’s John McCabe seems like the cock of his jaunty walk, yet he yarns away to himself to prove he exists; Gould’s Philip Marlowe is so twisted out of shape by old codes of honor that he may have his best conversations with his cat. Altman left traps in the ground around himself: no major director made so many awful films. But if some director had made only M.A.S.H., McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, 3 Women, and Short Cuts, there would be no doubt about his ultimate importance. Yes, he was a trickster and a tricky bastard, a bit of a double-cross. But do not forget that he introduced those lifelike realities at the very moment when innocent and foolish film followers were ready to believe that directors must be heroes, saints, or Santa Claus. We owe him plenty.

David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and Have You Seen? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films.