Philip French 

Nashville – Philip French on Robert Altman’s barbed-wire birthday card to the States

Altman's dazzling portrait of America in 1975 is one of his four large-scale masterpieces, writes Philip French
  
  

1975, NASHVILLE
Country ways… Jeff Goldblum in Nashville. Photograph: Allstar//Paramount Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext / Allstar Collection/PARAMOUNT

After wartime service as a bomber pilot, Robert Altman (1925-2006) served a long apprenticeship making industrial films, episodes for TV series and some cheap features. Then M*A*S*H, his satire on the absurdity of war, brought him the 1970 Palme d'Or at Cannes and overnight fame. His career thereafter was that of an unpredictable maverick, fiercely hostile to the Hollywood system, a bitter social critic in the tradition of Mark Twain.

Although he spent most of the 1980s filming small-cast chamber plays, he worked in every genre, and his characteristic mode was the widescreen movie with a large ensemble cast, a multiple soundtrack, overlapping dialogue and an openness to improvisation. His masterpieces in this vein are McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Player, Short Cuts and, supremely, Nashville, his barbed-wire-edged birthday card to the United States as it approached its bicentennial year.

In the 60s and 70s, Hollywood had helped shift country music (often condescended to as redneck blues) into the cultural mainstream, giving it an ambivalent political resonance in pictures such as Bonnie and Clyde and Five Easy Pieces. In Altman's movie some 24 characters descend on its southern mecca, home of the Grand Ole Opry, in the wake of the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Vietnam war and Watergate. They're dreamers, exploiters, loners, stalkers, groupies, performers, stars and would-be stars. A dubious populist presidential candidate (his slogan "New Roots for the Nation" heard, though he's never seen) is in town to attend a fundraising meeting and persuade the country stars to appear in an open-air concert at the Parthenon, a neoclassical building erected for the nation's first centenary.

The cast wrote their own songs (the most heavily ironic being Henry Gibson's patriotic number with the refrain "We must be doing something right to last 200 years", the most popular Keith Carradine's Oscar-winning I'm Easy). The singers are based on, or are composites of, leading country performers, and their paths cross and re-cross over five days, leading to the climactic rally. It's a dazzling, emblematic portrait of America in 1975, both trapped in amber yet still vitally alive. The screenwriter, Joan Tewksbury, a former Altman assistant, went on to direct a single feature, Old Boyfriends (1979). The DVD/Blu-ray has a commentary by Altman himself.

 

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