Robert Altman’s Flying Machine

Brewster McCloud (1970), Robert Altman’s second feature film, is wildly fluid. Even fans of M*A*S*H (1969) might not be completely tuned in to this movie’s disjointed counterculture lightness. Scenes of episodic, oddball humor, visual shocks and sexual arousal (the movie was originally called Brewster McCloud’s Sexy Flying Machine) butt up against each other like pinballs, and Altman, who heavily rewrote the Doran William Cannon screenplay, is tilting the machine.

In M*A*S*H, the satire was equally manic but a lot clearer; scenes were constructed to puncture bureaucracy and skewer the military officers and aides who peddled it to the American troops. We know what’s going on in Brewster McCloud and we can catch all the often very funny movie references and in-jokes, but we don’t often know what those references are doing there or why a disparate group of Houstonians are being strangled. The movie doesn’t ever tell us why these particular victims were targeted or even who the killer is. It could be the sensual but mothering older woman (Sally Kellerman), the dimwit tour guide (Shelley Duvall, whose eyelashes are painted in Raggedy Ann spikes), or the taciturn Brewster himself (Bud Cort, who played several of his movie roles as if they were on the spectrum). Are the victims Brewster’s persecutors, establishment materialists threatening to derail his desire to fly, or are they only in the wrong place at the wrong time? The victims are all found contorted in grotesque shapes, with bird droppings on their bodies or faces, but if Altman is attempting to make a deeper satirical point and not just a scatological one, that point is lost. The comic visual scatology is everywhere, in fact: bird shit is constantly being dropped (by unseen birds) on important papers, wallets, badges, and windshields. The movie is practically awash in it. The freedom that Altman gives his cast to improvise dialogue saves a lot of the non sequiturs in the script — for example, while the suave detective (Michael Murphy) is examining one of the victims at a zoo, an enormous tortoise lumbers into the frame, nudging the detective’s right elbow, and Murphy, without losing character, says, “Somebody get this turtle out of here.” Moments like that reinforce the improvisational personality without adding to the confusion.

Weirdos. Shelley Duvall, Bud Cort

Most of the earlier scenes — the farcical police investigation, the bonehead car chases, a runaway wheelchair, the whacked-out accidents and close calls — may not be linked logically to the movie’s climax, but they are, miraculously, linked emotionally, and that inevitability is probably the movie’s chief virtue and triumph. Altman is brilliant enough to loosen plot threads and abandon linear dialogue and still fulfill an audience’s emotional needs. Brewster’s exultant flight in the Astrodome is scored to Merry Clayton’s lovely rendition of a John Phillips song about the emotional abandon of spreading one’s wings and letting go. One of the great reprises in American movies of the seventies, the scene is a metaphor of the entire movie and its spasmodic narrative, the oversize contraption flapping its aluminum bones in order to climb dizzyingly higher and higher. But the emotional strength of that uplift is real, and the conclusion is devastating. The boy with the dream is the only one in the movie whose death is treated with tragic irony. The movie destroys him to liberate him. The audience knows it has lost something it can’t quite articulate, and Altman is compassionate enough to give us a final set piece of distancing theatricality — a circus of the stars and a Felliniesque view of life-as-theater (a sign saying “Greatest Show on Earth” hangs across the stadium seats). If that’s Altman’s point, he certainly takes a roundabout way of getting there, but the side roads are richly inventive, like early Fellini. The framing device alone is sophisticatedly, bizarrely witty enough for ten movies: a professor (René Auberjonois) lecturing on ornithology grows progressively more birdlike in his squawky speech and body movements each time the camera cuts back to his classroom. Once you see it as a hip, modern fable, Brewster McCloud may seem the giddiest flight fantasy since Miracle in Milan (1951).

The Razor’s Edge

Shenanigans. Elliot Gould, Tom Skerritt, Donald Sutherland

Those of you who think that movies are entirely a visual medium, and that the script is nothing more than a springboard—a prop in a stage play—just try imagining Robert Altman’s MASH (1970) without the script (credited to Ring Lardner Jr., who won an Oscar for it). The constant hubbub of overlapping dialogue, the profanity, the screaming, the cockeyed optimism—this corrosive, kinky screenplay does more than delineate character and lay out situations in the traditional commercial-movie way (advancing the narrative by having the characters “talk” the plot). The screenplay—about Army medics trying to save lives and stave off despair a few miles from the fighting front during the Korean War—binds the visual madness together into a cohesive, realistic world. Lardner and Altman make the movie a critique of highfalutin and hypocrisy—it’s blackly funny but not cynical.

Other American movies of the time reflect the Vietnam War, dirty politics, and the country’s disgust with itself—Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1967), Irvin Kershner’s The Flim-Flam Man (1967) with George C. Scott as an M.B.S., C.S., D.D. confidence man (“Master of Back-Stabbing, Cork-Screwing, and Dirty-Dealing”), Blake Edwards’s draggy and tasteless What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966), Ted Post’s Hang ’Em High (1968), Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff (1968). These movies seethe with political cynicism and sometimes gratuitous bloodshed (although the carnage in The Wild Bunch is far more complex and ambivalent than a spaghetti western). Altman could have gone entirely cynical, too, but what makes MASH so satisfying is that he expresses a realistic idealism—the moviemakers keep their sanity, the way the medics keep theirs, not by a Frank Burns style of phonily righteous preaching, but by demonstrating integrity and compassion, and disdaining hypocrisy and phoniness. MASH is a picture of redemption.

The bloody work of an army surgical unit is shown in a new way—not for didactic distancing (the way wounded men in war movies in the Forties and Fifties were used as homilies, swollen with sacrificial virtue), and not for the repellent gross-outs and shock effects of movies that use violence pornographically. In MASH, the blood-spattered surgical gowns, scalpels, and clamps are filmed for balance (and mostly in medium shot); the talented medics are humanized by working feverishly in rotten conditions, trying to staunch a wounded soldier’s bloodflow or save a limb (sometimes unsuccessfully). Even the satiric butts, like the prissily bossy “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and the sanctimonious hypocrite Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), are picked up and dusted off after being scraped across the gravel (although Altman perhaps mishandles Burns’s departure by stripping him of any vestige of pride he had—the scene goes for a cheap laugh at the character’s expense). The surgery scenes give weight and purpose to the sexual shenanigans and practical jokes. The MASH campground resembles Freedonia, the mythical kingdom of wartime mayhem in the Marx Brothers’ great Duck Soup (1933), only it’s a Freedonia without the loopy Dada.

Altman’s direction is excellent; he and his cameraman abruptly pan and zoom in and out to punctuate visual and verbal jokes, and the hip actors in the cast (who seem to know they’re making movie comedy history) take advantage of Altman’s generosity by improvising some bits. If the screenplay is a springboard for anything, it’s improvisation, and the movie has the tone of inspired improvisation. The story goes that Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland quarreled with Altman on the set. But their performances are marvels of corrosive wit, and reflect a cathartic release of tension.

The Last Supper.

The miracle of MASH is that it so successfully combines the taboo breaching of gallows humor—laughing at suffering to stay sane—with the naturalistic coarseness of low comedy: the movie balances bone saws and foul mouths, and spills off the screen in torrents. Although Korea is the ostensible setting, you know that the movie is really showing the madness of Vietnam, and telling America that it’s possible to do good work and sustain your sanity and humanity amid the senselessness of bloodshed and strangling bureaucracy. The effect is restorative, a work of humanism. MASH is a Rabelaisian black comedy, and one of the most sensible American movie satires ever.