Robert Altman Retrospective – SHELDON KIRSHNER JOURNAL

Movie director Robert Altman (1925-2006) was an original. Casting an astute and acerbic eye on American society, he was the antithesis of the conventional Hollywood filmmaker.

The Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell Lightbox is presenting a retrospective on this fairly prolific auteur. Company Man: The Best of Robert Altman will run from Aug. 7-31.

Ron Mann’s documentary, Altman, which will be presented on Friday, Aug. 8 at 6:15 p.m, provides an overview of his career.

Altman’s films, from McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) to Short Cuts (1993), are immediately recognizable. Satirical and subversive, they are highly naturalistic and free-flowing, the cinematic equivalent of stream of consciousness.

Unlike most directors, Altman was an actor’s director. He was not rigidly bound to scripts, to the frustration of screen writers, and encouraged members of the cast to improvise, with the result that his films are genuinely spontaneous.

This quality is evident in his first feature film, M*A*S*H (1970), a black comedy that unfolds at a U.S. army medical facility close to the front lines during the Korean war. Shot through with irreverence, it stars Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould as two surgeons who work hard and play hard. Sally Kellerman portrays a seemingly staid nurse whose panting hot lips bring Robert Duvall to an ecstatic place.

The film raises the issue of homosexuality, which was kept under wraps by Hollywood during that period, and uses a pick-up game of football to showcase the recreational pleasures of marijuana smoking.

Nominated for six Academy Awards, M*A*S*H is replete with counter-culture characters who relieve their tensions through sex and booze, and whose shenanigans a college fraternity house might relish. It’s marred by silly moments redolent of adolescent humor, but they speak to the chaotic nature of real life, which Altman sought to portray in his films.

Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman and Donald Sutherland

M*A*S*H will be screened on Thursday, Aug. 7 at 6:30 p.m.

Here’s the complete screening schedule:

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Academy Award-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond in person.
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1971 | 121 min. | R | 35mm
Archival print.
A two-bit gambler (Warren Beatty) and a haughty British madam (Julie Christie) go into business as co-managers of a frontier-town brothel, in this hauntingly gorgeous revisionist western that is rightly regarded as Robert Altman’s masterpiece.

Friday, August 8 at 6:15 p.m.That Cold Day in the Park
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1969 | 112 min. | 35mm
Restored 35mm print.
Shot in Vancouver on a low budget, Robert Altman’s odd and intriguing psycho-thriller — about a young spinster (Sandy Dennis) who develops a fatal attraction for a mysterious, mute young man she picks up off a park bench — has acquired a cult reputation and such fervent admirers as Bruce LaBruce.
Saturday, August 9 at 1:30 p.m.Brewster McCloud
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1970 | 105 min. | 14A | 35mm
Archival print.
An odd young man who lives in the bowels of the Houston Astrodome tries to realize his dream of flying like a bird, in Altman’s bizarro comedy-spoof-fable.
Sunday, August 10 at 1:30 p.m. The Long Goodbye
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1973 | 112 min. | R | 35mm
Elliott Gould gives one of his best screen performances in Altman’s sardonic, revisionist take on the private-eye genre, which remakes Raymond Chandler’s knight errant Philip Marlowe as a shambling, muttering, bedraggled hipster-loser adrift in a zonked-out post-hippie L.A.
Sunday, August 17 at 6:45 p.m.Thieves Like Us
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1974 | 123 min. | PG | 35mm
Two sweet-natured and slow-witted young lovers (Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall) take it on the lam from the law in Altman’s richly textured Depression-era crime caper.
Tuesday, August 19 at 6:30 p.m.Images
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1972 | 101 min. | R | 35mm
Archival print.
A schizophrenic novelist (Susannah York) is haunted by a host of memories, visions, dreams and demons when she retreats to a secluded summer house, in Altman’s cryptic and chilling exercise in psychological horror.
Tuesday, August 19 at 9:15 p.m.California Split
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1974 | 108 min. | R | 35mm
Archival print.
Altman’s freewheeling buddy comedy/character study focuses on two compulsive gamblers (Elliott Gould and George Segal) who form a friendship-cum-partnership based around the poker table, the roulette wheel and the racetrack.
Thursday, August 21 at 6:15 p.m.Nashville
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1975 | 160 min. | PG | Digital
Set over the course of five days in the country music capital, Robert Altman’s kaleidoscopic panorama of show business, politics, and other forms of American madness is one of the most influential American films of the last half-century.
Friday, August 22 at 6:30 p.m.Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1982 | 109 min. | 14A | 35mm
Restored 35mm print.
The first of several stage-to-film adaptations Robert Altman made in the eighties focuses on the members of a 1950s James Dean fan club (including Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, Kathy Bates and Cher) who reunite in a small Texas town twenty years after the actor’s death.
Saturday, August 23 at 12:45 p.m.

3 Women
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1977 | 124 min. | PG | 35mm
Archival print.
Two unlikely roommates (Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall) undergo a mysterious shift in power and personality, in Robert Altman’s So-Cal riff on Bergman’s Persona.
Saturday, August 23 at 3:30 p.m.

Secret Honor
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1984 | 90 min. | 14A | 35mm
Philip Baker Hall offers a towering turn as disgraced former president Richard Nixon in Robert Altman’s brilliant filmization of the one-man stage show.
Sunday, August 24 at 1:30 p.m.

Short Cuts
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1993 | 187 min. | 14A | 35mm
Archival print.
Altman returned to his Nashville-era mosaic mode for this sprawling, multi-character L.A. epic that weaves together a number of short stories by Raymond Carver.
Tuesday, August 26 at 6:30 p.m.

Vincent & Theo
dir. Robert Altman | Netherlands/UK/France/Germany | 1990 | 138 min. | 14A | 35mm
Altman’s sole foray into the very un-Altmanian genre of the period biopic focuses on the powerful but strained brotherly bond between Vincent van Gogh (Tim Roth) and his devoted brother Theo (Paul Rhys).
Thursday, August 28 at 6:30 p.m.

The Player
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 1991 | 124 min. | 14A | 35mm
Archival print.
Altman’s return to the Hollywood fold offers a scathing portrait of Tinseltown’s moral and artistic rot, in its tale of a sleazeball studio exec (Tim Robbins) who finds himself wanted for murder after his attempted reconciliation with a disgruntled screenwriter goes fatally sour.
Friday, August 29 at 6:30 p.m.

Gosford Park
dir. Robert Altman | USA /UK | 2001 | 137 min. | 14A | 35mm
Archival print.
Nashville meets Masterpiece Theatre in Altman’s art-house hit about murder at a posh English country manor, which earned an Oscar for the screenplay by future Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes.
Saturday, August 30 at 7 p.m.

The Company
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 2003 | 112 min. | 14A | 35mm
Neve Campbell, James Franco and Malcolm McDowell star in Altman’s behind-the-scenes look at life, love and art in Chicago’s renowned Joffrey Ballet company.
Sunday, August 31 at 1:30 p.m.

A Prairie Home Companion
dir. Robert Altman | USA | 2006 | 105 min. | PG | 35mm
An all-star cast — including Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Lindsay Lohan and many more — graces Altman’s lovely final film about the last stand of Garrison Keillor’s beloved, long-running folk music radio show.
Sunday, August 31 at 4:15 p.m.