“The Man I Love,” or Time Regained: Altman, History and Kansas City

15“The Man I Love,” or TimeRegained

Altman, History and KansasCityAdrian Danks

Introduction: Inside theAltmanesqueRobert Altman is commonly discussed as adirector of the “moment.” The majority of hisfilms and television productions are situatedwithin contemporary settings, featurecharacters who hold little sense or awareness ofthe past and are overwhelmed or intoxicated bytheir immediate surroundings, and arepreoccupied with aspects of modern Americaand its various institutions, urban and ruralenvironments, cultural values, entertainmentindustries and politics. This dominantpreoccupation with the here and now istherefore combined with an overwhelmingfixation on American locations, genres andsubjects. Altman’s work spans many of the keygenres of classical Hollywood cinema, examines

718A Companion to Robert Altman, edited by Adrian Danks, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=2009817.Created from rmit on 2020-03-15 22:40:26.

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various subjects including the modern healthindustry, the country music scene, Hollywood,society weddings, the Democratic Party’selectoral processes, gambling, the Wild Westspectacular, and explores a range of geographiclocations including Nashville, Los Angeles,Kansas City, Houston, Dallas, the Western“frontier,” Chicago, Phoenix and Saint Paul.Although a number of Altman’s films – ThatCold Day in the Park (1969), MASH (1970),Images (1972), Popeye (1980), BeyondTherapy (1987), Vincent & Theo (1990),Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Gosford Park (2001), andarguably McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), BuffaloBill and Indians, or Sitting Bull’s HistoryLesson (1976) and Quintet (1979) (the last threefilmed in Canada, if not set there) – were shotor are located outside of the United States, fewof his characters themselves seem particularlyinterested in the world beyond its borders. Eventhese films shot outside of the United Statescommonly feature American characters, actors,cultural artifacts and thematic preoccupations(such as the Korean War in MASH, Hollywoodcinema in Gosford Park, or the staging of NewYork in Paris in Beyond Therapy). It isn’twithout justification that one of the seminalbooks published on the director is called RobertAltman’s America (Keyssar 1991).

This insularity or interiority is demonstrated bythe form, structure and characterization ofmany Altman films, including one of the


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greatest and most underrated films of his peakperiod in the 1970s, California Split (1974). Themomentum and relationship of its twocompulsive gamblers, played by Elliott Gouldand George Segal, is only maintained as long asthey can dream of a trip to Reno, Nevada, andthat one big break. The friendship betweenthem is fuelled by the relentless pursuit andimmediacy of their next “fix,” as well as theiroften arcane, quixotic and stumbling recall ofthe byways of American popular culture. Thecharacters float – this sensation enhanced bythe constantly moving camera and the extensiveuse of the zoom lens – between recollections of1950s television shows, largely forgottennineteenth and early twentieth centuryAmerican popular songs and, amongst ascattering of other things, the names of theseven dwarfs, before drunkenly stumbling ontoa memory of the moment in Dumbo (BenSharpsteen et al, 1941) where the title characterlearns to fly.

As Adrian Martin (2002) and RaymondDurgnat (1982) have argued, Altman’scharacters often seem to occupy an almostpreconscious state or way of “being in theworld,” and fail to really see or even feel beyondthe immediate borders that surround and oftenhem them in:

It’s as if they have a swarm of bees in theirheads, all kinds of impulses, prejudices,


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received ideas, memories and perceptions –a swarm that makes a lot of noise, but notnecessarily much coherent sense.

(Martin 2002)

This is reinforced by the fluidity of thecharacters in films such as That Cold Day in thePark, 3 Women (1977) and Kansas City whooften appear to merge into one another. Such adiscussion of and insistence upon thesubjectivity and limits of Altman’s teemingcinema may seem surprising or inappropriate.The most common description given of thedirector’s work is of a broiling, unruly,tumultuous, panoramic and endlesslyshape-shifting world of intersecting characters,plotlines, lines of dialogue, focal planes, soundsand locations. Altman’s tendency to shootpredominantly in found places and voluminouslocations (the site of Montreal’s Expo 67 forQuintet; the bar, spa and apartment complex of3 Women), to work towards the construction ofa 360-degree space containing an almost VonStroheim-like level of textual detail (includingfully-stocked cupboards at the peripheries ofvast locations and sets), to allow a degree ofimprovisation and adjustment around theparameters of script, situation and character, allsuggest an explicit openness of form, style andaudience interaction. Altman is renowned for aparticular and even defined cinematic style thatis routinely described in terms of overlapping


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dialogue, multiple competing sound sources,the long take, the crowded and shifting shallowfocus of the widescreen frame, the languid,aqueous zoom, and an almost constantlyshifting frame – even though his work rarelyconforms to a consistent method or form, evenwithin a single film.

But Altman’s characters and situations areequally solipsistic and often only manage tostay afloat while the dialogue is flying and theworld around the characters is in constantlyflowing motion. And his cinema is crowdedwith moments where characters sense the joltof being ripped from this protective domain.For example, Altman’s breakthrough film,MASH, manages to convey the sense of ashared, if somewhat adolescent, communitythat exists between a group of charactersstranded within the limited geography andcolor field of the beige, khaki and olive greenenvirons of a field hospital somewhere in Korea(or in Malibu or the soundstages at 20thCentury-Fox). The film loses some of itsstylistic, narrative and tonal consistency in itssecond half – as it moves towards more farcicaland slapstick situations that also manage totemper some of the cruelty and elitismcharacteristic of the early sections – but in itsfinal moments it reinforces the primacy of thehere and now, the immediate physical andemotional environment, by showing us a pair ofdeparting characters who are a little


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shell-shocked and disorientated by the dawningreality of their imminent return home(motivating an uncharacteristic flashforward).The cocoon of the Altman “jamboree,”“mosaic,” “cavalcade” or “network” is plainlycoming to an end.

This chapter will examine the immediacy or“presentness” of Altman’s cinema in relation toa series of films he made about the past. Itframes this discussion through a reading of thedirector’s most “autobiographical” film, KansasCity, and explores the ways in which this latecareer work foregrounds a particularfascination with the 1930s, American popularculture, music, companionship, place, theUnited States and politics. In the process, it willprovide a critical discussion of one of Altman’smost vibrant and important late films inrelation to the musical qualities andfoundations of much of his work and its specificapproach to history and modernity.

“Hi ya, Cary:” Altman and FilmHistoryThe films that Altman made set in other timesand places tend to reinforce many of thecontradictory qualities and preoccupationshighlighted above. Altman’s interest in andapproach to the past bears fruitful comparisonwith many of the other directors of the NewHollywood cinema. Altman, of course, belongs


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to a different era or generation of filmmakersthan figures such as Martin Scorsese, FrancisFord Coppola, Steven Spielberg and GeorgeLucas. Although he is often included within thisgrouping, his extensive background inindustrial filmmaking and network television,as well as his varied life experiences, set himapart from the more cinema-focused likes ofScorsese, Spielberg and Lucas. Altman occupiesa place somewhat anterior to the core of NewHollywood and holds a very different relation tothe influence of classical Hollywood and evenEuropean art cinema, as well as a range of otherpolitical, cultural, historical and social interests,influences and concerns. Whereas a directorsuch as Scorsese tends to frame the past –despite an often overwhelming level proceduraland textual detail in a film such as Casino(1995), or a complex interlacing of intertextualreferences in a magisterial work like The Age ofInnocence (1993) – through the prism orperspective of the present, Altman’s films inthis mode draw closer to the work of a directorlike Terrence Malick who attempts to thickenthe representation of the past through anattention to experiential detail, the rhythms andspeech patterns of daily life, an “incoherent” orscattered recollection of the cultural relics of anearlier era, and an equal focus on theenvironment and the characters. WhereasMalick presents a pantheistic or cosmicperspective on the world, Altman provides amuch messier, immediate and prismatic


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viewpoint. Although Malick’s characters onlypartially grasp the grand sweep of universalhistory that circulates around and throughthem, Altman’s characters generally don’t see orsense the detail or contours of history at all.

Altman does populate several of his “period”films with references to significant historicalevents and well-known and obscure figuresfrom the past, but his characters have littlesense of their own significance or ultimate placein political, social or cultural history. This iseven true of Buffalo Bill in Buffalo Bill and theIndians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson.Altman represents Bill as a preening,self-promoting and verbose celebrity who islargely unable to distinguish between his ownpast actions and those that have beenmythologized, narrativized and patentlyfictionalized by various theatrical presentations,dime novels and his own Wild West show. InKansas City, Altman pushes his historicalfigures – such as the infamous political kingpinThomas Pendergast, Mob boss John Lazia,Count Basie, Charlie and Adie Parker – tosupporting or background roles in the action.The characters who most occupy our attention– Blondie and Seldom Seen – are those thatcommand or move “freely” through space andoccupy or populate the soundtrack (even if onlyfor a short time). Although they are figures whowill be largely lost to history, which favors theofficial stories of party politics, large municipal


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system of power and lasting cultural artifactslike jazz, Altman’s film gives us access to ahighly stylized but dynamic and detailed senseof what their past might have been like.

The distinctiveness of Altman’s films in this“mode” can be further examined through theways in which they approach the popularculture of earlier times and how it circulates orpulses through a particular moment in history.Although Altman is not entirely alone in thisregard, the direct references or “allusions” inhis work to other films and cultural practices donot generally provide a coherent or particularlypersonal catalogue of tastes, influences orinterests. The main exceptions to this areprobably those films that betray the influence ofsuch European directors as Ingmar Berman(Images and 3 Women) or, to a lesser degree,Jean Renoir (HealtH [1980] and GosfordPark). Even Altman’s work in particular genres,such as his various attempts at the “musical”from Nashville (1975) and A Perfect Couple(1979) to Kansas City and A Prairie HomeCompanion (2006), tend to only use the frameof genre as a point of reference rather than anactive invitation to enter into a detaileddialogue with or celebration of the genre.Unsurprisingly, the iconoclastic Altman hasoften been dismissive of the generic forms hehas worked with. For example, this is what hehad to say about the Western:


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in Paris they referred to McCabe [& Mrs.Miller] as an anti-western and they called itthe “demystification of an era.” That was myreason for getting involved in McCabe in thefirst place because I don’t like Westerns. Idon’t like the obvious lack of truth in them. Isee no reason to go back to the reality of itand then tell the story.

(Self 2007 , 55–56)

When Peter Bogdanovich uses actor BenJohnson in The Last Picture Show (1971), orstages a screening of Red River (HowardHawks, 1948) as the eponymous final show atthe small town’s local cinema, we recognize thisas an admission of influence, an act of homageand a melancholy reflection on the passing ofan era as well as a mode of filmmaking and filmspectatorship. Bogdanovich reinforces hisallegiance to such directors as Hawks and JohnFord, figures he was instrumental in bringing tothe forefront of the discussion of Americanauteurism and the canonization of classicalHollywood cinema. Altman’s cinema containsfew such homages to the past, anddemonstrates a distaste for the classical formsof the 1930s and 1940s. When discussing hisformative cinematic influences with DavidThompson (2006), Altman vaguely recalledviewing such escapist, action-oriented fare asKing Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B.Schoedsack, 1933), Viva Villa! (Jack Conway,


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1934) and Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939) inthe 1930s, but claims his first real encounterswith the expressive and emotional capacities ofthe cinema didn’t occur until the immediatepostwar period when he saw David Lean’s BriefEncounter (1945), John Huston’s The Treasureof the Sierra Madre (1948) and the early worksof Italian neorealism (4). It was only whenexposed to this work “that he first becameaware of an intelligence behind the camera. ‘Inever imagined they were directed,’ he has said.‘I just thought they happened’” (McGilligan1989, 59). When Ford is referenced in Altman’swork, in the communal setting of McCabe &Mrs. Miller or the faltering announcement ofthe screening of one of his less-celebrated films,When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950), inMASH, for example, it is generally to highlight,in often derisory terms, the inadequacy anddishonesty of these past models.

Similarly, the initially affectionate and cordialexchanges between Philip Marlowe (ElliottGould) and the gatekeeper (Ken Sansom) of theMalibu Colony where the Wades live inAltman’s adaption of Raymond Chandler’s TheLong Goodbye (1973), suggest a shared insiderknowledge of classical Hollywood and its role asan arbiter of taste, distinction and a particularrelation to the past (as well as a self-reflexivecomment on the film’s relationship to its genreand the way it radically recasts Marlowe). Theattendant’s impersonations of Cary Grant,


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Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s DoubleIndemnity (1944), James Stewart and WalterBrennan are initially used as markers ofprivileged knowledge, with Marlowe (andMarlowe’s friend, Terry Lennox) gaining entryonce he has genially identified the particularvoice or expression. But the film doesn’t takethis to its logical extreme, with, say, theattendant attempting to impersonateHumphrey Bogart in Hawks’s earlier Chandleradaptation, The Big Sleep (1946), and this chainof reference is ultimately abused by Marlowe –when he stalls the car tailing him by suggestingto the attendant that its driver is a big fan ofBrennan – and peters out like so many of otherplot strands and “riffs” that populate the movie.Here, Altman indirectly references suchdirectors as Wilder and Hawks – the onefilmmaker of classical Hollywood he correctlyidentified an affinity with in terms of a sharedfocus on the moment, overlapping dialogue andthe preeminence of the “situation” (seeThompson 2006, 29) – as a means to suggesthis distance from them. Although The LongGoodbye does repay examination in relation toHawks’s The Big Sleep (both involved thecollaboration of writer Leigh Brackett), and inlight of the Bogie cult that developed in the1960s and 1970s, it is also a radicaltransformation of the detective genre and anexplicit critique of the ways it traditionallycontrols space, constructs characters anddistributes knowledge.


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Goin’ to Kansas City: Altman andthe PastThroughout his career Altman hasintermittently made works that are set in thepast. In many respects, including in relation tohis approach to “history,” it can be argued thatAltman’s work in television in the 1950s and1960s sets the parameters for much of whatfollows. Many of the techniques he is noted for,such as overlapping dialogue and the fluid andrestless deployment of the zoom, find theirinitial, circumscribed presentation in thistelevision work. This is also true in terms ofAltman’s approach to genre and the ways inwhich its most basic forms provided alaunching pad for and often-critical influenceupon other approaches and preoccupationsacross his work. A number of the televisionshows that Altman worked on in this period,such as Bonanza, Maverick, Combat! and TheRoaring 20’s, also granted him an initial set ofexperiences in the rudimentary and oftenclichéd representation of various periods.Nevertheless, other than the various war ormilitary-related films and television shows thatAltman made, such as MASH, Streamers(1983), The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial(1988), his most sustained work in the “period”film encompasses the two Westerns he made inthe 1970s, both of which dramatize the“closing” of the frontier and explore the


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dynamics of the Western as an established,mythologized, even exhausted genre, and thethree films he made that are set in the 1930s:Thieves Like Us (1974), Kansas City andGosford Park.

It can be argued that this decade represents aparticular object of fascination for Altman. Hewas born in 1925, and his childhood and a largepart of his adolescence are encompassed by thispivotal decade in American life. But it must beemphasized that Altman’s work is neverthelessvery tricky to read in terms of autobiography.Of course, it is possible to suggest thatparticular thematic preoccupations such asgambling, the dynamics of the group orensemble, politics (a significant number of hisfilms are set during elections and electoralprocesses and were released during US electionyears) and a range of cultural industriesincluding Hollywood, the Nashville musicscene, ballet and jazz are elements that can beread in terms of the director’s own backgroundand interests. But there are few actual orsustained references to Altman’s upbringing,his family, or home town in his work.

Kansas City, where Altman lived until the early1940s, and then intermittently between the endof World War II and 1957, is referenced byseveral characters in his films in terms of aformative or traumatic incident from their pastthat occurred there – for example, both Karen


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Black’s Joanne in Come Back to the 5 & Dime,Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) and AnnieRoss’s Tess Trainer in Short Cuts (1993)remember particular events that occurred there– and many of Altman’s family and associatesfrom his formative years worked on or featureacross his films, but it is not until themid-1990s that he finally made a film thatexplicitly represented and remembered the city.Although Kansas City is filtered throughAltman’s memory of the period, and is litteredwith references to the popular history of the cityduring this era, it never really feels like areminiscence, and sits in contrast to suchexplicitly and impressionisticallyautobiographical works as Federico Fellini’sRoma (1972), Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982),John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987) andTerence Davies’ The Long Day Closes (1992).

Altman’s Kansas City focuses on two mainspheres of action and how they intersect withone another and a range of further plotlines,spaces, historical characters and events, and thebroader processes of institutional, racial andpolitical power. The film takes place over twonights and one day during Kansas City’s heavilycorrupted 1934 mayoral elections. The mainnarrative involves the kidnapping of a localpolitician’s wife (Carolyn Stilton, played byMiranda Richardson) by a telegraph operator(Blondie O’Hara, played by Jennifer JasonLeigh) who is obsessed by Jean Harlow. This


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kidnapping is inspired by the abduction of herhusband, Johnny O’Hara (Dermot Mulroney),by the African-American gambling and crimeboss Seldom Seen (a sublime and menacingperformance by Harry Belafonte). Johnny hasdared to rob one of Seldom’s best and mostlucrative customers, Sheepshan Red (A. C.Smith), while made up in blackface. Much ofthe film is preoccupied with the developingrelationships and dialogue between theseill-matched pairs of characters. All of the actionis scored by the “cutting contest” that also takesplace at the Hey-Hey Club on 18th and VineStreets, the epicenter of Kansas City jazz,between Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. Arange of other famous jazz players includingCount Basie, Mary Lou Williams, Ben Webster,Freddie Green and Charlie Parker (as a14-year-old who attentively watches from thebalcony) help complete the film’s vibrantpatchwork vision of this specific time and place.As Altman himself has said, “The story is just alittle song, and it’s the way it’s played that’simportant” (Sterritt 2000 , 213).

Some critics, such as Krin Gabbard (2000),have attempted to read Altman’s “presence” inthe film through his implicit identification withthe figure of the adolescent Parker. Thispersonalized reading is justified in relation toAltman’s statements that he also visited the jazzjoints of Kansas City at that age (though somefive years later) and the affinity of much of his


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work with the rhythms, free-form structure andimprovisatory components of modern jazz. AsRichard Combs (1997) argues,

With the release of Kansas City in 1996,some of that lost territory has been filled in.Altman has come out of at least one of hisclosets. This is cultural biography. A story setin the jazz milieu of Kansas City in theThirties. (68)

There is some validity to this reading, but thefilm, characteristically for Altman, decentersthis perspective, providing, instead, a prismaticor even “centrifugal” sense of character,situation and narrative. Although we areencouraged to wonder about the motivationsand subjectivities of the characters, and attain afeeling for their physical place within the worldand their experience of it, we are never reallygranted access to and understanding of whatmakes them tick, and what we do find out isoften contradictory. The “head arrangements”characteristic of Kansas City swing, allowingendless variation and eschewing musical chartsand scores, are translated to the improvisatory“presentness” of the characters’ movements,actions and often-wayward conversations. Eventhough they may appear to lack depth orcoherence, it is almost as if Altman’s charactersare being created while we are watching them.

Altman’s cinema is only intermittently orirregularly “subjective,” and the diaphanous,


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aqueous and sometimes disorienting focalplanes of the image, as well as the constantlyshifting points-of-view, rarely allow us to settleon a privileged viewpoint or perspective. Hiswork is profoundly situational, behavioral andconversational. It gives us “information” abouthow characters interact and cope with the worldaround them rather than clear motivations andreasons. Although Altman’s characterscommonly talk at length and often at somevelocity, such speech is generally a means ofnegotiating or exploring an environment orsituation, a carving out of space and territory,rather than a genuine dialogue, conversation ormeans of progressing or possessing the action.The various mutterings, soliloquies, asides andnon sequiturs expressed by the main characters(often composed as incomplete thoughts)across such films as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, TheLong Goodbye, California Split and KansasCity, act to reinforce a sense of isolation andsolitude. But while things are in motion andwords hang in the air, anything still seemspossible.

Kansas City was one of a string of films Altmanmade in the 1990s that failed to find asignificant audience or garner anything likeuniform critical approval. Although a number ofreviewers were very positive about the film’scombination of history, music and the director’scharacteristic if attenuated themes and style,many others criticized the film for either the


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thinness of its plot and stereotypedcharacterizations or its overwhelmingdependence on musical performance. Eventhose who championed the film’srepresentation of Kansas City jazz, and thequality of the stellar cast of musicians broughtin to play such luminaries as Lester Young,Coleman Hawkins and Mary Lou Williams,often questioned the veracity of the film’s detailin regard to the style of performance and thedegree and nature of the improvisationundertaken by the musicians. Altman’s decisionto not insist upon a fully accurate or“periodized” rendition of the style and form ofmid-1930s swing, tells us a significant amountabout both his approach to history (or thehistory film) and the film’s overwhelmingconcern with a feeling for or texture of the past,rather than an attempt to encapsulate orembalm it. Arguing for a more generalapplication of such an approach in thedirector’s work, Carrie Rickey (1977) hasclaimed that “Altman is like a history paintercarefully recording (the sounds as well as theimages) of contemporary life without anyparticular bias, opinion, or analysis” (47). I’mnot so sure that Altman’s films are devoid ofopinion, analysis or bias, but they do containthe multiple points of emphasis and attentionto detail characteristic of such historicalcanvases or the more social focus of a painterlike Pieter Bruegel. The energy of Kansas City’smusical sequences, and the ways in which they


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increasingly score and bleach into the rest ofthe film, is generated by the organized freedomallowed by such an approach to the questions ofform, history and style. The musicians (JoshuaRedman, Craig Handy, Christian McBride, RonCarter, and a range of other modernluminaries) do replicate some of themannerisms and sartorial quirks (Hawkins’spork-pie hat, for instance) of these figures, andwork mostly within the instrumental forms,structures and “standards” of the broaderperiod, but they are also allowed to“approximate” or generate such creativitywithin their own frame of reference and modeof improvisation. In this regard, they mirror thecommon ways in which such structuredimprovisation works across Altman’s cinemamore generally.

As Rick R. Ness (2011) has argued,

From the opening shots of an AfricanAmerican jazz combo performing in a KansasCity nightclub in his first feature film TheDelinquents (1957) to the final ensembleperformance of “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”as the end credits roll in A Prairie HomeCompanion, the films of Robert Altman haveforegrounded music and instances of musicalperformance…. [I]t is difficult to think of anyfilmmaker who has demonstrated a greaterwillingness to experiment with thepossibilities of film scoring or incorporated a


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wider range of musical styles in his work.(38)

As Ness outlines, Altman has drawn upon a vastarray of musical styles in his films ranging fromthe endlessly playful variations upon the singletitle tune in The Long Goodbye, the actorgenerated country songs of varying quality inNashville, the “found” tracks from the LP Songsof Leonard Cohen in McCabe & Mrs. Miller,and the combination of radio music, drama andcommentary in Thieves Like Us to theinexplicable presence of the wonderful KingSunny Adé in the otherwise execrable O. C. andStiggs (1987), the generic West Coast sound ofthe embarrassingly named Keepin’ ’em Off theStreets in A Perfect Couple, and theexperimental and sometimes atonal scores ofsuch films as Images (John Williams andStomu Yamash’ta), The Player (1992; ThomasNewman) and The Gingerbread Man (1998;Mark Isham). But as Gabbard (2000) hasclaimed, Kansas City foregrounds a musicalgenre – for really the first time in Altman’scinema other than the less celebratoryperformances by jazz singer Annie Rossfeatured across Short Cuts – that is much closerto Altman’s tastes, background and style: “ifthere is a noncinematic art form to whichAltman aspires, it is surely jazz” (152). Gabbardand other critics also take some liberties withAltman’s often-quoted statements about theimportance of jazz to him and the role played by


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his family’s African-American maid inintroducing him to it:

It’s just the first music I ever heard. It’s likethe basic music “chip” in my brain. I wasprobably 8 years old when I first heard it andit affected the way I do everything in my life.Probably how I make movies. The first song Iknow of as the first song I “heard” is DukeEllington’s “Solitude.”

(Altman in Jaehne 1996)

As Gabbard (2000) goes on to argue, “jazz itselfseems related to a sense of maternal plenitudefor Altman” (151). So although Altman insistson the “liveness” of the jazz presented in thefilm – as in Nashville, A Perfect Couple andvarious other “musical” films, the common andaccepted practice of playback is eschewed – italso has the imprint of memory cast upon it.Gabbard (2000) has also claimed, “Kansas Cityis very much about imitation” (153). In keepingwith this, both Johnny and Blondie imitate, inturn, a black man and a highly aestheticizedmovie star, but the musicians in the film alsoimpersonate previous, often more famous jazzplayers and Kansas City itself replicates theworld of Altman’s youth through the careful setdesign (overseen by Altman’s son, Stephen) andappropriation of actual locations long past theirprime. It creates, in the process, what RickThompson (2003) has called


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Cultural time. Altman’s dreaming of hisfilm’s moment is sprinkled with referencesand allusions to that time, building up animpasto of 1934ness…. Combined they offera selection of material from radio, movies,comic strips, painting, to gladden the heartof pop culture pioneer Gilbert Seldes.

A similar argument can be made in relation tothe look of the film. Altman hired OliverStapleton, a cinematographer who had workedextensively with the less aestheticallyadventurous Stephen Frears, to shoot the filmin a style that would represent a departure fromthe freewheeling, iconoclastic and zoom-ladenapproach characteristic of works such as TheLong Goodbye, Nashville and Prêt-à-Porter.Both Altman and Stapleton have discussed theirapproach to the film in terms of its attempt toreplicate the “look” of a past filtered throughthe popular media of its era:

I was trying to get the color out of the film.Most of these period pieces look fake ifthey’re done in color at all, because all wehave ever seen of this period areblack-and-white photographic images.

(Altman in Rudolph 1996, 37)

Altman was also trying to capture something ofthe style of the films of that period andsignificantly toned down his use of the zoomlens and the continuously mobile or reframing


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camera. As Stapleton claims, this provided afascinating tension between the mood, periodor atmosphere of the film and Altman’sestablished authorial style:

I also felt that Bob would be less comfortableif there wasn’t a zoom lens on the camera. Ithought that putting the zoom on the camerawould make Bob feel as if he were makingone of his [usual] movies.

(Rudolph 1996, 38)

As indicated by these quotations, Kansas City isboth a “usual” Altman film and a significantdeparture.

Kansas City was a film that Altman hadplanned to make for some time, its initialscripting occurring in the late 1980s while heand Frank Barhydt (the son of Altman’s formeremployer at the Calvin Company in the early1950s) were working together on theremarkable Tanner ’88 (1988; scripted byGarry Trudeau). In some ways it is a summary“work” in Altman’s career, and was made whilethe director was ailing from a life-threateningheart complaint that halted shooting on acouple of occasions. It combines many of thekey elements that typify the director’s work.The film’s basic structure counterpoints a seriesof “duets” between various characters andmusicians with the more panoramic or“networked” form that Altman is famous for.


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The film is also one of a long series of Altmanworks that foreground the creation of music,explore the entertainment or culturalindustries, politics, election processes, thecorrupting influence of power, thepsychological and situational influence ofpopular culture, the specificity of place, theimpotence of the individual, etc. It is one of anumber of films that explore the terrain of aparticular city and examine the complexinterrelationships of various strata of societyand class (though it is more focused on issues ofrace than almost any other work in Altman’scareer). The film also builds up a “density” ofrepresentation through its various references tohistorical figures and events, well-rememberedor forgotten cultural signifiers, and thecrisscrossing of the city and its suburbs by itscharacters. It builds up a “portrait” of KansasCity, Missouri through its insistent crosscuttingbetween various locations, complex networkingof space by various interconnected characters,and references to such significant denizens asJoan Crawford, Harry Truman, Jean Harlow,Bennie Moten, Lester Young and ThomasPendergast. Kansas City also features a numberof actors who have appeared in other Altmanworks – such as the talismanic Michael Murphywho worked intermittently with the director forover 40 years and Jennifer Jason Leigh, whoalso featured in Short Cuts and is the daughterof Vic Morrow, an actor with whom Altmanworked closely on Combat! in the early 1960s –


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and is obviously his most straightforwardlyautobiographical film. Ultimately, even thefilm’s more circumscribed, classical andcontained style doesn’t depart too strongly fromthe accepted Altman “formula.” The film alsobears explicit comparison with a series of otherworks that focus upon the shifting relationshipbetween a set or pair of female characters andthe ways in which their identities shift andmerge: That Cold Day in the Park, Images, 3Women, Come Back to the 5 & Dime, JimmyDean, Jimmy Dean, and parts of Short Cuts,Cookie’s Fortune (1999) and A Prairie HomeCompanion.

Meeting at the Crossroads:Altman’s Kansas CityKansas City is, of course, an emblematic film(and place) in other ways as well. AlthoughAltman was seemingly keen to leave his hometown to try his hand in Hollywood, his mostsignificant early work was created there,including his extensive “apprenticeship” inindustrial or corporate filmmaking at Calvinand his initial forays into feature filmproduction. There is a direct connectionbetween the opening scene of Altman’s firstfeature, The Delinquents (1957), showing aperformance by one of the survivors of theearlier jazz era, Julia Lee, in a Kansas City barthat is disrupted by the problematic


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“delinquents” of the title, and the worldcelebrated in Kansas City. Altman’s film wasalso instrumental in helping to rebuild andresurrect some parts of the city’s jazz “heritage”area (as well as Union Station, a location usedextensively in the film) around Vine and 18thStreets. But the city itself holds a much greaterstructural resonance within the film and as oneof the great urban centers of America in the1930s (it was sometimes called the “Paris of thePlains”).

This sense of Kansas City as a kind ofcentripetal force is reinforced by the way inwhich the film uses the train station and theHey-Hey Club as its two “central” locations. TheHey-Hey Club is depicted as a hub to whichalmost everyone is drawn (except the higherforces of power and class who are generallyrelieved of the necessity of undertaking anyambulatory movement at all). Kansas City,Missouri, became a central hub of jazz in the1930s due to its peculiar place as a geographic“crossroads” of the United States and as a resultof a confluence of other factors including thewide-scale internal migration of theAfrican-American population of the South inthe early twentieth century, the increasingmobilization of musicians who constantlytravelled through the city when heading northto Chicago, south to Texas and west toCalifornia, amongst other places, its relativeimmunity to the more severe privations of the


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Depression, and the rampant politicalcorruption of the Democratic “Pendergast”machine that controlled the city andcontributed to its reputation as a “wide open”town with the largest red-light district in thecountry (see Ebert 1996 ). The type of “cuttingcontest” represented in the film – where twomusicians playing the same instrument wouldcompete by improvising variations on a knowntune – was only made possible by this incessanttravel and the knowledge that such eventswould occur on a particular night and in aspecific, centralized place. Although LesterYoung was living in Kansas City at this time,Coleman Hawkins only intermittently passedthrough.

Although the train station is used as a site forthe kind of teeming communal interactivity thatushers in so many Altman films (and theircirculating characters), it is also a space of restand even respite for the constantly movingCarolyn and Blondie. But it is also a symbol ofmodernity and the vast interlocking network oftransportation lines that enmesh the countryand are channeled through Kansas City. Thisalmost Mabusian sense of the power caught upin such networks is reiterated by the film’s useof the telephone. The shadowy “political”figures that hold the reins of power onlycommunicate over the phone, and seldom leavethe confined spaces of their dining rooms, cozystudies or headquarters. Blondie’s infirm grasp


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on fleeting power is reinforced by the ways inwhich she is required to use other people’sphones in much more public environments tocontinue her kidnapping plot. Both the trainand the telephone might suggest a morecentrifugal sense or concentration of power,one in keeping with the increasingsuburbanization of the Kansas City landscape(and as represented in the film) and thedevelopment of urban centers throughout theUnited States, but the network also intimates asense of interconnectivity rather than dispersal.It is precisely this sense of interaction anddispersal, the centripetal and the centrifugal,subjectivity and objectivity that characterizesmuch of Altman’s work. As we shall see, theseconflicting and contradictory forces are also atplay in Altman’s representation of the forces ofpopular culture and entertainment.

Ivor Novello, Lester Young, JeanHarlow and Rudy Vallee: Altman,Popular Culture and the 1930sThieves Like Us, Kansas City and Gosford Parkprovide a fascinating inventory of Altman’sapproaches to artistic practice and popularculture. Kansas City stands as one of a numberof Altman films that represent a particularcultural practice or industry, ranging back tothe country music scene in Nashville andforward to the fictionalized final performance of


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Garrison Keillor’s radio show in a wintry SaintPaul, Minnesota in Altman’s benignlytriumphant but melancholy final film, A PrairieHome Companion. As Robert T. Self (2002) hasargued, the “oppressive contexts of mass-mediaentertainment are everywhere in Altman’sfilms” (13). But despite the fact that the jazzmusic scene is implicated in the violence andcorruption that almost swells to overwhelm thecommunity and urban fabric in Kansas City,the film’s representation of jazz is almostoverwhelmingly positive, highlighting theincessant creativity and communality of itsmost famous practitioners (as Seldom Seenstates at one point, while Count Basie is stillplaying Johnny remains alive). The jazz seemsto propel the city, and definitely the film, andcertainly acts to score and stage the motions ofall the other characters in the club.

Most commentators have discussed theparallels between the “cutting contest” betweenHawkins and Young and the subsequent killingof “Blue” Green, Johnny’s African-Americanaccomplice, by Seldom’s henchmen – filmed atsome distance in characteristic Altman style,while in the foreground Seldom tells a racistjoke – but these two actions are also studies incontrast. The killing of “Blue” Green, althoughmasterly staged, is predictable and ruthlesslyefficient. In contrast, the ongoing “cuttingcontest” between Young and Hawkins is a studyin endless variation that highlights the limitless


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possibilities thrown up by standard butinventive forms of popular entertainment.Although such contests often ended in defeatfor one player or the other, this one contraststhe seemingly limitless genius of its twocelebrated combatants. Geoff Dyer (1996) hasargued for the contrastive approaches andstyles of these two legendary tenorsaxophonists:

It was Hawk who made the tenor into a jazzinstrument, defined the way it had to sound:big-bellied, full-throated, huge. Either yousounded like him or you sounded likenothing – which is exactly how folks thoughtLester sounded with his wispy skating-on-airtone. Everybody bullied him to sound likeHawk or swap over to alto but he just tappedhis head and said.

– There’s things going on up here, man.Some of you guys are all belly. (6)

Such a contrast between the “head” and the“belly,” or the rational and the instinctual,provides a neat though inexact map throughwhich to read the various characters of KansasCity and chart Altman’s approach to the past.

All three of these films also foreground, thoughmore critically, other cultural artifacts of the1930s. The most sustained of these in KansasCity, other than its use of jazz, are its variousreferences to the movies. But rather than


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operating as markers of the filmmaker’s taste,or as a specific comment on the action, thesereferences are largely contained within theexperiences of the central characters. Altmanhas suggested that Blondie’s actions, mode oftalking and way of moving are informed by themovies: “Blondie is me, if anyone; she’ssomebody who learned her behavior from themovies” (Urban 1996, 82). Part of her failure asa character is precisely her inability to seethrough the surface illusions she is being soldby popular culture. Blondie’s love of JeanHarlow is largely fuelled by her identificationwith the actress’s onscreen persona and theknowledge that she also grew up in Kansas City.Leigh’s performance in this role is indeedheightened or even grating, as many critics haveargued (see, for example, Boyd 1996, 13), butI’m not so sure it isn’t an appropriate or evenbrave response to the inexpert, delusionary andreiterative nature of the character she plays. AsI have suggested earlier in this chapter, themovie’s references to film history are notrelated to or situated within a critical paradigmor canon. The film’s choice of Harlow as a rolemodel for its central character is definitely notbased on the continued popularity orcontemporary relevance of her star persona, orany specific affection that Altman or hisco-writer would have felt for this figure.Although Harlow is an interesting actor withinwhat is now commonly called “pre-Code”cinema, her mode of performance and star


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persona now seem overly mannered and dated.She is now mainly of interest as a relic ofclassical Hollywood cinema and its changingcodes of glamour and stardom. In manyrespects, these arcane qualities are preciselywhat drew Altman and Leigh to Harlow, alongwith the aspects of her biography that situateher within Kansas City.

Gosford Park, set two years before Kansas Cityat a country estate outside London, provides aninteresting parallel to the ways in which KansasCity represents and frames both cinema andfilm history. Once again, the movies andpopular culture seem to be generally equatedwith the working class, at least in terms of theirpopular consumption. Gosford Park features arunning plotline incorporating a fictionalHollywood producer (Morris Weissman, playedby the actual co-producer of Gosford Park, BobBalaban) researching a real Charlie Chanmovie, Charlie Chan in London (Eugene Forde,1934), at the country manor of an aristocraticEnglish family. Weissman has been invited tothe estate by the actor Ivor Novello (JeremyNortham), a relation of the family who alsoperforms a series of his own escapist popularsongs throughout the film. There are obviousparallels between the plot of the film beingresearched by the American producer and his“valet” and the one we are watching, but thisalso acts to highlight that the mechanics of plot,and the bare bones of the detective genre, are


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not what interests Altman in this film (or oftenelsewhere).

But the place of the movies and popular musicin this regimented but highly interconnectedand incestuous social world is both morecomplex and more revealing. The upper-classcharacters are generally indifferent to bothHollywood cinema and the presence in theirmidsts of the denizens of the great film factoryand an actual star of British cinema andpopular entertainment. For example, whenWeissman is asked who will commit the murderin the film he is making, he blithely replies,“Oh, I couldn’t tell you that. It would spoil it foryou.” Maggie Smith’s Constance Trentham,something of a matriarch of the upper-classsocial world that is on “microscopic” andpanoramic display, cuttingly replies: “Oh, butnone of us will see it.” But this generalindifference to and even dismissal of the movies– Countess Trentham providing numerouswitty and deflating put downs of the vapidity ofmovie stars and the fleeting nature of fame – isnot carried over to the household’s servants orthose figures that are less certain of their socialstatus and place. Although they are verysuspicious and critical of the visiting “valet”who is discovered to be studying them for arole, their response to the presence of Novelloin the house, and his performances of his thenpopular songs, reflects a very different


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relationship to the glamour and possibilities ofpopular culture.

Thieves Like Us presents a more commonplaceportrait of the place of popular culture in 1930sAmerica. Nevertheless, this representation ofvarious facets of popular culture is embeddedwithin a highly “situated” view of the past. AsHelene Keyssar (1991) has argued:

Keechie and Bowie, T-Dub and Chicamaw,Mattie and Lula…are rooted in and bound bytime and place; their language and theirfantasies, their relations to work and tofamily, are inseparable from the towns andthe practices of poor, rural Mississippiduring the economic depression of thethirties. These relationships, in turn, arecomplicated by the fragments of possibilitytransmitted on the radio and by newspapers.(120)

The film doesn’t include a conventional score ormusical soundtrack but instead utilizes extantrecordings of radio series, announcements andpolitical broadcasts of the day. Thieves Like Us,despite its facile resemblance to other crimefilms, is actually one of Altman’s least “active”and most leisurely works. It deliberately avoidsrepresenting most of the “action” involving thevarious robberies undertaken by the gang and ismore interested in showing the “down time”when characters hang out, bicker and interact.This emphasis also helps justify the film’s use of


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radio as both a source of information and a keybehavioral influence on the characters – wemostly only find out what the characters havedone through its reporting on radio and in thenewspapers – and as a sometimes critical ordeflating counterpoint to the action we seeonscreen. For example, in one of the film’s earlyscenes the gang robs the Mississippi NationalBank. The camera remains outside with thegang’s youngest member, Bowie (KeithCarradine), as he waits for the action to unfold.On the soundtrack we hear the overlymelodramatic score and narration of a GangBusters episode (Figure 15.1). On the one handthis matching of static image and hyped-upscore provides an ironic commentary on thefilm’s action, de-dramatizing and deflating thecriminal activities of the characters while alsopinpointing a key influence on the ways inwhich they carry out these activities.Throughout the film the characters readnewspapers and listen to the radio in order togauge the rising level of their notoriety andcelebrity, as well as the impact and validity oftheir actions. On the other hand, it is onlythrough this radio show that the scene is givenany drama at all. There is little tension here asBowie waits for his comrades to emerge fromthe bank, the film overwhelmingly emphasizingthe banality and everydayness of the robberyitself.


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Figure 15.1 Chicamaw (John Schuck) andT-Dub (Bert Remsen) head towards the bank inThieves Like Us (1974) directed by RobertAltman, produced by George Litto Productions,Jerry Bick, United Artists.

Radio also acts in the film to reinforce and bearfalse witness to ideals of social control – somany of the shows referenced and speechesheard are about law enforcement – whileover-emphasizing the public notoriety ofcriminality. In many respects, Thieves Like Usis an antidote to Bonnie and Clyde (ArthurPenn, 1967) and its emphasis on the moviestar-like celebrity and sartorial style of itstitular gangsters. These figures in Thieves LikeUs are largely backwoods criminals who spendtheir time hiding out in rural enclaves whilelistening out, hopefully, for reports of theirexploits on the radio. This is furtheremphasized in a wonderful scene towards theend of the film where Bowie stages Chicamaw’saudacious break from a rural prison. Rather


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than expressing his gratitude for Bowie’ssurprising and daring action – little has led usto expect Bowie’s extraordinary abilities in thisregard – Chicamaw is left startled and fumingby his young accomplice’s rising celebrity. AfterChicamaw ruthlessly dispatches the prisonwarden and Bowie listens to his accomplice’sranting complaint, Chicamaw is forced from thecar and left to fend for himself.

Although Altman has expressed an abiding lovefor jazz, even slotting a performance of DukeEllington’s “Solitude” into the film’s finalsequence as acknowledgement of its formativesignificance on him, its presence andappearance in Kansas City never exceeds oroutstrips its historical context. As Altman hasclaimed, this representation of the city and itsmusic in the 1930s is somewhat romanticized(see Jaehne 1996), and certainly fuelled by thefragmentary processes of recollection, but itseldom resembles the kind of “memory work”typical of filmic reminiscences by directors suchas Federico Fellini (a significant influence),Giuseppe Tornatore, John Boorman andTerence Davies. Other than to experience thecompulsive and incorporative but hermeticworld of jazz, the Kansas City of Altman’s youthdoes not really seem or feel like the kind ofplace you’d want to return to or even mistilyremember. The film is full of subtle referencesto the past and creates a relatively densepatchwork of its tone and texture. The Kansas


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City of the 1930s is indeed a “wide open” town,a melting pot of racial tension, political andcriminal violence, and cultural influence.

One of the most fascinating sections of the filmmoves from one of the elaborate, circular andmasterly monologues with which Seldom teaseshis captives to a screening of a Jean Harlow andClark Gable vehicle, Hold Your Man (SamWood, 1933), in a local cinema (Figure 15.2).This section of the film illustrates theassociational logic of its overall organization.The scene in the local cinema follows a“conversation” between Johnny and Seldomthat highlights and critiques the influence ofpopular culture on the ways that charactersview and experience the world. Seldomlambasts Johnny for his complacently racistviews of the place of African Americans insociety and their diminished capacity to exertpower, influence and violence:


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Figure 15.2 Clark Gable and Jean Harlow inHold Your Man being screened in Kansas City(1996) directed by Robert Altman, produced byCiBy 2000, Sandcastle 5 Productions.

You come swinging in here like…likeTarzan…right in the middle of a sea ofniggers like you’re in a picture show. You likepicture shows? I’m talking to you. You likepicture shows?

As elsewhere in this exchange extending acrossmuch of the film, Johnny is barely able to speaklet alone exert any influence on the direction ofSeldom’s thoughts: “I can take them or leavethem,” he says. Seldom’s highly ambulatoryriffs take in a variety of cultural references thatincorporate racist jokes, the blackface Amos ‘n’Andy, various jazz musicians, radiopersonalities and film actors: “I’d recommend


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you leave ’em…after what they done to your asswith all that Hambone and Stepin Fetchit shit.Or, maybe – maybe you’re a radio man.” These“cutting” solos are not really conversations ordialogues; in this realm Seldom is a master ofspace, speech, the body and the flow of capital.In this respect, and although these speeches areoften seen in “counterpoint” to the moregenerous interactions of the jazz musicians,they represent a different flow and hierarchy ofperformance.

After a further exchange that yet again critiquesthe role and place of popular culture in theoutlook and values of its audience – Seldom:“All that Amos – Amos ‘n’ Andy. In the moviesand in radio white people just sit around all daythinking up that shit. And then they believe it”– the film abruptly cuts to the interior of acinema. This scene reiterates Blondie’s view ofthe movies as a model of behavior – the plot ofHold Your Man providing some parallels in therelationship between the gangster played byGable and his faithful lover played by Harlow –but it also highlights the repetitive andritualized nature of the film-going experience.Blondie has time to kill while she is waitingaround for word to get back to her about thelikely success of the kidnapping she has enacted– so where else would she go? This scene alsohighlights the drifting nature of the relationshipbetween Carolyn and Blondie: they are bothcaught up in the movie and find it hard to tear


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themselves away from the action and facesonscreen to continue pursuing the film’smeandering and almost stagnant plot. Butanother element of this scene provides a neatcontrast to the assertions made by Seldom inthe previous exchange. Only when we lookaround the characters gazing at the screen dowe realize that Blondie and Carolyn are seatedin the balcony and are surrounded byAfrican-American patrons. The unrealistic anddamaging fantasies of popular entertainmentseemingly know no racial distinctions orboundaries. This moment also links back to anunproduced Altman and Belafonte projectabout blackface, Cork, and a joint memory ofthe complex byways of race in America: “weshared a fascination with The Amos ‘n’ AndyShow, still awed that white actors had played itsblack characters with such preciseness”(Belafonte 2011, 406).

Blondie and Carolyn are drawn out of thecinema and into the foyer to continue the “plot”of the kidnapping by making a phone call toCarolyn’s husband. But the clumsiness of thisexchange, and the discomfort of theAfrican-American patrons who venture past,only further highlight the distinctions betweenthe abstract glamour of the movies and themore sordid and discomforting “buddy picture”the pair find themselves within. Despite this“shared” moment in the cinema, the differencesbetween Carolyn and Blondie are reiterated in a


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subsequent scene where Carolyn questions theattractiveness of Harlow’s star persona: “Ithought her hair looked cheap.” In Kansas Citythe movies largely belong to the working classand are met with incredulity by wealthierpatrons who cannot fathom the real anddangerously necessary fantasies of escape theyoffer.

“In my solitude,” or the BandPlays OnThis chapter began with a discussion ofAltman’s overwhelming preoccupation with theUnited States and the here and now as well aswith how the fragmented nature of modernexperience and subjectivity are represented inhis work. Other than a short contribution to theportmanteau film Aria (1987), which presents abawdy and raucous performance of Rameau’sLes Boréades by asylum patients, prostitutes,aristocrats and various other figures around thetime of the French Revolution, all of Altman’s“period” films document the curious impact ofmodernity on contemporary life. Although theearliest set of these, Buffalo Bill and theIndians, poses as a Western set on the“frontier” in the 1880s, it shows the insulardevelopment of the Western as a genre and thepopular formation of many of its key motifs,narrative situations and modes of presentation.The film’s incessant use of a very long lens to


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capture the action both within and around thecompound of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West flattensany sense of perspective and reinforces thestage-like presentation of the action and itsschematic dramatization of then recent history.This flattened perspective also simulates theviewpoint offered by the cinema screen itself.The overly schematic but fascinating BuffaloBill and the Indians is preoccupied by the waysin which the West has been popularlymythologized and narrativized as well as itsincreasing commodification by modern formsof publication and popular entertainment. Italso stresses the direct link between thenarrative form of the show’s presentation andthe soon-to-emerge cinema, implicating itself inthis parade of historical contingencies,simplifications and inaccuracies, alongside thecolonization of place, space, time, storytellingand the lives of indigenous peoples.

Another reason for Altman’s interest in the1930s is that it is a key decade in terms ofsignificant shifts in the commodification ofAmerican cultural life and the rise of popularand increasingly globalized forms ofentertainment as sound cinema, radio, jazz andrecorded music. All of these forms fully emergein the 1920s but they reach a level of saturationand cultural dominance in the following decade.All of these media and technologies aretransportive in nature, helping to chart,communicate and reflect upon the radical


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changes in the experience of time, place, spaceand subject wrought by the processes ofmodernity. Even jazz, as an endlessly evolvingform of music rather than a new-mediatechnology, can be read in terms of thesemassive shifts in syncopation, speed,temporality and space. Jazz is also the firstmajor musical form to make full use of thereproductive and amplified nature of recordedsound, and its circulation through 78s, cinema,radio and other forms of public broadcasthelped to reinforce its ubiquity and culturaldominance in the 1930s.

Each of these forms is referenced and oftenforegrounded in Thieves Like Us, Kansas Cityand Gosford Park. As has already been argued,Thieves Like Us uses radio as both acounterpoint to the de-dramatized action wesee onscreen and as a point of access to thecultural experience and circumscribedsubjectivity of its characters. On the one hand,the film resurrects a now largely forgotten arrayof programs, personalities and modes ofsituated experience. Similar arguments can bemade about the ways in which Gosford Parkreferences the largely forgotten music andsongs of Ivor Novello and the politicallyincorrect movies of Charlie Chan, or theoverwhelming influence of the now somewhathard-to-fathom Jean Harlow on Blondie inKansas City. But on the other hand, ThievesLike Us also stages the dislocating shifts in the


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time, space and place of modernity through themedium of radio. Radio obviously acts to joinpeople and places together across vastlydifferent geographies, experiences and modesof existence, but it also offers a profound senseof temporal, geographical and aural dislocation– a tearing apart of the continuity, communityand immediacy of experience. The idyll ofKeechie and Bowie’s flowering romance isreinforced by the old sheet music that papersthe walls of the room they hide out in (Figure15.3). But the intimate “cocoon” of theirrelationship is undermined by the promise andcheapness of the world represented by radio.No less than three times their initiallovemaking is “interrupted” by a modernizedand cheapened dramatization of Shakespeare’stimeless play of star-crossed lovers broadcaston The American School of the Air: “Thus didRomeo and Juliet consummate their firstinterview by falling madly in love with eachother.” This device acts to question the validityand singularity of their “special bond.” The useof various radio shows to score the gang’sactions, and also give reports on the outsideworld (we hear accounts of lynching in theSouth and political broadcasts by figures suchas Franklin D. Roosevelt), also highlight theinterconnected but fractured and dissatisfactorynature of modern life. The often ironic use ofradio to emphasize the interconnected tissue ofmodern life in Thieves Like Us is far removed


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from the primarily nostalgic function it servesin a film like Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987).

Figure 15.3 Bowie (Keith Carradine) andKeechie (Shelley Duvall) in bed amongst sheetmusic in Thieves Like Us (1974) directed byRobert Altman, produced by George LittoProductions, Jerry Bick, United Artists.

Altman’s career was remarkable in terms of hisability to continue to create work across avariety of genres, media and narrative formswhile rarely producing movies that met withsignificant financial returns. After the minorfinancial and major critical success ofNashville, Altman was able to move on to themuch higher budgeted and equally ambitiousBuffalo Bill and the Indians. The film receiveda lukewarm critical response and an even lessenthusiastic public reception, returning onlyaround one-seventh of its then rather large$6,000,000 budget. Altman himself has calledthis somewhat desiccated film an “essay”


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(Thompson 2006, 100); while Self (2002 )argues that the director made a “history lecture”(209) rather than the action picture executiveproducer Dino De Laurentiis somewhatfancifully expected and desired.

One of the most damaging outcomes of thisfailure was De Laurentiis’s decision to removeAltman from his next project, an adaptation ofE. L. Doctorow’s extraordinary 1975 novelRagtime. Although Altman, like most othermajor directors, failed to complete an intriguingrange of potential or abandoned projects acrosshis career such as Petulia, Cork, Paint,Breakfast of Champions and The Book ofDaniel (also based on a Doctorow novel),Ragtime represents a significant missedopportunity. The novel’s mix of fictional andhistorical figures, intimate and panoramicscope, brutal and melancholy view ofmodernity, and epic if highly circumscribedview of American life would have provided afascinating canvas for Altman’scharacteristically exploratory, conflicted,networked and critical perspective on themelting pot of modern America. Doctorow’snovel takes the “new” forms and timesignatures of ragtime as a metaphor for themassive shifts ushered in by the technologies ofmodernity in the early twentieth century.Doctorow’s historical imagination is large,drawing fascinating connections and relentlesscorrespondences between his fictional


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characters and a vast array of significanthistorical figures ranging from Sigmund Freud,Carl Jung, Emma Goldman, Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan to Harry Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit.Like Altman’s cinema, Doctorow’s novelsuggests a patchwork or tapestry of connectionsbetween characters from a range ofbackgrounds who are buoyed or cast down bythe accidents of history and their environment.

In many respects, Kansas City represents ascaled down and “personalized” vision ofRagtime, with the freer, improvisatory rhythmsof 1930s Kansas City swing replacing the moreregimented, propulsive and temporallyrestricted forms of early twentieth-centuryragtime. But the former certainly betrays itsorigins in the latter. Doctorow’s novel containsmany fascinating snippets of “actual” andfantasized history, including a shared ridethrough Coney Island’s Tunnel of Love by anaccepting Jung and a horrified Freud. Onreturning home to Europe, the greatpsychoanalyst reflected on his experience:

The entire population seemed to himover-powered, brash and rude. The vulgarwholesale appropriation of European art andarchitecture regardless of period or countryhe found appalling. He had seen in ourcareless commingling of great wealth andgreat poverty the chaos of an entropicEuropean civilization. He sat in his quiet


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cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. Hesaid to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, agigantic mistake.

(Doctorow 1976, 33)

Although Altman’s Kansas City never managesto generate such a distanced or dystopic view ofthe American project, it does conclude with a“settling back” or winding down into thesystems of control and power that have onlyever been marginally disrupted by the noisy butdyspeptic solos of Blondie, Johnny and a rangeof other minor characters. Even Seldom Seen isfinally silent, counting out his money as a trioperform a beautiful but melancholy rendition ofEllington’s “Solitude.” In this final section ofthe film, everything falls back into place and thedreams, actions and words of characters such asBlondie are stilled and forgotten by the coldorganizational logic of money, politics, race andclass.

This is mysteriously demonstrated in the finalscenes between Blondie and Carolyn, as theyominously await the return of Johnny to thecouple’s home. Despite all of the evidence to thecontrary, Blondie still hopes for the kind ofHollywood ending, the “dream life,” that willreturn Johnny to her safely and allow them toescape to a better life. Although Carolyn haslargely drifted through the film under theinfluence of laudanum, missing manyopportunities to escape from the clutches of her


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largely incompetent and increasingly benignand inattentive captor, she is now plainly awarethat the only Hollywood ending Johnny’s fatewill resemble is that of James Cagney’s gangsterat the conclusion of The Public Enemy (WilliamA. Wellman, 1931; co-starring Harlow). Carolynallows Blondie the grace note of peroxiding herhair and dressing like Harlow – “Spittingimage, right?” – but she acts decisively whenJohnny is returned minus various of hisinternal organs. Although some critics haveunderstandably read Carolyn’s killing ofBlondie as “an act of mercy to rank with thegreatest of such scenes” (Williams 1996), it isunclear whether the bluntness of her actions isa sign of sisterhood or an entitled gesture ofsomeone who has merely tired of this escapadeand is perturbed by the raw emotion andhysterical pleas of her former captor. Carolynpicks up Blondie’s gun and matter-of-factlyshoots her in the back of the head. After Blondieslumps down to a final embrace with thedisemboweled Johnny – a grotesque comingtogether of the “head” and “belly” mentioned byDyer earlier – Carolyn wipes her hands on atea-towel and blithely places the gun in amixing bowl (Figure 15.4), knowing that theactions she has just carried out will be clearedaway by the minions of her powerful husband.As night falls and a violent election day comesto its inevitable and predictable conclusion,Carolyn enters her husband’s car andcomments: “You know what I didn’t do today? I


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didn’t vote.” All that is left is for the car to leavethe scene – reversing the car-bound arrival ofBlondie at Carolyn’s home at the film’s opening– Seldom to count his money and for the bassduo to complete the intersecting but solitarystrains of the song:

Figure 15.4 Carolyn Stilton (MirandaRichardson) “domesticates” the evidence inKansas City (1996) directed by Robert Altman,produced by CiBy 2000, Sandcastle 5Productions.

In my solitudeI’m prayingDear Lord aboveSend back my love

At least we have the music.


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ReferencesBelafonte, Harry (2011) My Song: A Memoir.New York: Knopf Doubleday.

Boyd, Todd (1996) “Kansas City.” Sight andSound, 6.12, December: 12–13.

Combs, Richard (1997) “Kansas City, KansasCity.” Film Comment, 33.2, March–April:68–71.

Doctorow, E. L. (1976) Ragtime. London: BookClub Associates.

Durgnat, Raymond (1982) “Foreword: The ManWith No Genre.” American Skeptic: RobertAltman’s Genre-Commentary Films, byNorman Kagan, xi–xvii. Ann Arbor, MI:Pierian.

Dyer, Geoff (1996) But Beautiful: A Book AboutJazz. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

Ebert, Roger (1996) “Kansas City.”Rogerebert.com, August 16.http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/kansas-city-1996 (accessed December 8, 2014).

Gabbard, Krin (2000) “Kansas City Dreamin’:Robert Altman’s Jazz History Lesson.” In Musicand Cinema, edited by James Buhler, CarylFlinn and David Neumeyer, 142–157. Hanover:University Press of New England.


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Jaehne, Karen (1996) “Robert Altman onKansas City.” Film Scouts.http://www.filmscouts.com/scripts/interview.cfm?File=rob-alt2 (accessedDecember 8, 2014).

Keyssar, Helene (1991) Robert Altman’sAmerica. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Martin, Adrian (2002) “Screwy Squirrels:Robert Altman’s Kansas City.” Film Journal, 3.http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue3/kansascity.html (accessed December 8, 2014).

McGilligan, Patrick (1989) Robert Altman:Jumping Off the Cliff. New York: St. Martin’sPress.

Ness, Rick R (2011) “‘Doing Some Replacin”:Gender, Genre and the Subversion of DominantIdeology in the Music Scores.” In RobertAltman: Critical Essays, edited by RichArmstrong, 38–58. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Rickey, Carrie (1977) “Fassbinder and Altman:Approaches to Filmmaking.” Performing ArtsJournal, 2.2, Autumn: 33–48.

Rudolph, Eric (1996) “Jazzed Up.” AmericanCinematographer, 77.9, September: 34–38, 40,42.

Self, Robert T. (2002) Robert Altman’sSubliminal Reality. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press.


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Self, Robert T. (2007) Robert Altman’s McCabe& Mrs. Miller: Reframing the American West.Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

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Thompson, David, ed. (2006) Altman onAltman. London: Faber and Faber.

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“The Man I Love,” or Time Regained: Altman, History and Kansas City

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Transcript of “The Man I Love,” or Time Regained: Altman, History and Kansas City