Altmans Nashville

I liked it more than tipsy seems to, but agree that it seemed more about character developement, maybe built up from improvisation, to some extent, like some of his others (Sissy Spacek said there was a script for Three Women, "but he wouldn't let us see it.") Gibson nails the Roy Acuff-based self-appointed righteous guardian of the American Tradition (which may be what led Perlstein along The Invisible Bridge back to Reagan). But otherwise, don't see anything political, beyond the para-office politics of the music industry (and how they're connected with the privileges of Keith Carradine's character, the soft rocker with the perpetual hard-on). What did I miss??

Perlstein's description of the film really registered for me in the context of the book. His description is fragmentary, like the film, and the like the description above--"a sort of scattered, discursive allegory for a national mood buried a bit too far beneath the surface of the national consciousness to make it a simple thing to explain"--he doesn't see it as explicitly political, but more as a reflection of general unease:

...you could pick through the various runes and try to make them signify something coherent, but the incoherence felt like the point--but an incoherence, be that as it may, that is shared.

There's also the more obvious connection, that Hal Philip Walker anticipates Carter in many ways, and the less obvious one, that he intersects (like Happy Days and lots else floating around) the desire after Watergate to go back to some make-believe simpler time, which is where Reagan comes in.

"scattered," "discursive," sure (though not too much; it's loosely tight, like a good jam going somewhere or other, enough to keep me watching so long)--but "allegory"? He thinks there's that kind of unity after all, under it all? I don't see anything beyond the obvious, like a campaign pro trying to rope the Acuff-based character in Lots of films had and have a general unease---but yeah, it's got that certain urban early-to-mid70s vibe for sure, the kind you can almost smell.

(Involuntary flashbacks to The Friends of Eddie Coyle as I wrote that last.)

premiered in NYC 40 years ago yesterday

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-altman-and-nashville

Finally watched this and found the ending oddly moving - all the kids who don't register what's happened and are getting into the song, all the rest coming through in the parents' expressions, and everyone weirdly sticking around, not screaming or trampling each other or anything, and Gibson simultaneously falling into shocked denial and showman's autopilot... I dunno, it got to me, more than most of the mini-plots or even their greater-than-the-sum juxtaposition. (Thank God for the format - a whole film or even a junior-size B-story about the folk trio love triangle would have been unbearable.)

It was a 'love' hexagon at the very least.

I find the ending extremely moving, in some ways I could explain and others I couldn't. Henry Gibson's "This isn't Dallas, it's Nashville" is weirdly heroic from such a buffoon.

Yeah somewhere a verse or so into the final song I started tearing up and could not then articulate why. Maybe some ghost of the ineffable qualities that struck such chords in the mid-70s, an "American Tune" sort of statement that doesn't say all that much literally but still gets at something that was off or wrong or sad about the way everything had turned out for a lot of people. Interesting also that except maybe Goldblum, who's a grinning, Zonker-esque clown cipher, all of the countercultural, big-city Hollywood outsiders are cynics, hacks, superficial morons or unfeeling shitheads. Not that the locals are all pure decent folk but certainly Tomlin, Wynn, Blakely and DoQui come off better than Duvall, Murphy, Chaplin and Carradine. Just thinking out loud, versus the notion that Altman is looking down at the South.

Part of it for me too is just grand a gesture it is, how audacious, and in the context of what was not exactly a commercial film, but one that did aim for a broad audience. (I get a little bit of that too from "God Bless America" in The Deer Hunter.) You can certainly argue, as many people do, that both films wildly overreach, which is where they get slammed for being pretentious (and, more so with Altman, smug). I don't agree (at all), but I can understand where that comes from. I find myself moved by the ambition of those endings. Does that still happen in (essentially) mainstream American films? Probably now and again, I'd have to try to think of some recent examples.

"how grand a gesture"

I could see Trump inspiring, if that's the right word, that kind of film.

James Gray comes to mind.

Found a good-shaped copy of Ronee Blakley's 1972 album for 75 cents a couple of weeks ago.

https://img.discogs.com/eG32IKnlKPviIuhxWNwmqzQjE38=/fit-in/256x256/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-2826604-1332401168.jpeg.jpg

It leads off with "Dues," three years before the film. Playing the album now--rest sounds pretty good, sort of country-gospelish.

RIP Barbara Harris

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/barbara-harris-dies-second-city-actress-freaky-friday-nashville/

Heard "I'm Easy" on the radio today. The song is inseparable from the film for me, that scene being so important and so perfectly directed, so I've never really had any reason to think about it as a thing unto itself. I wouldn't argue that you're knocking on Dan Hill's door here, though.

Altman said part of the reason ABC Films picked up the film was because they thought Carradine's songs would be hits and so they really wanted the soundtrack album. "I'm Easy" went to #17 Pop and topped the A/C charts (not to mention winning the Oscar), and Carradine cut two solo albums for Asylum.

SPOTTED: Henry Gibson reciting some of "Keep-A-Goin" on Dick Van Dyke in 1966

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tilp00uNlPg

The relevant bit around 08:45

I think I vaguely remember that--I loved DVD as a kid--but I'm not sure if I'm confusing it with Gibson doing the same on Laugh-In.