Altman likes show-business motifs, which appear regularly in his films, or bits of activity related to shows, and this derives, at least partly, from being comfortable with his performers. Donald Sutherland's and Elliott Gould's behavior in M∗A∗S∗H is a show in itself—theatrical, mannered, and even artificial in its heightened, cool relaxation. And there's the spoof of John Schuck's "suicide," a play in itself, complete with music and a grand finale. Brewster McCloud takes place at the Houston Astrodome, an arena devoted not only to sports but to shows as well. (p. 19)

Altman's "show" relates to another branch of the arts, painting, which he constantly refers to when talking about his movies. "I look at a film as closer to a painting or a piece of music, it's an impression," says Altman….

Altman's films are all shot in Panavision, which has an aspect ratio shaped like a rectangular painting, and this increases the force of his analogy. The complete control he exercises over the look of his films, as a painter does over his canvases, is another facet of Altman's preoccupation with painting. (p. 21)

All of Nashville is a canvas; it was part of Altman's filmic conception that most of the time the screen would be crammed with action and people, giving the impression of a postcard overflowing its borders. Buffalo Bill follows the same visual scheme, with its panoply of interrelated events, its swirling movements, all taking place within either the arena or the surrounding tent village.

Just as Altman's films cover the screen from corner to corner, the sound he employs fills the ear as natural, everyday sound does. (p. 22)

Most of Altman's films have had at least one individual who was "insane" or at least obsessed, from the Robert Duvall character in Countdown, who's determined to be the first man on the moon, to the person Sissy Spacek plays in 3 Women, who inhabits another character. (p. 25)

The insanity Altman shows on screen is a social madness; it isn't a private, locked-up-in-a-booby-hatch craziness (with the exception of the Robert Duvall character in M∗A∗S∗H). His films relate most directly to the screwball comedies and social justice dramas of the thirties. But madness in the seventies isn't the fey, charming whimsy it was in the thirties. The insanity Altman depicts is sour, deliberate, and streaked with sadism….

Altman takes the form of other movies and bends it into a quirky, mad version of itself to suit the sensibility of the seventies….

Along with the idea of social madness goes the concept of loners with visions, as Bud Cort is in Brewster McCloud and Warren Beatty is in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. These are men, or boys, stopped at some point in their adolescent development when they still believe that all things are possible. (pp. 26-7)

The worlds depicted in Altman's films are aberrent, self-enclosed microcosms. They look all right from the outside, but they're crazy when you get up close. (p. 2)

Altman likes to take a particular genre and break the form…. But it was the form that Nashville took that was the revelation; it was a kaleidoscope of impressions, vignettes, and thumbnail portraits. The minute the viewer started concentrating on what a character was doing or saying, or where his actions were leading, Altman cut away to another set of characters. He kept firm control of the film, though; Nashville may be impressionistic in style, but its realization is concrete. (p. 28)

The structure of any Altman film is deliberately unsettling. Altman takes parallel editing to the point of fracturing his film. This is particularly noticeable in Buffalo Bill, with its constant jumps between Bill's activities and Ned Buntline's carping commentary, delivered from the bar, but it was foreshadowed in M∗A∗S∗H, which used the operating room as a sort of splicing device to separate the various events but keep them firmly held together, as a form of thematic bridge. (pp. 28-9)

Each character in an Altman film comforts himself by refusing to see the truth around him and nourishes himself with ideas of his own invincibility and ability to overcome whatever obstacles are placed in his path. (p. 30)

Along with this idea of flying in the face of what would normally be considered the accepted wisdom is the notion that Altman's characters are, for the most part, hapless gamblers or romantic, foolish visionaries. To some degree, so is Altman himself, although his movies are, on the surface, cool and distant, with a sense of being rueful observations, rather than committed polemics. Such are the doctors played by Gould and Sutherland in M∗A∗S∗H who gamble that they can keep madness at bay with their sophomoric pranks and black humor. Brewster McCloud is the most quixotic dreamer of all Altman's heroes, with his insistence on scaling the Astrodome's heights, gambling that he can do it without falling and that his luck will hold out. (pp. 31-2)

Altman continues to consolidate and enlarge upon his growing popularity as a filmmaker by playing variations upon his greatest virtues: his startling originality, the fact that he never makes the same film twice, and his consistent use of "American" themes. Even Images, which is the only motion picture he has made abroad, has as its text the mental and emotional disintegration of an individual. (p. 36)

In spite of the frequently bitter viewpoint he takes in approaching each film, Altman is an optimist. He hopes for something better, but, being a realist, he presents his version of the truth, a slightly negative, determinedly ironic, highly idiosyncratic and deeply personal vision of America, a place Altman obviously loves, but which he shows with all its warts left on. He clearly loves making films, and he wants everyone to come to his party. (pp. 37-8)

The Delinquents is the sort of consummately silly movie many directors turn out as a first film. (p. 39)

The Delinquents features a great many raw, underlit interiors, overexposed exterior shots, and erratically moving shadows. It looks the way John Cassavetes's first movie, Shadows, would have looked had it been made out of doors. But it tells the same story Rebel Without a Cause told two years earlier. It even uses some locations of the same kind: a police station and an abandoned mansion. (pp. 39-40)

The film features a redundant and pointless narration, spoken in tones of darkest foreboding, about the "teenage violence and immaturity" that saps "the moral fiber of our great nation." At the end (the voice is used as if in preachy parentheses) the narrator asks "who's to blame?" for this "crippling disease," and suggests that "church groups" should step in to counsel troubled adolescents and their parents…. The results of … repressed sexuality, on the evidence of The Delinquents, are slashed tires, teenage hangovers, and the hassles one's parents dish out for irresponsible behavior. In fact, The Delinquents indicts uncaring, overzealous disciplinarian adults as severely as Rebel Without a Cause does, but without the careful motivation the Nicholas Ray/Stewart Stern script develops to explain the outbursts of hoodlumism in that film. One would like to absolve Altman of blame for the use of a poorly written narration for his film, but he and Stern are guilty of using (and overusing) the same device in The James Dean Story. (pp. 40-1)

The James Dean Story was an unsuccessful attempt to capitalize on the dead movie star's short-lived screen popularity. It's a rather ordinary compilation film that seeks to add luster to a tradition of dubious film documentaries—the psychobiography…. There is no hint, in either the narration or the style in which it was read, that the creators of the film understood what Dean was all about—that he was, as Brando put it, "a lost boy trying to find himself" and doing a bad job of it. (pp. 43-4)

It would have been far more effective to use his tormented screen persona than the shots of a dead seagull washing around in the Pacific, which Stern's narration likens to Dean's unfulfilled dreams. The effect of this kind of silliness is to obscure Dean rather than expose him. The most effective scenes are those among the people in New York who knew him before he made a hit on the stage in André Gide's The Immoralist and left for California. (p. 44)

By far the most irritating technique Altman and George employed was that of a "distant figure," an individual of Dean's size and build who is used as a stand-in, in locations from Dean's youth in Fairmount, Indiana. Fairmount is the only place where the filmmakers found cooperative subjects for their prying cameras. (p. 45)

And Stern's narration piles it on with a trowel: Dean possessed "the lonely awareness that growing up is pain," his death meant that "youth mourned itself in the passing of James Dean," and the commentary seeks to explain his passion for motorcycles by claiming that "to test the limits of life he had to approach the borders of death."

There are bits of truth in all this pseudopsychological attitudinizing, but it's hard to sort them out from all the blinding insights that occurred after Dean's death. The film is much better as a portrait of an era—the fifties. Dean belongs to that "silent generation" of "beatniks" who felt nothing but apathy at the Korean War or Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist hysteria. In the grubby New York of the midfifties, when all girls looked like Audrey Hepburn and all boys like Tony Curtis, there was nothing special about the young man who was born James Byron in 1931. What was special was the way those young Hepburns and Curtises worshipped Dean and made him into something he never could have been—an ageless idol, the representation of their youth and the repository of their fantasies. (p. 46)

Judith M. Kass, in her Robert Altman: American Innovator, Leonard Maltin, General Editor (copyright © 1978 by Leonard Maltin; reprinted by permission of Popular Library, Fawcett Books Group, a unit of the Consumer Publishing Division of CBS Inc.), Popular Library, 1978, 282 p.