Mark Weisenmiller

TAMPA, Florida, Nov 28 2006 (IPS) — U.S. film and stage director Robert Altman, who died of cancer at the age of 81 in Los Angeles on Nov. 20, will be remembered for the overt and subtle liberal political views that imbued his nearly 50 films.

Altman belongs in the pantheon of such influential film directors as Akira Kurosawa of Japan, Russia’s Sergei Eisenstein, Federico Fellini of Italy and France’s Jean Renoir. And like those directors, Altman was often more appreciated by movie-goers and critics around the world than in his home country of the United States.

When George W. Bush won the White House by a razor-thin margin in the contested 2000 elections, Altman, always outspoken, repeatedly attacked him in press interviews, at one point stating, “Whenever I see the American flag, I get sick” – a comment that alienated many here.

His liberal political views blossomed during the turbulent 1960s, but there were indications even in his early work that he was anti-conservative.

Altman’s long antipathy toward Richard Nixon, who rose as a Republican in Congress to win the presidency in 1968, only to quit in disgrace following the Watergate scandal six years later, can be traced back to an episode that he wrote and directed for a cowboy Western television series in 1960. Altman originally named the episode’s horse thief “Nixon”, but television network censors made him change it.

Altman is believed to be the first U.S. film director to describe a president of the United States with an obscenity in a prominent motion picture – in reference to Nixon by one of the characters in the movie “Nashville” (1975).

“In the mid-1970s, the two American film directors that you most heard about were Martin Scorsese and Altman,” Liam Lacey, a film critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, told IPS. “The key point here is that with both Scorsese’s film ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976) and ‘Nashville,’ both films showed a disenchantment that Americans felt about their country at about the time of the United States Bicentennial (1976).”

Even associates of Nixon’s weren’t free from Altman’s wrath. “Brewster McCloud” (1970), Altman’s oddest film, is about an eccentric aviator who builds a flying machine which he then proceeds to soar to the top of the domed Houston Astrodome stadium. In one scene, viewers see bird droppings on a piece of newspaper with a headline about Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s vice president.

Still, Altman was hardly in the mold of filmmakers like Michael Moore, whose “Fahrenheit 9/11″ unabashedly assailed the George W. Bush administration.

“I don’t think that Altman can easily be pegged as a director whose films have lots of liberalism in them,” said Michael Phillips, a reviewer for the Chicago Tribune. “In films like ‘Nashville’ and ‘Tanner ’88’ (a six-part cable television series by Altman and screenwriter Garry Trudeau, who mingled with real politicians running for president that year), we have specific political characters and political backdrops, but Altman was wise enough of an artist to make films that weren’t drenched in politics and could easily appeal to all people, irregardless of their political beliefs.”

There is one notable exception: “M*A*S*H” (1970), which was Altman’s first major movie. Released in theatres during the Vietnam War, it was a worldwide success and a polarising work of art that fueled the intense debate between conservatives who supported the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and those who abhorred it.

Nominated for five U.S. Academy Awards, including best picture, the film only won in one category, for best screenplay, at least in part because of the conservative leanings of the Academy at that time. However, “M*A*S*H” did win the Best Film award at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, and Altman received an honourary Oscar this year.

When Altman first gave interviews in 1970 to talk about “M*A*S*H,” he was careful to always call it “anti-military”, not “anti-Vietnam”. As the years went by, he became more assertive and stated that the film was meant to be a sort of cinematic manifesto of his antiwar beliefs, and especially his disdain of Nixon’s military and political policies in Vietnam.

“M*A*S*H,” the progenitor for the U.S. television series of the same title, tells the story of a group of surgeons at a mobile Army surgical hospital (i.e., M*A*S*H) during the Korean War. It was based on a best-selling novel. The two lead characters, played by Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, are irreverent, anti-establishment doctors who daily fight the U.S. Army’s bureaucracy.

“The Sutherland and Gould characters are obviously the liberal intelligentsia against Nixon’s military,” film critic Desson Thomson of the Washington Post told IPS. “Even though the film is set during the Korean War, it’s obviously supposed to allude to Vietnam as well. Altman was a child of the 1960s – with movie cameras. Capitalism and Nixon were the enemies.”

Thomson noted that “Altman’s films are not classically liberal, but usually they’re about an industry – whether it be the country music industry (‘Nashville’), the fashion industry (1994’s ‘Pret-A-Porter’) or the film industry (1992’s ‘The Player’) – and the manipulations that people do to each other in industries. In fact, in a sense, ‘The Player’ (a scathing look at the film business) looks like it was made by a conservative man mocking liberal Hollywood.”

Lacey said that “besides his obvious political films, like ‘Nashville’ or ‘Tanner ’88,’ all of his movies are political in the sense that he was fascinated with groups of people and how they do, or in most cases with Altman’s movies, how they do not get along. There was a constant sense that he simply didn’t trust large groups of people and their collective mindset.”

Altman decided to make films of the plays “Streamers” (about four young U.S. Army recruits, who talk about serving in Vietnam as they sit in a barracks) and “Secret Honour” in the 1980s (a one-man, one-set, part-fact, part-fiction play in which Nixon delivers a pathos-tinged monologue about his political and private life following his resignation from the presidency).

Altman’s films based on the plays were first released in 1984 and “both of those films hold up remarkably well,” said Phillips. “Both were adaptations of plays, but Altman made both even more political in his movies of the plays.”

In her review of “Secret Honour”, the late Pauline Kael, one of the most influential U.S. film critics of all time, wrote in the New Yorker magazine that, “The movie has a heightened quality, as if all the tumult of Nixon’s last year in the White House… were compressed into this frazzled monologue. It’s a seizure, a crackup, and the near-pornographic excess of the display is transfixing.”

In the 1989 biography titled “Robert Altman: Jumping Off The Cliff”, Donald Free, who co-wrote the play and the movie “Secret Honour”, describes the director this way: “He’s no quavering liberal. He is as bold in life as he is in art.”