Outside the Box - PHOENIX's Top 100 Not Quite Obscure Films

You wanna move in? I have a bedroom upstairs nobody's using.

Yeah, I am actually quite the fan of the novel and yet I absolutely love Altman's adaptation.

I am always surprised to realize/remember it's an Altman film.

I think it's just a perfect synthesis of the film's style and the lead performance. It's such a coherent take on the original story that it feels fresh and never feels like it's disrespecting the novel or straining to be different, it just fully embraces an original angle/vibe.

Altman might be unmatched in putting out quality 70's work.


MASH
The Long Goodbye
Nashville
Three Women
Images
McCabe and Mrs Miller
Brewster McCloud
California Split
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
and almost That Cold Day in the Park


That's a lot of movie magic there. And considering how uncompromising the guy was, it's a remarkable feat.


(plus I also like Quintet, shhhhhh, don't tell anyone)

Quintet does have a look though, and sticks in the mind. I can't go any further than that however.

__________________

I know it's not good.


I watched it during a time when I had become very fond of high profile boring failures.

And, no, A Wedding doesn't cut it.


At all.


I've rarely been so disappointed in a movie I wanted to finally see for years and years.

If we leave Quintet out of the equation, A Wedding is clearly Altman's worst film of the 1970s.

Weird and wonderful, I'll never forget the delight of seeing Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud for the first time - a free flowing film full of incredible invention, imagination and eccentric panache. A brave film for Altman to make after MASH, as it has no real popular mainstream credentials, showing the filmmaker had a determination to make films that were artistically satisfying to himself over and above their ability to make money. It's not exactly a film you can give a concise plot summery of, except to say it's about one boy's (Brewster - played by Bud Cort) attempt to fly like a bird, using a mechanical contraption. The film is full of various references - many of them to do with birds, but also various films such as The Wizard of Oz (Margaret Hamilton herself features) and La Dolce Vita. It was Shelley Duvall's film debut, and includes Sally Kellerman along with a whole host of Altman regulars such as Bert Remsen and René Auberjonois. I don't know what else to say, other than it's wonderful, marvelous and delightful - along with all other synonyms those words share. Along with some other great 70s Altman films, this one is underseen - but I really understand how it might not be everyone's cup of tea. Below is a video essay about the film which is really nostalgic and interesting (I so want that "Making of Brewster McCloud" book, but it costs something like $100 due to it's rarity.)


I could go the obvious boring route of giving my honorable mention to the Altman films I automatically assumed would be in the IMDb or Letterboxd Top 250 (McCabe & Mrs. Miller and 3 Women - I have to give these films a mention when I finish, they're two flat-out masterpieces.) I can't go that route however, because it's too easy. I wanted to find another really great film out there that has some relation to Brewster McCloud. I ended up landing on Birdman of Alcatraz - a 1962 John Frankenheimer movie featuring Burt Lancaster as real-life figure Robert Stroud, whose study of birds while incarcerated became a story in and of itself. From killing a prison guard to becoming a kind, compassionate man, his entire life-view evolved and changed once his love of anything avian was discovered. Watching Lancaster portray this is one of those supremely satisfying experiences we get every now and then in movies - I don't know how close it got to it's subject, but the film version of Stroud's story is great because Lancaster makes it so.

Burt Lancaster is great.

Not a huge Altman fan. I love MASH and like his other films, but Images was a disappointment. I need to rewatch it (it’s been many years) but I remember being confused by it, which certainly didn’t help.

Nearly every movie I've ever seen confuses me, and that's probably why I'm such a fan of them.


If they don't confuse me, they probably aren't movies. They are machines. Put one piece out of place, and they stop working altogether.



What's great about art, is you can just get frustrated and throw all the pieces on the floor, and even in a complete state of disarray, there is at least still something you can look at and contemplate over: "Hm, what was this supposed to be? I wonder what it would like to do?"


Put them back together into something that functions, and they inevitably just do menial tasks that only make us even lazier than we already were.

I refused to believe the critics were right in calling it a dog. Because it clearly wasn't going to be a dog. It was Altman with even more people talking over eachother than normal. How could it possibly lose?


But it was a dog. And it lost.

Gasp!

Or maybe Images is disappointed in you!

Hahaha! It’s one of those movies I fully acknowledge needs a rewatch.

There's an inevitability to Picnic at Hanging Rock appearing on any film list of mine - I long to see it on the big screen. It helps me ponder the absolute imponderables of life and the place our consciousness takes in the universe at large. I took geology during my first year at university, and unbeknownst to me this would include excursions to remote places - eerie, haunted places where I'd come face to face with peculiar thoughts about time. I'd come across rock that I was told was formed over 2 billion years ago. I put my hand on it, and thought to myself, this thing I have my hand on was cooked into it's current form that I'm seeing and holding over two thousand million years ago. Something inside me would shiver. Can I even comprehend one thousand years? I get exactly the same feeling watching Picnic at Hanging Rock - I think it taps into that same mystic nerve. We can understand much of the world around us without ever comprehending - and by creating a completely unsolvable mystery, I think Joan Lindsay was thinking along similar lines. It feels like fabulous fortune for Peter Weir to be the one who adapted her novel to the screen in such perfect a fashion. Thank you fate. As I'm supposing most of you reading this have seen Picnic at Hanging Rock, I include below the film's lost ending, which was cut before release. It gives the same perspective to the character arc of Mrs. Appleyard, but gives it a finality it doesn't have in the film as it exists today :


Well, as an honorable mention I can't go past My Brilliant Career - a 1979 Gillian Armstrong film which isn't as mystical, but provides another period snapshot of life in late 19th/early 20th Century Australia. It does that in so pleasing and unusual a fashion as to make it another new wave classic that's worth seeing multiple times - which I have done to this date, and intend to go on doing. Sybylla Melvyn (played by Judy Davis) is such an unusual film and literary character by being so relatable in some ways and completely alien in others - but that does enough to cement her individuality, and that's something that hits hardest in this movie. Her steadfastness in the face of overwhelming tradition is her quiet but mighty achievement, and for that it is in no doubt worthy of esteem - making for a really great adaptation. Sybylla is an individual - don't ever forget it.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is so great.

I remember (such a long time ago) in my youth, I'd be a regular at the very bohemian epicenter of my world at the time - a place one of my friend's mother actually bought for him after leaving high school - three friends lived there, and there'd always be interesting people and lord knows what going on. As I went to go there one night, my brother made sure to push his frequent recommendation of Phantom of the Paradise to me by saying he was going to record it on VHS - it being on while I was out. In the midst of what was going on that night - the TV was turned on and although I didn't know it, I caught the very end of Phantom, which was weird enough to have a few of us go "What on Earth is that??" Well, my brother, David, knew I was getting into rock musicals - and I did indeed love Phantom of the Paradise. Something went awry with the recording - so for a year or two I got to know it well, without the first 7 or so minutes. Narrative-wise, that's no problem at all. A couple of years later, David died in an accident - but I always credit my love of Phantom to him. Anyway - I love Jessica Harper, I love Paul Williams' music and songs, I love the weird comedic vibe the film has and I love Brian De Palma's urge to pay homage to an array of films and filmmakers - especially Hitchcock. Harper has a lovely deep singing voice - she's one of the bright spots of little-seen Rocky Horror sequel Shock Treatment. I'd say the movie has grown on me - but to be honest my appraisal was high from the first time I watched it, and it has never wavered despite many, many rewatches. Below is a short video which talks about how the film had to be hastily censored and reedited once De Palma found out he couldn't use "Swan Song" as the villain's record label for copyright reasons - and the many small instances where you see the "Swan Song" logo still here and there in the film, and unedited long takes which were ruined by the reedit. It's a video probably more suited to Phantom of the Paradise nerds - but hopefully everyone reading this becomes one - even if they've already seen the film.


Going the musical Jessica Harper route in picking an honorable mention is pretty useful, because I get to say something about Pennies From Heaven. Originally it was a brilliant seven-and-a-half hour miniseries by the venerated Dennis Potter. Released on television in 1978, I saw it re-aired in the early 1990s and it literally changed my life. When I saw it, there was a seismic shift in my mind concerning how I perceived film and television - and at the time I don't think I'd ever seen anything that good. In 1981, Potter adapted his own long tele-play for MGM - Herbert Ross directed, and the film featured Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Christopher Walken and Jessica Harper. It wasn't possible to recapture the magic of the original (which featured Bob Hoskins and Cheryl Campbell) but the movie still stands as a testament to Potter's unique imagination, style and dramatic mind. It also features a very early darkly dramatic role from what was at the time, a crazy comedian. I love both, for different reasons - and I'm overjoyed to see the slow cult following the feature version is gaining, and the reappraisal that continues to shine more light on it.

To think that Paul Williams wrote a jingle for a bank commercial, landed a gig with the Carpenters and then moved on to this. Must've have been some interesting years for him.

Not to mention playing Little Enos.