Robert Altman (1970)
The prospect of finally catching up with films of his that I’d never seen was a big attraction of BFI’s ten-week Robert Altman retrospective. With the qualified exception of Buffalo Bill and the Indians, they’ve proved a big disappointment – That Cold Day in the Park followed by Secret Honor followed by Brewster McCloud, the worst of the lot. (The remaining Altmans I’ve booked for are ones I already know – M*A*S*H, Nashville, Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion.)
The title character (Bud Cort) is a twentyish recluse who lives in a fallout shelter of the Houston Astrodome and wants to fly. He’s constructing himself a pair of wings and in hard physical training. This baby-faced body-builder is a confection of Icarus, Peter Pan and Superman, as well as a kind of Phantom of the Astrodome. Brewster’s helpmate is a woman called Louise (Sally Kellerman), a combination of guardian angel, earth mother and femme fatale. (She turns against Brewster once he loses his virginity.) The would-be birdman wears spectacles that emphasise his comical owlishness. Scars on Louise’s shoulder blades suggest vestigial wings. Brewster has a pet raven which, early in the film, craps on a newspaper headline about Vice-President Spiro Agnew. Brewster becomes a suspect in a series of murders – to add insult to fatal injury, the victims’ bodies are decorated with bird droppings. One of the murderees is elderly Daphne Heap, a domineering socialite who, during the opening titles, delivers a stentorian, off-key rendering of the American national anthem. She’s played by Margaret Hamilton, best known as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz; when Daphne’s dead body is discovered, she’s wearing sparkling ruby slippers and a few bars of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ are heard on the soundtrack.
This gives a flavour of Brewster McCloud’s tone – antic, anti-authoritarian, replete with movie references. Altman and the scenarist Doran William Cameron harness the rambling narrative with a framing device in which a college lecturer (René Auberjonois) regales an audience – and the film audience: he speaks to camera – with information about the habits of birds, gradually taking on an increasingly birdlike appearance himself. (Auberjonois has a head start.) The avian elements are overworked even without this one: the harness soon becomes a straitjacket, and is strenuously unfunny. The police procedural aspect is given tongue-in-cheek treatment but still involves a car chase which (by definition) goes on too long. There are loads of other characters – portrayed by, among others, Shelley Duvall, Stacy Keach, Michael Murphy and William Windom – but I can’t summon the energy to describe them.
The concluding sequence, in which Brewster takes flight and crashes fatally, is worth waiting for. Most of what has gone before is infuriating – especially because the film seems so pleased with itself and its knowing silliness. Proceedings end with a curtain call in the Astrodome and a cameo from Altman, the top-hatted ringmaster. He reels off the cast names – Bud Cort last of all. Cort doesn’t take a bow. Brewster is still a broken heap on the stadium floor.
18 June 2021
