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