“A Perfect Couple” (1979)
That “A Perfect Couple” is at least on the surface one of the more conventional films that Altman made didn’t stop it from being one of a string of critical and commercial disasters that the filmmaker made in the late 1970s. Which is a shame, because it’s a hidden gem in his filmography. Reuniting him with “A Wedding” co-writer Allan F. Nicholls, it’s a low-key romantic comedy about Alex, a middle-aged Greek-American antiques dealer (the always wonderful Paul Dooley), and Marta (Marta Helfin, an Altman favorite in this period who stepped in when Dooley turned out to be severely allergic to original choice Sandy Dennis’ cats…), a significantly younger back-up singer in hippie band Keepin’ Them Off The Streets, who begin a burgeoning romance after meeting through a video dating agency. It’s more traditionally made than some of the director’s work, but has that trademark Altman looseness and unruliness: the love affair is used as a pivot around which he examines all kinds of subjects like family, music, art and compatibility. You sometimes wish the film would get out of its own way, but what remains is so charming that you don’t mind the tangents and dead-ends so much. [B]
“HealtH” (1980)
Kept on a shelf for nearly two years and famously named by President Ronald Reagan in his diaries as the “world’s worst movie” after a Camp David screening, “HealtH” is better than its reputation, but then that’s not really saying all that much. With a script credited to Altman, his “Short Cuts” collaborator Frank Barhydt and “A Perfect Couple” star Dooley, the film is a spiritual successor to “Nashville,” tracking a number of characters at a Florida health-food convention competing to be voted president of the organization, including Dooley’s suicide-faking doctor, Glenda Jackson’s self-serious politician, Carol Burnett’s White House-tied candidate who becomes sexually aroused when she’s frightened (!), and Lauren Bacall as a narcoleptic 83-year-old virgin (!!). James Garner, Henry Gibson, a young Alfre Woodard and Dick Cavett (as himself) also feature in a film that gets wrong so much of what “Nashville” got right with a sense of oppressive wackiness that utterly overwhelms any point that the director might have been trying to make. The occasional joke lands and the cast are all game, but this simply doesn’t come close to satisfying as a whole and stands as a curio at best. [C-]
“Popeye” (1980)
Cocaine: it’s a helluva drug. It’s the only explanation for why producer Robert Evans, who was convicted for buying the selfsame substance during production, had the retrospectively lunatic idea of hiring counter-culture iconoclast Altman to direct a big-budget, mainstream family musical based on beloved comic strip characters. With star Robin Williams mumbling his way through as the titular sailorman, while a diverting Shelley Duvall plus character actors Ray Walston and Paul Dooley do their best to offset the mess, the biggest issue is the glacial pacing and lethargic script by Jules Feiffer (“Carnal Knowledge”), not to mention a charisma-free villain in Paul L. Smith. Feeling less like a movie than an excuse for an all-expenses paid vacation in Malta where the film was shot on location, “Popeye” has its occasional whimsical moments, but it’s hard to locate the actual story: something about a fatherless sailor in search of his Pappy. Even the famous Popeye theme tune isn’t heard until the very end of the film after a lot of extraordinarily boring non-antics. Its a rare all-out misfire from Altman, even if these days it’s best remembered for featuring the song “He Needs Me,” which Paul Thomas Anderson appropriated for “Punch Drunk Love.” That’s as much as, or maybe more than, it merits. [C-]
“Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” (1982)
The critical failure of Altman’s Broadway run for Ed Graczyk‘s play left him undeterred, and a couple of years later, he shot ‘Come Back’ with the same cast he’d used on stage: it’s the first of several theater-based films he would direct. The result is a curate’s egg: for every bit of invention that helps the film become more cinematic —such as the mirror device that overlays the story’s two different time periods— there’s another directorial decision that seems designed to remind us that the material was not originated as a film. This includes eliciting theatrically arch performances from many of his female cast (Sandy Dennis, Cher, Kathy Bates, Karen Black, Marta Heflin), who stride around the set as though it were a stage and deliver a lot of their dizzily overwrought dialogue as though for the cheap seats at the back. But whether because Graczyk’s play, dialed to 11 on the hysteria register though it is, is genuinely interested in these women (one of whom is transgender) and the counterpoint between their oppressive small-town backgrounds with the glamor of the James Dean myth, or because the actresses are such good value to watch, ‘Jimmy Dean’ nets out at a win, if hardly an unalloyed one. [B]
“Streamers” (1983)
After the excesses of “Popeye,” Altman stripped things down again, spending most of the 1980s (with the exception of ill-fated comedy “O.C. & Stiggs“) on a series of adaptations of stage plays. “Streamers,” one of the rawest and most claustrophobic as such, stands as a pretty good representation of this curious tangent. Based on the Tony-nominated play by David Rabe, it’s set in an army barracks just before the Vietnam war kicks off, with four soldiers awaiting deployment. They are Billy (Matthew Modine), Roger (David Alan Grier), Richie (Mitchell Lichtenstein) and the visiting Carlyle (Michael Wright), whose good-natured banter becomes powder-keg volatile as they become more aware of Richie’s homosexuality. It’s far from Rabe’s best play and is now somewhat dated and a bit crude in its depiction of race and sexuality. It probably doesn’t help that Altman keeps the action, as he did for most of this period, resolutely stagey, never leaving the room in which it’s set. But the film’s worth seeing purely for the cast, which also includes George Dzunda, which is uniformly superb. In a virtually unprecedented move, they all shared Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, and Grier, now best known as a comic actor, is a particular revelation. [B-/C+]