I’ve always been reluctant to list my favorite films in order of preference. There are so many styles and genres of films that I love — why force an apples-and oranges-comparison? What sense does it make to rate films such as The Philadelphia Story, All About Eve and Brief Encounter against the likes of The Graduate, Sophie’s Choice and The Deer Hunter? Can’t I appreciate the works of Bergman, Scorsese, Capra, Ford, Cukor and others without saying that certain films are better than others? It’s why I despise awards shows or anything that would have us believe that pitting wildly different works of art against each other is a valid and helpful exercise. So while I’d be happy to write up a list of 100 movies that have had an impact on me, I would be loathe to organize them in some kind of ascending order. Except for one. My favorite film of all-time is Robert Altman’s Nashville.
I remember walking into Chicago’s Esquire Theatre in June 1975 to see the film during its opening weekend. It would be the first of more than a dozen screenings in theatres as well as countless viewings on video and DVD. Altman had already made films using large ensembles and overlapping dialogue (most famously in M*A*S*H five years earlier), but he perfected this style in Nashville as he showed the interweaving stories of 24 characters over the course of five days in the country music capital. But Nashville was not really about country music. Nashville was about America, it was about us.
Critics around the world have dissected Nashville. Pauline Kael got reamed by many back in the day for her enthusiastic raves that were published in The New Yorker a full four months before the film was released. Critics tended to hail the polarizing film as grand masterpiece and incisive look at the post-Watergate American zeitgeist or as a hopelessly scattered example of Robert Altman’s ego run amuck. Several years ago a book was published by Jan Stuart about the making of the film that is required reading for all Altman fans and Nashville fanatics like myself.
I don’t know what it was like to work for Robert Altman, of course, but I’m willing to take Meryl Streep’s word that it was creative paradise for an actor. Streep and Lily Tomlin, who co-starred in his final film, Prairie Home Companion, presented Altman with a lifetime achievement award at the 2005 Oscars, just a few months before he died at the age of 81. Altman gave Tomlin her first movie role in Nashville. She herself questioned why she was cast as Linnea Reese, the white lead singer in an all-black gospel choir and wife to creepy lawyer Delbert Reese (Ned Beatty), who was working on the presidential campaign of Replacement Party candidate Hal Philip Walker. In truth, the part of Linnea had been written for Louise Fletcher who had to bow out at the last minute. It was Fletcher’s experience with her own deaf family members and her knowledge of sign language that prompted screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury to give the Reeses two deaf children. Tomlin gamely learned how to sign for the role and quickly proved that the gamble on her dramatic talents (until then she was mostly known for her comedy bits on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In) was very well placed.
The casting of Nashville was truly inspired, even if several people got there in a rather circuitous way. At left are just a third of the brilliant actors in the film: Ronee Blakley and Henry Gibson, Barbara Baxley and Barbara Harris, Geraldine Chaplin and Keenan Wynn, and Karen Black and Lily Tomlin. Each of them brought their own skills and back stories to the roles, making for one of the richest ensembles in American film. Rounding out the cast were Altman veterans Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Timothy Brown and Gwen Welles; stalwarts like Michael Murphy, Allen Garfield and Bert Remsen; and newcomers Cristina Raines, Scott Glenn and 21-year-old Jeff Goldblum.
Susan Anspach was originally cast as the emotionally fragile country superstar Barbara Jean. Rumors why she dropped out ranged from her demanding more money than the rest of the cast (Altman used a two-tiered salary range that was paltry even by 1970s standards) to the fact that she just couldn’t cut it vocally. Although I think that Anspach is a talented actress, I’m grateful that she dropped out since that opened the door for Ronee Blakley’s tragic portrayal of Barbara Jean that holds the film together. Blakley was an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who was touring with Hoyt Axton in the mid-1970s. She went up to Altman’s office to try to sell him some songs for the film and ended up with a lead role even though she had very little acting experience and had never made a film. Details of her own life were written into the script and her improvised dialogue in the two big breakdown scenes made me think she was no stranger to the complexities of mental illness.
Keith Carradine was first signed to play Bill, the timid member of the folksinging trio Tom, Bill and Mary. When Gary Busey dropped out of the film, Carradine was asked to take on his role of womanizing Tom who is not only sleeping with Bill’s wife Mary but also carrying on affairs with three other characters in the film including Tomlin’s suburban housewife. Carradine played the role to perfection (and won the film’s only Oscar for his song “I’m Easy”) but reportedly had a difficult time playing such an arrogant jerk.
The late Gwen Welles was particularly moving as waitress and wannabe country star Sueleen Gay. Sueleen idolizes Barbara Jean and, with the promise of getting to sing with the star at an upcoming concert, agrees to strip at a sleazy good ol’ boy fundraiser for the Hal Philip Walker campaign organized by Delbert Reese. Sueleen’s desperate backroom striptease is one of the most poignant and painful scenes in the film. Finally, her friend Wade (Robert DoQui) is forced to tell her the truth in an attempt to help Gay avoid demeaning herself further. “Girl! You can’t sing! You got no talent!” but Sueleen, always the delusional optimist, is not deterred from her dream.
Geraldine Chaplin descends upon the characters in the guise of Opal, a pretentious British journalist who claims she is doing a documentary about Nashville for the BBC. Though she fancies herself a true intellectual, her biases and ignorance are on display whenever she turns on her portable tape recorder (following her obnoxious “Testing, testing — un, deux, trois, quatre!”). When I think of Opal, who fancies herself a representative of the people, I think of the scene in which a local driver asks her if he can show her around Nashville and she interrupts him in mid-sentence with, “I’m sorry, I make it a point never to socialize with the servants.” Chaplin’s character is clueless and constantly misinterpreting the reactions of her subjects. When she tries to interview the young soldier played by Scott Glenn during a concert at Opryland, he only has eyes for Barbara Jean who he’s had a deep crush on his whole life. Chaplin asks Glenn if he’s just back from Vietnam. Glenn is staring rapturously at Barbara Jean and seeing this look on his face, Chaplin says very seriously, “Oh, I see that you have.”
Altman had most of the actors write their own songs for the film. The late Karen Black sings two of her own (quite well), Carradine sings “I’m Easy” which he wrote years earlier (aren’t songs nominated for Oscars supposed to be written specifically for the film?), and the folksinging trio sings a Gary Busey leftover from his days on the set. Ronee Blakley contributed four songs — two for Barbara Jean and two for other characters who lacked the songwriting chops. Henry Gibson’s milk-drinking country icon Haven Hamilton sings three songs that perfectly complement his narcissistic self-image and his anxiety over a world that is beginning to pass him by. But Haven’s ego is mollified by some vague promise that Hal Philip Walker thinks he’d make “a mighty fine governor for this state.” Gibson’s first song in the film sets the appropriate grandiose tone for his character. With the country about to head whole hog into the yearlong bicentennial frenzy, Gibson’s song “200 Years” could have been its rallying cry.
I’ve lived through two Depressions
And seven Dust Bowl droughts
Floods, locusts and tornadoes
But I don’t have any doubts.
We’re all a part of history
Why Old Glory waves to show
How far along we’ve come ’til now
How far we’ve got to go.
At the Grand Ole Opry, Haven Hamilton sets a familiar poem to music to wild applause. It’s familiar because we heard Henry Gibson recite the poem a few years earlier on Laugh-In — and a few years before that, Gibson read the poem on an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. The poem, another personal motto for his evangelical character, is called “Keep-a-Goin’” and later in the film, following the shocking assassination of one of the major characters that also injures Haven, we see the extent to which he actually does live by these simplistic words.
If you strike a thorn or rose
Keep a-goin’!
If it hails or if it snows
Keep a-goin’!
‘Taint no use to sit an’ whine
When the fish ain’t on your line
Bait your hook an’ keep a-tryin’
Keep a-goin’!
Could these lyrics also represent Robert Altman’s approach to Hollywood?
The campaign of Hal Philip Walker that is heard throughout the film (even though we never see the third-party candidate who had already won three primaries and is poised to take Tennessee) was a prescient glimpse at the future of American politics. Just as we laughed at TV executive Faye Dunaway’s insane programming ideas in that year’s Oscar-winning film Network, we howled in 1975 at Hal Philip Walker’s words which blared from the loudspeakers on roving campaign vans. Who knew that Faye’s ideas would seem tame in 2013 and that that there would be many candidates who made Hal Philip Walker sound like Robert Kennedy? Ross Perot even had the same vocal intonations. Here’s a blurb from the endless Hal Philip Walker tirade that blankets the city of Nashville throughout the film.
Who do you think is running Congress? Farmers? Engineers? Teachers? Businessmen? No, my friends. Congress is run by lawyers. A lawyer is trained for two things and two things only. To clarify – that’s one. And to confuse – that’s the other. He does whichever is to his client’s advantage. Did you ever ask a lawyer the time of day? He told you how to make a watch, didn’t he? Ever ask a lawyer how to get to Mr. Jones’ house in the country? You got lost, didn’t you? Congress is composed of five hundred and thirty-five individuals. Two hundred and eighty-eight are lawyers. And you wonder what’s wrong in Congress. No wonder we often know how to make a watch, but we don’t know the time of day.
Walker also advocated abolishing the electoral college, changing the national anthem, battling oil companies, and taxing churches. Sounds good to me. Jimmy Carter may not have shared those off-the-chart views, but his sudden dominance on the national scene that summer was a bit Hal Philip Walker-like in the way he captured the interest of a public desperate for change including many people who would have dismissed him as a country bumpkin a year earlier.
The shocking ending of the film (which I won’t give away for those of you who are lucky enough to have a first viewing of the film in your future) is a perfect statement on where American was at in the mid-1970s following years of an unpopular war and an out-of-control government that was running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution.
I’m still not sure I’ve conveyed exactly why this movie is so meaningful to me. Do we love certain movies because of how we personally relate to the characters? Is Nashville my favorite film because I see it like a dream with all the characters representing different aspects of myself? God knows I can relate to Henry Gibson’s blustery bravado, Geraldine Chaplin’s pretentious babbling, Gwen Welles’ desperate dreams, and Keith Carradine’s injured arrogance. But mostly I think I identify with Ronee Blakley’s sad ricochets between her purely innocent intentions and the tortured realities of her life that keep cutting her down.
I admit I became a little obsessed with Ronee Blakley after seeing Nashville. I listened to her two albums constantly (to this day I know every song by heart) and even went to New York that summer just to hear her sing at the Greenwich Village nightclub The Bitter End. True, at the age of 15, I couldn’t get in to the club, but I stood in the doorway and listened to her sing. (Yikes, I sound as scary as the people who were stalking Barbara Jean in the film!) Ronee Blakley was nothing like Barbara Jean back then but it almost seemed like she merged with her character over time. Though she was deservedly nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar (along with Lily Tomlin), her film career never really took off. Today she is best known, besides Nashville, for her role as the mother in the original Nightmare on Elm Street. She toured with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez for a while and appeared as Dylan’s wife in the ill-fated Renaldo and Clara but both her music and movie careers stalled. It was only a few years ago that her two excellent albums were finally released on CD.
I ran into Blakley years ago at a film premiere and asked her about the rumor I’d heard that Altman was preparing a sequel to Nashville. It was true, she told me, she had seen an early version of the script and had agreed to be in the film but wasn’t sure how they’d use her. The story was to revolve around Lily Tomlin’s Linnea Reese running for governor of Tennessee and we’d see many of the old characters from the film. I swooned at the thought and was heartbroken when I heard a few months later that Altman had decided to abandon the project. I also heard that Altman had so much footage from the original shoot that he considered releasing a six-hour TV version divided into two parts: Nashville Blue and Nashville Red. But this footage has never appeared on TV or on DVD.
In the summer of 2000, I went to the 25th anniversary presentation of Nashville at the Motion Picture Academy with Altman and most of the cast members present including Ronee Blakley. Heaven. Several years ago, singer Carolyn Mark and her friends including Neko Case, Dave Lang, and Kelly Hogan released a wonderful tribute album to Nashville in which they recreated all of the songs and even a lot of the dialogue.
I love many of Robert Altman’s films — A Wedding, Three Women, The Player, Gosford Park, to name a few — but Nashville is still on the top of the list for me. If I had to choose one film for a time capsule to represent the state of this country in our wounded, vulnerable post-Watergate years, it would be Nashville by a mile!
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A new Criterion Blu-ray/DVD edition of Robert Altman’s Nashville will be released this December.