Robert Altman Study Part 4: First Features

As I mentioned in my last post, Altman made several stabs at a Hollywood career during his six years directing industrials for the Calvin Company. None of those paid off, so his entrée into the film industry came back home in Kansas City rather than out west. His first opportunity came via Elmer Rhoden Jr., a former classmate and son of the owner of a regional movie theater chain who wanted to break into producing. Rhoden enlisted Altman to help write the script for Corn's-A-Poppin' (1951), a film loosely assembled around the dubious talents of a few local aspiring country singers. The film is difficult to see now (I haven't managed to lay eyes on it), though a newly restored print recently screened in Chicago at the UCLA's ongoing Altman retrospective, which has been making me extremely jealous with its wealth of obscurities.

Altman's feature directorial career started in earnest four years later, again through the auspices of Elmer Rhoden. The producer dreamed up the zeitgeist-grabbing title The Delinquents and hired Altman to turn it into a movie.

There are countless juvenile delinquent movies from the mid-1950s, and Altman's is... one of them. If he had never gone on to make another film, The Delinquents would be a forgotten programmer (it is anyway, but with the novelty of a yet-to-be-famous auteur attached). There's nothing in the film that would merit its rediscovery, and little that even seems interesting in light of the director's future work. It stars the future Billy Jack, Tom Laughlin, and imports Peter Brown from Blackboard Jungle. Altman's then-wife, Lotus Corelli, and his daughter Christine both make appearances, his sister Joan serves as production manager, and a few names who would prove to be longtime associates are already onboard (assistant director Reza Badiyi, art director Chet Allen). The most interesting aspect of the film is the Kansas City locations, including the long-gone Crest Drive-In and a small jazz club where singer Julia Lee is backed by the Bill Nolan Quintet Minus Two, performing "The Dirty Rock Boogie" in the opening minutes. It would be another four decades before Altman would return to the music of his hometown in Kansas City (1996).

When he signed on to direct The Delinquents, Altman stipulated that the film be edited in Los Angeles, and this time his move west would stick. But his next project re-teamed him with George W. George, his collaborator on Christmas Eve and Bodyguard. George called Atman immediately following James Dean's death on September 30, 1955, with the idea of making a documentary on the young movie star. The pair rushed a film into production with a script by Rebel Without a Cause screenwriter Stewart Stern, who came up with a combination of personal remembrance, psychoanalysis, and purple poetry.

The James Dean Story claims to be a "different kind of motion picture," utilizing the "new technique" of "dynamic exploration of the still photograph." In that much it prefigures the films of Ken Burns, but only in that - this hoopla is a way of covering for the fact that the material that makes up The James Dean Story is incredibly thin, relying mostly on panning and zooming over a few dozen images of Dean indiscriminately employed. Stern's script is laughably gushing and belabors its metaphors, from the dead seagull that represents Dean's too-early loss or the barren tree that is constantly used as a stand-in for his loneliness, only exacerbated by the stentorian tones of narrator Martin Gabel. ("He made this statue and called it 'Self' - but it had no face [cue music sting]." Before Stern came along, Altman and George had already interviewed a number of residents of Dean's Indiana hometown, the proprietors of restaurants that the actor frequented, and a few lesser-known friends and ex-girlfriends. This is as close to Dean as the film gets, and exposes the endeavor as the scheme to glom onto the craze ignited by his death that it is. The only time we actually hear Dean's voice is in a traffic safety film that he made with Gig Young shortly before his death, and a brief outtake from East of Eden. Most of his non-frozen screen time comes through the use of a body double, a technique reprised to no better effect last year in Shane Salerno's Salinger.