At the same time as his stint at Desilu, Altman became a regular director on The Millionaire, which was already a hit show in its fourth season when he came on board. The premise of the show was that a millionaire named John Beresford Tipton (his face never seen, his voice portrayed by the ubiquitous Paul Frees) would regularly present anonymous million-dollar checks to complete strangers for unknown reasons. Each episode followed his executive secretary, Michael "Not the Bassist for Van Halen" Anthony (Marvin Miller) as he presents the checks and changes the recipients' lives. The premise allowed the tone to shift from melodrama to comedy to crime stories from one week to the next, so each show was essentially a B-movie boiled down to its least interesting essentials. It did include guest spots by a great number of once and future stars, including Dennis Hopper, James Coburn, Tuesday Weld, Agnes Moorehead, Betty White, Vic Morrow, and Charles Bronson.
As flat as the writing for the show tended to be, this run marks the first time that Altman begins to stand out. The show hasn't been officially released on DVD, but I got my hands on around 80 of its 200 or so episodes, including nine directed by Altman. Without a reliable list of directors by episode I went into each show blind, only finding out the director's name at the end of the episode. More often than not, when a particular episode's visual style made an impression, the name at the end belonged to either Altman or John Brahm, who made several impressive films in the 1940s (The Lodger, Hangover Square) before turning to TV almost exclusively in the '50s and '60s. The show was determinedly square (one of Altman's episodes features a beatnik painter who ultimately shaves his beard, puts on a tie, and admits to hoodwinking the masses with that nonsensical modern art, all for the love of a good woman), but technically the self-contained stories were a fertile ground for experimentation, and Altman took full advantage.
The earliest episode I've seen is also Altman's worst. "Peter Barkley" (each show is named for the millionaire-of-the-week) is about an orphan separated from his two younger brothers who seeks out a reunion when he's handed his check after serving in WWII. The cloyingly sentimental show dwells unabashedly on Catholic imagery from the orphanage's caring nuns to the youngest brother's turn to the priesthood. There are also a couple of other weak episodes, including the corny comedic story of a prospector of the "consarn it" ilk (complete with pack mule) whose sudden riches convince a pair of execs that his dried-up goldmine is worth buying, and a drama about a wife who goes to South America in search of her allegedly dead husband.
Things pick up with "Dan Howell," one of the director's most interesting episodes. Howell is a cop transporting a prisoner on a train when Anthony finds him. After Howell receives his check, his charge escapes with the officer's jacket, seeming to take the landfall with him when he's assumed to have jumped from the train to certain death. The story is nothing special, but the episode unfolds with the rumbling and honking of the train filling the soundtrack and drowning out much of the minimal dialogue. It's a definite precursor to Altman's more daring experiments in sound later on, and manages to maintain a decent degree of suspense, at least relative to the show's normal blandness.
"Pete Hopper" offers a more visual challenge, focusing on an insurance accountant who's providing the only testimony against a client's fraud. He's also concerned about his son's fear of the dark, which of course necessitates a final scene that plays out in the dark, with Altman playing with shadows and movement through the rows of crates in a warehouse during the climactic shootout. And "Timothy McHale" is a strong noir-in-miniature about a cab driver who runs afoul of a femme fatale (and James Coburn), and can't provide an alibi without revealing the source of his sudden fortune (one of few episodes to play with the gift's secrecy rules).
"Hank Butler" is a domestic drama that hasn't aged so well, featuring the owner of an upstart doll company who uses his million to relieve his wife of her responsibilities in the family business, allowing her to grow bored in their new mansion (Spoiler: the day is saved when she gets knocked up, obviously the key to any woman's happiness). The most interesting episodes are uncredited remakes of recent films - Hitchcock's Rebecca, Suspicion (more than once), and Rear Window were all knocked off, as was The Wages of Fear (with Richard Jaeckel as the driver). Altman took his turn remaking his ex-boss with "Angela Temple," one of the Suspicion variants about a woman who begins to suspect her husband of wanting to murder her while on their honeymoon in a secluded cabin. And there's a bonus Hitch-within-a-Hitch homage: at one point her brakes go out, leading to a careening drive down a mountain road inspired by North By Northwest.
No comments:
Post a Comment