Robert Altman Study Part 9: Bonanza and Bus Stop

Even armed with only a knowledge of his feature films, one of the most fascinating aspects of Robert Altman's career is his role as a bridge between the Golden Age of Hollywood and the renegade American cinema of the 1970s. Altman was born in 1925, five years before Clint Eastwood, who I've long maintained is probably the last vestige of the classical Hollywood tradition. Both garnered key early experience in television (Altman behind, Eastwood in front of the camera), and looking at his work through Bonanza it would appear that Altman is well on the road to a career resembling the one that Eastwood carved out as a director. But Altman, perhaps in part because he started his feature directing career fairly late in life and in part because he never had a mentor like Eastwood did in Don Siegel, ended up making films more in tune with the film school generation born more than a decade later.

Robert Altman Study Part 8: Warner Bros. and freelance

After wrapping up his stints with Desilu and The Millionaire, Altman moved on to the slightly more exalted Warner Bros. television department, where he had better production values and scripts to work with. He made the rounds of the studio's shows, including episodes of Lawman, Hawaiian Eye, and Surfside Six (none of which I've seen). Altman's Warner stint started out with two episodes of the "frontier lawyer" series Sugarfoot, starring Will Hutchins. The first, "Apollo With a Gun," is an odd comedic story in which Hutchins' Tom Brewster gets involved in a love triangle with the real-life couple of actress Adah Isaacs Menken and bare-knuckle boxer John "Benicia Boy" Heenan. The episode finds the star dragged behind an escaped, lovestruck stallion; getting on the wrong side of a local hothead; and shanghaied into performing Shakespeare (badly).