Robert Altman Study Part 19: Thieves Like Us

After all the talk in my last several entries about Altman's freewheeling approach to adaptation comes Thieves Like Us, which is surprisingly faithful to its source material - certainly more so than Nicholas Ray's 1948 version, They Live By Night. The latter is by no means a severe departure, but it updates the 1937 Depression-set novel by a decade and makes its leads far more glamorous than the novel or Altman's take would. It's also required by the Production Code to marry Bowie and Keechie before they can run off together, though to Ray's credit this leads to one of the film's best inventions, the shyster minister played by the great character actor Ian Wolfe.

Shot by French cinematographer Jean Boffety after Long Goodbye co-star Mark Rydell absconded with much of Altman's crew to make Cinderella Liberty, Thieves Like Us imbues its hardscrabble Mississippi with a misty lushness, imposing both a gauzy nostalgia as well as a bleary melancholy over the landscape. It's here that Altman offers the most concise and focused take on a theme that runs as an undercurrent through so much of his work: the idea that men are dreamers whose pursuit of unrealistic goals dooms them, and that women are forced to be more pragmatic and perseverant in order to stay the course that their men keep insisting on deviating from. The concept was also at the core of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and would recur immediately (though in less balanced form) in California Split. To some extent it also explains the director's uncanny female-centered film, set in worlds that become skewed when women can't even hold the center.

The men here are T-Dub (Bert Remsen) and Chickamaw (John Shuck), two seasoned bank robbers, who escape from prison along with the inexperienced Bowie (Keith Carradine). Their female counterparts are Mattie (Louise Fletcher), T-Dub's taciturn sister-in-law, forced to raise her children alone since her husband is serving time; and Keechie, perhaps the most revealing performance by the always-open Shelley Duvall, a sheltered girl who falls immediately in love with the puppy dog-like Bowie, but has more common sense about the dangers of his life of crime than he does.

In many ways the anti-Bonnie and Clyde, Thieves Like Us begins as another rollicking tale of Depression-era bank robbers, less altruistic Robin Hoods who envy bankers and lawyers who "rob people with their brains instead of guns." But it turns darker as the desperation and paranoia of the men escalate, allowing Shuck a stunning turn as the increasingly drunk, disturbed, and violent Chickamaw, his bulldog features turned rabid in a way that none of his genial earlier roles for Altman even hinted at. Remsen's T-Dub is another in the filmmaker's rogues' gallery of fast talking con men whose aimless, seat-of-their-pants actions never quite live up to their optimistic bragadoccio.

Altman's innovative but only occasionally effective use of '30s radio shows in lieu of score speaks to the romanticization of thieves and their derring-do at a time when most in the country were suffering financial hardship. But the running thread of Coca-Cola ads - on every gas station, corner store, and even prison - hint at the encroaching consumer culture that would soon overtake the country.

The one major change that Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury make to the novel - and that Ray made as well - is to allow Keechie to survive Bowie's brutal gunning down by police. In this case, she's glimpsed setting out on her own on a train to wherever, about to give birth to a child she determinedly won't name after its father, becoming as hardened as Mattie in order to survive.

Robert Altman Study Part 18: The Long Goodbye

From the western, Altman moved on to film noir with similar intent: subverting expectations. Not so much subverting genre; though his cinematic reinventions and their timing aligned him with the film school brat generation, he's not exactly of them. He's almost a generation older, for one; for another, he's less interested in meta explorations than in using generic conventions to disregard storytelling. The Long Goodbye, despite its undermining of Bogart's Marlowe ideal, isn't about undermining noir. It's about twisting the expectations of noir to comment on the shifting mores of the day.

Altman referred to Elliott Gould's portrayal of Raymond Chandler's iconic private eye as "Rip Van Marlowe." The idea was to take the '50s-era detective and drop him into the world of 1973. And Gould's Marlowe does feel like a man out of time: he wears a suit and tie, however rumpled, while his neighbors practice topless yoga. He's the only character who smokes in this health-conscious era, striking his matches on whatever available surface. And he has a firm sense of morality and justice at a time when such notions feel quaint and outdated.

All of which makes him a sucker rather than a hero, a notion that offended Chandler devotees. But it also gets paid off in his killing of Terry Lennox, a drastic departure from the source novel that originated not with Altman but with screenwriter Leigh Brackett but which Altman made a contractual obligation of his taking on the film. Everyone in the film except for Marlowe is absorbed in their own self-interest, down to his picky cat, who disappears when Marlowe attempts to pass off a non-approved brand of cat food.

Once again Altman thrives when he can push story to the background and focus on details. The big reveal of Lennox's betrayal is relegated to a mumbled voiceover running against sunset shots of Mexican cityscapes. There is an utter disregard for the "mystery" at the heart of the story, which is fundamentally changed from Chandler's book, though Chandler himself preferred language to narrative sense. Brackett's final scene, leading up to Lennox's shooting, is a fairly typical sum-up of the details. In Altman's hands, most of this dialogue is jettisoned - just enough remains to make some sense of the plot, but what's important is Gould's sense of resigned indignation.

Altman reportedly insisted that key cast and crew read Raymond Chandler Speaking, a collection of correspondence and essays in which the author propounds on the detective story, writing, and cats - a clue to where that opening scene comes from. Much of the film's attitude can be found in these pages; even if Chandler might not have approved of the changes made, as he rarely did in the adaptations of his books, he'd have to admit to a shared philosophy. Even an offhand description of Marlowe striking his matches on any convenient surface emerges in the film's depiction of the character, a trait not mentioned explicitly in any of the novels or stories.