Before M*A*S*H, Altman – who’d been a bomber pilot during World War II – had enjoyed a few early forays into the film industry (a script credit on the 1948 noir Bodyguard; a James Dean documentary and his obscure drama debut The Delinquents in 1957), but had mostly cut his teeth working on industrial films and TV shows, as well as directing theatre.
McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), which starred Warren Beatty as an enterprising gambler and Julie Christie as a brothel madam, has endured as one of the finest revisionist westerns ever made; The Long Goodbye (1973), a languid take on noir starring Gould (a frequent Altman collaborator) as Philip Marlowe, is likewise revered within its own genre.
Those films – plus the dark, disturbing 3 Women (1977) – may be the most well-known of Altman’s Seventies trove, but there’s gold, too, in the margins: the bizarre, ambitious Brewster McCloud (1970), for instance, in which Bud Cort attempts to fly using mechanical wings, or the hypnotically watchable gambling drama California Split (1974), another Gould-fronted venture.
Age may well be a factor: Altman was 20 years the senior of many New Hollywood filmmakers, the Scorseses and Spielbergs who have continued making popular films well into the 21st century.
Altman’s work on industrial films saw him experiment with unconventional sound mixes – including the naturalistic “overlapping dialogue” that would later become his signature.
