Little-Loved Altman

December 30, 2024 6:03 AM

Dr. T and the Women. HealtH. A Perfect Couple. Buffalo Bill and the Indians and Quintet. Ready to Wear. A Wedding. And the final horror: O. C. and Stiggs.

Sitting through O.C. and Stiggs is a brutal, near impossible, thing to do. Like everything to come out of the National Lampoon magazine itself in the 70's and 80's, it is unfunny, self-satisfied and vaguely racist. … Let's be clear: my complaint is not that O.C. and Stiggs is a goofy low-brow comedy. My complaint is that it is terrible. It is, I believe, as bad a movie as I have ever seen.

posted by Lemkin (26 comments total)

I've seen Dr. T and the Women, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Quintet, Ready to Wear, and OC and Stiggs and they are indeed terrible, terrible movies.

OC and Stiggs and Dr T and the Woman are incomprehensibly bad. No redeeming qualities.

I'd also say that this list is missing Cookie's Fortune, Aria, Kansas City, and Beyond Therapy.
posted by dobbs at 7:05 AM on December 30 [4 favorites]

Cookie’s Fortune is one of those movies where you know they started with the title and worked backwards to the character name.

Like Poetic Justice.
posted by Lemkin at 7:12 AM on December 30

OTOH I saw 'A Wedding' in the cinema (twice!) and thought it was a great picture.
posted by Rash at 7:20 AM on December 30 [3 favorites]

I'd include A Prairie Home Companion. It has an inexplicably high rating on RT, but even as someone who used to like the radio show that it was based on (and this movie came out well before Garrison Keillor's MeToo moment), I thought that this was a criminal misuse of great character actors; bringing some of Keillor's recurring characters to life was kind of dumb since by that point they had become threadbare, and Keillor himself, well, aside from having a face made for radio, he seems to be pretty checked out as well. Altman's swan song was spent filming a swan song for an NPR program that should have swanned years before.

I have not seen O.C. and Stiggs, thank the old gods and the new, but I did unfortunately read the National Lampoon issues that they were based on. NatLamp, having reached its zenith with Animal House, which celebrated the underdogs (well, the white, male, private college underdogs, anyway), decided to start celebrating the bullies instead, under the delusion that that sort of thing was funny. The very best thing that could have possibly been derived from O.C. and Stiggs was the short-lived British comic series D.R. and Quinch, by longtime X-Men artist Alan Davis and Alan Moore before he got really famous; they're aliens who do "pranks" such as using time travel to manipulate the formation of Earth's continents so that they form an insulting message in an alien language, the overlord of which planet then destroys the Earth to erase it. They also end up killing off Marlon Brando with a giant pile of oranges. OK, I guess you had to be there.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:36 AM on December 30 [5 favorites]

OTOH I saw 'A Wedding' in the cinema (twice!) and thought it was a great picture.

True, I wouldn’t lump it in with the rest of these. But it deserves some kind of opprobrium for Altman yet again indulging his fetish for “women being seen naked when they shouldn’t be”.

I mean, YKIOK, but 3 times in Short Cuts alone verges on pathology.
posted by Lemkin at 7:59 AM on December 30 [2 favorites]

I've seen Dr. T and the Women, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Quintet, Ready to Wear, and OC and Stiggs and they are indeed terrible, terrible movies.

Of those I've only seen Ready To Wear and although that film wasn't completely worthless it wasn't near as annoying as 3 Women, which I would add to this list (even though, bewilderingly, it has its fans).
posted by Rash at 8:00 AM on December 30 [2 favorites]

Keillor himself, well, aside from having a face made for radio

Shaming a person's looks? Not very cool.
posted by davidmsc at 8:37 AM on December 30 [1 favorite]

I'll admit that that was inelegantly put; I think that I was trying to convey that, for someone who had been acting on radio for decades, Keillor was oddly inert in the movie based on his own creation that was being directed by a movie-making legend.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:46 AM on December 30 [2 favorites]

There's an interview with Martin Mull on Letterman where he admits he was Altman's second choice for his role in O.C. and Stiggs. Altman's first choice that he wasn't able to get? Walter Cronkite.
posted by dannyboybell at 9:10 AM on December 30 [1 favorite]

What's admirable about Altman is he made a very large number of idiosyncratic and difficult films that often nonetheless connected with people. They're not all conventionally "good" and almost all of them take new directions or make strange swings at trying something different, some more successfully than others. To their credit, they pretty much always reflect on what it means (or meant at the time) to be an actual person in modern society.

I remember when POPEYE, which I've always loved, was considered a "film maudit" and was largely considered the end of his career until his late-'90s resurgence. BREWSTER MCCLOUD and 3 WOMEN, both truly remarkable, were also once dismissed. I saw KANSAS CITY in the theaters, totally sober, and felt like I had a confusing and almost psychedelic experience that nonetheless has stayed with me and was worthwhile. A friend of mine saw O.C. AND STIGGS (indeed brutal, near impossible) and, as a result, delved deeply into King Sunny Adé and African music.

At the end of the day, Altman made a number of truly interesting films, and what stands out is his willingness to experiment in a mainstream space at the expense of "likeability". I've genuinely hated some of Altman's films, but I don't regret watching any of them. We're under no obligation to like all of them, but I wouldn't really dismiss any of them.
posted by eschatfische at 9:21 AM on December 30 [7 favorites]

I liked O.C. and Stiggs. Not a great film though - it starts strong but then wanders off, however, you can never have too much King Sunny Ade.

Edit: Nathan Rabin's 'Year of Flops' defense of O.C. and Stiggs
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 9:23 AM on December 30 [3 favorites]

I'll stand up for Dr. T and the Women. Unlike the linked essay, I thought it had lots of memorable moments, and that it was unequivocally feminist. Dr. T's superficially benign attitude towards women is actually infantilizing. He starts to learn better when Helen Hunt's character calls him on his bullshit, and by the end of the film he has pulled his head at least somewhat out of his ass.

The Quintet essay was much closer to my opinion (flawed but lovable).

I enjoyed Ready to Wear more than it deserved, but wouldn't dream of defending it.

I haven't seen any of the rest.

3 Women 4ever.
posted by doubtfulpalace at 10:31 AM on December 30 [1 favorite]

I didn't know that a movie of O.C. & Stiggs existed. Now I've seen the trailer (with the pull-quote This is the Altman film that shouldn't exist - but does!, which doesn't mean what the studio thought it does) I still wish it didn't exist.

→ The very best thing that could have possibly been derived from O.C. and Stiggs was the short-lived British comic series D.R. and Quinch

Yes, that's a great series. Thank you for finding something redeeming coming out of this.

As for Prairie Home Companion, so many phoned-in performances. It seems that GK is still in deep denial over his #MeToo moment, despite the court settlement. Blecch.
posted by scruss at 10:39 AM on December 30 [3 favorites]

it wasn't near as annoying as 3 Women

This is madness. 3 Women is a masterpiece and the best film of 1977.

If I could snap my fingers and affect any cultural moment of the last century, I would give 3 Women the box office success of Star Wars and vice versa. I suspect I'd be much happier in the resulting world.
posted by dobbs at 10:58 AM on December 30 [6 favorites]

As an ‘Italo-Hispanic proto-man’ myself, I’ll cop to having laughed at O.C. and Stiggs the first time I read it. In my defense, it was a very long time ago, however.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:18 AM on December 30 [2 favorites]

I'm reading Jon Cryer's memoir and O.C. and Stiggs was his first movie. I was so tempted to watch it, but maybe I'll just try the trailer.
posted by juniper at 11:50 AM on December 30

I'm with eschatfische -- O.C. & Stiggs is not a success but I admire the swing. And look, I've seen Dracula 3000. There's a bad movie.

Man, interesting site, though. Browsing through their Second Chances archive, it becomes clear that their movie preferences are on a very different wavelength than mine (Nicholas Ray as overrated?) I'm not totally sure it's worth spending the time to figure out where they're coming from, but I'm tempted.
posted by Bryant at 11:55 AM on December 30 [2 favorites]

I've never seen O.C. & Stiggs, but it doesn't surprise me that Altman would try his hand at satirizing* the teen sex genre, nor that the attempt would land in a no-man's-land of not succeeding as either a satire or an example of the form.

If Nathan Rabin is to be believed, anyway, but I think he is/
posted by Navelgazer at 1:44 PM on December 30 [1 favorite]

Looking at his "known for" list on wikipedia, I think I have maybe seen three?
(MASH, Brewster, maybe McCabe?)

Guess I missed the boat on his good work. MASH was fine, but I had watched the show long before I saw the movie. What is his best film? Nashville is the only one I recognize really.
posted by Windopaene at 3:14 PM on December 30

What is his best film?

I think his "best" film would be a matter of unresolvable debate: he made so many, in so many different styles and genres, that nailing down one quintessential "Altman" movie is kind of pointless. But for the purposes of really getting at that "huge ensemble casts, overlapping dialog, etc." Altman-ness, then I'd say Nashville for his early period, and Gosford Park for his later renaissance period.
posted by Navelgazer at 4:36 PM on December 30 [2 favorites]

I think The Player is a good starting point. It’s less bizarre than most of his best work, while still being recognizably his, and of very high quality.
posted by doubtfulpalace at 5:51 PM on December 30 [2 favorites]

Loved MASH and The Player, enjoyed California Split, Brewster McClous, and Buffalo Bill, despised Dr T., never saw Nashville for some reason.
posted by billsaysthis at 9:12 PM on December 30 [1 favorite]

The ending of Nashville is a great moment in Western Civilization.
posted by neuron at 10:47 AM on December 31

The one cool thing about O.C. and Stiggs is that it introduced a lot of people to King Sunny Ade. His presence almost makes it worthwhile.
posted by mike3k at 1:41 PM on December 31 [1 favorite]

I'd say that Buffalo Bill and the Indians is under-rated. It's an interesting look at the culture of celebrity, the bullshitting invention of the American frontier myth, and a 19th century premonition of 20th century mass-media. The politics are a bit heavy handed, but it is weird and funny in an entertaining way. The protagonist Bill is not really likeable, but I think the audience is hoped to identify more with Sitting Bull. I rate this one as a decent Altman title. (Yeah it does kinda hang on to Little Big Man's shirt-tails a bit).

Quintet is an interesting concept that doesn't quite work. It suffered from serious pacing problems; (spoiler eh) The big explosion at the end of the first act felt like the climax of the story, and the rest of the plot just flounders for an hour or so after that.

I'm vaguely curious to see if O.C. & Stiggs is as terrible as everyone says.

Shelley Duval should have gotten an Oscar for 3 Women.
posted by ovvl at 9:58 PM on December 31

The Long Goodbye is my most watched. The Player is also excellent. McCabe and Mrs. Miller as well, though each of those three very much depends on a more than general interest in the thing they're about (crime movies, Hollywood, and The Western, respectively).
posted by dobbs at 4:10 PM on January 2