There’s a sense in which, had Robert Altman’s new film been better, I probably would have liked it less. Nashville was “better”: it dumped a truckload of city-slicker’s scorn for “down-home” America at our doorstep, and yet covered its tracks so well that its enthusiasts were able to claim it was actually (if ambivalently) a celebration of the grit and fortitude of our vulgar country cousins. Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson comes equipped with no such cagey defenses. The American flag (which figured so prominently in the conclusion of Nashville) is raised, and from then on there’s not a single shot that isn’t bathed in the yellowish, “autumnal” light of decrepitude. (The film does, in fact, seem to have been photographed entirely through yellow filters.) Nor could one easily find two lines together without at least one of them smacking of some point of instruction in the film’s own “history lesson.” Once again, the doors are thrown open for Robert Altman, your genial host, to give another of his famous parties, but this time it’s unmistakably a didactic moralizer who bursts out of the closet to greet you.

And what his lesson consists of is this. Buffalo Bill, prototype of “America’s national hero,” is a corrupt fraud (we’re introduced to him haggling over commercial rights with an associate who assures him, “Everything historical is yours”). As “father of the new show business,” Buffalo Bill purveys, via his Wild West show (“America’s national family”), a fabricated image of his legendary prowess and derring-do in fighting Indians, palming off this pack of lies (on a receptive and gullible public) as the historical truth. (“The truth?” Buffalo Bill exclaims. “I’ll tell you what the truth is! The truth is what gets the most applause.”) But when the real Sitting Bull is signed on to enact a role in these charades, he throws a wrench in the myth-making machinery (“History”—i.e., white-man’s “history”—“is nothing but disrespect for the dead,” he declares), and demonstrates that, far from being the villainous savages that the show has depicted, Indians are actually beings far superior to their victors in nobility and wisdom, and mystically in touch with forces of nature and the realm of dreams. (Sitting Bull joins the show because he’s had a dream that, through doing so, he’ll meet and be able to make a request of the “Great Father”—Grover Cleveland—who, to everyone else’s surprise, does come to see a performance, but, needless to say, flatly rejects the chief’s request without even hearing him out.)

Indeed, the innate dignity of Sitting Bull is such that (much to Buffalo Bill’s astonishment) the Indian is applauded even by the show’s brainwashed audience, when, without any theatrical flamboyance, he merely rides into the arena. But. in the end, the show-business lies prevail. The real Sitting Bull returns to the reservation where he dies, and his place in the show is taken by his former interpreter, another Indian who de-meaningly enacts a fictitious version of Sitting Bull’s death at the hands of Buffalo Bill. And that such lies only meet the audience’s need for them, is clearly implicit. (“Is he sitting on that horse right?” an aging Buffalo Bill addresses a portrait of himself during a drunken reverie in which he imagines the dead chief present. “If he’s not sitting it right, then how come all of you took him for a king?”)

In any case, the show goes on; and, at the end, we see Sitting Bull “killed” by Buffalo Bill, the Indian-fighter’s teeth flashing in a smile of manic glee and a look quite as mad as that of Little Big Man’s Custer in his eyes—they are, in fact, the perfect teeth and blue eyes of Paul Newman, as America’s reigning star portrays its original one. Morever, the suggestion is plainly made that show business is only a metaphor for business as usual in America, past and present: that the lies of the Wild West show are continuous with those of the larger society. “Welcome to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” the show’s manager greets Sitting Bull. “You’ll find it ain’t all that different from real life.”

Such, then, is the history that the film expounds: the standard demonology of venal white devils trampling noble red men underfoot, envisioned as the paradigm of “America.” (“God meant for me to be white,” Buffalo Bill declares. “The difference between a white man and an Indian is that an Indian’s red, and for a real good reason. So you can tell us apart.”) To the general rule of white iniquity, the film offers only two exceptions: Annie Oakley, depicted as a sensitive, “artistic” woman exploited for profit by a manipulative husband (essentially, the Ronee Blakley role in Nashville), and Ned Buntline, the writer who “invented” Buffalo Bill, and who functions as a sententious chorus of one (“That’s when the show business flourishes, when times is bad,” etc.). But in a way, and especially given that a real historical injustice is tangled up with the film’s simplistic recasting of bad cowboys against good Indians, it’s the treatment of the Indians that is more objectionable. For the portrayal of the red man as Noble Savage is just another way of “not seeing” the Indian (despite his appropriation by radical chic, still the most invisible of America’s minorities): of denying him his own identity to serve one’s sloganeering. For all the usual Altman-film, revisionist air of seeing through conventional generic stereotypes, there’s more real respect paid to Indians in the depiction of their unknowable otherness in such a conventionally “old-fashioned” Western as Ulzana’s Raid than in all of Buffalo Bill and the Indians’ facile idealization of them.

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And yet, repugnant as the new Alt-man film may sound when paraphrased on paper, its effect on the screen is, in fact, surprisingly benign, even, despite all its potential for hate-mongering, good-natured. Part of this affability seems attributable to the presence of Paul Newman, who may be a star, but is precisely the wrong kind of star—one indelibly associated with anti-heroic roles and liberal causes—to give the film that extra layer of irony which seems intended; for the film’s conception (that of one manufactured image portraying another) to have bite, a John Wayne seems called for, though probably a younger John Wayne than the one now trading shamelessly on his “legend” in The Shootist. (The Wild West-Hollywood connection is pressed still further by the character of the show’s producer, a figure given to such Goldwynisms as “futurable” and “disimproved,” who at one point proclaims his intention to “Cody-fy” the world.) But more important, perhaps because the film’s point-making is so emphatic and pervasive, and the points themselves so blunted by familiarity, one can more or less ignore such things (rather as one may automatically filter out the sound of surface noise in listening to some poorly recorded music) and direct one’s attention elsewhere: in particular, to several deft comic touches, some nicely turned performances by a typically eccentric Altman cast (one of my favorite funny people, Pat McCormick, plays Grover Cleveland), and, above all, to the recurrent, densely textured scenes of the show people as they mill or rush about in a Saint Vitus’s dance of incessant activity.

Indeed, these latter scenes seem virtually self-sufficient in their hold on one—seem almost to have a rooted life of their own quite apart from the shaky superstructure of statements erected on them. For if, on its surface, Buffalo Bill and the Indians is a collection of flimsy ironies about the fraudulent myth-making of American “history,” there is also, as in the best of Alt-man’s other films, something far more compelling at work beneath, much as a McCabe & Mrs. Miller is “about” capitalist rapacity, but draws its power from some more deeply buried source. Buffalo Bill and the Indians expounds its text, but, like Altman’s other films, it also has a subtext—and though this new film is among Altman’s least substantial ones, it’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, his deepest work, of which it most reminds me. (Never more so than when, like the whores in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Sitting Bull stands in wonderment before a prototypical juke box—in which, however, he soon loses interest.) Like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the work’s emotional core seems to reside not so much in its action, in what happens, as in its evocation of the life of an isolated community at some outpost of civilization, with the Wild West show’s compound resembling less a fairgrounds than a frontier fort. (Both films were, in fact, shot in relatively isolated conditions in Canada.) And though this community’s population is composed, far more exclusively than McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s, of buffoons, it’s remarkable that, even in the case of Buffalo Bill himself, the characters are no worse than buffoons, and rather gently drawn ones at that. And it’s this sense of a communal outpost—of some isolated group banded together to create a refuge from the harshness of the world outside—that underlies almost all of Altman’s best films, and radiates a warmth through them despite their overlay of cynical myth-debunking. One may even come to suspect that what these films are about is ultimately the experience of making them: about that fragile, transient, harmonious community that Altman gathers around himself for the making of his movies. And if his lesser work has the air of a convivial party, the best of it seems more like a celebration of some warmly felt gathering of family.

Yet if Buffalo Bill and the Indians is reminiscent of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, one is struck no less by the two films’ dissimilarities. In McCabe & Mrs. Miller, a veneer of irony coats but ultimately doesn’t conceal the resonant depth of feeling below; in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, a shallow substratum of feeling can intermittently be sensed beneath the top-heavy edifice of meanings on the surface. Nor is this just a case of one film running deeper than another in the way that any artist’s work may vary in quality from one creation to the next. Rather, it seems increasingly likely that, with the extravagant overpraise that’s been lavished on his work since McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Altman is now locked into the role of oracle, committed to telling us, in ever-widening arcs of indictment, that we’re living a lie, and all our heroes have feet of clay. And the shame of that is really less that we’re likely headed for other Altman films as thin as Buffalo Bill and the Indians (or, worse, more Nashvilles), than that we may never again be given an Altman film as rich, reverberant, and mysterious as McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

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That I’ve been able to write about movies, on and off, for some fifteen years, and only once, in passing, mention the name of Claude Chabrol, is, I suppose, fair indication of the value I place on his work. Not that Chabrol, a director whose ability to turn out movies on a mass-production schedule has long since exceeded my ability to keep track of them, hasn’t made some films I’ve enjoyed greatly (chiefly, the earlier, more flashily melodramatic ones, such as The Cousins, and, best of all, Les Bonnes Femmesy). But he’s also been responsible for some of the most excruciating hours I’ve ever experienced in a movie theater—I think particularly of the self-indulgent preciousness of Landru, and the pompous self-importance of He Who Must Die. (I might have added La Rupture to this list, but I left some ten minutes before it ended out of indifference and boredom.)

The die for Chabrol’s career seemed cast with his first two films, Le Beau Serge and The Cousins, the second totally inverting the country-cousin/city-cousin values of the first, as though in frank admission that this director could as easily make a movie one way as another, just so he was making movies. And from then on, it’s been movie-making alone that’s provided the common thread in Chabrol’s films as he’s flitted ceaselessly from film to film and “period” to “period” in a parodic facsimile of an artist’s evolution—from pulpy thrillers (The Tiger Likes Fresh Blood) and fancier ones (Ten Days’ Wonder) to the ripped-from-the-tabloids political variety (The Nada Gang), and from elegantly ironic studies of provincial life and (in the nice title of one as-yet-unreleased example) the “folies bourgeoises” (La Femme Infidèle) to a work like La Rupture, so lifelessly posturing that his defenders have had to invoke alleged resemblances to Racine and Shakespeare to justify it. Though it’s the films such as La Femme Infidèle, Le Boucher, and Just Before Nightfall that have won Chabrol such respect as he has in the American press, there seems to me something slightly anemic in their subdued refinement. When a director’s films are able to rove with such chameleonlike ease from one subject (and style) to the next, so free of any commitment deeper than that to film-making itself, one may reasonably wonder if there isn’t something fundamentally frivolous, even trashy, about the sensibility of their maker. And perhaps because there is, it’s the more openly trashy Chabrol films that seem, finally, to have more life in them.

One virtue of such a director is that there’s no predictability from one of his works to the next: a total failure can immediately be followed by a success. And Une Partie de Plaisir (dubiously translated as A Piece of Pleasure), the most recent (as I write) of Chabrol’s films to be released here, seems to me one of the good Chabrols, shot with some forcefulness and played with a violent edge: another study of the bourgeoisie, but bound up this time with a jumble of feelings on the changing relations between the sexes. The story is neatly ironic: a man urges his (common-law) wife to intellectual “growth” by her taking lovers as he has, but finds himself not quite so free as he thought of “outmoded” jealousies when she does. Moreover, what she grows into isn’t Baudelaire but Kahlil Gibran, until, in the end, she “outgrows” her husband as well; Pygmalion succeeds all right, but this Galatea isn’t quite what he had in mind.

Up to this point, the film’s elements are shrewdly managed, and, if the feelings it draws on seem confused, it’s a confusion recognizably our own and of our times; and, at the least, the material seems genuinely felt in a way that little in recent Chabrol films has. (The film is written by Paul Gegauff, Chabrol’s long-time collaborator, who has admittedly drawn for his material on his own marriage, and who, along with his own real wife, plays the lead.) The trouble is that, like the rest of us, Gegauff and Chabrol don’t know where our current upheavals in the relations between the sexes are taking us, and so the film concludes with a reversion to what Chabrol and Gegauff (the writer Chabrol has described as his specialist in injecting violence) know best—the movies—with a tacked-on, brutal act of murder. Which is to say the film, not knowing how to conclude, simply stops. Still, I was in my seat and attentive when it ended, and not, as in the case of La Rupture, several blocks away and slipping into two-hours’ worth of welcome amnesia.

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In the best of worlds, I’d be writing every few months not on some new film by Robert Altman, but rather about the Indian director, Satyajit Ray, whose work I love. Ray is no less prolific than Altman (though he’s no Chabrol), but the randomness of his films’ exhibition in this country is such that, though I first saw his last-released work, Distant Thunder, several years ago, I’ve only now got to see it again when it’s more or less disappeared from American theaters. That the film falls short of Ray’s best work is probably true enough, and worth saying. No less worth saying, however briefly and belatedly, is that I’ve seen no other film this year or last which seems to me to approach it.

The film takes place in the midst of a man-made famine (the rice diverted to the troops) in a Bengali village during the early days of World War II. It is a famine in which millions died, but what the film is about is less this historical event as such than the transformations wrought by that famine on the lives of one couple. Characteristically, the principals aren’t some neo-realist-style impoverished every-man-and-woman but a Brahmin teacher and his wife, accustomed by their caste to privilege, and taking deference as their due. It would have been easy to have made these characters, the man especially, more sympathetic—though such sympathy would be worth far less than that which the film elicits—just as it would have been easy to make the store owner who hoards his rice merely despicable, and not (as he is) less despicable than pathetic. And it would have been easy, also, to have set the film in some expressively ravaged and barren landscape rather than the film’s verdantly beautiful one, and to have photographed it in stark black and white instead of sensuous color. But this is a film of distant thunder, in which the first words, said by the woman of some passing bombers, are, “How beautiful! Like a flight of cranes!”—a film about a world that’s full of death, but a world in which death comes not with sudden violence so much as by stealth: stealing up on one in barely perceptible increments.

Distant Thunder has its faults. Though exquisitely delicate when it keeps to the intimate scale of the man and wife, it can be perfunctory and uninspired (montages of newspaper headlines) in sketching the larger social movements in the background; and the symbolic presence of a facially disfigured man who waits in the forest to trade rice for sexual favors seems, at times, an uncharacteristically easy and even callous stroke (though, finally, even this man seems more victim than predator). Moreover, the ending, with its leap into metaphor, verges on not working, though I found myself finally pulled along by its power. An old man, to whom the wife (to the husband’s annoyance) had earlier given food and shelter, returns with all his dependents trailing behind him; and as the husband, now entered into the fraternity of the hungry, tells his wife to let them in, a title informs us of the horrifying size of the famine’s death toll while the screen fills with the image of silhouetted, advancing masses. The effect is of the whole world suddenly crowding in. And by that time, the film’s embrace has come to seem wide enough to receive it.

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