Thieves unlike them

Wouldn’t be exactly right to call Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us a critique of Bonnie and Clyde or even a commentary on it.  But it definitely has a few things to say in answer to it.

In his films, Altman rarely seems to notice the work of other directors.  To the degree that he does, his notice takes the form of a generalized anti-style. 

“I’m making a service comedy, but not the kind of service comedy you’d make.”

“I’m making a detective movie, but not the kind of detective movie you’d make.”

“I”m making a western, but not the kind of western you’d make.”

“I’m making a movie about bank robbers, but it’s not the kind of movie about bank robbers you’d make.”

Bonnie and Clyde is fast-paced, violent, sexy, and those qualities inform and enhance each other.  The pacing of Thieves Like Us is less than urgent.  Scenes take their time or as much time as Altman is willing to give them, and he’s in no hurry.  Almost all the violence takes place off screen.  In fact, major characters die off screen.  And the love story between Keith Carradine’s apprentice bank robber, Bowie, and Keechie, a Coca-Cola addicted clerk in her father’s small town garage, played by Shelley Duvall, is a story of domestic tranquility interrupted rather than one of erotic compulsion and projection brought to their inevitable climax.

Keechie knows that Bowie is a bank robber and a killer but to her that’s the uninteresting part of him.  Where Bonnie Parker thrills at Clyde Barrow’s barely contained violence, Keechie is immediately bored as soon as Bowie begins to tell how he came to be sent to prison for murder.

She’d much rather hear about the time he spent working for a carnival.

Keechie’s attracted to what’s dull about Bowie.  She likes him because he’s a good-looking guy about her own age who is pleasant company and tells dumb jokes and likes Coke and is interested in talking to her.

Duvall has an extended nude scene but the point of it is emphasize how comfortable Keechie is living with Bowie and how comfortable Bowie is living with her. 

The reason she wants to go with Bowie on one of his trips to meet his partners isn’t that she wants to join in the fun.  It’s that she wants to stop it.   She agrees to stay home only because he promises he’s going to tell them he’s quitting the gang.

All of this means that Thieves Like Us and Bonnie and Clyde could be used as a compare and contrast assignment for a film class.  Altman was openly aware of Bonnie and Clyde when he was making his film.  Add to this the knowledge that Altman and Warren Beatty didn’t get along all that well during the making of McCabe and Mrs Miller, and Beatty was the star, producer, and, arguably, the co-director and co-writer of Bonnie and Clyde.

But Altman and Beatty’s arguments on the set of McCabe were about working styles---Beatty, a purer product of the Hollywood studio system than Altman, was an old-fashioned sort of perfectionist and his approach to getting things perfect was conventional---meticulous planning, intense focus and discipline on the set, and lots of takes.  Beatty thought that the right way was to keep shooting until you knew you’d gotten the perfect take. If it took forty-six takes, it took forty-six takes.  Altman figured that if he did five or six takes, maybe nine or ten, at least one, but probably more than that, would be interesting.

Beatty was also concerned that Altman’s experiments with recording on sixteen tracks would result in nothing but noise in which much of the overlapping dialogue drowned itself out.  He was right and Altman himself was frustrated by the soundtrack in the end, but it turned out not to matter because something Altman had decided about writing dialog back when he was directing M*A*S*H happened to be proven true by the “noise.”  People only need to hear bits and pieces of a conversation to “hear” everything that’s being said.

But if Altman wound up saying to Warren Beatty with Thieves Like Us it was less along the lines of “I can made a movie about bank robbers, but not the kind of movie about bank robbers you made,” and more like, “See, I can do it your way too.”

Rather than being a commentary on Bonnie and Clyde, Thieves Like Us can be seen as Altman’s response to Altman.

Thieves Like Us is disconcertingly underpopulated for an Altman film.  Scene after scene takes place in which there are no more than two or three characters talking to each other, and the result is a quietness that is lacking not just from McCabe and Mrs Miller, but from all the other movies Altman made in the 1970s.

And since there aren’t any background characters to talk over, talk under, or talk around, what the main characters have to say to each other receives an attention conversations don’t in the other films, particularly McCabe.  Scenes are driven by dialogue more than by images which forces Altman to force his actors to stick to the script or at least stick more closely to it than actors on his other movies had to or were allowed to.

Thieves Like Us, then, is only typically an Altman movie in the ways that it is self-consciously not a typical Altman movie.

Which seems like the kind of thing on my part that warrants discussion, so let’s get down to it.

Called it a night at 11:30 or so, but the discussion never shuts down.  Feel free to add comments anytime and don’t forget to take a complimentary mint on your way out.

Next week:  The Player.

You can watch The Player online via Amazon.

My main source for the biographical and background information is Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff, which, along with all the movies under discussion here and all the rest of Altman’s films that are out on DVD, is available for purchase through my aStore.

Comments

[Lance]

Welcome to the discussion, folks. Hit your refresh button regularly to see the latest comments.

[Lance]

I'll start with this. The main cast of Thieves Like Us is made up of actors who had been supporting players in Altman's previous films. Bert Remsen, John Schuck, and even Keith Carradine were not among Altman's leading men before Thieves. Nor would they be in future movies.

[William Rennie]

Could be Altman's adversion to pretty people. American film only recognizes certain types of people as existing. Altman was as likely as not to cast off the street. Keith Carradine is as attractive a leading as was available at the time. Like Depp as Dillinger, he doesn't really look like a guy thats ever been forced to miss a meal, or work on something that made his hands bleed.

Hate this interface. You have no idea how much security I have to defeat on my system to post here.

[Lance]

Altman was always happy to work with movie stars, he just didn't use them as movie stars. He could have had Elliott Gould playing John Schuck's character, the out of control drunk and killer Chickamaw, could have had Gould playing Remsen's goofily optimistic and lascivious T-Dub, for that matter. He could have gotten a certifiable and bankable star instead of a rising one in place of Carradine. And he certainly could have found a more conventional starlet instead of Duvall.

The question is, why did he go with the character actors instead of stars here.

[Lance]

There is a leading man in the cast, Tom Skerritt, but he's playing the sort of part Remsen or Schuck would have been the more obvious choices for. Skerritt's part amounts to an extended cameo.

[Cassandra]

I love B & C, but Beatty and Dunaway were without a doubt a little too pretty for the subject, the region and the era.

[Lance]

Sorry about that, Bill. But I'm afraid if I take this off the blog readers won't go looking for it. Is there anything I can do here to fix the problem?

[Lance]

Hey there, Cassandra. Duvall v. Dunaway, there's a study in comparison and contrast.

[William Rennie]

Maybe working with Beatty soured him to stars. Duval was easy. Shes one of the few actresses in the period that can play a working class character without being condescending. As a redneck, I appreciate it. Working class characters are always heros or villains in hollywood.

She made her living on playing rednecks for the next decade or so. In Roxanne, Steve Martin promoted her and she got to be the owner of the diner.

[Lance]

Bill, speaking of Altman casting off the street, I didn't get to this last week. Most of the extras and bit players in California Split were from a 12 step program for people with gambling problems.

[William Rennie]

How about fleshing out the war movie comment Lance.

[Lance]

Cassandra, at least there's a hardness to Dunaway's face. Did you know that Natalie Wood and Jane Fonda were in line to play Bonnie at different points.

[Cassandra]

I certainly think he wanted us to see these characters as losers, or at least people with limited horizons.

[William Rennie]

Great about California Split. I wonder how much they all took the crew for. ;-)

[Lance]

Bill, Beatty soured him on working with a certain kind of star that's for sure. But Altman made two movies with Paul Newman in this period. And later on he built a whole movie around Richard Gere playing Richard Gere.

[Cassandra]

Well, Beatty was less convincing for me as depression-era west Dallas than Dunaway.

[Lance]

C, that's what I was thinking.

[William Rennie]

Same problem with Depp in Public Enemies. Also, he was about a foot short.

[Lance]

Bill, you want me to get into the ways the director of god knows how many episodes of Combat made an anti-war movie out of what was supposed to be a service comedy like Captain Newman MD, Operation Mad Ball, or The Wackiest Ship in the Army?

[William Rennie]

Always been a Paul Newman fan, so I have stars in my eyes, but I always made him as a character actor stuck with a pretty face. "Buffalo Bill" is an interesting role for him.

What was the other Altman role?

[William Rennie]

No Lance, was wondering what elements of a war movie are in this movie. MASH is another couple of days worth of blogging.

[Lance]

C, I'm not sure, but from what Beatty says in the oral biography of Altman, it sounds as though he recognized how Altman was keeping him from making Pudgy McCabe into something like his Clyde Barrow, and he was appreciated it.

[William Rennie]

Risking multithreading. Cassandra, I like your point about limited horizons. Carradine's characters bounds are obvious. What do you think about Duval.

[Lance]

The other thing about using his supporting players in place of leads---Skerritt and Schuck could have switched roles easily---is that their less than familiar faces blend more convincingly into the period look of the film.

[Lance]

Oh, I see. That would have been an interesting point, but I was referring to MASH up there. MASH, The Long Goodbye, McCabe, and Thieves.

[Cassandra]

As L. said above, Duval's character isn't the least interested in a glamorous life of crime. She's very sweet, with conventional dreams for her future, and pretty oblivious to how much bleakness there is around her.

[Lance]

Altman made a bunch of genre movies in the 70s. Didn't do another one till Gingerbread Man in 1998.

[Lance]

Good question for C there Bill. Last we see of Keechie she's on her way to what she regards as a big city.

[Lance]

Actually, she's on her way to becoming part of a more typical Altman film, crowded with idiosyncratic characters, noisy, more social.

[Lance]

Is that escape? Is it happiness?

[Cassandra]

With Father Coughlin, the Limbaugh of his day, on the soundtrack...

[Lance]

Oh, and Bill, Newman's other film with Altman was called Quintet. It's completely disappeared. It's more gone than Health and Brewster McCloud, both of which at least live through their reputations.

[Lance]

C, yeah, scary, isn't it? Funny thing, though. I think that's first time I've ever actually heard Coughlin's voice but I knew at once that it was him.

[William Rennie]

I had no idea Quintet was his. Its sort of a cult Sci Fi film. Rare but it exists, though not in circles you frequent.

[Lance]

Speaking of Father Coughlin on the radio, though, C, what did you think of the way Altman used radio voices throughout the movie?

[Lance]

For instance, FDR's delivering his second inaugural address during the bank robbery scene.

[Cassandra]

Gave a nice period feel, and the crime dramas, with their supervillians and G-men heroes, an ironic commentary on what seems an entire society of losers.

[Cassandra]

I need to go back and listen to that FDR part.

[Lance]

I'm replaying the scene now, just to be sure I'm remembering it right.

[Lance]

While I'm looking, any lurkers want to say hello?

[Lance]

Yep. It's the Second Inaugural all right.

[Cassandra]

I do have to go myself right now, Lance; thanks so much for the invitation! I'll tune into this thread again later, and see you next week.

[Lance]

That means the robbery takes place on January 20, 1937. Doesn't look like January, even for the deep South.

[Lance]

Thanks for joining in, Cassandra. Good night.

[Lance]

No lurkers willing to out themselves? Oh well. Thanks for stopping by anyway. Time for me to go. Good night.

[Dan Leo]

This is based on a really cool novel by the way, by Edward Anderson. Very hard core for its time. Also, Nicholas Ray's noir adaptation, They Live By Night, is also very worth checking out.

By the way, I think Combat was a pretty cool series. Pretty non-rah-rah, too. Its creator, a WWII vet named Robert Pirosh, also co-wrote Hell Is For Heroes, one of the best American war movies, with one of Steve McQueen's best performances.