HOLLYWOOD: Robert Altman has dared to be critical of the US - yet he is the most American of directors, writes John Patterson.
The American right have been having a whale of a time kicking Robert Altman around of late. Oliver North, the wet-eyed, feel-good right-winger of Iran-Contra who now blabs across the airwaves to a constituency of (says he) three million, accuses Altman of spitting on Old Glory and "talking down America".
North has urged his listeners to boycott Gosford Park and says Altman should stay the hell out of America for remarks he made in the Times (London's, not New York's) and elsewhere recently. (Too late, Ollie - he's already back.) A right-wing website called Sendthempacking.com is soliciting contributions to pay the airfares of everyone who has said they find George Bush's America unbearable, Altman included. All the neo-conservative TV pundits - which is to say pretty much all the TV pundits - have weighed in on the subject, many of them citing Altman's remark "When I see the American flag flying, it's a joke," and his opinion that Bush is "an embarrassment".
The fact that Altman said some of these things to the Times just makes make it worse. No matter that the Times often shares their caveman bellicosity; to Americans it's just the house-rag of effete, perfidious Albion, another whining, vacillating European ally, and just the sort of paper to give Altman, whom North calls "that traitor", a platform for his "un-American" views.
Some of my right-wing acquaintances in the US echo this shabby rhetoric, particularly the notion that "Altman should never be allowed back in this country".This group - like North - was also disgusted to learn that Altman had quit drinking but wasn't planning to forswear marijuana, his other favourite aide to creativity. All of which makes me say three cheers for Bob - and all of which proves his claim to the mantle of Great American is far more secure than theirs.
Is there a more definitively American director now working than the 77-year-old Altman? I don't believe so. While his political enemies are using the Bill of Rights for toilet paper and screaming for the scalps of dissenters and "the disloyal", Altman has never wavered from his commitment to the notion that the right to free speech demands that artists perform an abrasive, critical function in society.
What is interesting is that the American film-makers he most closely resembles were often hounded out of Hollywood, or found the obstacles to creation there so great that they left of their own accord. Despite having just made a film abroad, Altman is unlikely to take their chosen path of European exile. He has always been luckier than they were: he never annoyed Hollywood as much as Orson Welles, and he has never been as fragile as Nicholas Ray or as persecuted as those - like Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin or Cy Endfield - who formed the McCarthy diaspora across Europe. For better or worse, he always stayed and fought, engaging with his country and with the times he lived in. The only time he fought elsewhere was when he co-piloted B-24 bombers in the waning days of the second World War, something North and his nodding cohorts conveniently forget.
I often find myself linking Altman with Nicholas Ray, the great Technicolor expressionist of the 1950s, and not merely because Altman's 1974 film Thieves Like Us is a remake of Ray's sublime début, They Live By Night. Those two films show that their film-making styles were wildly divergent, but if you compare their careers, there are enormous similarities of approach.
Both tackled nearly every genre and both made a conscious choice to politicise genres and myths anew, thereby rediscovering the genres' power and the myths' weaknesses.
They also re-shaped genre to deal head-on with their respective eras. Ray virtually invented the 1950s juvenile-delinquent movie with Rebel Without a Cause. Altman took genres apart one by one in the early 1970s with McCabe and The Long Goodbye - and invented some of his own with Nashville and M*A*S*H.
But unlike Ray, Altman has rarely worked outside the US, and little wonder - they are his subject. Ray ended up alcoholic and defeated in Europe.
Altman has never really left, and for that, for his career, for all his great works - and with special regret for his unmade version of EL Doctorow's Ragtime - they should give him that best (American) director Oscar now. No one else comes as close to deserving it.