If Robert Altman is known for anything, it’s his dialogue. Assessing a roughly 40-year career, it’s easy to identify how this element operates in his work, functioning as a connective web enveloping ensemble casts who become increasingly enmeshed in wooly cascades of crosstalk as the plot shambles forward. While this specific style has never been matched, the idea of characters talking over each other is now so common that it’s easy to forget it was ever seen as unconventional. Yet the circumstances behind the production of 1967’s Countdown, his studio debut, bear out this fact. In the kind of moment that seems fabricated for a cheesy biopic, Altman was fired by the studio after shooting completed, with the overlapping dialogue taken as an apparent lack of understanding about how movies were made.
What this really signaled was a refusal to play by the rules, which in Hollywood always remains a dangerous proposition before such innovation can be confirmed as a sure financial bet, as it would a few years later with M*A*S*H. This means that Countdown, ultimately edited without its director’s involvement, does nothing but abide by those regulations, turning it into a turgid, terminally inert example of elevated studio fluff, an epitome of the era’s standard of popular taste. Bearing Altman’s later work in mind, however, it’s possible to imagine the less conservative outcome had he been allowed to see the project through to completion, the eccentricities that might have been expanded, and the odd character details which could have been teased out. The movie, which for the most part stinks, thus serves as a useful case study, a relic of sclerotic orthodoxy teetering on the precipice of transformative stylistic change.
It’s also funny to imagine the editing process, in which veteran studio hand Gene Milford, whose career petered out during the early ‘70s, was forced to Frankenstein together an entire film from the scraps of footage where everyone speaks neatly in turn. The plot, unsurprisingly drained of any energy or creative essence, follows the competition between two astronauts, Lee Stegler (James Caan) and Charles “Chiz” Stewart (Robert Duvall), both eager to be chosen as the first man to walk on the moon. Their program is at odds with a competing Soviet mission, making for a fictional dramatization of space-race highlights which would become reality two years later. Based on Hank Searls‘ novel The Pilgrim Project, the movie contains a solid story structure and the possibility for a thrilling faceoff between two acting titans, both just prior to their prime. Possibly due to the paucity of usable footage, the results are underwhelming; Duvall is still Duvall, but Caan hasn’t yet grown into himself, coming across as too clean cut, not yet in command of the implicit, mischievous danger that would define his best performances.
The film is in a similar state of unbecoming, struggling to find some subtext or complication to make any of this rote conflict feel remotely interesting. Hints are scattered throughout, with certain isolated images, like a plastic toy rat stuffed inside an American flag packet, providing clues of what might have been. There’s the vague sense of a thematic undercurrent about the futility of human competition, and as in most Altman, conversation serves as both an expression of interpersonal chaos and a conduit for possible connection. This is the case primarily between Caan and Duvall, but also in the larger battle between the Americans and their largely unseen Soviet counterparts. In the end Caan’s character wins the race, and his Soviet opponents end up dead on the lunar surface, a fate he seems soon to follow. Yet even this bleak, fitting conclusion is diminished by a slapped-on happy ending, where Stegler is potentially saved by the aforementioned rat, a gift from his son Stevie (Bobby Riha, exemplifying that cloying, unsettling style of juvenile cuteness so common to this era), which ends up functioning as a rudimentary compass.
Highly studio-bound, Countdown does wrench some weird poetry out of scenes of Caan compressed into a tin can spacecraft, or wandering around on the set of an artificial moon surrounded by interstellar matte paintings. Joanna Moore turns in a strong performance as his put-upon wife, injecting some real pathos into what might have been a stock role. A better film could have been constructed around her conflict, the domestic duty of supporting her husband’s quest for greatness complicated by the likelihood that his accomplishment will obliterate the family in the process, leaving their son an orphan. None of this coheres, leaving scattered hints of possible brilliance stitched together by long, stolid scenes of bureaucratic debate and some particularly heavy glowering.
Later Altman films like California Split would do a great job of contextualizing competitive male twosomes within a larger network of personalities, with skeins of conflict and camaraderie threading out in all directions. The potential for such a dynamic exists here, but the lack of a directorial mark makes it impossible for it to take form in even a rudimentary way. The movie is still sporadically interesting, but mostly as a time capsule, capturing a credible fantasy of space travel just before it became a reality. Reflecting contemporaneous fears and concerns, it achieves the dubious honor of demonstrating the kind of bland product the studio felt was safe enough to issue to the public, a bleak vision of corporate efficiency trumping creative achievement.
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