In 1968, Robert Altman had a movie taken away from him in post-production, after committing the grievous sin of being a rookie director spicing up a staid space program drama with a little too much chaotic crosstalk. By 1970, he’d been granted carte blanche on a freewheeling ensemble comedy, shot on location, in which the protagonist is a bespectacled social maladroit attempting to construct a flying contraption in the upper reaches of the Houston Astrodome. Obviously, the director’s status, and that of American cinema in general, had changed a lot in two short years. Altman was able to complete Brewster McCloud due to the enviable career position granted by the success of M*A*S*H*, the shambolic Korean War comedy which confirmed the increasingly profitable notion that youth were willing to turn out to theaters for all things weird, wild, and irreverent. By the early ‘70s, this state had reached a tipping point, creating both an effusive creative ferment and an unparalleled sense of chaos in Hollywood.
The resulting climate, in which often outré and experimental material was blessed with inordinately large budgets, is rightly heralded as one in which a new generation of auteurs found their voices, largely because the people providing the financing had no idea what was going on. This didn’t have wholly positive creative results in the short term, and for every classic nugget of cinema from this era, there’s at least a few lumps of bizarre dreck that have aged abysmally. Yet even these misfires have had an enormous cultural impact. The playground atmosphere of the time gave directors a chance to quickly establish personalized styles in ways the studio system hadn’t allowed prior, a window of freedom which hasn’t opened again since.
Significantly older than many of his movie brat contemporaries, Altman made the most of these circumstances. Pivoting off M*A*S*H*, he started his own production company and immediately got to work, pumping out eight features in five years, expanding upon the run-and-gun methods of his Kansas City-shot debut The Delinquents. The strangest of these early efforts is probably Brewster McCloud, an anarchic personal statement of creative desire and caustic satire, which prefigures later, more fully-fledged efforts like The Long Goodbye and Nashville.
The tale of a boy dreaming of taking to the skies, it stars Bud Cort as the title character, who’s tirelessly working out plans to fly off with a homemade set of mechanical wings. This quixotic quest is contained within a broader story concerning a string of murders, investigated by Bullitt-parodying detective Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy), which may also concern McCloud. Also making time for an off-kilter romance with an Astrodome tour guide (Shelley Duvall), and frequent visitations from an earthbound guardian angel (Sally Kellerman), the film isn’t exactly a triumph of characterization or narrative coherence. What it does achieve is something rarer, a persistent sense of a limitless field of activity that stretches beyond the camera’s purview, into which the movie only periodically dips. Sketching out a mashup of carnivalistic action, social burlesque and overt parody, it presents a rough, Felliniesque image of what was to come, exhibiting a broad referentiality that would later give way to a more refined auteur approach.
Things start off with a fake out, as Margaret Hamilton (most famously known as the The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, the first of many references to the movie) leads a stationary marching band in a tone-deaf rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Stopping halfway through, she lambasts the all-Black ensemble for supposedly being out of key; they start again in a different one, to no better result, and the frustrated group instead segues into “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the NAACP-dubbed “Black National Anthem.” While now easy to write off as a tokenistic bid for outsider cred in a movie that features no prominent Black faces, this opening is significant for the interruptions it introduces into the rollout of the credits. These are the first of many meta touches, as the band’s eventual release from their fixed position into a riot of freeform movement sets up the film’s rollicking style.
Most importantly, this introduction establishes a porous border between text and subtext that will only expand as the plot progresses. Also key are frequent faux-educational interstitial bits featuring “The Lecturer,” played by René Auberjonois, who is gradually transforming into an actual bird, his physical metamorphosis mirroring McCloud’s mechanical one. The way these scenes bleed into the primary story is telling, and continues elsewhere, with bits of radio and TV chatter at times filling in for narration, at others filling in purposefully blanked-out gaps in the story. Bird poop is presented as both directorial hand and commentary, casting slimy aspersions on targets of the film’s scorn.
As much as Altman seems to be aping Fellini (including a conclusion that directly takes off on 8 ½), the placement of its unassuming protagonist, working head-down as the world buzzes around him, also recalls Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, particularly as the character functions in his 1967 masterpiece Playtime. The earth McCloud wants so badly to leave is displayed as a vivid patchwork, stitched together across highways and ranch houses, chockablock with either flower-power insignia or stolid wood cabinetry. This overstuffed stagnancy is key, and it becomes increasingly clear that a movie with such a mordant vision of the world and so many Icarus references can’t offer any real hope of escape in the end. The walls come closing in, and the dream comes crashing down. This reads as a depressive vision of a creative bubble about to burst, but luckily Brewster McCloud was only the start of the director’s most fertile creative period, with far greater experiments to follow.
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