The Great Movies III

Altman's multiple cameras and miking are ideal for the backstage sequences, in which characters drift in and out and talk at the same time. We get an immediate feel for the dressing room, the lulls between numbers, the history and memories that all dressing rooms contain and evoke. Streep and Tomlin have hilarious conversations with exquisite timing, and so do Reilly and Harrelson. Lohan is fresh and excited, pulled onstage for her radio debut.

The music is important, but this is not quite a musical. The songs are more performances. Toward the very end of the last show, the singers and musicians join Keillor in singing that saddest of all lovely songs, that loveliest of all sad songs, "Red River Valley." When I heard it for the first time around a campfire at a summer camp when I was about nine, I knew I would feel that way about it all of my life.

The film, as I suggested, reflects Altman's style of direction: assemble gifted actors, friends as often as possible, and make it possible for them to do what he knows that they can do. Create an atmosphere where it can happen. Support them. Fulminate against absent enemies (Teamsters, props, costumes, studio executives) but never against actors. One long afternoon I watched him transform an entire scene in a Lyric Opera production he was directing, without ever uttering a direct instruction. The actors almost feel they're doing it themselves.

Did Altman know this would be his last film? Certainly not. But he knew his time was limited. "Where the years have gone, I don't know," he told me backstage that day at the Lyric. "But they're gone. I used to look for a decade. Now I look for a couple more years." He got them. "When I'm not making a film," he told me on the set of Gosford Park in zoos, "I don't know how to live. I don't know what to do with the time. I don't have an assistant director taking me to this little restaurant around the corner, and a production manager telling me about my hotel, and a driver to take me where I have to go."

He said he kept track of time not by the years but by the film he was making. Given an Honorary Oscar in March 2oo6, he astonished his audience by revealing he had been living ten or eleven years with a heart transplant. He didn't mention that he also had leukemia, listed as his cause of death on November zo of the same year. At the time, he had two films in pre-production.

ou're tearing me apart! You say one thing, he says another, and everybody changes back again."

James Dean shouts these words in an anguished howl that seems to owe more to acting class than to his character, the rebellious and causeless Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. Because he died in a car crash a month before the movie opened in 1955, the performance took on an eerie kind of fame: it was the posthumous complaint of an actor widely expected to have a long and famous career. Only East of Eden (1954) was released while Dean was alive; Giant, his last film, came out in 1956. And then the legend took over.

The film has not aged well, and Dean's performance seems more like marked-down Brando than the birth of an important talent. But Rebel Without a Cause was enormously influential at the time, a milestone in the creation of new ideas about young people. Marlon Brando as a surly motorcycle gang leader in The Wild One (1953), James Dean in 1955, and the emergence of Elvis Presley in 1956: these three role models decisively altered the way young men could be seen in popular culture. They could be more feminine, sexier, more confused, more ambiguous.

"What can you do when you have to be a man?"Jim Stark asks his father, the emasculated Frank Stark (Jim Backus). But his father doesn't know, and in one grotesque scene, wears a frilly apron over his business suit while cleaning up spilled food. Jim comes from a household ruled by his overbearing mother (Ann Doran) and her mother (Virginia Brissac). Early in the film, he regards his father and tells a juvenile officer: "If he had guts to knock Mom cold once, then maybe she'd be happy, and she'd stop picking on him."

As causes go, Jim's doesn't rank with civil rights and war resistance, but the movie's point is that Jim is denied even a reason for his discontent. In the early 195os, his unfocused rage fit neatly into pop psychology. The movie is based on a 1944 book of the same name by Robert Lindner, and reflected concern about "juvenile delinquency," a term then much in use; its more immediate inspiration may have been the now-forgotten 1943 book A Generation of Vipers, by Philip Wylie, which coined the term "Momism" and blamed an ascendant female dominance for much of what was wrong with modern America. "She eats him alive, and he takes it,"Jim Stark tells the cop about his father.