Departed American director Robert Altman may have had a patchy overall career (his ’90s renaissance after a checkered ’80s was also peppered with things like “Prêt-à-Porter” and passable works like “The Gingerbread Man”), but the classics in his oeuvre are myriad (“MASH,” “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Nashville,” “The Player,” etc.).
So what happens with what we presume is a forgotten film gem like 1970s comedy “Brewster McCloud” that followed immediately after “MASH”? Well, instead of going to the Criterion Collection, it gets dumped on to the Warner Bros. online archive. Here’s the synopsis.
Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort) lives deep within the cavernous underground of the Houston Astrodome, but his dreams rise much higher. He aims to fly. Not in a plane. But with strapped-on wings he’s designing – encouraged by a mysterious woman (Sally Kellerman) who may be his guardian angel. But Brewster McCloud, Robert Altman’s wild, anarchic cult fave, isn’t about dreams as much as it is about the highs and lows of humanity. It’s a serial-killer mystery. A frenetic car-chase flick. A crazy circus-finale comedy. Shelley Duvall debuts as the tour guide whose seduction of Brewster may lead to his undoing. Ah, love. The thing that at once shapes and unravels us. The thing that may or may not give us wings.
We’ll be totally straight with you. We haven’t seen this one since it was on television back in the day and barely remember a thing about it, so we can’t say whether this move is unjust or not, but we’ve been looking for this film to hit DVD for years (and this writer tried unsuccessfully to buy a bootleg a few years back that never arrived). And no, Netflix doesn’t put the Warner Archive online either (at least not yet). So, to view this one, you’ll have to shell out a fairly steep $24.95, considering it’s only remastered and there are zero extras. Well, the always-awesome Rene Auberjonois does co-star as well, so perhaps that’s worth something (and it’s quietly crept onto Amazon on August 4 for around the same price).
And maybe this tossed-off DVD release is at least semi-deserved (not every film company wants to shell out major money to re-release just an OK movie). A recent A/V Onion review says.
Brewster McCloud is a thematic and narrative mess: disjointed, badly paced, tonally all over the place, and weighed down by an endless car chase and a running gag involving shit that Altman later pointlessly recycled for Ready To Wear. Yet it’s also a strangely compelling, utterly singular (even in Altman’s oeuvre) film rife with indelible moments. Even at the beginning of his film career, Altman was boldly reaching for the sky and sometimes falling straight on his ass.
Oddly enough, a trailer in embeddable form is hard to find, but you can see it here on TCM’s site. And here’s a scene below.
