The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Altman · a film · 1975 · about 160 minutes · screenplay by Joan Tewkesbury
Mode
Ensemble film without a protagonist; satire, musical and political film in one mosaic that ends in an assassination
Mythos
The temple of democracy rebuilt as a stage; the saint of the popular audience; a sacrifice before the crowd; the assassination as the recurrent national act
Phase
Five days in one city, from a recording studio and an airport to a rally at the Parthenon, the threads crossing without meeting until the last scene
Presentation
Feature film in anamorphic widescreen, in English, about 160 minutes; twenty-four principal roles; sound recorded on many tracks with radio microphones on the actors and mixed as overlapping voices; songs written by the actors who sing them
Register
Comic, observational and mild for long stretches; revue farce, club performance, a church montage, a breakdown on stage and a shooting under the flag
Scale
One city, its music business and a presidential campaign; twenty-four lives and a crowd
Governing Proposition
Twenty-four people cross the city of Nashville over five days: country singers and the men who manage them, the advance man of a presidential campaign whose candidate is never seen, a woman who sings in a black church choir and signs to her deaf children, a soldier, a young man with a violin case, a visitor who narrates everything into a tape recorder. They pass one another at the airport, on the freeway, at the hospital and in the clubs, and meet only at the end, in one crowd at a rally under the flag, where a stranger shoots the city’s beloved singer and another woman takes the microphone and the crowd sings. The wager of the film is that a society can be shown as a field of performances that cross without meeting, heard as many voices at once, and that the nation’s violence belongs to that field and is absorbed by it: the show goes on.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In a recording studio Haven Hamilton, played by Henry Gibson, records “200 Years”, a song for the nation’s bicentennial. Gibson plays him vain and brave in his toupee. Through the streets a sound truck carries the voice of Hal Phillip Walker of the Replacement Party, a presidential candidate who is present in the film only as that voice, as posters and as a campaign apparatus, and who is never seen. The truck and the song are the film’s two engines: a campaign that wants country music’s audience, and a music that wants the campaign’s stage.
At the airport the principals pass one another without meeting, and Barbara Jean, the city’s beloved singer, played by Ronee Blakley, collapses. Barnett manages her fragility as he would a tour date. Among the others in the crowd are John Triplette, the campaign’s advance man, played by Michael Murphy; Opal, a visitor who narrates whatever she sees into a tape recorder, played by Geraldine Chaplin; Albuquerque, played by Barbara Harris; Kenny Frasier, played by David Hayward, who carries a violin case; and Private Kelly, played by Scott Glenn, who watches Barbara Jean. The film does not say who matters. It lets the viewer find out, as a city would.
Paramount released the film in June 1975, the theatrical cut of about 160 minutes, which is the only version and the one judged here. Joan Tewkesbury wrote the screenplay; Paul Lohmann photographed it in anamorphic widescreen; Sidney Levin and Dennis M. Hill edited it; Richard Baskin supervised and arranged the music, and most of the songs were written by the actors who sing them. Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. The sound was recorded on many tracks, with radio microphones on the actors, so that many voices could be caught at once and mixed as a field in which the listener must choose.
Movement II
On the freeway the traffic piles up, and most of the twenty-four are caught in the same jam among strangers who are part of the film and do not yet know it. It is the first of the film’s convergences, and a comic one: they meet without meeting, and each goes on performing for whoever is near enough to hear.
The threads spread across the city. Linnea Reese, played by Lily Tomlin, sings in a black church choir and signs to her deaf children; her husband, Delbert, played by Ned Beatty, works with Triplette for the campaign. Tom Frank, a singer played by Keith Carradine, conducts his seductions. Mr. Green, played by Keenan Wynn, has a wife dying in the hospital, and L.A. Joan, played by Shelley Duvall, circles the town. Tommy Brown, played by Timothy Brown, is a black star in a white industry. Lady Pearl, played by Barbara Baxley, carries her grief for the Kennedys. Connie White, played by Karen Black, sings; Sueleen Gay, played by Gwen Welles, hopes to; Allen Garfield’s Barnett keeps Barbara Jean working. Elliott Gould and Julie Christie pass through as themselves, and a man on a tricycle passes through everything.
The sound is the film’s way of knowing. Conversations overlap, so that what is said matters less than who is heard; the slogans of the Walker truck bleed into a love scene; songs are performed at length while lives go on around them. Opal holds her microphone up among school buses and in a car lot and narrates the city without seeing it. Lohmann’s camera drifts across crowds and zooms to find a face inside them, and the editing moves from thread to thread on a rhyme or a sound rather than on plot. The viewer, like the city, attends to whoever is loudest.
Movement III
At the Exit Inn Tom Frank sings “I’m Easy”, and four women in the room each hear it as meant for her. The camera moves among them and finds Linnea. The song is meant for her, and she knows what it is worth. Tomlin plays the scene in near stillness, and that stillness carries the one love the film allows: a seduction in a song, heard truly by the one listener it was meant for.
Linnea spends an evening with Tom, and the film gives it a care it gives nothing else. She is the one person in the film who is not performing: she signs to children who cannot hear the city’s noise, and the attention she gives them is the measure of what everyone else has lost. The film protects her interior life without opening it, and the reticence is part of what it knows.
Elsewhere in the city Sueleen Gay is brought to a smoker, arranged by Triplette and Delbert Reese, where the campaign’s men want an evening before they vote, and she strips for them. The scene ties the campaign to the music, and it is the film’s plainest statement of its law: a private hope is converted into a public number, and the price is paid by the one who hoped.
Movement IV
Barbara Jean returns to the Opry stage and begins to sing. The song gives way to a rambling memory of her childhood, told to the audience as if to friends, and the audience, which loves her, begins to turn. Blakley plays the breakdown without a seam, and it is among the best-acted scenes of the decade: a woman whose suffering voice is the property of others, losing the use of it in public.
On Sunday the film crosses the city’s churches in one sequence, from Linnea in the black choir to Barbara Jean in a Catholic chapel, in her wheelchair. It is the film’s gravest passage and one of its few elevations, the city’s performances turned for once toward something other than an audience, and still performances.
Beneath the comedy the decade is present. Lady Pearl’s grief for the Kennedys will not be put down. Private Kelly watches Barbara Jean, and the war is in his watching. Mrs. Green dies. The bicentennial is everywhere on the surface, in Haven’s song and in the campaign’s posters, and the film lets the murdered sixties show through it.
Movement V
The campaign’s rally is held at the replica of the Parthenon in Centennial Park, under the flag. Every thread is in one crowd for the first time. Barbara Jean, in white, sings on the steps of the temple to the people who love her. Kenny, who has carried his violin case through the film, shoots her: the singer, not the candidate. Haven is wounded in the arm.
Albuquerque takes the microphone and sings “It Don’t Worry Me”, and the crowd sings with her. The camera rises from the singing crowd toward the sky, and the film ends there, with terror and a strange uplift together. Kenny’s reason is never given. The film declines to explain the killing because an explanation would turn a society into a plot, and its point is that the show absorbed the death and went on.
The country music establishment took offence, and the argument joined in 1975, whether the film despises or loves its singers and their audience, has never closed. In the decades since, the network narrative has become a major form of feature cinema, and Altman’s own later ensembles and Paul Thomas Anderson’s films of the 1990s declare the debt. Later American politics, with its candidates of pure voice and slogan, and later celebrity culture have made the film look like prophecy more than once. What it showed was simpler and harder: a nation in which every wound becomes a number, and a crowd that, handed a death, sings.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged by the subtractive test, which makes no exception for a form chosen to admit the inessential. Much is required. Barbara Jean’s collapse at the airport, her breakdown on the Opry stage and her death are one line; Kenny’s violin case is planted early and carried to the end; Sueleen’s evening at the smoker, arranged by Triplette and Delbert Reese, ties the campaign to the music; the Walker truck passes through every day and makes the rally inevitable. The multiplicity is itself required, since the subject is a crowd. What holds this axis lowest is what could go without loss: Opal’s monologues among the school buses and the car lot repeat one joke, the cameos are ornaments, the Tricycle Man is a signature, several songs outrun the drama, and L.A. Joan’s thread circles.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in this America politics, celebrity, religion and entertainment are one economy of performance, every private wound is turned into a public number, and the nation’s violence is absorbed by the show, which goes on. The Walker campaign wants country music’s audience and the singers want the campaign’s stage; Sueleen strips for men who want an evening before they vote; Barnett manages Barbara Jean’s fragility like a tour date. The killing is continuous with the culture: Kenny shoots the singer, not the candidate, and the crowd sings. Lady Pearl’s grief for the Kennedys and Private Kelly’s watching carry the war and the murdered decade beneath the comedy. Held below the top: Kenny’s motive is withheld by design, and the satire of Walker’s slogans is broader than it is sharp.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The register is mostly comic, observational and mild, and the film keeps elevation rare by design. When it rises it rises high. At the Exit Inn Tom sings “I’m Easy” and four women each hear it as meant for her, and the camera finds Linnea, for whom it is meant and who knows what it is worth. On the Opry stage Barbara Jean’s song gives way to a rambling memory of her childhood while the audience turns. On Sunday the film crosses the city’s churches. At the Parthenon terror and a strange uplift arrive together as the camera rises from the singing crowd to the sky. The summits are real and several; the long stretches between them, kept level on purpose, hold the figure.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The myth is partly built. The replica of the Parthenon, temple of the first democracy rebuilt in the city that calls itself the Athens of the South, is the setting of the rite that ends the film: a national rally under the flag, a figure in white sacrificed on its steps, a crowd that receives the death and sings. The bicentennial and the assassination, the recurrent American act, make one day in one city stand for the national pattern, and Barbara Jean is the saint of the country audience, its suffering voice made property. The particular stays particular: Haven’s toupee, Opal’s tape recorder, a freeway jam. Held below the bar because much of the charge is evoked through place and allusion, the Kennedys and the Parthenon as found object, rather than built through the action, and the mosaic diffuses the rite until the last ten minutes.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the studio ensemble film of Grand Hotel, Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, the musical, and Altman’s own films of overlapping voices from M*A*S*H (1970) to California Split (1974). The turn is large: a studio release of about 160 minutes with no protagonist and twenty-four principals; no plot line until the last scene; sound mixed as a field of simultaneous voices in which the listener must choose; songs written by the actors who sing them, some deliberately mediocre, performed at length; a candidate never seen; a star killed by a stranger whose reason the film declines to give. The stake was real: the country music establishment took offence, and the form had no commercial precedent at this length. Held short of the top because Altman’s previous five years had prepared the method, and the wager was placed by a director at the height of his licence.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Substitute another form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that a society is a field of performances that cross without meeting, and the mosaic is the instrument: characters pass one another at the airport, in the pile-up on the freeway, at the hospital and in the clubs, and the viewer, like the city, attends to whoever is loudest. The sound enacts it: the slogans of the Walker truck bleed into a love scene, and conversations overlap so that what is said matters less than who is heard. Told through one protagonist it would be a story about a singer or a campaign; told as a plot it would explain the killing. The threads converge only at the Parthenon, in one crowd, and the convergence is a murder and a song. Held a little below the top where the mosaic adds rather than builds.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence across fifty-one years. The questions stay open: whether the film despises or loves its singers and their audience, an argument joined by the Nashville establishment in the year of release and still run; why Kenny shoots Barbara Jean; whether the closing song is the nation’s anaesthesia, its resilience or both; what the film knows of Linnea, whose children and whose evening with Tom carry the one interior life it protects. Later politics, with the outsider candidate who is pure voice and slogan, and later celebrity culture have renewed it, so that it has been watched again as prophecy more than once. Formally it yields on return, because a second viewing hears different voices in the same scenes. Held at the figure because part of the yield is topical recognition, which renews by event rather than by depth.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1970s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of form: the film made the network narrative a major form for feature cinema, a whole society in one structure without a centre, and joined it to a sound design that changed what film dialogue could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Altman’s own A Wedding (1978) and his later ensemble films; Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999), which declare the debt; the ensemble and network films of the 1990s and 2000s; the practice of radio microphones on many actors at once; the political film of performance and media. The reach is wide among directors and narrower in the public’s sense of what a film is than that of the decade’s popular landmarks, and part of the network line descends from television.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric over fifty-one years. The form survives whole: one version as released, nothing lost, restorations that only repair. Presence has been continuous: revivals, television, home video, steady placing in critics’ lists, and a fixed place in the teaching of American film of the 1970s. Two charges hold it below the usual mark for its age. The surface is fixed to its year: the bicentennial, the Replacement Party and the mood after Watergate are worn openly, and they date it more than most films of the period. And its presence, steady among critics and filmmakers, is narrower than that of the period’s popular classics and has not passed far beyond cinema. The figure stands between the usual step for fifty years and the charged one.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in two places: the management of twenty-four principals across five days without a lost thread, and the sound, whose mixing of many live voices makes the film’s way of knowing possible. Paul Lohmann’s camera, with Altman’s zooms and slow drifts across crowds, finds faces inside masses; the editing of Sidney Levin and Dennis M. Hill moves from thread to thread on rhyme and sound rather than plot. The performances are many and exact: Henry Gibson’s Haven, vain and brave; Ronee Blakley’s Barbara Jean, whose breakdown on stage is among the best-acted scenes of the decade; Lily Tomlin’s Linnea, whose stillness at the Exit Inn carries the film’s one love. The charges are real: Geraldine Chaplin’s Opal is caricature, the zoom is sometimes reflex, and looseness, the method, costs exactness in places.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Opal’s farcical tour of the car lot and the school buses, and the shooting at the Parthenon. One law governs both: everyone is performing for an audience, and the performance replaces attention to the person in front of them. Opal narrates the city into a microphone without seeing it; Kenny ends one performance with a gun, and the crowd is handed another. The same law covers Haven’s household, Sueleen’s striptease, Triplette’s campaign and Tom’s seductions. Only Linnea, signing to her deaf children, stands outside it, and the exception confirms the law. The range runs from revue comedy to assassination. The strain is at the margins: the cameos and Opal’s broadest moments obey the satire rather than the law, and the Tricycle Man belongs to the director’s signature rather than to the world.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure. The state, in the Walker campaign and its advance men; the economy, in the recording business and the management of singers in a city of studios; the family, in the Reese marriage and the deaf children, in the Greens, in Haven’s household; race, in Tommy Brown, a black star in a white industry, and in the choir; war, in Private Kelly and the Vietnam beneath the bicentennial; the sacred, in the Sunday churches; death, in Mrs. Green and Barbara Jean; history, in the bicentennial and the Kennedys; consciousness, held lightly, chiefly in Linnea and Barbara Jean. The mosaic integrates them in the city and in the final crowd. What holds the axis: consciousness is mostly surface by design, the city’s labour is seen only as performance, and the natural order is absent.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.7, then The Unconcealment, Pressure on Tradition, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.6. A mosaic of crossing performances that is the instrument of what the film knows; a studio release of 160 minutes with no protagonist and a sound field in which the listener must choose; a disclosure that politics, celebrity, religion and entertainment are one economy of performance that absorbs the nation’s violence; and a command of twenty-four lives across five days without a lost thread.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9: the multiplicity is required, since the subject is a crowd, but Opal’s repeated set pieces, the cameos, the Tricycle Man, several songs that outrun the drama and L.A. Joan’s circling thread could go without loss. Above it, The Sublime at 8.2, where the summits are high and several but the stretches between them are level by design, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, built at the Parthenon and evoked through place and allusion elsewhere.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis: The Swerve at 8.7, The Unconcealment at 8.6, Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, unmet on The Archetypal Deep, and by its aggregate, 8.5 from a sum of 101.6, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Nashville as released by Paramount in June 1975, the theatrical cut of about 160 minutes (sources give 159 or 160), from the recording studio to the camera’s rise above the Parthenon: directed by Robert Altman from a screenplay by Joan Tewkesbury, photographed by Paul Lohmann, edited by Sidney Levin and Dennis M. Hill, with music supervised and arranged by Richard Baskin. No other version has been released, and no other is judged. No print, script or recording was consulted. No line of dialogue is quoted; song titles are given where they are certain, and speech is described. Details that could not be verified, among them the film’s financing before Paramount, the recording system used for the sound and its priority, the number of songs, the days of the week the story covers, the running order of the middle days and the film’s later honours and editions, are not given.