Brewster McCloud (1970)

Memorable, crazy movie

Just perfect...

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The key to understanding this film is to realize it is unmistakably surrealist in the formal sense - directly comparable to the works of European Surrealists like for example Luis Buñuel. His film "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" came out in '72, that is after Brewster McCloud, and if you've seen both films, it is not a stretch at all to surmise that it may well have been Buñuel who was influenced by Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud (which after all came out two years before Buñuel's film.) And as in Buñuel's film, the surrealism in Brewster McCloud certainly has a humorous aspect, but is at its heart a vehicle for subversive but oblique social commentary: oblique because this movie in its ultra-hip cool sensibility would feel obliged to start mocking itself if it actually started preaching to anyone. But of course this film does actually mock itself, along with everything else in the known universe. That is what surrealism is: When you start literally mocking *everything* it ceases to be funny, and rather something much more fundamentally disturbing. And yet this film is easily one of the most accessible of the truly surrealist masterpieces. It is good-natured about everyone and everything it mocks.One of the pleasant surprises I had upon discovering this film was how realistically it portrays Texans and Houstonians. There is no hackneyed accents or cowboy hats - it really does depict Texans (and specifically Houstonians) as they are - at least as they were in 1970. I'll give one example: The undercover cop is at the zoo with his wife and kid, and his wife says, "Johnny wants to go see the monkeys", and the dad responds, "Well, let him go to N*gger Town then." Now, as a matter of fact, I have scores of relatives from Houston, and I remember as a child how people from Houston talked around 1970, and I know that that was a common but offensive colloquialism for the black part of town in Houston back then. So the period detail is just spot on. And there's no judgment when the character says this. It could be he dies mysteriously later in the film with bird poop on him, but so do a dozen other characters - not all of them bad. And also, they must have had real Houston cops playing some of the cops in the film, or they might as well have. But beyond the negative attributes of the period, this film is in many ways a heartfelt homage to the city of Houston - there are plenty of just plain normal folks who must have been local extras plunked down into this phantasmagoria of a film.When I say "surrealist" one big aspect of that is the disjointed, disengaged banal "conversations" between various characters, where they seem to be saying stuff at random, and not even paying attention to each other. And yet its still simply fascinating for some odd reason to listen to them - you are literally hanging on every meaningless word. Sally Kellerman is some sort of angel, but for no apparent reason decides to shop-lift a huge amount of film while at the camera store. When the employee who was previously lusting after her chases her down to confront her about the theft, she start pulling bottles of shampoo out of her purse and giving some convoluted explanation why she has so much shampoo, which has nothing to do with any action that has transpired previously in the film. But even banal bits of conversation that are superficially "normal" come off as highly ironic. Shelly Duvall throws up over the railing at the Astrodome, her boyfriend walks up right then and they passionately kiss right after she throws up. Then they notice his dad who is cop is dead nearby, And Shelly says, "What should we do". And her boyfriend says, "Call the cops." And he reaches down and starts pulling something out of the dead guy's shirt pocket, and Shelly Duvall says, "What are you doing?" And he responds, "Getting the phone number." Oh well, its interesting in the film for some reason.And then there are an unending series of clever and surprising visual gags throughout the film that seem to have occurred by accident somehow. At other times there is visual lyricism and poetry. But this film never ever stops surprising you - by the end it is wowing us with technological wizardry because the depiction of the main character's flying machine is truly amazing. And as I indicated it is somehow, above all of this, a film about an actual real place -Houston Texas - and it has plenty of elements that would undeniably appeal to a lot of real good old boys from Texas - things like great sounding cars like Camaro Z28's and Roadrunners and car chases.It is without question in the top five of Robert Altman's films and I never heard about it till last night. BIll Hader from Saturday Night Live was a guest on Turner Classic Movies and Brewster McCloud was one of four films he had selected as personal favorites of his that were shown. (The others were Rashomon, This is Spinal Tap, and something else. I had never seen all of Rashomon before either - its overrated.) But that old guy who is the standard host on TCM seemed mystified or something by Hader's choice of Brewster McCloud, but regardless, its a really, really memorable film.

Brewster McCloud (1970), set in Houston in the late 1960s, is a Robert Altman comedy. One reference source describes it as a quirky comedy, which may be the best adjective to attach. The movie is about birds, and things bird-like, in three ways: First, Rene Auberjonois appears intermittently as a gawking professor of ornithology, to lecture the audience on matters avian. As the film progresses, he comes more and more to resemble his subject. Second, Bud Cort lives surreptitiously in a cubbyhole of the Astrodome, where he has fashioned a set of wings and is attempting to learn to fly, as in human-powered flight in something of a throwback to before the Wright brothers. Third, there occurs in Houston an inexplicable series of deaths, possibly murders. A common element is that the deceased are found with....well, let's stop there, tiptoeing toward the edge without risking falling off the cliff into a spoiler.Sally Kellerman plays a quasi-angelic character who watches over Cort's welfare. We have also the young Shelley Duvall, ten years before her appearance as Jack Nicholson's wife in The Shining (1980), in the role of an Astrodome tour guide. Michael Murphy plays the San Francisco detective who is summoned to Texas to investigate what is going on. His big decision each morning is to decide on the color de jour for his trademark gun holster and matching turtleneck.As was said, quirky.

This is one of my Top 10 Movies! It was when I saw it and it still is. It is the story of Sally Kellerman teaching Bud Cort how to fly in the Houston Astrodome. The humor is incredible, probably the best piece is when the servant tries to describe how tall a person was to a detective. The juxtaposition of the participants positions and the spoken words make it memorably funny. And when Rene A. starts out as a person and slowly evolves into a bird is just a wonderful thing to watch and a great acting feat. One of Robert Altman's best, it is a master of comedy and staging. I recommend this movie highly and I wish that it was available on DVD. I would buy it tomorrow.

If ever there was a love it or hate it film, this is it."Brewster McCloud" is a glorious mess, an imperfect film in that fascinatingly imperfect way that only Robert Altman could pull off. I admit that much of my affection for this film lies in the fact that I studied it in a Robert Altman seminar; each of us picked one movie to watch, analyze and report back on to the class, and this was mine. I was completely befuddled by it the first time I watched it, but then after I'd seen it three or four times, trying to make sense of it in order to talk to the class about it, I sort of fell in love with it.Brewster, played perfectly by Bud Cort, lives in the Houston Astrodome and harbors the intense desire to fly. His efforts in that direction are complicated by any number of odd-ball characters, including a rich tycoon for whom he works as a chauffeur (an unrecognizable Stacy Keach delivers a howler of a performance as the tycoon, and has far too little screen time), a private investigator (Michael Murphy) with a penchant for colorful turtlenecks who's investigating a series of murders around the city, and a couple of bizarre female love interests, played respectively by Jennifer Salt and a divinely whacked out Shelley Duvall. Meanwhile, a sort of guardian angel (Sally Kellerman) with scars on her back where wings used to be follows Brewster around and may just be responsible for the murders taking place around the city (every corpse the cops find is splattered with bird crap). And last but not least, in perhaps the most bizarre role (and that's saying something in this movie), Rene Auberjonois plays some kind of professor delivering a lecture on man's desire to fly, who serves as a kind of narrator for the film and gradually turns into a bird himself.Much of the film doesn't really make any sense in a conventional way, even after multiple viewings. The film is a lot like Altman's break out hit, "MASH," from the same year, with the overlapping dialogue, chaotic action and super-sarcastic sense of humour, but it doesn't have a universal topic like war around which to anchor itself, and many viewers might feel like they're watching an extended inside joke not meant for them. What is one to make, for example, of the use of Margaret Mitchell as a cranky old lady whose face we never see but whose voice is ingrained in our collective subconscious, and who is wearing an awfully familiar pair of ruby slippers when her body is found, victim to the mysterious avian serial killer? The allusion to "The Wizard of Oz" of course is obvious, but what purpose does it serve? The same can be said of Murphy's hilarious, dead-pan parody of Steve McQueen's character Bullitt, and the movie even includes a ridiculous and long high-speed car chase that pays homage to the one in that 1968 hit. It's all very funny, and maybe that's point enough, but I can't pretend to know what Altman was trying to say.But the ending, after all the glibness that has preceded it, comes to a poignant and quite emotionally affecting conclusion. Bud Cort is the perfect actor to make us root for Brewster, and once we see this strange and even rather creepy kid get himself airborne with a set of makeshift wings, our hearts soar and we want to see him achieve the impossible. Watching him frantically flapping his wings as he sails around the Astrodome, only to plummet to his death, offers a sad reminder that some dreams, no matter what optimists may say, are never attainable.Believe it or not, "Brewster McCloud" was the 1970 release that Altman thought would be the biggest hit, and he was very disappointed when "MASH" scored five Academy Award nominations and "Brewster" was ignored. One can't even conceive how Altman ever thought the stuffy Academy would go for something as esoteric as this.Grade: A