Altman and Capra are the two outstanding artists here, though at the opposite ends of their careers. In 1972, when this programme was recorded, Altman had recently experienced his first major success as a director with M*A*S*H (1970), a zeitgeist film that endorsed the ethics of the counterculture and condemned America’s disastrous Vietnam war.
M*A*S*H allowed Altman to make a series of significant films that satirised and revealed as vacuous American society and culture, films such as California Split (1974), Nashville (1975) and A Wedding (1978), though, in this period of Altman’s career, his most compelling works are probably McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971) and The Long Goodbye (1973), which take on the two most enduring American film genres, film noir and the Western.
McCabe and Mrs Miller is an anti-Western. It might be set in the West, but it’s not interested in any of the Homeric questions that Westerns – from John Ford to Sam Peckinpah – are interested in: the warrior code, courage, personal honour, a mastery of violence, etc; while The Long Goodbye is a contemporaneous version of the eponymous Raymond Chandler novel, in which Elliot Gould plays Phillip Marlow, private investigator, but not as the sharp-suited, sharp-witted American knight, but as a shabby, bumbling, mumbling dupe.
If Altman made films against the Hollywood tradition, Capra, on the other hand, is a a pioneer of such film, starting his career in silent films and then, when talkies came along, not only inventing romantic comedy, screwball comedy and the road movie all at once – in It Happened One Night (1934) – but also American ideology.
As John Cassavetes’, one of Capra’s greatest admirers said: ‘Maybe there really wasn't an America, it was only Frank Capra.’
Capra is best known for It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), which unjustly has become known as sentimental hokum – Capra corn – when a more sophisticated reading of the film reveals it to be a dark and desperate exploration of thwarted desire, failure and, indeed, the logical appeal of suicide.
Unfortunately, this misreading of Capra has somewhat diminished his reputation, and there is now a tendency to overlook the extraordinary series of films he made leading up to It’s a Wonderful Life – films such as Ladies of Leisure (1930), Dirigible (1930), The Miracle Woman (1931), Platinum Blonde (1931), Forbidden (1932), American Madness (1932), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937) – and, indeed, this sneering at Capra put paid to his career by the early 1950s.
For Capra, the demise of his career was down to a change in cultural tastes. This is how he described his fall from ideological favour:
‘The winds of change blew through the dream factories of make-believe, tore at its crinoline tatters... The hedonists, the homosexuals, the hemophiliac bleeding hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who substituted shock for talent, all cried: “Shake 'em! Rattle 'em! God is dead. Long live pleasure! Nudity? Yea! Wife-swapping? Yea! Liberate the world from prudery. Emancipate our films from morality!” Kill for thrill – shock! Shock! To hell with the good in man, dredge up his evil – shock! Shock!’
Ironically, it was a fall from favour that Altman, despite his obvious reverence for Capra, with his more countercultural sensibility, his more scathing approach to American values, his lack of sympathy for his characters’ dreams and his films’ inclination to pessimism, nihilism and cynicism, which contributed to tearing down what Capra had built.