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Height of the space race, twilight of the studio system. Pilgrim Project to beat the Ruskies to the moon, "one man all the way," it kicks off as a civilian drama in Houston. Astronaut (Robert Duvall) wants it, trainee (James Caan) gets it, rivalry and fear line the journey. "The, uh, American Dream." "Oh brother." Jumbo-sized NASA paraphernalia fills the Panavision screen behind the opening credits, but Robert Altman in his first Hollywood production insists on low-key humanism—a zoom through the machinery before liftoff isolates the pilot's nervous, darting eyeball. The Hawksian torch passed on (clusters of overlapping dialogue point up the thread spun between classical and modernist searchers), Lean's The Sound Barrier and McCarey's Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! are also visible in the construction. Grueling zero-gravity training, journalists angling for a scoop, the wife (Joanna Moore) who discovers the mission's high-risk side and is ordered to smile. Away from blocky offices and conference rooms, a fine Minnellian soirée at the suburban bungalow: Robert Ridgely on guitar ("The moon is gonna be the death of me!"), a belligerently tippling Ted Knight, Barbara Baxley's harmonizing melancholia by the piano. Cape Kennedy in the middle of the night, the high-angled camera cranes down to Caan and Moore awake in bed and pans into the shadows before dissolving to the launching pad at dawn. "If I don't make this trip, then who the hell am I?" The voyager on the lunar surface (the Earth is seen framed between two craggy mountains) is curiously anticipatory of McCabe in the snow, Stars and Stripes plus Hammer and Sickle and a child's squeaky toy figure in Altman's admirably anticlimactic denouement. 2001: A Space Odyssey later that year offers a contrasting view. With Michael Murphy, Charles Aidman, Steve Ihnat, and Stephen Coit.
--- Fernando F. Croce |