|
The perfect couple is a glamour-puss and her baronial beau miming infatuation, Robert Altman's camera passes them to focus instead on Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin. He's a furniture salesman and she's a backup singer, matched by video dating services and huddled in the Los Angeles Philharmonic audience, a sudden downpour gives a premonition of The Company. (The first kiss between the drenched figures is negotiated in a service elevator, something of an Ermanno Olmi grace note.) The second date doesn't take off until she bops him on the noggin with a poker, it continues with growing ardor in the emergency room: "I don't think you two should be kissing while I'm suturing." Chayefsky's "dogs" (Marty), a world of "freaks" and "weirdos" musically separated and reconciled. On one side the rigid rituals and black suits of the Old World family lorded over by the overbearing patriarch (Tito Vandis), on the other the open road and blurred lines of the pop-folk commune led by the shaggy vocalist (Ted Neeley). Too tight, too loose, just right at last. "Think of me as a Jewish mother with a Greek remedy." A consciously modest reflection of Nashville along the lines of a romantic comedy, a sketch or rather a duet enlarged by emotive vibrancy—in the way Dooley is unclasped from his Wimpy rock to race after his beloved's tour bus, or in how scrawny-frizzy Heflin blooms when she steps before a microphone with a bluesy number. "Love is stronger in the eye of the hurricane," as goes the song, heard by Altman and Cassavetes (Minnie and Moskowitz) and anyone else who wonders what a Borzage tale in the Seventies would be like. With Belita Moreno, Henry Gibson, Dennis Franz, Ann Ryerson, Heather MacRae, and Allan F. Nicholls.
--- Fernando F. Croce |