>>If not in Nashville, then in any of his other films you can find lots of
>>contempt for women. And men. And, seemingly, anyone who's not Robert Altman.
>Who said otherwise? To anyone who saw _M*A*S*H*_ (1970), that's already
>obvious (the most glaringly so in the "Hot Lips" jokes at the expense of
>Major Margaret O'Houlihan played by Sally Kellerman). However, in
>_Nashville_ and _McCabe & Mrs. Miller_, excellent performances given by
>Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, and Julie Christie bring to the films a feminist
>dimension entirely missing from other Altman films.
So if a film has a compelling female performance, it's de facto feminist? Then I need to go back and view some of those great old Hollywood damsel-in-distress films; perhaps Fay Wray's turn in King Kong was a harbinger of feminism to come.
I won't speak to Nashville b/c my memory of it's sketchy, but I missed the feminism of Julie Christie in McCabe. Was it because she was "strong"? Well, I can think, for instance, of several very nonfeminist Joan Crawford roles where she was strong. Did Julie's feminism come into play because she was an opium fiend? or because she conspired with Warren Beatty to make lots of money? I guess I am missing what was feminist about her character, or in her portrayal of it.
Okay, perhaps I'm being too rigid, both in my interpretations of the films and in my definition of what is feminist. But that is kind of my point: How do you decide that the "Hot Lips" jokes reflect on the woman, not on the men saying them, but that the strip(non)tease in Nashville reflects on the men, not the woman? It's an honest question, to which "excellent performances" is not a sufficient answer.
(Let me say that this, for me, doesn't reflect on Julie Christie; in fact, my feelings about her verge on the obsessive--but I won't bore you with that. I will say that I see more feminist content in her earlier performances, from the mid to late 60s, such as in Billy Liar and Far From the Madding Crowd--even Dr. Zhivago.)
>Also, films reclect the times in which they were
>made; it is not insiginificant that _Nashville_ was made in 1975 and
>_McCabe and Mrs. Miller_ 1971, respectively.
Perhaps you're right. That years were, after all, mostly concurrent with the extremely mysoginistic counterculture.
Eric