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Some great directors are born, while others must work hard to achieve their status. If we are to judge by Robert Altman’s “Countdown,” which will be shown at the Biograph on Friday as part of the Altman festival, he falls into the second category. It’s a film that’s intermittently interesting, frequently boring, and gives no indication of the riches to come in the form of shows like “MASH,” “Nashville,” and “Three Women.”
In it, James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Ted Knight star in the story of a last-ditch American attempt to beat the Russians to the moon. They were all unknowns at the time of their appearance (prophetically playing a self-important public relations spokesman for the U.S. space program). It is the bitterness of Duvall (a trained military pilot) when Caan (a civilian geologist) is chosen as the pilot for the mission that drives the plot of the film, in its most basic form.
However, the film appears to be oddly disjointed, and the first hour is devoted to long stretches of uninteresting, everyday dialogue. There is no tension, no genuine conflict, no humor, and no suspense in this film. Instead of feeling like a space adventure, “Countdown” comes across as an oddly low-keyed exercise in corporate intra-fighting. Only the climactic scenes, in which Caan survives a perilous space flight and then wanders through a lunar landscape, hold our attention (there’s a particularly lovely scene involving American and Russian flags and a small toy mouse, for example).
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It’s important to note that “Countdown” is not a film that Altman himself claims to be entirely his own work. It was his first theatrical feature since two early short films, “The Delinquents” (1955) and “The James Dean Story” (1956), which were both released by Warner Brothers in 1967. (1957). During the decade in between, he worked as a director for television series such as Combat. And he doesn’t appear to have had complete control over the decision to return to making feature films.
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He was produced by William (Cannon) Conrad, who, in hindsight, does not appear to have been the best choice to work with Altman on the project. The painfully obvious sound track music, or the unbelievable false scene at a party where everyone gathers around to listen to an amateur folk singer (if this scene were promoting a Schlitzfest, we’d understand), could all have been dictated by Conrad or someone else at Warner Brothers, according to some theories.
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There are also some significant issues with the credibility of the plot. First, the United States must land a life-support capsule on the moon, and then send poor James Caan up there with a one-way ticket to crawl into the capsule and wait out the 10 months it will take before the Americans can send up another spaceship to bring him back to Earth, if they are successful. Evel Knievel was destined to be the pilot for this mission.
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This must not have been an auspicious start to the director’s career, as he would go on to become one of our most inventive and original directors in a matter of years after making “Countdown.” According to reports, the studio screening at Warner Brothers was a disaster (Jack Warner hated the film). Several negative reviews were written about the New York debut (“Simply stultifying… slack…. cliché-ridden… listless… dreary,” according to Thompson of the New York Times). The studio pulled the film from national distribution and mercilessly edited it down from 101 minutes to 73 minutes for the British release, which was a critical success.
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“Countdown” is the only uncut 35mm copy of the film that has survived, and it is the mint-fresh copy from the Warner Brothers vault that will be shown at the Biograph on Friday. It was obtained through the intervention of director Robert Altman, and it should be noted that Friday will likely be your only opportunity to see this film in a theater. The other half of the double bill is Altman’s inspired tragicomedy “MASH,” which was released only two years after “MASH.” At the very least, he didn’t look back after he released “Countdown.” Thank God.
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