Bibi Andersson | Through the Shattered Lens

(Lisa recently discovered that she only has about 8 hours of space left on her DVR! It turns out that she’s been recording movies from July and she just hasn’t gotten around to watching and reviewing them yet. So, once again, Lisa is cleaning out her DVR! She is going to try to watch and review 52 movies by Wednesday, November 30th! Will she make it? Keep checking the site to find out!)

The 1979 post-apocalyptic film Quintet aired on FXM on November 15th. I recorded it because this film is often cited as being one of director Robert Altman’s worst but I’ve also read some very passionate defenses of Quintet. Since I’ve enjoyed several of Altman’s films (Nashville, Gosford Park, Short Cuts, The Company, The Player, The Long Goodbye, and many more), I wanted to experience Quintet for myself.

I mean, seriously — a postapocalyptic sci-fi film from Robert Altman!? That would have to be at least interesting, right?

Anyway, I watched Quintet and to be honest, I wasn’t really sure what the Hell was going on for most of the film. Things made a bit more sense after I did a little bit of research and I discovered that Quintet was 1) inspired by a fragment of a dream that Altman had and 2) went into production despite not having a completed script.

Quintet opens with a breath-taking shot of a frozen landscape. There’s been a new ice age. The entire Earth is frozen. There’s only a few hundred humans left and their number is rapidly dwindling. Some, like Essex (Paul Newman) and Vivia (Brigitte Fossey) spend their days hiking across the tundra and hunting seals. Others — like practically everyone else in the entire freaking film — spend their times in ramshackle villages, pursuing what little pleasure they can find while waiting to die.

In this new frozen world, the most popular activity — outside of getting drunk — is playing a board game called Quintet. I have no idea how Quintet is played, though the film is full of scenes of people playing it. From what we do see, it really doesn’t look like that fun of a game but I guess you can’t be picky when you’re waiting to freeze to death. I mean, honestly, if the world’s ending, I’d rather play a board game than charades.

Anyway, in one of the frozen towns, a group of people are having a Quintet tournament, with the rule being that, once you’re eliminated in the board game, you are also killed in real life. (And again, this is where it would have been helpful for the film to take just a few minutes to clarify just how exactly Quintet is played.) One of the Quintet players is killed by a bomb, which unfortunately blows up Viva as well. Seeking revenge (or, at least, I’m guessing that was his motivation because Paul Newman didn’t exactly give the most communicative performance of his career in Quintet), Essex assumes a fake identity and enters the tournament.

Soon, he’s running around the frozen landscape, killing people. He knows that the final player standing will receive a prize of some sort but he doesn’t know what the prize is. How deep! Or something.

Dammit, I really wanted to defend Quintet. I really did. Whenever I see a movie that has gotten almost universally negative reviews, my natural instinct is to try to find something good about it. And I will say this: visually, Quintet is fascinating. A lot of care was put into creating this frozen world and it’s interesting to note how every location is decorated by elaborate ice sculptors. The ice may be destroying civilization but it can’t squelch humanity’s natural creativity.

Unfortunately, Quintet may be well-designed but it’s also a painfully slow film. Just because the film takes place on a glacier, that doesn’t mean that it needs to move like one. The slow pace is not helped by the fact that many of the characters have a tendency to suddenly start delivering these faux profound philosophical monologues, the majority of which are about as deep as the typical Tumblr post.

Quintet stars Paul Newman, who was both an iconic movie star and a legitimately great actor. He spends most of Quintet alternating between looking confused and looking stoic. That said, it’s always interesting to watch an actor like Paul Newman slog his way through an artistic misfire like WUSA or Quintet. Let’s give Paul Newman some credit: he delivered his lines with a straight face. Just as Essex knew he was trapped on a glacier, Paul Newman understood that was trapped in Quintet. Both did what they had to do to survive.

Robert Altman was a great director but Quintet is not a great film.

It happens.

What happened when famed action star Steve McQueen met playwright Henrik Ibsen?

Here’s Steve McQueen in The Great Escape:

Steve McQueen In The Great Escape

This is Steve McQueen in Bullitt:

Steve McQueen in Bullitt

Here’s Steve McQueen with his future wife, Ali MacGraw, in The Getaway:

Steve McQueen in The Getaway

And finally, here’s Steve McQueen starring in An Enemy of the People:

Steve McQueen in Enemy of the People

In the four years between appearing in the Oscar-nominated The Towering Inferno and starring in An Enemy of the People, McQueen notoriously turned down several high-profile projects. He turned down the lead role in Sorcerer because director William Friedkin would not write a role for MacGraw. He turned down the lead role in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of The Third Kind because he felt that he would not be able to cry on cue. (When Spielberg offered to take out the crying scene, McQueen replied that it was the best scene in the script.) Francis Ford Coppola could not afford his salary and McQueen missed out on the chance to play Capt. Willard in Apocalypse Now, a role he would have been perfect for.

AnEnemyOfThePeople_poster Instead, after a four years absence, McQueen returned to the screen in one of the least expected films of his career. Based on Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s original play, An Enemy of the People featured McQueen playing Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a scientist who discovers that his town’s local spring has been polluted by a tannery. When Stockmann reveals his findings, the town turns against him and his family. Stockmann has to decide whether to give into pressure from the town or to stay true to his principles.

As a star who was best known for playing stoic men of action, Steve McQueen was the last actor that anyone expected to appear in a film based on an Ibsen play. McQueen also insisted on playing the role with a heavy beard and a stocky build, making him virtually unrecognizable on-screen. Warner Bros. had no idea how to advertise An Enemy of The People so they didn’t. After a year of sitting on the shelf, An Enemy of the People was given a limited run in a few college towns. Many critics assumed that McQueen deliberately made an uncommercial movie just to get out of his contract with Warner Bros but, according to both Ali MacGraw and Marshall Terrill’s Steve McQueen: An American Rebel, McQueen was actually very enthusiastic about making An Enemy of the People and extremely disappointed when it was not a success. After the film failed to find an audience, Steve McQueen returned to appearing in action films and westerns.

Steve McQueen in Tom Horn (1980)

I recently saw An Enemy of the People on TCM and I thought it was slow and didactic. (It did not help that An Enemy of the People is Ibsen’s weakest play.) Especially in the beginning, there are a few scenes where McQueen struggles to hold his ground against co-stars Charles Durning and Richard Dysart, both of whom had far more theatrical experience. But McQueen gets better as the film goes on and proves that his deceptively casual approach can still be effective even when he is playing an intellectual who chooses to make his point with his words instead of his fists. He does a good job handling Ibsen’s notoriously wordy speeches. By the end of the movie, the idea of Steve McQueen in an Ibsen play no longer seems strange at all.

After An Enemy of the People, McQueen would only make two more movies before dying of cancer at the age of 50. Based on his performance as Dr. Stockmann, I believe that if McQueen had not died, he would have aged into being a great actor, in much the same way as Clint Eastwood. It’s unfortunate that McQueen never got that chance.

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