G Wood | Through the Shattered Lens

First released in 1970, Brewster McCloud takes place in Houston.

A series of murders have occurred in the city. The victims have all been older authority figures, like decrepit landlord Abraham Wright (Stacy Keach, under a ton of old age makeup) or demanding society matron Daphne Heap (Margaret Hamilton, who decades earlier had played The Wicked Witch in The Wizard Of Oz). The victims all appear to have been killed by strangulation and all of them are covered in bird droppings. Perplexed, the Houston authorities call in Detective Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy) from San Francisco. Shaft only wears turtlenecks and he has piercing blue eyes. He looks like the type of guy you would call to solve a mystery like this one. It’s only later in the film that we discover his blue eyes are due to the contact lenses that he’s wearing. Frank Shaft is someone who very much understands the importance of appearance. As one detective puts it, when it comes to Shaft’s reputation, “The Santa Barbara Strangler turned himself in to him. He must have really trusted him.”

Perhaps the murders are connected to Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort), who lives in a bunker underneath the Astrodome and who seems to be fascinated with birds. Brewster dreams of being able to fly just like a bird and he’s spent quite some time building himself a set of artificial wings. A mysterious woman (Sally Kellerman) who wears only a trenchcoat and who has scars on her shoulder blades that would seem to indicate that she once had wings continually visits Brewster and encourages him to pursue his dream. However, she warns him that he will only be able to fly as long as he remains a virgin. If he ever has sex, he will crash to the ground.

Brewster thinks that he can handle that. Then he meets a tour guide named Suzanne Davis (Shelley Duvall, in her film debut) and things start to change….

Brewster McCloud is a curious film. The story is regularly interrupted by a disheveled lecturer (Rene Auberjonois) who is very much into birds and who, over the course of the film, starts to more and more resemble a bird himself. The film is full of bird-related puns and there are moments when the characters seem to understand that they’re in a movie. Frank Shaft dresses like Steve McQueen in Bullitt and his blue contact lenses feel like his attempt to conform to the typical image of a movie hero. (A lengthy car chase also feels like a parody of Bullitt’s famous chase scene.) When the old woman played by Margaret Hamilton dies, the camera reveals that she’s wearing ruby slippers and a snippet of Somewhere Over The Rainbow is heard. As played by Bud Cort, Brewster is the perfect stand-in for the lost youth of middle class America. He knows that he’s rebelling against something but he doesn’t seem to be quite sure what. Brewster, like many idealists, is eventually distracted by his own desires and his once earnest plans come cashing down. Brewster becomes an Icarus figure in perhaps the most literal way possible, even if he doesn’t come anywhere close to reaching the sun. As with many of Altman’s films, Brewster McCloud is occasionally a bit too esoteric for its own good but it’s always watchable and it always engages with the mind of the viewer. One gets the feeling that many of the film’s mysteries are not necessarily meant to be solved. (Altman often said his best films were based on dreams and, as such, used dream logic.) With its mix of plain-spoken establishmentarians and quirky misfits, Brewster McCloud is not only a classic counterculture film but it’s also a portrait of Texas on the crossroads between the cultures of the past and the future.

Though it baffled critics when it was released, Brewster McCloud has gone on to become a cult film. It’s a bit of a like-it-or-hate-it type of film. I like it, even if I find it to be a bit too self-indulgent to truly love. Quentin Tarantino, for his part, hates it. Brewster McCloud was released in 1970, the same year as Altman’s Oscar-nominated M*A*S*H. (Both films have quite a few cast members in common.) Needless to say, the cheerfully and almost defiantly odd Brewster McCloud was pretty much ignored by the Academy.

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Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1972’s The Glass House! It can be viewed on YouTube.

The Glass House starts with three men arriving at a location that will define the next few months of their lives.

Brian Courtland (Clu Gulager) is a veteran of the Vietnam War. He spent part of his service working as a guard in the brig. Now that he’s back in the United States and in need of a regular paycheck, he has gotten a job working as a prison guard. Courtland is not naive about where he’s going to be working or who he is going to be working with. But he is an idealist, one who tries to treat everyone fairly and who hopes that he will be able to do some sort of good in his new position.

Alan (Kristoffer Tabori) is a young man who has been arrested for selling marijuana. He is quiet and just hoping to serve his time and then get on with his life. His fellow prisoners have different plans for him.

Finally, Jonathan Paige (Alan Alda) is a liberal professor who, in a moment of rage, accidentally killed a man in a fight. Convicted of manslaughter, Paige enters the prison in a daze and cannot stop flashing back to the one moment that changed his life forever. Paige is assigned to work in the pharmacy, where he meets a prisoner-turned-activist named Lennox (Billy Dee Williams). Paige struggles to retain his humanity despite the harsh conditions.

All three of the men find themselves having to deal with the attentions of Hugo Slocum (Vic Morrow), the predatory “king” of the prison. Slocum expects Paige to help him run drugs though the the pharmacy. Slocum preys on Alan and sends his gang to punish him when Alan refuses Slocum’s advances. And Slocum expects that Courtland will just be another corrupt guard who agrees to look the other way when it comes to Slocum’s activities. Courtland, however, turns out to have more integrity than anyone was expecting.

The Glass House opens with a title card, informing the viewer that the film was shot at an actual prison and that the majority of the people in the film were actual prisoners. Not surprisingly, The Glass House does feel authentic in a way that a lot of other films about incarceration does not. The prison is claustrophobic and dirty, with every crack in the wall reminding the prisoners and the viewer that no one cares about what happens there. The extras have the blank look of men who understand that showing any emotion will be taken a sign of a weakness. Made in 1972, at a time when America was still struggling to integrate, The Glass House takes place in an almost totally segregated world. The black prisoners stick together. The white prisoners stick together. Everyone understands that’s the way that it will always be and, as we see by the end of the film, that’s the way the guards and the warden (Dean Jagger) prefer it because that means almost any incident can be written off as a being “a race riot.”

The real actors amongst the population do a good job of blending into the surroundings. Alda, Williams, and Tabori all give good performance while Vic Morrow is truly menacing in the role of the vicious Slocum. Slocum may not be particularly bright but, because he has no conscience, he is uniquely suited to thrive in a world with no morality. The film’s best performance comes from Clu Gulager, who does a great job of portraying Courtland’s growing disgust with how the system works.

Though it’s over 50 years old, The Glass House is a still a powerful look at life on the fringes. Society, for the most part, doesn’t really care much about what happens to the incarcerated. This film makes a strong case that we probably should. One is left with little doubt that, even if relatively harmless prisoners like Paige and Campbell survive being locked up with men like Slocum, they’ll still be incapable of returning to the “real world” afterwards. The viewer, like Brian Courtland, is left to wonder how much corruption can be tolerated before enough is enough.