Nashville: It Don’t Worry Me

A dramatic national mood of restless discontent. A country-based populist uprising. Culture wars. A madman’s botched political assassination. We’ve been here before. Robert Altman’s Nashville was one of the most critically praised movies of the Seventies, one that was once confidently predicted to change film history, if not modern American history itself. It started filming in Tennessee on July 9, 1974, fifty years ago this month.

This was a moment when pre-Carter Democrats uneasily glimpsed the disruptive possibilities of populist anger. Nashville’s fictional third-party insurgent, John Philip Walker, is never seen, but his Southern voice booms out of sound trucks. He’s closer to a Ross Perot or a Ron Paul than to Donald Trump, but…the parallel is close enough. A half century on, Nashville is remembered but is not nearly the towering landmark in film history it once seemed when it first opened, in the Left-infused screen year of 1975.

Part scripted, part improvised, the actors helped write their own dialog and even wrote and performed their own songs. There wasn’t one central star, but a whole sprawling ensemble cast. All this sounded very collective and progressive to Altman’s many cheerleaders in the press.

The critics adored it. But the city it was named for—and its music industry—have always disliked it. It was pretentious, condescending, and wildly overestimated, and yet…I hate to admit it; despite its flaws, it’s worth seeing. It enters the cynical half-admiring world of Screwtape’s Screening Room as successful media manipulation worth examining. Nashville is an ungainly mess, but it’s got something.

While the cast and crew worked through a hot summer in Nashville, the Seventies, almost halfway through, were still very much a work in progress. The game-changing mega-success of Jaws was still a year in the future; Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were still only rough draft scripts, years away from actual production. No Saturday Night Live yet, no Saturday Night Fever.

Robert Altman had an unusual path to a Hollywood director’s chair. A WWII veteran, he got his start in the Midwest, making industrial and educational films. He moved to the West Coast and managed to work his way into directing filmed TV series, shows like Peter Gunn and Bonanza. Altman was anything but an overnight success, forming a lasting, resentful chip on his shoulder as other men his age reached the top: Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Blake Edwards. Then in 1970, M*A*S*H not only put Altman on the map but made him one of the star directors of the decade. He was 45. Five years later Nashville (1975) was widely proclaimed to be his masterpiece.

Altman promoted himself as a male feminist and later pledged his profits from 1978’s The Wedding as a donation to the Equal Rights Amendment. This was a headline-grabber in ’78, since it could have amounted to $2 million. Of course, the film never went into profit, so it was a moot point. Despite Robert Altman’s Norman Lear-era Hollywood liberal politics, in Nashville, women are given over to fashionable promiscuity, so much so that it embarrassed actor Keith Carradine, who was the fictional bedmate of several of them. “Why would they do this?”, he asked in a plaintive note to the screenwriter.

An ambitious singer played by Gwen Welles endures a scene of brutally direct, over-the-top sexism when a hooting crowd of men turns her song into a striptease. And yet, I was pleased to read, it was difficult to get male extras to cooperate in filming this bar scene. Long before there was feminism down South, there was a residual sense of decency. Altman didn’t count on local men turning down his paycheck, so he had to press some of the crew into on-camera duty.

The courtly Missourian sometimes treated family relationships with an almost gleeful mean-spiritedness. Nothing delighted him more in a script than people close to each other hurling angry insults that they’ll never be able to take back.

Robert Altman’s relatively humble early years of shooting 16mm “Industrials” made him a little more knowledgeable about tech issues than the average director. This was routinely exaggerated to the skies by critics who wanted a Stanley Kubrick that the Left could claim as its own (They were thrilled by Strangelove, baffled by 2001, and totally put off by the anti-utopian message of A Clockwork Orange.) In the mid-Seventies many of them fixed on Altman as an artistic savior and his technical abilities were part of the reason.

The prime example in Nashville was the climax of the movie, which takes place at a political rally in Parthenon Park. There, the dozen or so plot lines are finally tied together. This was done with constant use of “overtalk,” overlapping dialog, using a standard multitrack recording system to seemingly drift freely from conversation to conversation. Everyone had their own radio mike, and every channel was recorded separately, so in the mix it just required fading from one to another. Few film critics or journalists have the faintest idea how these things are done, so the film’s minor innovations were treated with slack-jawed awe.

The film’s editor and his crew worked with Altman to construct the complicated scene. Basically, they first put in the absolute essential moments, then went back and scooped out some time for important but less central reminders of who else is in the crowd, and who else is coming up soon in the mix. The editors of any courtroom drama would know the drill. Stay with the action, tease what’s ahead.

Barbara Harris, playing a naïve singer, finally gets her big break in tragic circumstances. Tentatively, ignored by the crowd at first, she gets their attention with a quavering voice and a song they all join in with, “It Don’t Worry Me.” It ends there, with an echo of bloodshed and a fluttering flag in the sky.

You don’t have to believe the movie’s whole implied package of Bicentennial-America-is-somehow-doomed to find that final tilt-and-fade an unexpectedly moving ending, better than it deserves to be.