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Of all the reasons for which Nashville will be remembered, not the least significant is the movie debut of Lily Tomlin, extraordinary in the role of an upper-middle-class suburban wife who sings with a black gospel group. Anyone who knows Tomlin's particularly shrewd and quirky kind of comedy from television will not be surprised that her same skills come through here: intelligence, a dead-on perception of people that can be funny or rueful (or both at once), a uniquely intriguing mixture of sensuality and chagrin. There is hardly a false moment in her performance, never a trace of calculation or caricature. She is a major actress.
∙ Jay Cocks
Robert Altman has a healthy respect both for good movies and a good time. Indeed, for him, the two often go together. "Making movies is like playing baseball—the fun is the playing," he says in a benevolently ursine growl. To keep the juices flowing and spirits running high, Altman enjoys and enforces a continuous party atmosphere; he likes to keep cast and crew together both onset and off hours. "At the end of the day, I drink a lot, smoke a lot of dope, and loosen up," Altman, 50, explained to TIME'S Jean Vallely. Katherine Reed, Altman's third wife (they have been married for 16 years), corroborates Altman's account. "My husband's favorite things are smoking dope and having good parties."
The camaraderie around an Altman film influences, sometimes even shapes the final result. "I think of California Split as 'my Altman experience,' " George Segal says. "He makes you believe you can do anything." On Nashville, Altman put the entire cast and crew up at the same motel, expected performers to stick around all through the shooting and paid his stars a modest $1,000 for each of the ten weeks of shooting. During working periods, he would treat them with the sort of care and give them the kind of controlled freedom that make actors swear lifelong loyalty to a director. Ronee Blakley wrote her own onstage mad scene; Barbara Baxley provided a moving drunken meditation on the Kennedy brothers.
"Working with Bob is like building him a train," says Writer Joan Tewkesbury. "You've got to enter through the engine and leave through the caboose. How you get through the cars in between doesn't really matter." Altman is both current headmaster and leading pupil in what might be called the grab-it-and-go-with-it school of film making, where accidents and incidental inspirations are encouraged, then capitalized on. The results of this sort of freewheeling are frequently felicitous (as in Nashville or last year's Thieves Like Us), sometimes unfocused and disconcerting. Elliott Kastner, producer of The Long Goodbye, one of Altman's muzziest and (as the director himself concedes) least satisfying films, characterizes his former collaborator with epithets like "narcissistic," "totally contemptuous," "perverse."