Friday's Old Fashioned: Brewster McCloud (1970)

“Brewster McCloud” was the result of a familiar Hollywood scenario in which a filmmaker (Robert Altman) hits it so big (M.A.S.H.) that he receives carte blanche from the moneybags-that-be with his next movie. Even by those standards, though, the maverick Altman swung for the fences. Indeed, the original screenplay by Doran William Cannon, heavily revised by the director, was set in New York but moved to Houston, much of it taking place in and around the Astrodome, the so-called Eighth Wonder of the World, a monument to an American kind of excess destined to eventually go bust. “Brewster McCloud” begins with a bang, concludes with a bigger bang, and in-between exists as a wild, wandering satire of a country it can’t quite bring itself to believe in, maybe portending the 70s, maybe just responding to what was in the air. In opens with a deliberate Frank Debrin-ish recitation of the National Anthem by Daphne Heap, who is played by Margaret Hamilton, who was The Wicked Witch of the West, which Altman makes explicit by putting her in ruby slippers, giving way to a performance by the Merry Clayton of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem, and reminding us how good our national anthem could be, never mind our country.

Is it any wonder the eponymous Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort) has taken to a fallout shelter beneath the Astrodome where, aided by something like a revisionist Clarence Odbody, a guardian angel (Sally Kellerman) who seems to have lost her wings, he goes about building his own mechanical wings to take flight like a bird and escape all this mess. Costumed in a red and white striped shirt that evokes Where’s Waldo, Brewster never quite entirely takes flight as a true character himself. He often recedes into the background of a movie in which he’s nominally in the foreground, with Cort’s deliberately standoffish air never taking hold of the screen like Shelley DuVall as his unlikely kinda, sorta love interest, demonstrating in her inaugural onscreen role that she just seemed to arrive onscreen intact in her one-of-a-kind eccentric air.

Then again, in the parallel sequences of an unnamed professor (René Auberjonois) rattling on and on about birds, these monologues essentially describing the behavior of Brewster, it’s a little like he’s in a National Geographic special, a specimen being observed. And he’s a specimen stranded in a world of ignoramuses, racists, and elites. Altman doesn’t let us simply work that out for ourselves; he makes it as pointed as possible, highlighted in how he calls these, shall we say, deplorables out by having bird poop repeatedly fall on them from above, ravens as sort of spiritual hecklers, calling strikes and balls on the playing God phonies below.

The denouement, though, in which Brewster does take to the air with his artificial wings is limited to the Astrodome’s interior, meaning that despite the initial free-feeling nature of the scene, undergirded with inspiring music, he’s still a caged bird. Even then, I wasn’t quite ready for the utterly dark turn this moment takes, joy giving way to agony giving way to horror. And if I wasn’t quite ready for it, I was even less ready for how the utterly dark turn took another turn right back into joy, albeit a brutally ironic kind of joy, deriding breaking the fourth wall to essentially invite us into the horror, a beautifully bewildering coda. It’s nothing new, of course, both before and after “Brewster McCloud,” to equate our society with a bloodthirsty circus crowd but rarely have I seen it conveyed with such manic rage.