The film double-header has become something of an emperor’s holy grail (to splice fables): with a paucity of revival theatres/drive-thru’s on hand, it seems the closest we’ll ever get to making out in the back of that topdown chevrolet is the gluttonous overkill of the 24 Hour Movie Marathon. In the meantime, stay-at-homes whose Eraserhead t-shirts have long since seen their last spin cycle can continue to wax elegiac: Everyone knows trash culture died the second it was wrung through the hands of a generation spoon-fed on borrowed nostalgia and nervously glanced is-anyone-else-dancing? Irony.

If three years of artschool have taught a person anything, it’s that a thousand undergrads at a thousand typewriters can divine a compare&contrast paper on any two art objects under the sun, according to your preregurgitated theoretical framework of choice. But it’s rare to find one film that seems so serendipitously catered to working over another, as was the case when I unwittingly screened Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon alongside Robert Altman’s The Company.

Like celluloid spooled through a disco ball, each is a glittering hallway of actor/director personalities spun round and refracted. It doesn’t take much to picture a sidelined Altman streaming directions to fey surrogate (played by Malcolm Macdowell and a yellow scarf) in his characteristic bitch-drawl: “Process, process, process.” Yet while surrogate-Bob to some extent becomes an outlet for creative megalomania, there’s a streak to his führer that’s more compulsive than sadistic, synching with the work-intensified aura of the company. In fact, the dancing here is held in such militant focus, that just about everything else congeals into mere surface-effect (even an audience-end has been cut out of just about all the production numbers). In line with this narrative totem-ing, Altman trades in the equichaos of his tableau-soundscapes for a visual suite that’s more discriminating: rehearsals and performances beat through the breathy wings of a frame preserved in mid-shot, while everything else hurls by mid-sentence, like an impresario’s afterthoughts. Coming into one of the most formless things Altman’s ever done, most view the taffy-like remains of Ry’s (played by Neva Campbell) romantic surge as a misstep, but he handles the union-between-skeletons with such a perfect sense of proportion that its innards invariably end up expanding between the cracks.

If The Company was all about the dimpled grace of Degas, then The Band Wagon springs from Toulouse-Lautrec’s mantle of carnivalesque pathos. Astaire, for one, acts with such a heart of plexiglass, that you hardly need the assistance of imdb to see through to the real-life machinations that might’ve spawned such a cinematic wet-trophy. If anything, it just goes to show that retrospect can truly be a bitch, ‘cos try as he may, Fred can’t escape the divine pull of a legacy sealed by his feet. But who can blame the guy, when compensation for working that hangdog pout is the hand of mega-babe Cyd Charisse? It’s a getup that makes most screen May-September romances look like they were counted in leap years, and only dampens the driving already-stench of lugubrious narcissism. On top of that, you have Astaire posited as an everyman of entertainment, warding off pretentious assholes and their higher notions at every step; though if you call that bizarre, tantric-like finale “for the masses,” then I’m an ivy-league man all the way.—David Levinson

» Robert Altman | USA | 2003
» Vincente Minnelli | USA | 1953