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Reviews
Countdown (1967)
Interesting Altman film with hints of things to come
Not a great film but very much worth it for Altman fans. In many ways it's a conventional cold war drama, but it has some wicked resonances if you see the Robert Duvall astronaut character as what he was surely meant to be: an over the top version of John Glenn: a boy scout rah rah guy who can't stand the much hipper, laid back James Caan, who is a stand-in for the real astronaut Al Shepard. (Wolfe's The Right Stuff, if I recall, has useful material on the mutual distrust between Glenn and Shepard.)
Altman tries a few tricks for which he is later famous. The primary one is overlapping dialogue. Altman hated the formal style of traditional films in which everyone speaks in complete sentences and never overlaps. You can see the overlapping here, though not to the degree that comes through in later films like M*A*S*H and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Still, the innovation was enough to infuriate the studio execs when they began viewing the rough cut. Hey! We can't understand half of what the actors are saying! So they fired Altman about nine-tenths of the way through shooting. Watch closely and toward the end of the picture, you'll see a change in style as the replacement director takes over. It's much more stilted (especially in the press conference). And I recall (though can't be sure at this remove, I haven't seen or read about the picture in decades) that the original ending was a tragedy, which was changed to a happy one instead.
The most effective aspect of Altman's interest in sound design was what he did when Caan loses contact with ground control as he approaches the moon. Altman heightens anxiety (Caan is already worried that Duvall is endangering his life) when the radio contact picks up static and it gets hard to hear. Caan begins to feel all alone out there, millions of miles from earth. And so do we, instinctively...we want to hear what Mission Control is saying, and their words keep breaking up. Very clever: using +bad+ sound to make viewers unconsciously uneasy. It's a great way to accomplish your goal on a lower budget project.