![]() Newman's character can be read with embarrassing ease as Altman's heroic self-image: the maverick hold-out in a corrupted civilization.įernando Rey, cast as a devious tournament "judge," looks like Altman and gets to articulate much of the would-be revealing or scathing social commentary. The frozen metropolis could be interpreted as an ironic metaphor for the Hollywood environment Altman inhabits. ![]() "Quintet" may prove a convenient sourcebook for Altman scholars, particularly if they're inclined to psychoanalyze the subject. When one of the characters says, "There's been no new life here and no hope for any," he might as well be describing the movie itself. There's no evidence of a passionate dedication to life or even the game of filmmaking in this parable about doomed gamblers. Like many a misbegotten allegory, "Quintet" is not so much startling or devastating as tiresome. ![]() The list is a hit list: It contains the names of contestants matched in a big tournament game. Assuming the identity of the dead man, he eventually learns that at the highest level Quintet is played for keeps. ![]() Going through the dead killer's effects before the dogs clean his bones, Newman discovers his name - Redstone - and takes his Quintet tokens and a list of names. Newman pursues the assassin, who is in turn assassinated by another strange man, readily identifiable as Vittorio Gassman. Moments later a strange man opens the door to the apartment, rolls a canister under the card table and the players, Fossey included, are killed by a bomb blast. While Newman steps out to purchase some firewood, the family sits down for a friendly game of Quintet. Newman locates his brother whose womenfolk react with wonder to the youth and pregnancy of Fossey. (Altman had the rooms, casinos, lobbies, corridors and stairways of the metropolis built on outdoor sets outside Montreal in the dead of winter.) Accompanied by a mate, Brigitte Fossey as a perky little Eskimo who sucks her thumb when settling down to sleep, Newman trades the frozen wastes of the great outdoors for the frozen wastes of the indoors. Paul Newman, cast as The Last Noble Man, arrives from depleted seal-hunting grounds somewhere to the South to look up his brother, who dwells in Quintet City, or Icicle City, or Pentagon City, or Busted Circuit City, or whatever you want to call it. The pentagon-shaped playing board can be nothing but an allusion to the Pentagon, a cherished symbol of folly and wickedness in the Hollywood liberal demonology. Quintet is supposed to distill the essence of the cvilization addicted to it, and that essence is death. ![]() There are indications that losers and derelicts go literally to the dogs: Packs of Rottweilers munch on fresh and/or frozen corpses all around town.Īlthough the precise rules of the game remain vague, Altman emphasizes the salient points with blunt portentousness. Although we're shown only fragments of play, Quintet appears to proceed along the lines of Parcheesi or Monopoly, with the sole object being to eliminate the other players. Evidently the national pastime, Quintet is a board game played with dice and tokens. The survival instinct seems to endure only in the perverted form of the cutthroat competition practiced by an elite of Quintet aficionados. As one of the pontificating characters remarks, "The planet will be frozen in an envelope of ice and that will be mercifully the end of this history." The standard Hollywood liberal nightmare of a fiery denouement - the nuclear holocaust or "the fire next time" - is replaced by slow death in a freezing metropolis whose inhabitants have no purpose in life. "Quintet" appears to be Altman's rather complacently misanthropic meditation on the dire, decadent drift of modern civilization. Robert Altman's "Quintet," now at area theaters, earns a little five-sided niche right under John Boorman's "Zardoz" and "The Heretic" in the '70s memory album of pseudo-profound fiascoes. ![]()
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