Name: NASHVILLE • 50th Anniversary | Altman: Centennial Tribute
Start: 2025-09-17T13:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-09-17T16:00:00-05:00
Location: 1005 McCausland Ave, St. Louis, MO, United States, Missouri 63117

$NASHVILLE \u2022 50th Anniversary | Altman: Centennial Tribute$

Few directors reshaped American cinema as radically—and as playfully—as Robert Altman. The Cinema of Robert Altman: Centennial Tribute pays tribute to Altman’s legacy by revisiting the films that defined him as a fearless innovator and iconoclast.
For all titles and showtimes: https://hipointetheatre.org/film-series/robert-altman-centennial-tribute/
50th ANNIVERSARY!
A part of our series Hollywood Films of the 1970s with a special discussion led by retired Cinema St. Louis Executive Director Cliff Froelich at the 1PM Screening!
Robert Altman, 160m, 1975
Starring: Barbara Baxley, David Arkin, Karen Black, Ned Beatty, Ronee Blakley, Henry Gibson, Geraldine Chaplin, Lily Tomlin, Scott Glenn, Keith Carradine
The first of Robert Altman’s cast-of-thousands comic dramas – successors include A Wedding, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park – Nashville explores the intersection (and collision) between country music and American politics. But it’s full to bursting with so much more, from subplots involving romantic heartbreak, family dysfunction, and mental illness to critiques of sexual exploitation, celebrity culture, and gun violence. Appropriately, given its setting, Nashville also delivers musically, featuring nearly two dozen character-revealing songs adeptly performed (and sometimes written) by the film’s actors. (Nashville artists, it should be noted, pooh-poohed the music as inauthentic, but the songs beautifully serve the film.) Nashville’s complex soundscape is unified, in a characteristic Altman touch, by a roving van whose loudspeaker insistently broadcasts platitudinous sound bites from independent presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker, an omnipresent yet incorporeal presence who’s often heard and discussed but never seen. Among the many acting standouts: Lily Tomlin (Oscar nominated in her film debut), Ronee Blakley, Gwen Welles (devastating as sadly delusional aspiring singer Sueleen Gay),
Keith Carradine (whose “I’m Easy” won the Oscar for Best Original Song), and Ned Beatty.
“The funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen. Robert Altman’s 1975 movie is at once a ‘Grand Hotel’-style narrative, with twenty-four linked characters; a country-and-Western musical; a documentary essay on Nashville and American life; and a meditation on the love affair between performers and audiences.“ —Pauline Kael, New Yorker (Feb 23, 1975)
“This is a film about America. It deals with our myths, our hungers, our ambitions, and our sense of self. It knows how we talk and how we behave, and it doesn’t flatter us but it does love us…. Watching NASHVILLE is as easy as breathing and as hard to stop. Altman is the best natural filmmaker since Fellini.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Jan 1, 1975)
“I hate to go out on a limb after only one viewing, but NASHVILLE strikes me as Altman’s best film, and the most exciting dramatic musical since Blue Angel.” —Andrew Sarris, Village Voice (Jun, 9, 1975)
“Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE is the movie sensation that all other American movies this year will be measured against. It’s a film that a lot of other directors will wish they’d had the brilliance to, make and that dozens of other performers will wish they’d had the great good fortune to be in.” —Vincent Canby, New York Times (Jun 12, 1975)