The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 5-11
Nashville (1975)
Directed by Robert Altman
Most epics are merely crowded; Nashville is multifarious. A deft societal cross-section, a carousel of studies in musical performance, a caustic satire of show business and politics, a reckless formal gambit, and the biggest canvas Altman ever painted on, the film follows two dozen or so characters through a five-day stretch in country music’s capital city, culminating in a massive public concert-cum-political rally. Such transparent ambition deserves skepticism, but the picture’s credibility is vouchsafed by its remarkable clutch of original songs, many of them written (and performed in character) by cast members Keith Carradine, Ronee Blakley, and Karen Black. Their music, more than the drama, carries the emotional payload. For Saturday’s screening, Metrograph will host the film’s screenwriter, Joan Tewkesbury, whose own work as a director still awaits reexamination. Eli Goldfarb (April 8, 4:30pm, part of Metrograph’s Tewkesbury tribute; she’ll also appear at a Sunday afternoon screening of Altman’s Thieves Like Us [1974])