Streamers [1983] Robert Altman

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Streamers (1983)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086377/

Includes documentaries Beautiful Streamers and interviews with stage cast members Herbert Jefferson Jr, and Bruce Davidson.

Streamers is a play by David Rabe.

The last in his Vietnam War trilogy that began with The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, it focuses on the interactions and personal conflicts of a group of soldiers preparing to ship out to fight in the Southeast Asian conflict. Among them are middle class African American Roger, upper class Manhattanite Richie, who is struggling with his sexual orientation, conservative Wisconsin country boy Billy, and fearful loose cannon Carlyle, a streetwise black. In charge of their barracks are abrasive alcoholic Sgt. Cokes, who already has served overseas, and aggressive Sgt. Rooney, who is anxious to get into combat.

Its title a reference to parachutes that fail to open, Streamers originally was a one-act play entitled Knives Rabe completed in the late-1960s prior to writing the first two-thirds of his trilogy. While working as a journalist in New Haven, Connecticut, he expanded it into a full-length play. Under the direction of Mike Nichols, it premiered at the Long Wharf Theatre on January 30, 1976.

The production transferred to Broadway, opening on April 21 1976 at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, where it ran for 478 performances.

Awards and nominations for the play:

Tony Award for Best Play (nominee)
Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play (winner)
Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play (Evans, nominee)
Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play (nominee)
New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play (winner)

In 1983, Rabe adapted his play for a feature film directed by Robert Altman and produced by Robert Michael Geisler and John Roberdeau (The Thin Red Line). The cast included David Alan Grier as Roger, Mitchell Lichtenstein as Richie, Matthew Modine as Billy, Michael Wright as Carlyle, George Dzundza as Cokes, and Guy Boyd as Rooney.

Matthew Modine ... Billy
Michael Wright ... Carlyle
Mitchell Lichtenstein ... Richie
David Alan Grier ... Roger
Guy Boyd ... Rooney
George Dzundza ... Cokes
Albert Macklin ... Martin
B.J. Cleveland ... Pfc. Bush
Bill Allen ... Lt. Townsend
Paul Lazar ... MP Lieutenant
Phil Ward ... MP Sgt. Kilick
Terry McIlvain ... Orderly
Todd Savell ... MP Sgt. Savo
Mark Fickert ... Dr. Banes
Dustye Winniford ... Staff Sergeant

The 1980s are known as being a dark period for Robert Altman. Having been branded uncommercial by the New post-Star Wars, post-Jaws, post-Heaven's Gate Hollywood, the creative freedoms he and others like Coppola enjoyed during the seventies, as provided by the studio tit, were largely stripped from him as he found himself unable to find studio backing for his projects. Altman's work in the '80s greatly reflected this ostracization, as films like Secret Honor and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean found him moving away from the freeform mosaics that distinguished his 1970s work and adapting stage plays most of which were chamber pieces restricted to a single set. Streamers, adapted by David Rabe from his Tony-nominated play, is as revealing of this dynamic as any of Altman's work from this period, its drama confined to an army barracks at the eve of the Vietnam war, its characters all existentially and ideologically "trapped" by the tenets and schemata of military life.

David Rabe's play is named after military parachutes that fail to open, although the young soldiers' freefall starts in the barracks before they're shipped off to Vietnam. The symbolism is foregranded heavily in song, "Beautiful Dreamer" lent a maudlin-mordant twist by a couple of sergeants full of beer, yet Robert Altman remembers the tune from McCabe & Mrs. Miller and steers the conflict wryly, amply elucidating "the nice thing about the long fuse." The drama is M*A*S*H* stripped from its wise-guy veneer (like that most desolating of comedies, this is also often reductively mistaken for an anti-war track), or possibly an all-male retelling of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean -- either way, the full weight of Altman's acuity, from Combat! on, is applied to what was at the time dismissed as canned theater. Kubrick surely must have recalled Matthew Modine here as "a storyteller" and "a busybody" when casting Full Metal Jacket, David Alan Grier as the black recruit who's learned not to rock the boat plays the role for all the subtle comedy in it; the two soldiers are repulsed and fascinated by Mitchell Lichtenstein, whose "fag stuff" is a threat to the Army's cult of masculinity. (During one of Modine's monologues, the camera prowls close to Lichtenstein as he toys with a piece of wire from his mattress.) Guy Boyd and George Dzundza wander in and out as blowhard Korean War vets, Michael Wright is the razzing outsider who, armed with racial fury and a switchblade, infiltrates the circle of anxiety and pushes it to its shattering point. Stocked with jive, bravado, and blubbering, the barracks distill the racial and sexual turbulence of the society glimpsed out the window; Altman's camera fills the stage with the characters' inner space, and leaves it in the middle of a storm. Cinematography by Pierre Mignot.

In an unusual move, the entire cast was named Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival.