Rated: R    Runtime: 112 min.
ROBERT ALTMAN VS. NOIR!

Quintessential American iconoclast Robert Altman spent fifty-five years exploring human behavior through cinema. In that span, certain themes and authorial viewpoints asserted themselves. For a few nights, the Roxie would like to draw your kind attention to his combative but consistent approach to a trio of topics:

Tonight, ROBERT ALTMAN VS. NOIR finds our auteuer knocking the fedoras off devotees of those enshrined saints of the genre, Raymond Chandler and Nicholas Ray.

Double Feature!

THE LONG GOODBYE
Phillip Marlowe wakes up at the beginning of The Long Goodbye, and he might’ve been asleep since the ‘40s. He’s a man out of time, a decent and principled private eye adrift in the amoral morass of 1970s Los Angeles. The movie was loudly decried by Chandler enthusiasts as sacrilege. They’re wrong. Elliot Gould gives a career-best performance. Also starring Sterling Haden and Nina van Pallandt. 1972, 35mm, 112 min. 7:00.

THIEVES LIKE US
Based on the same novel as They Live By Night, Thieves Like Us trades Nicholas Ray’s impressionism for Robert Altman’s freewheeling humanism. Three escaped convicts rob banks across the Depression-era South. How will they fare against love, dumb luck and media-inflated infamy? Fantastic and nuanced performances abound in this film, but Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall are especially heart-wrenching. 1974, 35mm, 123 min. 9:00.