Movies:
Brewster McCloud
- Rating:
- Genre: Comedy Drama
- Movie Type: Fantasy Comedy, Satire
- Themes: Obsessive Quests, Saintly Fools, Fighting the System
- Director: Robert Altman
- Main Cast: Bud Cort, Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy, William Windom, Shelley Duvall
- Release Year: 1970
- Country: US
- Run Time: 101 minutes
- MPAA Rating: R
Plot
A boy yearns to fly in Robert Altman's whimsical youthquake parable. With the aid of seraphic Louise (Sally Kellerman), owlish Brewster (Bud Cort) constructs a pair of human-size wings in his Houston Astrodome nest to realize his dream. Meanwhile, conservative creeps, including a witchy "Star-Spangled Banner"-belting crone (Margaret Hamilton) and Brewster's skinflint boss (Stacy Keach), keep turning up dead covered with bird droppings; the Houston Establishment calls in blue-eyed, turtleneck-wearing "San Francisco super cop" Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy) to investigate. Brewster cooks his own goose, however, when he defies Louise's edict against sex and hooks up with Astrodome usher Suzanne (Shelley Duvall) after she impresses him (and saves him) by out-driving Shaft in her Road Runner. Despite her apparent sweetness, Suzanne ultimately will not compromise her comfortable home for flight with Brewster. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie GuideReview
Director Robert Altman confounded MGM by following his antiwar hit MASH with this oddball story, in which he mocked Hollywood with nods to The Wizard of Oz and a parody of Steve McQueen's Bullitt, while breaking up the narrative with "interpretive" interjections from an avian lecturer (René Auberjonois), who exhorts the audience at the beginning to draw no conclusions. Altman presents Brewster's wish to fly away from it all as irresistible, yet doomed by late '60s-early '70s cultural confinements; there are too many clowns, young and old, who can ground the idealistic urge to escape. Too inscrutably weird for its own financial good, Brewster McCloud was not well-received by either critics or audiences. Even so, it remains an intriguing barometer of the Nixon-era struggle between repression and freedom, skewed through Altman's penchant for wrapping a sharp message in layers of goofy, ironic absurdities. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie GuideCast
- Bud Cort - Brewster McCloud
- Sally Kellerman - Louise
- Michael Murphy - Frank Shaft
- William Windom - Haskel Weeks
- Shelley Duvall - Suzanne
René Auberjonois - Lecturer; Stacy Keach - Abraham Wright; John Schuck - Lt. Alvin Johnson; Margaret Hamilton - Daphne Heap; Jennifer Salt - Hope; Corey John Fischer - Lt. Hines; G. Wood - Police Capt. Crandall; Bert Remsen - Douglas Breen; Angeline Johnson - Breen's Wife; Bill Baldwin - Weeks's Aide; David Welch - Green Jr.
