Basements
Screening on Film
Directed by Robert Altman.
With John Travolta, Tom Conti, Linda Hunt.
Canada, 1987, digital video, color, 108 min.
Copy source: Robert Altman Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive
With John Travolta, Tom Conti, Linda Hunt.
Canada, 1987, digital video, color, 108 min.
Copy source: Robert Altman Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive
Altman and Harold Pinter became acquaintances after Pinter expressed his admiration for Secret Honor. In choosing to direct two early Pinter one-acts, The Dumb Waiter and The Room, the filmmaker was no doubt influenced by the playwright’s collaborations with Joseph Losey, who was an avowed influence on Altman. (Certainly both favored baroque eccentricity set in enclosed places, with Altman woolly where Losey was icy.) By the 1980s, with Altman himself working in Europe in a kind of economic exile, he would have had reason to identify with Losey’s exodus to England thirty years earlier. Basements is the title for the omnibus film that brings together the two sixty-minute films, each, once again, set in a single location.
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