A Perfect Couple (1979)

User Rating:

6.1/10   

Director:

Robert Altman

Writers:

Robert Altman (written by) &
Allan F. Nicholls (written by)

Genre:

Comedy | Romance

Tagline:

What do you do when everything between the two of you seems wrong? ...fall in love.

Plot Keywords:

Musician | Dating | Singer | Videotape | Dating Service

Cast

Paul Dooley	...	Alex Theodopoulos
Marta Heflin	...	Sheila Shea
Titos Vandis	...	Panos Theodopoulos
Belita Moreno	...	Eleousa
Henry Gibson	...	Fred Bott
Dimitra Arliss	...	Athena
Allan F. Nicholls	...	Dana 115
Ann Ryerson	...	Skye 147 Veterinarian
Poppy Lagos	...	Melpomeni Bott
Dennis Franz	...	Costa
Margery Bond	...	Wilma
Mona Golabek	...	Mona
Terry Wills	...	Ben
Susan Blakeman	...	Penelope Bott
Melanie Bishop	...	Star

Runtime:

110 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Australia:PG | USA:PG

Company:

Lions Gate Films

Trivia:

The role of Sheila Shea was originally written for 'Sandy Dennis'. Paul Dooley was seriously allergic to cats though, and when cat-lover Dennis would come to the script readings with up to five cats at a time, he was briefly hospitalized. As a result, 'Allan Nichols' re-wrote the role of Sheila Shea from an Earth Mother type to the young singer/groupie played by Marta Heflin.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "The Directors: The Films of Robert Altman (#2.9)" (2001)

Soundtrack:

Somp'ins Got A Hold On Me

A Glorious Oddity, An Altman Gem

I finally got around to seeing this for-many-years-as-good-as-lost Altman film, and I must say, I was extremely impressed. It is a highly unusual piece. Altman biographer Patrick McGilligan says "There is not another movie like it in the Altman canon," and he's not kidding; there is scarcely another movie like it in anyone's canon. The closest I can think of is George Romero's also criminally underrated There's Always Vanilla, which also deals with the arc of a romance between "ordinary" people with no touch of Hollywood iconography about them.

The film is conceived in terms of a number of binaries: two families, a rigidly patriarchal Greek family and a rock music collective with its own sort-of-patriarch; classical music and pop music, which join hands in the climax; a "perfect couple" of two decidedly imperfect, non-glamorous people, and a near- silent "imperfect couple" of two glamor-pusses, whose path repeatedly crosses that of the perfect couple, but in ways that only the audience perceives. (The perfect couple meets through a video dating service that is a direct precursor to the Internet dating services of our own day; that lends the film an oddly timely-contemporary touch.)

The rock music collective, Keeping 'Em Off the Streets, co-formed by Altman collaborator Allan Nicholls, actually existed and concertized a couple of times, but failed to win a recording contract. (The soundtrack was preserved on Altman's own Lion's Gate label; I recently scored a copy of this rare LP.) As many of the reviewers here at the IMDb enthuse, the music is quite delightful, and rather difficult to pigeonhole, with rock, pop, jazz, and theater music elements. There are a lot of musicians, a lot of singers, a lot of people (and even a dog) just hanging around, in somewhat elaborate and rather magical spaces (courtesy of master designer Leon Ericksen), and the musical numbers seem to emerge from the ambiance. The film is very driven by the songs.

Adding to the flavor of A Perfect Couple is a remarkably casual- positive attitude toward several gay and lesbian characters, so much so that Vito Russo singled the film out in his book The Celluloid Closet as being "special" for its era in its recognition of a "happy, well-adjusted" lesbian couple as a "family."

In the lead roles, Paul Dooley is remarkably winning, and Marta Heflin has a mysterious, somewhat withdrawn quality that suddenly announces itself forcefully in her one solo number, "Won't Somebody Care", which is also one of the great musical sequences in all of movies, if you ask me -- right up there with Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy" in Nashville.

The next forgotten Altman film that needs to be rehabilitated is H.E.A.L.T.H., which Helene Keyssar praises most interestingly in her book Robert Altman's America. I saw it only once many years ago and am eager to see it again.