A Perfect Couple

Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin play a most decidedly IMperfect couple in Robert Altman's version of a romantic comedy. His claim at the time (justified) is that Hollywood had always allowed only beautiful people to fall in love, so he wanted to make a romance with a couple of ordinary folk. He succeeded when he found the paunchy Dooley and the distractingly skinny (nearly anorexic) Heflin for his leads, but the film itself is not much of a success. This came out during Altman's "experimental" period, meaning he threw together some disparate elements and hoped for the best. Actually, it's quite accessible for Altman, considering "Quintet" came out in the same year, and it's one of his least Altman-like projects. Unfortunately, it's those very qualities that also make it one of his least interesting and ugliest from a purely visual standpoint.

The film does boast some good if dated music though, performed by the real-life band Keepin' Em Off the Streets, led by Ted Neely, most known for playing the role of Jesus in the film version of "Jesus Christ Superstar" (and whom I saw perform the role on stage in a touring version).

Grade: C

I loved this movie from the first time I saw it. Sure, it's basically a new take on Romeo and Juliet, but it's still a good flick. The music is undoubtedly the best part {especially when "Bobbie" sings 'Lonely Millionaire (swoon)}--if Keepin' 'Em Off the Streets were a real band, I'd be their biggest fan.

Does anyone know how I might get a copy of A Perfect Couple?

Producer/director Robert Altman's 1979 film is a Los Angeles set romantic comedy drama about a seemingly chalk and cheese relationship between a U. S./Greek businessman called Alex (Paul Dooley) and a young singer called Sheila (Marta Heflin) who meet through the 'Great Expectations' video dating service. Their different (and similar) lifestyles are contrasted, as are the different families of 'freaks' and 'weirdos' both belong to. Not Altman at his best, indeed one of his least known films, it is comic and poignant (as written by Altman and Allan Nicholls), has vague echoes of 'Follow Me' and 'Breezy' , a mysterious couple who help the relationship of Alex and Sheila at crucial moments, as well as unmemorable musical bits.

"Nashville" represented a critical and commercial high point for Altman. He followed it with a series of films that puzzled the critics and alienated his already slender audience (the critics loved his overlapping dialogue and generally unhappy endings but audiences didn't). "Buffalo Bill and the Indians", "A Wedding", and worst of all, "Quintet".

Altman was running out of studio backing and critical support. He had never really been a money maker and by 1979 with "Jaws" and "Star Wars" Hollywood had discovered the special effects summer blockbuster. It was tired of auteurs like him and Bogdanovich and Coppola, particularly auteurs who didn't make money (auteurs who remain the darlings of the critics like Woody Allen and Scorsese and don't cost too much money are OK.). Altman needed to show Hollywood that he could make money.

"A Perfect Couple" and "Popeye" were Altman's attempts to make movies he hoped would reach out to the general audience and be hits at the box office.

"A Perfect Couple" comes from a period when Altman was trying to make films through his own Lion's Gate company with financial backing from Fox (courtesy of Alan Ladd, Jr.). Working, in the main, with very slender budgets, he seems to have been trying to do work that could break even financially even when the films didn't expand much beyond the small audiences that most of his movies had typically attracted. In the end, the effort failed. He was rapidly losing the support of even critics who had long been sympathetic, and the audience for small, experimental films was drying up.

Most of the films from the Lion's Gate/Fox period have a flimsy undeveloped quality to them. His work from M*A*S*H to Nashville had all started from someone else's script even though most of those films would do little more than retain the basic structural elements, the rest being altered/improvised during rehearsal and actual shooting. But he had something to work off, react to (or against) and build from. By the time of "A Perfect Couple," Altman's name was showing up as screenwriter (usually in collaboration with someone from a previous film) which is a fair indication that these movies started shooting with little or no script at all, just an idea, some characters, and some sense of where it all should go. The financing was there, and he had to take advantage of it, hoping to pull something off on the spur of the moment. It worked with "3 Women," but he was less successful here and in "Quintet."

Paul Dooley is a middle-aged divorced man living at home where his life is ruled by his rich father (since they're Greeks, his father is naturally played by Titos Vandis). Marta Heflin is a shy aimless young woman who's a member of a rock band and lives with them all in a kind of self-contained community in a downtown L.A. loft. They meet through a computer dating service, come together, fall out with each other, come together again, and fall out. Most of the film deals with their efforts to kindle a romance in spite of the obstacles placed in their way by the respective family groups each belongs to.

Altman seems to have intended a culture clash comedy, and, in some ways, this film grew out of "A Wedding" in which Dooley and Heflin both had roles, and where Altman set two dissimilar families against one another with fair results. Here, though, the cultures that clash are both sketched out so quickly, and with such broad strokes, that "A Perfect Couple" could play as self-parody, if self-parody were so obviously not intended. Dooley makes the best of it. He's able to find (or create) funny moments, but they're just moments. There's not enough here for them to integrate into any kind of whole. Heflin is less successful, but then her character is, in general, so passive that there's not much character to play.

Not much develops here because so much time is given over to the rock band (Keepin Em Off the Streets) that Heflin belongs to. Every time the film starts going somewhere, we get another song that's played out to full length (and there are 11 of them in the movie). The band was formed by Altman cohort (and "Perfect Couple" co-screenwriter) Allan Nicholls, and "A Perfect Couple" seems to exist as much to showcase the band as to tell the film's story. Maybe the thought was that if the band (or any of its songs) hit, that would be enough to propel the movie to some kind of success.

In the end, the movie was dismissed by most as a light curiosity, and it went nowhere. If it's interesting, it's interesting as an experiment on Altman's part to exist in the commercial mainstream making quick, cheap movies that wouldn't need to bring in large audiences to succeed. But Fox, after a management shake-up, lost interest in Altman, and he lost their financial backing before Lion's Gate was able to make anything that succeeded (even on Altman's terms). Altman, for his part, would spend most of the '80's making even smaller, less expensive films in an effort to keep his hand in.