Quintet

Quintet marks the only venture of both Paul Newman and director Robert Altman into the realm of science fiction. It was said of Newman that he could not do comedy, but he tried until he finally scored a real success in that genre with Slap Shot. But the failure of this film left him gun shy and he never tried it again.

This is one of the biggest downer films I've ever seen. It's a futuristic ice age, brought on by who knows what, but presumably it's a nuclear winter. Even during the ice age of thousands of years ago, the equatorial parts of the earth still sustained animal and human life, but apparently not here. Seals have survived and Paul Newman is a seal hunter on the outside.

But hunters do need a little R&R and Newman goes to a futuristic city where things are so boring the natives have some kind of game played with six people and it's a kind of Russian roulette. To win you have to kill five other participants in your game.

It's a sad turn to see what man has come down to. Which is one of the reasons I just could not get into this story. The atmosphere is bleak, the story is bleak, the people are bleak, it's all so bleak. No wonder this thing came up short at the box office.

It's a film that just about everyone thinks is never going to be on the top ten list of Paul Newman films, including me.

This is man's future, what a bummer.

I finally have found others who unfortunately saw this ......movie? I did not get it at all. Sure it was post apocalyptic, but could a movie ever have been made so poorly as to leave an entire theater wondering what in the world did we just see? To this day I am still baffled by this ....movie? and have never been able to describe or discuss this film without the words: "worst movie I have ever seen!"

Sorry--whatever merits the story about the game may have, this movie really loses it with the details. This post-apocalyptic city seems to have plenty of light bulbs and electricity (where from who knows where), but apparently no one bothered to save an electric heater. I am sorry, but if you have electricity, why do you have to rely solely on fire for warmth? Also, some characters seem to have vaguely Italian accents while the rest are deadpan American.

And the dogs--jeez! Why aren't the people eating them (instead of the reverse)? And apparently only one breed survived. The dogs are a distraction and rather stupid. The movie could have worked on the level of the game, but the stupid "realistic" details were just the reverse and made the movie false and unwatchable.

I saw Quintet on a Sunday afternoon in Northbrook, IL in the winter of 1978-1979. There was so much snow plowed badly in the parking lot that I had a hard time finding a space. When I got to the theater there was a strange little notice hand printed on a 3x5 file card that there would be no refunds to Quintet once you had entered the theater. I asked the ticket seller why and he said that so many people had left during the previous night's performance that they almost had a riot.

I knew I was in for something special. As the movie began I noticed that there were credits for the original screenplay and then for the final screenplay. Dissension in the ranks. There was inadequate explanation of where Paul Newman and Bibi Anderson came from and why they were going to the city. Indeed, the idea of hosing down Expo '67 in the winter and allowing the icicles to freeze gave it an other-worldly appearance. (I think that could have been Altman's attraction to the project.) Living in the Midwest during the winter of '78-'79 made me very sensitive to freezing weather. I moved to California the next fall.

There are two last items to consider: the dogs and the fish. The city was home to dozens if not hundreds of dogs. They scavenged for meat (often human bodies.) The malaise affecting the human population disabled them from disposing of the human dead. And finally the fish. There are several shots showing fish being harvested and processed at the beginning of the film, showing that there was an adequate food source for the people who lived in the city.

And finally a mention of the Game: there was a feeling of depression to the movie and the inhabitants of the city. When cut off from a natural human life that includes the having and raising of children, one can get depressed. An aberrant lifestyle that made a game out of killing others might result.

I really wanted to like this movie--I like Altman, I like Newman. I like science fiction and I liked the idea. And since this movie seems to be universally hated, I wanted to swim against the tide and find the intellectual quality in the movie that others seemed to be missing. All that going for it, and I still hated it.

Incomprehensible drivel.

And what's with the vaseline all over the camera lens? Folks who like this movie are fooling themselves, just because you dont understand a movie doesn't mean that it's deep, it means that the director and writer didn't know what they were doing.