A collection of enduring excellence
Robert Altman was the great artist-journeyman of his generation: Whenever he fell out of fashion, he just kept working until he fell back in again. The opposite of a control freak, Altman preferred to assemble the constituent parts of a film, throw them together, and see what happened -- his art was in the unexpected. Not all of the 35 feature films that resulted were brilliant (some are downright bad) but the elements gelled with enduring excellence in the following 10:
M*A*S*H* (1970): A scabrous black comedy about the Korean War that was understood by all to be about the tragedy of Vietnam, this is the movie that put the former television director on the map -- and he was the producers' 16th choice. It is a harder, tougher piece of work than the beloved small-screen series that followed.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971): Of all the revisionist westerns that clogged up the counterculture era, this is the one that sticks: a playfully bodacious saga of a mining town entrepreneur (Warren Beatty) and his madam (Julie Christie) that slowly turns dangerous and sad.
Thieves Like Us (1974): Skipping from genre to genre -- as if to make up for lost time -- Altman tackled a Bonnie-and-Clyde romance, a remake of a Nicholas Ray film from 1948. If anything, it's more tender than the original, with Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall heartbreaking as lovers on the lam.
Nashville (1975): The maestro goes for broke and triumphs, creating an incisive, unforgettable mosaic of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Young filmmakers are still trying to reverse engineer the movie, but even Altman never quite hit this high-water mark again. With "The Godfather," it is probably the best film of the '70s.
3 Women (1977): In the wake of "Nashville," Altman veered off into surrealism, inaugurating the period of his greatest self-indulgence. This dreamy sideways California re-do of Bergman's "Persona" is by far the best of the bunch, with a mysterious, career-peak performance by Shelley Duvall.
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982): From the director's wilderness years, just to remind us he was still alive, came this adaptation of Ed Graczyk's play, stuffed to the gills with actresses doing amazing things. Anyone who thinks the director was a misogynist needs to watch Sandy Dennis here.
The Player (1992): The big comeback, gleefully biting the hand that (intermittently) fed him. Michael Tolkin's screenplay about a homicidal Hollywood suit (Tim Robbins) allowed Altman to vent his bile over an industry that never understood him; revenge has rarely been as delicious.
Short Cuts (1993): An adaptation of several Raymond Carver short stories, this was the director's immediate payback for "The Player," when everyone in Hollywood wanted to work with him. It is another dazzling mosaic, but the mood is darker and nastier than "Nashville." Altman's most misanthropic film.
Gosford Park (2001): And this is his most playful, a droll British murder-mystery infused with that milling, murmuring Altman DNA. The social algebra is acute, the players congenial and penetrating.
A Prairie Home Companion (2006): Top-notch Altman? Perhaps not, but a worthy way to go out -- celebrating musicians and actors and the whole silly show, honoring the Midwestern puckishness of his own Kansas City roots, and letting Meryl Streep and company croon to the moon. Thirty-one years after Barbara Harris sang "It Don't Worry Me" in "Nashville," the viewer senses Altman finally agreeing.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ ae/movies/blog. 
