LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Robert Altman: Years
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Altman directed 8 episodes of Bonanza, all but one in the show’s second season — and they’re some of the darkest in its 14-year run. In The Rival, gentle Hoss loves a woman, but she loves a fugitive. In a typical Bonanza plot, a showdown seems inevitable, but Hoss agonizes over the ambiguity. Is he hunting his rival because of his crimes — or to vindictively avenge his scorned heart? There’s no easy answers as a lynch mob starts forming, and even before any triggers are pulled, a devastated Hoss knows that the woman he loves will never, ever be his. Altman heightens the episode’s tension with evocative lighting tricks.
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Sunday night, Altman, for once, couldn't conceal his joy. After thanking his wife, Katherine Reed, for her support, he said that being the recipient of a heart transplant, he now has a heart that had belonged to a woman in her 30s. "By that calculation, you may have given me this award too early," Altman said. "I think I have 40 years on it, and I intend to use it."
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On the one hand, these early interviews show Altman to be "human"; on the other hand, the image they project can form a stereotypical picture, and one that is hard to change. Questions concerning Altman's personal life, his drinking and his gambling, can be divergent. Bruce Williamson's lengthy interview covers a lot of untapped ground: Altman's attitude to critics, and to those who rate his films. At the same time, some of Williamson's questions border on the intrusive and irrelevant: "Are you a heavy better?"(60) Similarly, "You're now on your third marriage, but that has lasted 17 years. What do you think makes it work?"(61) Nevertheless, Williamson is writing for Playboy, and his probings make one question the interviewing process: how much can one rely on interviews as "truth", and how much does their emphatic structure bind a person to a particular set of ideas? Altman is aware of this manufacturing of a personality, one that is no different to his Buffalo Bill character in Buffalo Bill and the Indians(1976):
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Patrick McGilligan's biography of Altman, Jumping Off the Cliff (St. Martin's Press, 1989) is greatly detailed in its writing about the Altman family's involvement in early Kansas City, Altman's childhood, his first films, and the workings of his mind and personality. This book is the source of this article's information on Altman's childhood, military service, and early years of filmmaking in Kansas City.
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"M-A-S-H" was Altman's first big success after years of directing television, commercials, industrial films and generally unremarkable feature films. The film starring Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould was set during the Korean War but was Altman's thinly veiled attack on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
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Altman was unafraid to take risks. Even in his latter years, he was turning out idiosyncratic films like Dr. T and the Women, defying the MPAA with a closeup shot of a baby bursting out of a vagina and ruminating upon the gender gap at the risk of coming across as a misogynist.
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