The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 431

JUNE 29, 1975 LOS ANGELES TIMES Altman's Mural of Country and Western Music BY CHARLES CHAMPLIN "Nashville" is undoubtedly the best and most assured film Altman has yet made, certain to be his most commercially successful since "MASH" and the most consistently revealing of his unique and remarkable gifts as a film-maker. It is also the most original and provocative American movie in a very long time. His moment's worth of life is five days of Nashville as the capital of country and western music, and his collective star is a superb cast of two dozen principals who weave in and out of each other's lives, sometimes Please Turn to Page 50 Robert Altman's "Nashville" must fulfill a dream every film-maker has had at some time: to escape the bonds and the boundaries of the straight-line story with its restraints and exclusions and to use the wide screen as a tapestry to catch at least a moment's worth of the immense diversity of life in a time and at a place. The easy analogies are to the dense and teeming canvases of Breughel, to Hogarth's serial vision of London, to the picaresque early English novels, to Joyce's "Ulysses" as it immortalized a day in Dublin, to John Dos Passos' ranging view of America in "U.S.A." The comparisons imply a forbidding and formidable ambition, but while Altman and Joan Tewkesbury, who wrote the script, clearly intend "Nashville" to be larger than Nashville, the film whatever its powers of suggestion is a rollicking and vivid entertainment, done in the primary emotional colors of the country and western music which it uses, examines and celebrates. The humor ranges from slapstick to satire; the heavier emotions are similarly widely ranged from poignant to painful.

The invention is amazingly varied, which is also to say uneven, though not troublingly so. 'Lucky Lady' Filming Just Plain Unlucky BY MARY MURPHY 1 'f 0 GUAYMAS, Mex. In the black of a moonless night, a flotilla of twinkling fishing boats cuts through slow rolling swells to a 63-foot sailboat, the Lucky Lady. Forming a necklace of tiny lightbulbs above a deep pool of dark water, the fishing boats illuminate two men. Carefully, with skills learned the hard way from five months of making a movie at sea, Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds toss cases of rum from the Lucky Lady to bobbing skiffs below.

It is a perfect take. For once, the sea is relatively calm, boats are in view of the camera and nobody is seasick. Director Stanley Donen heaves a noticeable sigh of relief. Then the wind malevolently picks up. A backup boat, rocked by waves, crashes into a Coast Guard cutter carrying the camera crew.

The camera slips from its moorings and plunges overboard, and with it the film of the scene just completed plummets to the depths of the Sea of Cortez. "There are times," Stanley Donen said later, "when I feel like committing suicide." Stars of "Lucky Lady," Gene Hodman, Liza Minnelli and Burt Reynolds, smile through tears oyer film's shooting. i Zurich Taking Over as Art Center BY HENRY J. SELDIS "Lucky Lady" is fast becoming a legend in the annals of Hollywood movie making. The grand-scale story of Prohibition rum-running, written for the screen by Gloria Katz and husband Willard Huyck, currently enjoys the reputation of being one of the most lavish, overbudget, difficult to make films in the last decade.

Not only have the film-makers had to contend with ravages of the sea, sweltering heat, bitter cool nights, dysentery and a steady diet of tortillas and beans; there has been the greater strain of being isolated in a foreign environment for 19 weeks. Except for a few hired drivers, electricians, and extras, the people of Guaymas, and particularly the women, have refused to have anything to do with Donen's British crew. The fortitude of the people sweating it out in this desolate fishing village had been exceptional, but as the end neared, almost everyone had reached a breaking point. Please Turn to Page 39 ZURICH-The queen of Iran is reported to be a bargain-conscious but regular buyer of modern art at the Samiha Huber Gallery here run by one of her compatriots. She is said to have turned to this increasingly important center for the sale of art only after she was vastly overcharged by some prominment Paris dealers.

Recently, when rival dealers mounted an elaborate display of art in a St. Moritz hotel where the Shah and his family were vacationing, the queen refused to even glance at it. Nor is there any evidence that Mideastern oil millionaires are buying much art here (or elsewhere), preferring jewelry, rare cars and even rarer race horses for purposes of investment and conspicuous consumption. What has made this international financial center a global focal point for the art market-particularly when it comes to modern and contemporary art is the establishment in recent years of branches of international galleries such as Gimpel Hanover Maeght, Marlborough and Andre Emmerich. Please Turn to Page 75 SUMMER ROUNDUP A survey of summer events in the arts, compiled by Times critics and writers, appears this week on Page 32.

The index is on Page 26..