This Elliott Gould essay contains spoilers for M*A*S*H, Getting Straight, Little Murders, The Long Goodbye, Busting and California Split. Check out Vague Visages’ film essays section for more movie coverage.

Stars come to define their era. Greta Garbo, Marlon Brando, Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe entered the cultural lexicon by virtue of the way they could be truncated into myth. But what gets erased in the process is the challenge they posed to the orthodoxy of the time. The stars who began to emerge at the turn of the 1960s managed to retain this discomfiting component; their fledgling images do not sooth and seduce but to this day call forth the contentions of the era. It is still possible to watch the vanguard of talent that picked up a bedraggled Hollywood and see all the excitement and unease that animated their rise; they have largely resisted integration into the accepted canon — they stand at a distance from the caricatures that adorn Tinseltown’s tourist attractions. Elliott Gould’s stardom was perhaps the most unlikely of all; in many ways, he was the definitive 1970s movie star. Gould’s persona upended traditional notions of cinematic masculinity in its appeal to a generational fatigue and ambivalence; his sexual magnetism eschewed the amatory codes of the traditional leading man. Gould dramatized the first fierce flickers of the wry detachment that would characterize the 70s outlook in Paul Mazursky’s merciless satire of bourgeois hippiedom, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969). Wounded by the failures of the 60s, a sardonic distance ensued, and Gould’s Ted Henderson is the most cogent articulation of this nascent tendency. The character is chastised by his friend, Bob Sanders (Robert Culp) — who has just returned from a trip to an Esalen Institute-like lifestyle retreat — for being the bearer of a “put down look” when Bob and his wife, Carol (Natalie Wood), expound on their new state of enlightenment.

Hollywood’s wholesale embrace of 60s signifiers positioned the decade’s radicalism as a moribund phenomenon; there was an element of grief, but equally of capture. In many ways, the New Hollywood was a memorial for the 60s, but it also presaged the loss of faith in institutions which reached its apotheosis with the resignation of Richard Nixon. A wave of political assassinations and the expansion of an unpopular war in Indochina drew many of the politically engaged inward in search of solutions; a politics of personal satisfaction prevailed among those with the luxury of checking out, like the well-heeled seekers in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Ted finds a vehicle for his discontent in sexual adventurism, but it is done so with a degree of distance; the character puts up derisive defenses against the possibility of enduring another disappointment — another avenue that proves a dead end. This sense of something being withheld was a crucial component to Gould’s popularity with an audience that had been battered by the tides of social tumult. The actor’s sneering lethargy lends his performance a degree of naturalism that sets it apart from a style still grounded in the notion of acting as an external process; it is as though he is trying to shatter the constraints of the premise and reveal authenticity through ambiguity, like a new decade waiting impatiently for the previous one to wither away.

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M*A*S*H (1970) was the film which articulated this impatience most succinctly. It was consequently a massive hit which propelled its stars and director into mainstream stardom. Robert Altman’s pitch-black summation of war’s fundamental ridiculousness embraced the confusion and chaos of a paradigm dying, with Korea standing in for Vietnam as the present site of imperial concern. The war hospital where Gould’s jaded surgeon, “Trapper” John McIntyre, works is turned into a bloody playground where the authority of the command structure and the objectives of the war are undermined with mean-spirited pranks and heedless revelry. The most fearsome mockery is reserved for those whose illusions remain intact, such as Maj. Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and Maj. Margaret O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), whose outward piety is stripped away through the surgical exposure of their underlying hypocrisy. Trapper and his equally jaundiced sidekick, Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland), are rumpled but lovable nonconformists who take a defiantly unheroic posture; they have no truck with petty officialdom; they refuse to honor their standing in the camp’s class system; they have come to terms with the absurdity of their predicament and surrendered their fate to blind chance. M*A*S*H revealed Gould to be a tremendously generous performer, perfectly suited to Altman’s application of overlapping sound that merges the dialogue of his ensemble casts into a collective hubbub. Gould would do some of his best work in this early 70s hot streak as part of a duo or large cast, striving to reconcile his elevated status with his intrinsic ordinariness.

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Getting Straight (1970) is an extrapolation of the persona formulated in M*A*S*H . Gould plays Harry Bailey, a verbose Vietnam vet who is studying for a teaching credential at the University of California, Berkeley and struggling to find his way out of the ferment of his fellow student radicals. Getting Straight is a rather heavy-handed explication of campus unrest, but it is illustrative of a growing foreboding that many felt as they saw the defeat of their ideals on the horizon. Harry is a wounded optimist, and Gould brings to the role a languor that is punctuated with explosions of rage. The protagonist vacillates between surrender to the promise of “money and power and little girls to molest” that come from taking one’s place in the system, and a reflexive revulsion at the “ridiculous robot factory” that is churning out good citizens brandishing certificates to verify their social viability. Gould is at his engaging best in the classroom scenes where he is teaching a remedial English class, evincing an easy charm and self-awareness that enlivens often uninspiring material. Yet there is something preoccupied in the actor’s performance, the histrionics which break through have a pleading tenor to them, as if dramatizing the chasm between bitter experience and a dream that feels increasingly threadbare as Harry tries to claw his way into the professional class.  Harry is doomed to the forms of sublimation into which the assiduously detached 70s subject will fall — aggressive sniping and studious non-intervention as riot police crack skulls. Harry finds that he cannot exist in either milieu; he can share neither the optimism of the students nor the pragmatism of the grandees; he doesn’t have the capacity to decide. Harry learns that life in the 70s has become a matter of personal interpretation; a text becomes a possibility, definitive judgements are dispensed with in favor of a narrative that will ease the passage into comfortable but circumscribed models of existence.

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Things were bound to take a turn for the strange as people insulated themselves against the brickbats of reality and devoted their lives to personal perfectibility in fortified bubbles. Little Murders (1971) is brimming with the cynicism that had become endemic to life in the febrile metropolis, of which New York City was the starkest example. Alan Arkin’s film is one of the oddest artifacts of the period; it shares some connective tissue with The Out of Towners (1970) in its depiction of NYC as a cesspit of crime, isolation, violence and decay. Adrift in this urban hell is Gould’s Alfred Chamberlain, a phlegmatic photographer who initially gets accosted by a gang of muggers. He is rescued by Patsy Newquist (Marcia Rodd), who takes it upon herself to drag Alfred out of his apathy and nihilism. At the height of his fame, Gould’s forte became playing characters who are failures in the traditional sense; they fail to live up to the archetype of the “big, strong, vital, self-assured man”; they are neither resolute nor cool, neither Gary Cooper nor Paul Newman. In this way, Gould was the heir to Jack Lemmon’s comedic crown, and his portrayal of Alfred is Billy Wilder by way of Albert Camus. The character has a defeated demeanor; he confronts life with a shrug — Alfred takes his lumps and slumps into a chair, understanding that renunciation is “the only way to survive” the attrition of stability and meaning. Gould delivers a deftly weighted comic performance that is passive without being anonymous; it is a testament to his self-assurance that he can keep the pitch so low yet still command the screen. Alfred records life at a remove by taking photos of objects — he makes a living photographing shit, drawing attention to the thing we shrink from examining, turning his camera into an offensive weapon. Alfred is the perfect windowless monad of the neoliberal imagination, a man who “used to protest a little” but has lost sight of the teleology that guided him, who responds to the heated farce of the film’s final act by embracing retributive violence.

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Gould returned from working with Ingmar Bergman on The Touch (1971) for another collaboration with Altman, doing for the detective genre what M*A*S*H had done for the war film. The Long Goodbye (1973) is another inspired piece of deconstruction which repudiated everything that preceded it in its rendering of private eye Philip Marlowe. Where Marlowe had previously been the ultimate hard-boiled hero, Gould’s character interpretation has a kind of languid anti-magnetism, with his perennially loosened tie and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, whose only allegiance is to his cat. The actor’s inherent self-awareness is once again brought to the fore, traveling with a look of cosmic amusement through a Hollywood that is a vast soundstage, hip to the performance in a town that never stops performing. This is a new conception of the gumshoe, but — as with The Big Sleep (1946) — texture supersedes text. The Long Goodbye is as much a film about the failure to communicate effectively as the plot machinery which enmeshes Marlowe. Though Gould’s protagonist attempts to ensconce himself in a bubble of cool detachment, things get too real and the act founders in the face of Sterling Hayden’s alcoholic writer, Roger Wade — a stand-in for every macho creative, who derides Marlowe’s “J.C. Penney tie.” In Wade’s presence, Marlowe stumbles over his words — he becomes flustered and drops his cigarette. It is in these moments that Gould taps into the character’s insecurities, his fear of being swept away by the tempest. With Wade and gangster Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell), the violence that underlies the spectacle wrenches Marlowe from his amused distance and brings him into proximity with the ugly reality. Like Alfred in Little Murders, Gould’s Marlowe is forced to exact a hollow revenge; the actor contorts himself into the willing dupe, the “born loser” his character discovers himself to be.

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Busting (1974) offered another neat piece of genre deconstruction in its unpicking of the cop drama, placing its protagonists — a pair of vice detectives played by Gould and Robert Blake — at odds with the culture around them. Peter Hyams’ film is another attempt to subvert the signifiers of authority for a new, distrustful audience. Gould’s Michael Keneely lambasts a pair of blundering uniformed officers and brands them “pigs”; he recites the pledge of allegiance with all the irony he can muster. Upon getting home, he throws off his sports coat and puts on a tatty wool cap. Hyams makes good use of Gould’s enigmatic qualities; Keneely is visibly ill-at-ease when forced to testify in court, mumbling his answers with a surly mien, yet he thrives in the chaos of the street, all the time trying to fight off the suspicion that the fix is in and his efforts only serve to reinforce a power structure he loathes. The world of vice becomes an opportunity for Keneely to frolic in the demimonde, with all its attendant allure and threat, but the fundamental distance with which Gould endows Keneely is never bridged; there is always the hint of a secret schema at play, a motive that is only hinted at with a guarded smirk. Gould is not an actor who disappears into a role; there is always a conversation between the material and the delivery; he often seems ready to bail on the whole thing at any moment. Gould displays an exasperation which speaks to generational unrest and culminates in one of the great endings of a decade in which the downbeat denouement was an article of faith. Keneely finally has his quarry where he wants him; the film’s crime kingpin, Rizzo (Allen Garfield), is sprawled on the ground and at his mercy. Keneely aims his weapon at Rizzo, who scoffs at his heroics and dares him to pull the trigger. It is the Dirty Harry moment, but Keneely flunks it. The scene freezes on an image of Keneely’s pained face, overlaid with the sound of the character speaking to an employment agency about his decision to leave the force. Keneely explains that he “needed a change.”

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The year 1974 was a time of indecision for Gould; he seemed stuck between two worlds, unsure of whether to embark on a new phase that would establish him as something more than a talented character actor whose stardom was contingent on a change of emphasis within the industry. Gould ventured into more crowd-pleasing territory with a couple of Cold War curiosities — S*P*Y*S reunited the actor with Sutherland for a lightweight espionage romp which relies heavily on the nimble interplay between its stars to get it over the line, while Who? is an incredibly strange thriller in which Gould plays an FBI agent who is tasked with determining whether a doctor returning from behind the Iron Curtain after a car accident is who he purports to be, having had extensive plastic surgery which makes him look like something from Metropolis (1927). It fell upon Altman to lift Gould out of this lull with another inspired intervention, creating the conditions for the actor’s strangeness to shine. Once again, Gould proved himself to be a premium collaborative actor, teaming up with George Segal to play a pair of inveterate gamblers in California Split (1974). Altman turns Joseph Walsh’s screenplay into a deft allegory for the logic of late-stage capitalism, where life is a high-stakes game played with gusto and won by those with the mettle to delve into the action and emerge with what they can grab amidst the confusion. Survival becomes a matter of creating a plausible contrivance; the gambling table is the stage upon which the most voluble hustlers unsettle their competitors.

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California Split is one of the great hangout movies; watching Gould and Segal shoot the shit and concoct their strategies is the film’s real pleasure. Gould’s slovenly charm and bravado as Charlie Waters once again brings his ironic distance to the fore — he blissfully lives out of step with the straight world which Segal’s Bill Denny still nominally occupies, supplying an endless supply of diversionary monologues which imbue Bill with the chutzpah necessary to advance into the toughest of action. Charlie is an American archetype — the charismatic chancer whose ebullience and aggressive optimism draws everyone around him into his logic, feeling like a winner even if he knows he looks like a loser. Gould’s consciously showy performance is perversely among his most naturalistic; he blends into life at the tables and the track, bantering with non-actors, easing into the crowd and adjusting accordingly. Charlie and Bill go all in as “total partners” and advance to Reno, where Bill hits a hot streak in poker, blackjack, roulette and craps, and they come away with $82,000 between them. It should be a moment of exultation, the fulfillment of everything Charlie has been preaching. But as Gould’s character finishes counting the money, he says, “Don’t mean a fucking thing, does it?” This line could be read as Gould’s own reflection on a period that was about to end; the hot streak he’d enjoyed in the first half of the 70s had crested. The actor’s own insecurities about his status would be explored in Altman’s next film, Nashville (1975), in which he plays a version of himself. There was a feeling of Gould being tyrannized by the version of “Elliott Gould” the public had embraced so wholeheartedly; the strangeness that had set the actor apart became formalized; he was the designated representative of his generation in all-star Hollywood fare like A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Escape to Athena (1979), where he was required to be nothing more than the persona that made him bankable. The rest of the decade seemed like a surrender to stardom, as Gould would never play a substantial role with Altman again. He made a brief cameo as himself in The Player (1992), and films like The Silent Partner (1978) stood out in a sea of mediocrity.

D.M. Palmer (@MrDMPalmer) is a writer based in Sheffield, UK. He has contributed to sites like HeyUGuys, The Shiznit, Sabotage Times, Roobla, Column F, The State of the Arts and Film Inquiry. He has a propensity to wax lyrical about Film Noir on the slightest provocation, which makes him a hit at parties. The detritus of his creative outpourings can be found at waxbarricades.wordpress.com.

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