We can see this approach developing in the films after "M*A*S*H." Altman handles it awkwardly in "Brewster McCloud" (1970), with its strange tale of a young boy who lives in an unmarked room in the Houston Astrodome and is tutored by a fallen angel as he tries to build wings that will let him fly. Altman, who stands behind all of his later films, insists that "Brewster McCloud" rewards additional viewings, but it has not rewarded mine. Yet it does, like his other films, occupy the center of a community of people, of purposes that are common or crossed. It is not just the story of the boy but of the immediate society which has to decide what it thinks of him. "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," discussed above, is about community almost to the exclusion of narrative. McCabe walks into a smoke-filled frontier barroom with its half-heard conversations, its laconic asides, and becomes one of its regulars. As he attempts to become an entrepreneur through the construction of a bordello and the importation of Mrs. Miller and her troupe of prostitutes, the community carries on its daily affairs all around him. Church services are held. Community baths are taken. When a young boy is shot dead because he was unfortunate enough to find himself crossing a footbridge at exactly the same time as a hotheaded young killer, it is the whole community that absorbs the event, and mourns it. "California Split" (1974) is at pains to place its two compulsive gamblers within a clearly seen gambling community. Altman’s stylistic approach is especially evident here in a scene where the protagonists are shown into a room where a high-stakes private poker game is in progress. Murmurs on the sound track introduce the players, whose long-standing rivalries and friendships are taken for granted: We arrive, as we so often do with Altman, in medias res.

Altman’s most free, ambitious films about communities come in "Nashville" (1975) and "A Wedding" (1978). In both films he almost seems to be testing his limits, daring himself in an attempt to get as many recognizable characters as possible on the screen, and to keep them all established. "Nashville" was not popular in Nashville, where the residents felt the film did an injustice to the city and its primary industry, country and western music. But Altman was not doing a documentary on Nashville; he was using the title, I believe, as a specific for community. And during a mobile era when communities are reformed year by year, he was concerned not so much with the roots of the city and its industry as with the many kinds of people who found themselves drawn there for socioeconomic reasons of the moment. A presidential campaign is in town, and so are several top country singers, back from national tours for recording dates and the Grand Ole Opry. But the city’s dynamic has also attracted such characters as a would-be assassin; a man grieving for his dying wife; a star-struck young woman from the state’s rural areas; her jealous husband; two groupies (one a young soldier, one an eccentric girl from California); an Englishwoman pretending to be from the BBC; a waitress and her man friend; visiting celebrities (Elliott Gould and Julie Christie play themselves); a campaign manager and his advance man; and even an inexplicable magician on a motorcycle (who seems to be an American cousin of the anonymous cyclist who roars at random through many of the scenes in Fellini’s "Amarcord").

Few of these people know each other when the movie begins, and some will not have met when it ends. But many of their paths will cross, their lives will affect one another (if only at two or three removes), and Altman seems fascinated by how this interaction takes place. There is no central character in "Nashville," no person whose fate is more important than another’s, and in this respect Altman was wise to leave the presidential candidate offscreen entirely. If he had brought him on and then had him assassinated, the movie would inevitably have been categorized as “about” political assassination, and the real subject, the haphazard and human interactions of a community, would have been missed.