Radiance Films: O.C. and Stiggs (1987) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

The least seen and discussed Robert Altman film in his canon O.C. and Stiggs (not to be confused with the nonsensical Joe Begos alien invasion film Jimmy and Stiggs) is an infamously Dadaist affront disguised as an 80s teen comedy that could well be the countercultural maverick filmmaker’s most poisonous piece of hate mail ever unleashed on an unsuspecting filmgoing public as well as producers who asked for something completely different from what they got.  Originally shot in 1983 and edited while he was shooting his TV film Secret Honor which chronicled one night with Richard Nixon (Philip Baker Hall) in the oval office, the $7 million rebuke of a film bounced around festivals and poorly received test screenings before finally being granted a limited theatrical dump in 1987 alongside his other comedy Beyond Therapy where it died a quiet death only amassing around $29,000. 
 
Now years later, this same, completely uncompromising and downright unfriendly picture loosely based off of two preexisting characters created in the National Lampoon magazine at this stage represents perhaps Altman’s most acerbic dose of spoiled popcorn and stale soda pop as a thinly veiled anti-comedy, anti-film, anti-American scribe is now being reassessed as one of the director’s unsung unexpurgated triumphs, an angry film designed to make you angry by resembling a teen comedy ala John Hughes or Amy Heckerling that in actuality is a mercurial takedown of the very genre it seems to reside in.  While in theory it has the skin of National Lampoon’s Animal House or Porky’s or even some of the scuzzier regional fare ala Pinball Summer or Joysticks, in practice scene after scene it intentionally plays against expectations with two positively irredeemable antagonists as our central heroes let loose in a waking nightmarish world of petty personal vendettas, nasty quips drifting in and out of racist cultural appropriation and an intentional, striving effort to be deathly unfunny.
 
Oliver Cromwell Oglivie nicknamed O.C. (Daniel H. Jenkins) and Mark Stiggs (Neill Barry) are a couple of lazy entitled reprobates in high school who while away their time sneaking onto and vandalizing the property of the Schwab family commandeered by greedy conservative patriarch Randall Schwab (Paul Dooley) and his perpetually inebriated wife Elinore (Jane Curtain).  Alongside are their two children, his daughter Lenore (Laura Urstein) and his emotionally stunted son Randall Jr (Jon Cryer from Two and a Half Men).  When it comes to light that O.C.’s grandfather’s retirement policy has been cancelled by Mr. Schwab’s company, O.C. and Stiggs proceed to wage war on the man’s home and his family including but not limited to wrecking Lenore’s wedding with an Uzi from a Vietnam veteran named Sponson (Dennis Hopper goofing on his mad journalist from Apocalypse Now) and a hydraulically suspended car.  Later the twosome bring aboard the talents of African pop band King Sunny Adé (who also provided the film’s incongruent score).  

In between launching homophobic slurs at their drama teacher and starting pranks with their drinking buddy Wino Bob (Melvin Van Peebles making a cameo as a token black drunk), they eventually even go as far as turning the Schwab’s fancy expensive home into a homeless shelter, further leaning towards an underground bomb shelter battle fought with firecrackers, all the while American iconography keeps being paraded across the screen throughout the course of the movie.  An impression is being built up that we’re looking at Altman’s idea of modern suburbia beset by mountains and swimming pools.  All of this bubbles to the surface like a broken sewer or septic system dripping with contempt.

 
Mean and mad, gleefully offensive and more than a little heinous, Robert Altman’s perfectly poised smackdown of contemporary America through the prism of the teen sex comedy boilerplate is an intentionally difficult, almost terminal cancer of a film with the mask of a bright summer comedy but the fangs of a blood sucker.  A movie that originally came together via Ted Mann and Todd Carroll’s National Lampoon magazine stories before a fictional account of their summer entitled The Utterly Monstrous Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs, the project first saw light with producer Peter Newman and director Mike Nichols who later admitted he couldn’t figure out how to do the film and backed out.  On a whim talking with Robert Altman in passing, he agreed to do what shaped up to be O.C. and Stiggs with rewrites by Donald Cantrell as well as barring the original two writers from the set.  The production, like Altman’s Popeye before it, was noted for the director’s gambling, marijuana and cocaine abuses on the set while looking at dailies.  In a way, you could call this Altman’s stoner flick.

 
Reportedly hated by one of the original creators Ted Mann who was at odds with Altman for not adapting his screenplay as written, the film sat on the shelf for four years being shown at Film Forum before getting a limited theatrical run.  The film received less than stellar reviews from critics and was kind of looked upon sight unseen as an outlier in Altman’s canon.  Despite this, in the years since it has gained something of a cult following for being the hardest, nastiest, snarliest teen comedy of the 1980s if not all time.  During the press tour for Larry Clark’s infamous Kids, screenwriter and co-star Harmony Korine noted O.C. and Stiggs was one of his favorite films, something that should come as no surprise to anyone considering the slice-of-life abstract elliptical approach to editing, narrative flow and drifting in and out of dream logic we’d see in his Floridian films Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum.  

While the film was a critical and commercial failure buried under its own negative weight at the time, Radiance Films have through their boutique label proposed more sophisticated audiences of today should reevaluate it.  I’m not sure I liked the film in practice but in theory you could call it something of a secret success, a movie that doesn’t work on the surface yet comes through your barriers and hitting you in ways both unexpected and discomforting.  Not for all tastes and certainly not Altman’s best but for completists its something to see!

--Andrew Kotwicki