Brewster McCloud (1970), set in Houston in the late 1960s, is a Robert Altman comedy. One reference source describes it as a quirky comedy, which may be the best adjective to attach. The movie is about birds, and things bird-like, in three ways: First, Rene Auberjonois appears intermittently as a gawking professor of ornithology, to lecture the audience on matters avian. As the film progresses, he comes more and more to resemble his subject. Second, Bud Cort lives surreptitiously in a cubbyhole of the Astrodome, where he has fashioned a set of wings and is attempting to learn to fly, as in human-powered flight in something of a throwback to before the Wright brothers. Third, there occurs in Houston an inexplicable series of deaths, possibly murders. A common element is that the deceased are found with....well, let's stop there, tiptoeing toward the edge without risking falling off the cliff into a spoiler.
Sally Kellerman plays a quasi-angelic character who watches over Cort's welfare. We have also the young Shelley Duvall, ten years before her appearance as Jack Nicholson's wife in The Shining (1980), in the role of an Astrodome tour guide. Michael Murphy plays the San Francisco detective who is summoned to Texas to investigate what is going on. His big decision each morning is to decide on the color de jour for his trademark gun holster and matching turtleneck.
As was said, quirky.
Sally Kellerman plays a quasi-angelic character who watches over Cort's welfare. We have also the young Shelley Duvall, ten years before her appearance as Jack Nicholson's wife in The Shining (1980), in the role of an Astrodome tour guide. Michael Murphy plays the San Francisco detective who is summoned to Texas to investigate what is going on. His big decision each morning is to decide on the color de jour for his trademark gun holster and matching turtleneck.
As was said, quirky.