Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age.

Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age opens today at BAM and runs through August 21. For the New York Times, Dennis Lim talks with Gould about the ten films, all made between 1969 and 1976: "This was a tumultuous period for Mr Gould, beginning with his swift rise from the Broadway minor leagues to the studio A-list, a vanguard figure of what the critic J Hoberman has called 'Hollywood's Jew Wave,' the 'leading man as schlemiel.' But after an intense experience working with Ingmar Bergman, Mr Gould went on an existential walkabout, eventually returning from the wilderness with the help of his friend Robert Altman."

Bruce Bennett talks with him, too, for the New York Sun: "In a 1970 cover story profile, Time magazine branded Elliot Gould 'the standard bearer for the Western World's hung-up generation.' Dated jargon notwithstanding, for the first half of the 1970s, the actor did indeed personify the Nixon-era antihero in all its three-dimensionally neurotic glory."

"All of these movies have aged well, and all of them pretty much flopped back in the shag carpet days," writes Robert Cashill. "Unlike his contemporary Dustin Hoffman, who bided his time between plum parts, Gould struck while the iron was hot post-M*A*S*H, and struck it again and again till it was ice cold."

"He's the perfect performer for an era at once drunk on and hung over from possibility," writes the L Magazine's Mark Asch. "I mean his early 70s heyday, and maybe now, too."

In Time Out New York, Joshua Rothkopf revisits M*A*S*H.

Posted by dwhudson at August 1, 2008 9:18 AM