Cast: Daniel Jenkins, Neil Barry, Jane Curtin, Paul Dooley, Jon Cryer, Cynthia Nixon, Dennis Hopper
A director with a career prolific and varied as Robert Altman is bound to have some bombs, curiosities or plain forgetful movies. O.C and Stiggs is a combination of the three, certainly a bomb, it is mostly an inconsequential movie that possesses the vivaciousness and structure of cult comedies, but is too scatter shot to create a satisfying whole.
Technology has increased the availability of older movies and this has led to some critics re-assessing the back catalog of auteurs. One prominent re-assessment of O.C. and Stiggs I found was by Nathan Rabin in his series My Year of Flops. In his review Rabin posits that O.C. and Stiggs was a "Secret Success" because Altman snuck sly class commentary into what was on the surface a frivolous teen sex-romp. Rabin's take is a charitable one, while OC&S does have a message its satire is so leaden it feels more like Altman slyly snuck a teen comedy into a clumsy satire than the opposite. The film opens with a staple of the genre, our smart-alecky duo O.C. and Stiggs prank the household of the square Schwabs while they are distracted by their own company's ad on TV, where Randal Schwab states amongst other things doesn't tolerate "the continent of Africa". That joke is funny, but it is hardly subtle and neither is much else in the film. Altman seems to think that he can replicate the ideas of great satire by possessing the vitriol that motivates great satire, but ultimately his commentary about class warfare is about as sophisticated as his two teenage protagonists.
O.C. and Stiggs is interesting in the margins, it has to be by the fact itself that Robert Altman directed it. However Altman has directed many films that are interesting in a lot more places than the margins and I can only really recommend this film to people who are Altman completists or those that want to perform an autopsy on an interesting failure.
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