Nashville is the damnedest thing you ever saw since M-A-S-H was the damnedest thing you ever saw. Altman comes the closest he has ever come to challenging his older masterpiece.

This is the deep probe into the American malaise, the film that should be required viewing before we consider "celebration" of a bicentennial. Almost incidentally, it is one of the great American movies.

There is almost no plot, as such, but Altman's command is so sure that the two-and-a-half hours race by. And more than any recent film, this one repays a second visit, so subtly and carefully has Altman constructed his multiple plots.

It is to American film what William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" is to American literature -- an epic definitive statement of the natural undercurrents shaping this nation.