DREAMS ARE WHAT LE CINEMA IS FOR...

Thinking back to that time in the late 60s when Old Hollywood (all overlit studio sets, name stars, and conventional genres) gave way to New Hollywood (with its auteurism, non-linear storytelling, and emphasis on youth), it’s easy for me to forget how gradual and awkward a transitional period it was. Film history can make it sound like one day Hollywood was churning out The Sound of Music, the next, Bonnie and Clyde; but closer to the truth is that the old guard was very slow in passing the torch to the younger generation, and the strain frequently showed.

Some Flowers Blossom Late But They're The Kind That Last the Longest
Ingrid Bergman admires her metaphor

During what I call the movie industry’s “Last Gasp” phase (a period wedged uncomfortably between the studio system excesses of the late-60s and the emergence of the American New Wave in the early-70s) Hollywood released a glut of wheezily old-fashioned films it attempted to pass off as “with it” and “now” entertainments targeted towards the young. These woefully middle-class, middle-aged films strove to reflect a youthful perspective but were at a loss for what that actually meant beyond the token insertion of self-consciously “hip” templates like rock music (which, to the septuagenarians running the studios meant Burt Bacharach or Henry Mancini); a smattering of profanity; aggressively mod costuming and art direction; and at least one cast member under the age of 40.

The Kids Are Alright
Bergman gets in touch with her inner MILF

The worst examples (like 1969s The Big Cube or the has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed Angel, Angel, Down We Go— starring Lana Turner and Jennifer Jones, respectively) alienated young and old alike by thrusting past-their-prime and obviously uncomprehending members of Hollywood Royalty smack into the center of psychedelic, youth-pandering tales of drugs, sex, and depravity. But most were just forced and artificial overtures to the youth market that, when serious, could only look at the young through the eyes of struggling-to-adapt adults (The Arrangement and The Happy Ending ); or when comedic, settled into the kind of sitcomy smuttiness that would come to typify TV’s Love, American Style (1968's twin smirking sleazefests, Prudence and the Pill and The Impossible Years).

One of the better films to emerge from this cross-generational limbo is Cactus Flower, a farcical comedy that in less capable hands could have come off exactly like an expanded episode of Love, American Style (Love and the Cactus Flower), but avoids that fate exclusively through the efforts of its appealing and talented cast. Truly, this film is a shining example of how resourceful actors can turn dross into gold.

Walter Matthau as Julian Winston

Ingrid Bergman as Stephanie Dickinson

Goldie Hawn as Toni Simmons

Jack Weston as Harvey Greenfield

Rick Lenz as Igor Sullivan

To keep from giving his much-younger girlfriend, Toni (Hawn), any matrimonial ideas, confirmed middle aged bachelor Julian (Matthau) pretends to be the married father of three. When a suicide attempt (always good for a laugh) prompts the Park Avenue dentist to propose, Julian asks his devoted nurse Stephanie (Bergman) to pose as his wife and reassure Toni she is not a home-wrecker and that their divorce is mutually desired and amicable . This being a farce, nothing goes as planned and all manner of Neil Simon-esque comic complications ensue before the not unexpected happy conclusion.

Walter Matthau and Goldie Hawn are each so adorably asexual that their May/December romance (there's a 25-year age difference) never crosses over into gross-out territory. The rubber-faced Matthau is one of my all-time favorite actors and I just think he's hilarious in this film. His inherent likability is what keeps the film afloat.

Based on the 1965 stage hit that gave Lauren Bacall her Broadway debut, Cactus Flower is an artifact from the “tired businessman” era of theater when breezily escapist musicals and plays were concocted for the benefit of NYC businessmen seeking to avoid the rush hour crunch of the trains to the suburbs. Dating back as far as 1952's The Seven Year Itch, these shows offered mindless laughs and tame titillation by way of middle-aged wish-fulfillment fantasies envisioning a world populated by bland professional men on the prowl pursued by bevies of beautiful young women who live only to be wed. That marriage is presented as the end all and be all in these vehicles has always struck me as positively perverse given how prominently deception, serial adultery, and lying figure in the so-called sexually sophisticated hi-jinx.

To my way of thinking, America in the very repressed and sexist early-60s had a particularly ugly concept of what constituted sexy and funny in motion pictures— Under the Yum Yum Tree; The Marriage-Go-Round; Boeing, Boeing; Any Wednesday…ick! Is it some heterosexual coping mechanism that, even to this day, makes it necessary to perpetuate an image of romantic courtship as an intricacy of calculated lies and tricks leading to the altar, only to be followed by a state of matrimony wherein the “domesticated” male can’t wait to stray, and the clinging female is an emasculating killjoy? Every time I hear that pathetic “sanctity of marriage” argument in today’s same-sex marriage battle, my mind goes to all those wholesome comedies and sitcoms I've suffered through in my lifetime (from a “simpler, more innocent time”) that treated adultery like a frolicsome lark.

So she got herself all dolled up in her satins and furs, and she got herself a husband...but he wasn't hers.
Very-married diplomat Arturo Sanchez (veteran character actor Vito Scotti) romances dental assistant Stephanie Dickinson, whose last big love affair was with a married man. What with Toni's year-long involvement with a man she thinks is married, Cactus Flower is like one long, pro-adultery infomercial.

Having so far lodged a case as to why Cactus Flower should be at the top of my list of most reviled films, I state here and now that no one is more surprised than me that this film ranks among my favorite comedies of the 60s. It’s a sweet-natured, laugh-out-loud, absolute delight… almost in spite of itself.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:
Say what one will about old Hollywood, when it was at the top of its game, no one was better at turning out these kinds of frothy, intricate farces. Cactus Flower has the undistinguished yet delectable visual gloss of a Doris Day movie; a sardonically funny screenplay (adapted from Abe Burrows) by Some Like it Hot’s I. A. L. Diamond; snappy, keep-the-action-moving direction by Gene Saks; and, most advantageously, an appealing and talented cast that knows its way around a punchline.

The premise of Cactus Flower is silly in the extreme, but it’s inconceivable to me that anyone could ever devise a journey that I wouldn't want to be taken on by Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, Jack Weston, and Ingrid Bergman. What an absolutely amazing cast! Just the fact that they are all in the same film should qualify Cactus Flower for classic status, but watching their sublime comic sparring is like taking a master class in chemistry and charisma. Their scenes fairly crackle with inspired bits of acting magic. Each is so deft and gifted a performer that together they infuse Cactus Flower with spark and wit.

Another Cactus Flower odd couple is Jack Weston and statuesque Eve Bruce (she played the Amazonian streetwalker in The Love Machine), both of whom add hilarious support to the increasingly complicated proceedings

PERFORMANCES:

As Goldie Hawn’s nomination and win for Cactus Flower is the only Oscar® recognition the film received, it’s a fact worth mentioning. But as any indication of real merit, one has to keep in mind we’re talking the Academy Awards here; an organization that first weighs in on sentiment, politics, publicity and popularity before it ever gets around to considering excellence. In this, her first major film role (in 1968 she appeared in Disney’s creaky musical, The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band in a giggly blond role E.J. Peaker probably turned down for Hello, Dolly!), Hawn radiates real star quality and holds her own against veterans Matthau and Bergman (Hawn's debut sort of stole the thunder of Bergman's return to American screens after a 20-year absence).

Old Hollywood meets New Hollywood

With her enormous eyes and Betty Boop voice, it is difficult not to watch Hawn every second. She's so excitingly kinetic a presence she single-handedly blows the cobwebs off of Cactus Flower's rather old-fashioned bedroom humor. I think she does a marvelous job with a deceptively difficult role. She has to make Toni sweet and waiflike enough to care about, but strong and resilient enough so that Julian doesn't come off as a total jerk. Although Hawn is really perfect in the role, there’s no denying that her win was heavily swayed by her being "This Year’s Blond" for 1969. It's perhaps best not to dwell too long on the other performances and actresses nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category that year and just enjoy watching a future superstar’s first class film debut.

The talent and chemistry of Oscar winners Ingrid Bergman and Walter Matthau elevate Cactus Flower to high-style farce

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:
Goldie Hawn's character is a clerk at a Greenwich Village record store, and the scenes that take place amongst the shelves of albums (featuring artists like Lou Rawls, The Beatles, Buck Owens, and Petula Clark) and walls of psychedelic blacklight posters feel as distant and of another time as any episode of Downton Abbey. They make me feel so nostalgic. (Bang! Right in the childhood!)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Because there’s so little about Cactus Flower that actually reflects the year in which it was made, I think it plays better now than it did in 1969. In the year of Woodstock, the Stonewall Riots, Charles Manson, and the Vietnam War, America could certainly use a few laughs, but Cactus Flower's mid-life comedy must have seemed a tad out of touch. Today, it's a film that fits snugly into the vague, pop-culture mashup of what is thought of as the 60s (on a double-bill, Cactus Flower would not look out-of-date with 1963's Move Over, Darling) and feels charmingly old-fashioned and just a tiny bit camp (what with references to “love beads” and those Muzak versions of songs by The Monkees and Boyce & Hart playing on the soundtrack). The dialog makes me laugh, the performances are great fun to watch, and if I don't dwell on the whole lying-your-way-to-love subtext, I have a wonderful time each time I see it. This is rom-com done right.

By the way, given my oft-voiced disdain for all things Adam Sandler, I don't recommend checking out the (loose) 2011 remake of Cactus Flower titled, Just Go With It. I haven't seen it, but c'mon, it stars Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston...call the bomb squad.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES:

Inscription reads: "Ken, See how old and mean you get if you hang around long enough."

Back in 1995 I had the pleasure of being Walter Matthau's personal trainer (a fact that amused the legendary sloucher no end). I liked him a great deal and found him to be every bit as funny (he told the best dirty jokes!) and sweet as he appears on screen. With all the anecdotes he shared about working in Hollywood, I should have been paying him. He's very much missed.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

Joan Rivers: "I wasn't invited to the prom. I invited the guy and I had to buy my own orchid. Carrie had a better time at her prom than I did."

That Carrie can be referenced in the punchline of a joke without benefit of clarification is a testament to how deeply rooted in our cultural consciousness Brian De Palma’s 1976 film (vis à vis Stephen King’s 1974 novel) has become. Indeed, contrary to the circumstances of her character in the film (she’s such a non-entity at her school that the principal repeatedly misidentifies her as “Cassie”) and the teaser ads for the forthcoming sequel (You Will Know Her Name); I'd say that by now, everybody knows exactly who Carrie is.

Sissy Spacek as Carrie White

Piper Laurie as Margaret White

Betty Buckley as Miss Collins

Amy Irving as Sue Snell

William Katt as Tommy Ross

Nancy Allen as Chris Hargensen

John Travolta as Billy Nolan

I was just starting college the year Carrie was released and (cinema snob that I was) I really couldn't have been less interested in it. 1976 was an absolutely amazing year for movies, and the films that preoccupied my mind, my time, and my interest were the more high-profile releases: Taxi Driver, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Hitchcock’s Family Plot, Fellini’s Casanova, Marathon Man, Rocky, King Kong, A Star is Born, Polanski’s The Tenant, Network, The Last Tycoon, Burnt Offerings, Sparkle, Lipstick, Logan’s Run, Bertolucci’s 1900, Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and Bergman’s Face to Face. I hardly saw daylight the entire year!

And then there was the woefully under-hyped Carrie. Here we had a film by a director whose only other work I’d seen at the time hadn't exactly swept me off my feet (Phantom of the Paradise), and whose sole marketable cast member, John Travolta, was a fledgling teen idol from the execrable sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, and whose whispery pop single, “Let Her In,” had turned summer of ’76 radio-listening into an absolute nightmare. Everything about Carrie, from its no-name cast to its over-explicit poster art, gave me the impression it was strictly drive-in fare; a movie suitable for a double-bill with one of those low-budget releases from AIP or Crown International about Bigfoot or redneck serial killers.

Eve was Weak
Margaret White's religious fanaticism adds adds an effectively ominous overlay of sin, sacrifice, and retribution to the story of a awkward teen and her coming-of-age awareness of her powers of telekinesis.

It was only through the persistent badgering of my best friend that I even came to see Carrieat all. My friend, a sci-fi / Dark Shadows buff, had already seen Carrieand used the excuse of wanting to see it again as an opportunity to call in his marker for the time I’d pestered him into attending a screening of Barbarella with me. As I took my seat in the packed San Francisco movie theater where Carrie was playing, I seethed with resentment over what I perceived as my friend extracting a particularly mean-spirited payback for what, the heinous crime of exposing him to the sight of a naked, zero-gravity Jane Fonda? However, some 98 minutes later I emerged from the theater, red-eyed (from crying- that Sissy Spacek really gets to me in this movie...even today) and overwhelmed. Wow! I had NOT been expecting that!

Macabre Martyrdom

Anticipating at best a run-of-the-mill horror movie, what I got was a surprisingly sensitive character drama that morphed into a kind of a nightmarish Grimm's fairy tale. A blood-splattered religious allegory of sin and redemption that's a near-poetic parable on the inability of a legacy of pain and cruelty to beget anything other than more pain and cruelty. Just out of high school myself (an all-boys Catholic School, but let’s face it, high school is high school) it felt more than a little cathartic to see a film that depicted everyday schoolyard torments with the graveness of Greek tragedy, meeting out suitably catastrophic retribution to the guilty.

I was sold by Carrie’s first five minutes (the volleyball game and the gym shower), both of which established: a) the atypical horror film setting of a high school; b) the female-centric thrust of the story, wherein the concerns, actions, and motivations of the women in the film appeared essential to propelling the plot forward; and c) the obvious subjective perspective the film was going to take regarding Carrie herself. Carrie absolutely floored me. I saw it three more times that month, and it has since remained one of my all-time favorite movies. A motion picture I’d readily list among the best horror films ever made.

Brian De Palma is known for his employment of the literal split-screen, but Carrie is also full of sequences in which the natural framing of a shot encourages the audience to take note of the dual /conflicting experiences of the characters as they occupy the same space.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Given that adolescence was a living hell for the vast majority of us, there’s something conceptually ingenious about a horror film set in an American high school—a “house” as haunted by the ghosts of the tortured and suffering as any European Gothic mansion. The hierarchy of school cliques and the day-to-day cruelties teens inflict upon one another seem to me perfect subjects for a meditation on the banality of evil; a concept explored in many of the films that have proved most influential in the horror genre (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

School Days, School Days

Carrie was made at a time when "bullying" was largely seen as kids-just-being-kids behavior.

Unlike Stephen King’s novel which expands the scope of Carrie to include news and science investigations into what happened at the prom, De Palma’s film wisely maintains a much narrower subjective tone (few things happen outside of the scope of the high-schoolers), heightening our identification with and empathy for Carrie and her rather tragic life. I’m reminded of a review of Carrie that smartly observed how it was so fitting for Carrie to have only destroyed her high school in the film (as opposed to half the town in the novel) because to an adolescent, high school IS the entirety of a teenager’s world. I honestly think the intimate scale of De Palma's Carrie is what makes it work so well. Carrie's nightmare is merely every adolescent's anxieties (public humiliation, social ostracism, the desire to fit in) writ in blood.

Adolescent trauma meets Grand Guignol

PERFORMANCES:

Defying accepted Hollywood logic that holds horror films don’t get Academy respect, the two (and only) Oscar nominations afforded Carrie were for the impossible-to-ignore performances of Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. Taking wildly divergent acting paths—Spacek playing her keyed-up naturalism off of Laurie’s idiosyncratic stylization—the actresses share a symbiotic chemistry in their scenes together that elevate Carrie far beyond what is usually considered possible in a horror film. Spacek's Carrie doesn't amp up the cliche acting signals that would indicate an outcast character. Rather, Carrie's awkwardness appears to emanate not out of any innate strangeness (she's actually better adjusted than most of her peers) but out of perhaps feeling too much and having been deprived for too long of any outlets of expression. Carrie's slowly developing telekinesis is a perfect metaphorical representation of what happens when rage is repressed.

Born Into Sin

And Piper Laurie...I can't say enough about the amazing risks she takes with her role and actually makes them work! It seems as if by grounding her character in a reality deeply felt and understood by her mentally unstable character, she allows herself to inhabit this monster of a woman and prevents herself from regulating any part of her performance by external "sane" standards. Laurie makes me believe in this broadly-drawn woman, and, more miraculously, she terrifies me even when she's making me laugh at her (as Ruth Gordon did in Rosemary's Baby).

One of the great unsung performances in Carrie is that of Betty Buckley as the sympathetic gym teacher. De Palma must have really appreciated her incisive portrayal, because he always seems to leave the camera on her just long to capture the brief flickers of emotion that play across her face at the end of scenes where she's forced to be tougher than she'd like to be, or when she's saying something she hopes to be true, but doesn't really trust in. Ironically, the sweet-natured Buckley assumed the role of Carrie's mother in the ill-fated 1988 Broadway musical of the film.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

The trademark Brian De Palma bag of tricks (slow motion, swirling camera, split screen, complex tracking shots, subjective sound, Bernard Herrmann-esque scores, Pino Donaggio's sensual music used as violence counterpoint, copious bloodletting) have never been put to as effective use as in Carrie. And no sequence in Carrie better illustrates the seamless blending of visual style with narrative theme than the bravura prom sequence. One of the most amazing bits of film as storytelling as you're ever likely to see.

Last Dance

A tour de force sequence that conveys tenderness, romance, joy, pathos, suspense, and terror in a seamless flow that's close to operatic. Like my favorite scene from Hitchcock's The Birds (the Tides Restaurant bird attack) the climatic prom at Bates High School is a sequence I never cease to marvel at, no matter how often I see it.

Contemporary filmmakers (especially those enamored of the excesses tolerated by the horror genre) who strive to blow us away with empty violent spectacle and CGI nonsense can take a lesson from De Palma here. If this sequence were all about the destruction and blood, Carrie would have gone the way of obscurity long ago. Carrie endures as a horror classic because De Palma takes the time to bring us into Carrie's dream come true before he turns it into a nightmare.

Grand Grotesquery
The eruption of the "curtain of fire" is one of my favorite film moments. It is so horrifically beautiful...I recall getting goosebumps when I saw it on the big screen.

THE STUFF OF ~~DREAMS~~ NIGHTMARES:
In speaking of Rosemary's Baby, director Roman Polanski is fond of saying that his intent was to make a horror film that looks like a Doris Day movie but reveals itself to be something sinister. To me, Carrie works in much the same fashion: it starts out like one of those teen-empowering After School Specials (a series of TV movies targeted to adolescents in the 70s and 80s) and then throws us a nasty curve as the heretofore reassuring ugly-duckling wish-fulfillment fantasy turns into a nightmare. It's brilliant.
I wish the 2013 remake a lot of luck, but just as Mia Farrow is and always will be the one and only Rosemary Woodhouse, Sissy Spacek's touchingly raw performance assures that there can only be, and only ever will be, one true Carrie.

"If only they knew she had the power."

Movie poster tagline

My introduction to Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music came in 1973 when I blindly purchased the Original Broadway Cast LP solely on the strength of my passionate adoration for his timeless scores to the Broadway shows, Companyand Follies. I say blindly because, despite my mini-fandom of Sondheim (that same year I’d dragged my family to see The Last of Sheila simply because I’d heard Sondheim collaborated on the script with actor, Tony Perkins), I really knew nothing about A Little Night Music at all. I was unaware of the 1955 Ingmar Bergman film upon which it is based —Smiles of a Summer Night; I didn't know anything about its content or structure, or whether it was a dramatic musical or comedy; and of course, I hadn't heard a note of the of the music (I know it’s hard to imagine now, but there was actually a time when not every man, woman and child had a recording of Send in the Clowns in release).

A Little Night Music sets the proper fairy tale tone by using a theatrical staging of the musical as a framing device that casts the principals in the evening's romantic roundelay as "players" in a turn-of-the-century operetta. Careful attention paid to the myriad couplings and uncouplings in Patricia Birch's gloriously gliding waltz choreography reveals the entirety of the film's plot.

But here is an instance of ignorance most assuredly proving to be bliss, for in purchasing the cast album without benefit of foreknowledge, I was granted the ultimate gift of being introduced to A Little Night Music as a purely musical experience. And for a Sondheim fan, what could be better? As a show, A Little Night Music is a perfectly charming little sex farce, perhaps one of the best of its stripe; but for me its strongest suit has always been Sondheim’s lushly romantic score. Consisting entirely of intricate waltz-time melodies with witty lyrics full of astoundingly clever wordplay, Sondheim’s compositions for A Little Night Music are among the best of his illustrious career.

By the time the film adaptation of A Little Night Music opened for a limited engagement at San Francisco’s Castro Theater in 1977, I had not as yet seen a stage production (that wouldn't be until some 30 years later) but having all but worn out the grooves on my Broadway cast LP and committed the entire score to memory, I would say that I was more than primed for the event.

Elizabeth Taylor as Desiree Armfeldt

Diana Rigg as Charlotte Mittelheim

Lesley-Anne Down as Anne Egerman

Hermione Ginglod as Madame Armfeldt

Len Cariou as Frederick Egerman

Laurence Guittard as Carl-Magnus Mittelheim

Like an intricate waltz in which the participants continually and imperceptibly change partners, A Little Night Music is a lyric dance of desire in which lovers, paired by fate, and with varying degrees of success, try to manipulate the circumstances of their lives. In turn-of- the-century Austria, stage actress Desiree Armfeldt (Taylor), wearying of her life on the road away from her daughter, Fredericka (the superb Chloe Franks), hatches a plot to marry former lover, Frederick Egerman (Cariou). Obstacles: Frederick has recently wed the beautiful but slightly shallow Anne (Lesley-Anne Down), his 18-year-old love who, after 11 months of marriage, still guards her virginity; Desiree herself is the mistress of the jealously possessive and much-married military dragoon, Carl-Magnus (Guittard), whose shrewd and embittered wife (Diana Rigg) is Anne’s old school chum; and,adding to the mix, Erich Egerman, Frederick's son from a previous marriage (Christopher Guard) is tortuously in love with Anne, his stepmother.

An orchestrated string of comic contrivances results in this amorously antsy group (which also includes a randy housemaid and a handsome manservant [Lesley Dunlop & Heinz Marecek]) converging for a weekend at the country estate of retired courtesan Mme. Armfeldt (Gingold) who just also happens to be Desiree’s mother.

Self-serious seminary student Erich Egerman struggles to resist entrapment in one of "the devil's snares" in the form of Petra, the housemaid. Ironically, in real-life actors Christopher Guard and Lesley Dunlop became a couple after meeting on this film.

A Little Night Musicis the stuff of classic romantic farce played out with considerable charm and wit by an engaging cast in eye-poppingly sumptuous costumes and surroundings. And interwoven amongst the sometimes heartbreaking follies of these lost and searching fools whom the summer night is hoped to smile upon, is Stephen Sondheim’s breathtaking music (lushly orchestrated to Oscar-winning effect by Jonathan Tunick who appears briefly as the conductor for the operetta that opens the film).

In the 1978 Harold Robbins camp-fest, The Betsy, British actress Lesley-Anne Down displayed her versatility in taking on a role the polar-opposite to that of child-bride Anne Egerman in A Little Night Music. Personal fave: 1981's Sphinx, where Down plays the screen's most improbable Egyptologist.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Translating a beloved stage musical to the screen is largely a thankless job, for you’d have to attend a comic book convention to find fans more vociferously persnickety and proprietary than theater geeks. And while I've suffered my share of gut-wrenching disappointments at seeing some beloved stage show bowdlerized on the screen (cue Sir Richard Attenborough’s lame-legged, A Chorus Line), I always concede to the fact that film and stage are entirely different mediums and a movie musical has to stand on its own distinct merits, not on how faithfully it translates its source material. I’m in a small camp on this one, I know, but I find A Little Night Music to be a marvelous movie musical. One that I'm well aware fans of the stage show consider to be a disaster. I'm not denying its flaws (even the filmmakers concede that pressures of time and budget made certain compromises necessary), but for pure screen pleasure and taking delight in wonderful actors, beautiful music, and a sharp, funny screenplay, A Little Night Music is a most diverting and glorious entertainment.

The night smiles three times at the follies of human beings: First for the young who know nothing; the second, for the the fools who know too little; and the third, for the old, who know too much.

My lack of a theatrical frame of reference no doubt played a large part in why I fell so hard for this flawed, but thoroughly delightful film, just as did the circumstances of my seeing it (The Castro Theater was packed, the film was shown with an intermission, and applause followed almost every number). Hoping just for a chance to see what I had missed in never seeing the show onstage, A Little Night Music as a film actually exceeded my expectations in terms of cinematic style, performances, and overall panache. It succeeded at being bitchily witty, moving, romantic, and at times, just gorgeously opulent and lovely. This kind of light, frothy entertainment is exceeding difficult to carry off, but for me, A Little Night Music hit the perfect key. An odd choice of words, I know, given Elizabeth Taylor’s touchingly hesitant vocalizing of Send in the Clowns (a friend of mine adored one critic’s summation of Taylor’s rendition as, “No chart-buster”).

PERFORMANCES:

Well-suited to portraying a diva of advanced years who knows a thing or two about how to get a married man to leave his wife, Elizabeth Taylor is at her latter-career best in A Little Night Music. Not only is her much-commented upon, well-upholstered figure perfectly suited to Florence Klotz’s Oscar-nominated period costumes (although in some scenes one might wish cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson had made more of an effort to photograph her flatteringly) but is quite winning as she effortlessly glides from slightly overplayed comedy to genuinely touching drama. She’s marvelous and brings an appropriately regal star power to the film, but in all of her triumphs, it’s Diana Rigg who walks away with the picture.

The Ladies Who Lunch
Everyone references Send in the Clowns when speaking of A Little Night Music, but my favorite song in the entire show has always been the plaintive Every Day a Little Death. This duet by the two deceived wives is movie musical magic for me. I fall apart, it's just that gorgeous.
Listen to it Here

To paraphrase a lyric from one of the show's Second Act songs, “The woman is perfection.” Diana Rigg, whose talent for high-style bitchery is rivaled only by perhaps Maggie Smith, is everything that a film like A Little Night Music needs. She's an urbane and spirited actress with a way of commanding the screen no matter whom she shares it with. Hers is a sharp performance that gives the film much-needed zest and fire. Adding to this is the brilliant Hermione Gingold who, though sadly underutilized (and denied her lovely song, Liasons), enlivens each of her scenes with her trademark droll delivery. The contributions of these two actresses is invaluable in making A Little Night Music such an enjoyable experience.

Laurence Guittard and Len Cariou recreate the roles they originated in the Broadway production. As fine as they are in their roles, both actors lack that intangible "something" that' translates on film. They recede into the background and nary make an impression. The women do all the heavy lifting in A Little Night Music.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

I’m not overly fond of the arbitrary, often unimaginative “opening up” that occurs when theatrical properties are adapted to the screen, but I love it when directors discover an authentic cinematic language for a show that justifies it being transferred to another medium. The Glamorous Life is an ingeniously economic number that conveys a great deal of backstory, plot exposition and character information in a montage of silent and sound images that recall the sensation of leafing through a scrapbook.

The Glamorous Life
Sondheim's brilliant song begins as a young girl's boastful paean to the life of her actress mother and ends up being a self-convincing denial of loneliness

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:
Even people who don't much like the film express nothing but praise for the handling of the number, A Weekend in the Country, the film's centerpiece. Shot in a series of escalating cross cuts that mirror the mounting anxieties of the two parties set to merge at the Armfeldt estate, its a bouncy and amusing number well-played by all and very cinematic. It's a real highlight. Fans of Downton Abbey should really discover A Little Night Music...it has a wonderful look.

Considering how many people involved in the original Broadway production were involved in bringing A Little Night Music to the screen (Sondheim, director Harold Prince, choreographer Patricia Birch, screenwriter Hugh Wheeler, costume designer Florence Klotz) it's surprising the finished product pleased so few. The filmmakers cited crunched schedules, unstable financing, and the legendarily bad health of Taylor as the reasons for the many compromises undertaken.
True or not, I think all that focusing on what could have been clouds a fair appreciation for what was accomplished, which for me, a man who returned to the Castro Theater three more times to see A Little Night Music during its initial engagement, is something pretty special.

(Incidentally, these days, what with all those kids from Glee butchering one Broadway standard after another, I'm beginning to look more kindly on ol' Liz's "no chart-buster" version of Send in the Clowns.)

Why this nifty little thriller is so forgotten and nowhere to be found today is a mystery. It's really a rather intriguing, if sometimes uneven, attempt at mixing Hitchcockian suspense with the kind of supernatural theater of the macabre one might associate with an old episode of Night Gallery. Prior to its release in theaters, Universal Studios generated considerable public interest with TV ads that prominently featured footage of a little old lady in a runaway wheelchair careening helplessly towards traffic (backwards yet!) down a particularly precipitous slope of one of San Francisco's many hills. As a San Francisco resident at at the time, these commercials made Eye of the Catthe must-see movie of the summer of '69 as far as I was concerned.

This scene, which owes more than a little to Hitchcock, is enough to make Eye of the Cat a must-see.

To clarify, said “little old lady” in the film is three-time Oscar-nominee, Eleanor Parker, who was just 46 at the time. Although unfamiliar to me then, Parker, just four years after The Sound of Music, was another talented actress "of a certain age" (a la Jennifer Jones, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Bette Davis, and Tallulah Bankhead) who found herself prematurely relegated to “horror hag” roles in youth-centric 60s thrillers that took as a given audiences finding women over the age of 30 to be as grotesque as Hollywood apparently did. Eye of the Cat, which has never had a DVD release and seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth, was one of the earliest films to exploit the subtle malevolence and flagrant creep-out factor of amassing animals; a trend that blossomed into a full-blown horror sub-genre in the 70s with films like Willard, Empire of the Ants, Kingdom of the Spiders, and the laughably non-threatening Night of the Lepus (giant bunnies!). I saw Eye of the Cat at San Francisco's Embassy Theater on Market Street, the first show of its first weekend in release. Not being much of a fan of cats (that has since changed) the movie fairly gave me the willies and in short, scared the hell out of me...but that didn't stop me from sitting through it three times.

Gayle Hunnicutt as Kassia Lancaster
"Just another beautiful girl with all the wrong values."

Michael Sarrazin as Wylie
"In good mirrors you can see that once I was disastrously beautiful."

Eleanor Parker as Aunt Danielle (Aunt Danny)
"Nowadays you can't depend on natural causes."

Tim Henry as Luke
"It's not a good idea to take cats lightly."

Joseph Stefano, screenwriter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, penned this original screenplay about feline seductress Kassia Lancaster (“It sounds like a cell door slamming shut.”) and her plot to secure the fortune of an ailing San Francisco matron (Parker) by returning to the lonely dowager her beloved derelict nephew, Wylie (Sarrazin), and arranging for her subsequent murder once her will has been altered in his favor. Danielle (or Aunt Danny as she's affectionately/derisively known) is a near-invalid suffering from acute emphysema and lives in a cavernous San Francisco mansion with Wylie’s younger brother, Luke (newcomer Tim Henry), who waits on her in apathetic servitude, and roughly a hundred overprotective cats, the sole benefactors of her will. Kassia's diabolical plan hits a major snag when it's discovered that Wylie, the linchpin of the whole operation, is plagued by crippling ailurophobia (a deathly fear of cats).

In addition to this feline homage to Psycho, Eye of the Cat features a wonderful score by Lalo Schifrin (Cool Hand Luke) with obvious Berrnard Hermann overtones.

Eye of the Cat is not really the “When Good Animals Go Bad” creature-features thriller its title would suggest (a plus, I might add) but rather an intriguing attempt to modernize those murder and passion crime thrillers that once typified film noir (Gayle Hunnicutt, with mounds of big, 60s hair, is a terrifically ruthless femme fatale) combined with the supernatural chill-thrill of say, classic horror of Val Lewton (Cat People). I’d like to report the experiment was wholly successful, but it kind of loses steam in the middle only to end just as it’s becoming the shuddery thrill ride it should have been all along. Perhaps in more resourceful hands than those of director David Lowell Rich (The Concord… Airport ’79, need I say more?), Stefano’s somewhat colorless script could have lived up to the promise of the film’s sensational (silent) pre-credits sequence.

Eye of the Cat gets off to a very winning start by way of a stylish expository pre-credits sequence that mirrors the multi-image / split-screen opening sequence of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and effectively predates Brian De Palma's subsequent appropriation of the device.

The raw material is certainly there: an enigmatic villainess; the San Francisco setting (a wonderful city for thrillers—the picturesque angles of all those hills never fails to unsettle); the misleadingly simple murder scheme; the probable subterfuge and concealed motives behind virtually each action engaged in by every character at all times; and the fascination of cats and their inherent mystery. But it's precisely there being such a rich mine of chiller material to vein that makes one wish Joseph Stefano's script were more up to the task set forth by the premise. Luckily, Eye of the Cat's gratuitously cryptic dialog is delivered by a better-than-average cast, all of whom appear gleefully game for this kind of psyco-fright stuff; and the enjoyably peevish malevolence at the heart of the story greatly mitigates Mr. Stefano's penchant for trying to generate mystery by leaving his characters and their motivations underdeveloped and unexplored to a maddening degree.

That's Mark Herron there in the mint green Nehru smock, Judy Garland's 4th husband (her 2nd gay husband). He has a small role as Belmondo (one name only, please), owner of an elite San Francisco spa.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Any dog can be scary in real life, but for me to be made afraid of one onscreen, it has to be one of those ugly, aggressive breeds like a Rottweiler or a Pit Bull or at least a rabies-infected killing machine like Cujo (who was, on the whole still pretty cute,). Cats, on the other hand, merely have to be themselves. Cute or creepy, cats introduce an element of uncertainty just by showing up and they always appear to be operating under their own mysterious, sinister agendas. (This calls to mind a Night Gallery episode I once saw that made use of a quote from Samuel Butler’s novel, Erewhon: “Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead.” If ever two words perfectly summed up my impression of cats, it’s the words “low cunning.”)

Pussy Galore
The trainer for the armies of cats used in Eye of the Cat was the late Ray Berwick, who also served as bird trainer on Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. He shared his feline training techniques in a well-received book published in 1986.

My long-held distrust of cats played into the effectiveness of Eye of the Cat the same way a childhood spent in Catholic schools played into my enjoyment of Rosemary’s Baby the year before: it wasn't compulsory, but it helped. And what I like about both films is that in their basic structure, they work perfectly fine whether one buys into the supernatural angle or not.

Eye of the Cat generates genuine tension as a crimecaper thriller, keeps you guessing as a psychological suspense flick, and works your nerves as a supernatural horror film about potentially pernicious pussycats (hee hee). With so many plots to juggle, Eye of the Cat can perhaps be forgiven the mood-killing miscalculations of throwing in an obligatory 60s party scene and a lengthy “love montage.” (For some reason, the 70s was the era of the romantic montage. This cheap and economic go-to device for writers unable to plausibly convey a developing romance has ground many a promising film to a grinding halt. Perhaps the worse offender being Clint Eastwood’s 1971 directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, in which a pretty good suspense thriller takes a 20-minute nap while Clint gives us a Carmel, California travelogue and an infomercial for The Monterey Jazz Festival.)

What's New, Pussycat?

PERFORMANCES:

As a longtime fan of glamorous tough broads in movies, it’s unlikely Gayle Hunnicutt’s Kassia Lancaster wouldn't emerge my favorite character in the film. She states early on, “I’m not afraid of anything!” and spends the rest of the film proving it. Dangerous, self-assured, authoritative, and without a doubt the strongest, smartest character in the film; female characters of her stripe would become extremely rare in the 70s as male-dominated “buddy films” grew in popularity. The fantastic-looking Gayle Hunnicutt gives an assured performance whose measured severity plays nicely off of Michael Sarrazin's more easygoing style.

I love that the first time we see Kassia, she's shown licking her fingers and grooming herself like a cat.

Eleanor Parker looks wonderful and is very good in an underwritten part that casts her unsympathetically with little foundation. Cast as a salacious older woman, Parker certainly doesn't embarrass herself as Jennifer Jones did in a similar role in Angel, Angel, Down We Go that same year, but in having already played a horny older woman in 1965's The Oscar, one wishes the eternally classy actress found something else to do if this was the only kind of role Hollywood was throwing her way.

The loss of two-thirds of her lung tissue barely puts a crimp in Aunt Danielle's libidinous urges. Here she's seen languishing in an oxygen tent in what is apparently the bed from Love, American Style.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

I love a thriller that keeps me guessing, and Eye of the Cat is splendid at throwing so many red herrings and false clues into the pot that no matter where you think the film is headed, it veers elsewhere. But as good as a film as it is and as much as I found it scary and suitably creepy as a pre-teen, I'd be lying if I said that the prodigious amount of male flesh on display in Eye of the Cat didn't in part inspire those three viewings at the Embassy in 1969.

Perhaps in an effort to convey his character's freewheeling ways, Michael Sarrazin spends a great deal of the film shirtless or with nudity artfully concealed. Similarly, dreamboat material co-star Tim Henry (bottom pic with Eleanor Parker) adds a touch of homoerotic interest to a film that already overflowing with adultery, promiscuity and possible incest. Hooray for Hollywood in the 60s!

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

One of the reasons I wish Eye of the Cat would get a legitimate DVD release is so that I can relish the San Francisco locations, digitally enhanced. The film had lots of great location shots that establish a wonderful sense of time and place.

A process shot, to be sure, but behind Sarrazin's head can be seen San Francisco's Paris Theater on Market Street.

At the top, the corner of Octavia and Washington in San Francisco as seen today. To the left is the exterior of Aunt Daniell's cat-filled mansion, to the right, the hill that features so prominently in the plot (below, the site in 1969).

Eye of the Cat is no classic, but it's a dynamo of a thriller that doesn't deserve its obscurity. It certainly holds up for me after all these years and still packs a punch despite my having overcome my own youthful antipathy toward cats.

"They do come back..."

Late in the summer of 1973, just around the time I (and most of America) was in the throes of a pop-cultural mania sparked by the powerhouse release of The Exorcist, the delectably tense drawing-room thriller, Night Watch, was sneaked into Bay Area theaters without benefit of fanfare or much in the way of advance publicity.

This was at the height of Elizabeth Taylor’s and Richard Burton’s waning relevance as both movie stars and tabloid darlings, theirs having been a ten-year reign of bad publicity, bad behavior, and bad films together (the exquisite Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?notwithstanding), culminating in a final tandem screen appearance in the 1973 two-part TV-movie “Special Event” prophetically titled: Divorce His – Divorce Hers (their 10-year marriage would end the following year). Like most everyone else at the time, I had grown pretty tired of hearing about “Liz & Dick”- Hollywood’s answer to Orthrus, the mythological two-headed beast - whose conspicuous private life excesses had long overshadowed any merit I once accorded their professional talents. Off my personal radar for some time, I hadn't seen Elizabeth Taylor in a movie since 1968’s Secret Ceremony (which I loved), but when I saw the newspaper ad for Night Watch, I knew I HAD to see this movie.

I'm sorry, but how was it possible for anybody to resist this image of a windswept, heavily-mascaraed, Liz Taylor melodramatically clutching her head while lightning flashed overhead and two shadowy figures appear in spooky silhouette in the windows of a creepy Gothic mansion? OMG! This is marketing perfection! I practically camped out in front of the theater waiting for it to open.

Based on playwright Lucille Fletcher’s (Sorry, Wrong Number) moderately successful 1972 Broadway play which starred Joan Hackett and future Taylor co-star, Len Cariou (A Little Night Music - 1977), Night Watch, on the surface, treads territory familiar to those acquainted with George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) or any of those “Is she crazy or is she being driven crazy?” thrillers like Midnight Lace (1960), Diabolique (1955), and Sudden Fear (1952).

Elizabeth Taylor as Ellen Wheeler

Laurence Harvey as John Wheeler

Billie Whitelaw as Sarah Cooke

Idle and wealthy Ellen Wheeler (Taylor), the neglected wife of loving but desperate-to-prove-he’s-not-living-off-her, workaholic husband, John (Harvey), is still, after eight years, haunted by memories of her first husband’s death in a violent automobile crash that also took the life of his 20-year-old mistress. After suffering a crippling breakdown, Ellen has since been plagued by nightly bouts of insomnia and subtly treated as a mentally fragile time-bomb by both her husband and her visiting girlhood friend, Sarah (Whitelaw). On one particularly stormy night vigil with too little sleep and too many inner demons to battle (and there are a LOT of rain storms in this London-based thriller), Ellen glances out the window to the abandoned house across the courtyard and sees, in a flash of lightning and flurry of storm-tossed shutters, the horrifying image of a man with a slashed throat propped grotesquely in a wing-back chair situated close to the window. When a police search of the old dark house fails to unearth even a trace of habitation, let alone evidence of foul play, John and Sarah’s concern for Ellen’s mental state intensify while Ellen herself grows ever more convinced that what she saw was real.

I don’t tend to think of myself as someone drawn to a particular type of film, but truth be told, I confess to having a decided weakness for suspense thrillers. If you’ve been a fan and seen as many movies as I have, comes a time when a certain over-familiarity with certain narrative tropes and plot devices can undermine the ability of a film to take you by surprise. As movie genres go, the suspense thriller (and its attendant sub- categories: the psychological thriller, the mystery, the whodunit, the erotic thriller, the sci-fi chiller) is one of the last mainstays of the unanticipated for a veteran film fanatic like myself, and I especially relish it when, as in the case of Night Watch, a movie so structurally conventional can have so many sinister surprises up its sleeve.

"That's what the watchers of the night are for. Things that in daytime are unknown and unremembered."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

As a lifelong insomniac familiar with the kind of subtle disquiet that can creep into the soul in the wee small hours of the morning, I have to say first and foremost I love the film’s title. To “Night Watch” is a perfect description of what it feels like to be wide awake when the vast majority of those around you are asleep and you’re standing metaphysical guard against your id playing havoc with all those subterranean thoughts and repressed terrors your ego holds so reliably in check during the daylight hours. Secondly, I found myself totally caught up in the way Night Watch uses the conventions of the modern Gothic to construct a persuasively suspense-filled thriller built around the uncertainty of perception. This film is full of games of truth and illusion more deceptive (and far deadlier) than any of those employed by Albee’s George and Martha.

"If the mind is obsessed enough with something it can actually produce an image on the retina. It has a name...it's called an 'eidetic image'."

PERFORMANCES:

With but a few exceptions, most of my favorite actresses have tried their hand at the suspense thriller. Meryl Streep – Still of the Night; Audrey Hepburn – Wait Until Dark; Sandy Dennis – That Cold Day in the Park; Julie Christie – Don't Look Now; Jane Fonda – Klute; Lauren Bacall – The Fan; Susannah York – Images; Faye Dunaway - Eyes of Laura Mars; …even such unlikely candidates as Goldie Hawn (Deceived) and Twiggy (W). In this, her sole foray into the world of scream queens, daggers, and red herrings, Elizabeth Taylor is to the manner born. Movies like this fall apart if the audience is unable to identify with or relate to a character's dilemma. Elizabeth Taylor brings a considerable amount of verisimilitude to her character, making her crumbling mental state both believable and compelling. She is given solid support by the talented, exclusively British cast, but Taylor holds the thing together by making her terror seem debilitatingly real. But as an actress who has, in the past, introduced to the screen characters created by Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Carson McCullers, one can’t exactly say Elizabeth Taylor is a stranger to hysterics.

Cracking Up

Reunited with Butterfield 8 co-star, Laurence Harvey (only 45 at the time but exhibiting the wasting effects of the stomach cancer that would take his life only four months after the film’s release) Taylor is simply terrific as the high-strung witness to a possible murder no one believes really happened. Like late-career Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, late-career Elizabeth Taylor is often a matter of taste. Those having a problem with her impossible-to-ignore star persona, fluctuating weight gain (sometimes mid-film), designer caftans and unique vocal style (she’ll insert pauses and stress emphases in the most unexpected places) are not likely to be persuaded by her work here. Me, I think she’s the top, and in Night Watch she gives a spellbindingly intense performance that's revealed to be even sharper and subtler upon repeat viewings.

The icy reserve of Billie Whitelaw (who would later terrify as the menacing nanny, Mrs. Baylock, in The Omen) contrasts effectively with Taylor's more earthy vulnerability.

Suspiciously conciliatory neighbor Mr. Appleby (Robert Lang) directs Ellen's attention to something in the window of the abandoned house next door.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

At first glance, Night Watch looks like a derivative catalog of hoary horror film clichés. And, well…it is. There’s the woman in distress; the incessant thunder storms with well-timed lighting flashes; the old dark house; the ludicrously skeptical friends and annoyingly unhelpful police; the assortment of suspicious characters with dubious motives; the non-stop entreaties to “calm down” or “get some sleep”; they’re all there.

Bill Dean as Inspector Walker

It’s only later when you start to realize how much your expectations have been intentionally manipulated does it begin to sink in how cleverly Night Watch works audience familiarity with the conventions of the genre to it its advantage. It's a tight, well-paced thriller that deftly builds its suspense by playing with the audience's mind as cleverly as it plays with that of Taylor's character.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm
Why would someone be digging a hole in the garden in the middle of the night? Night Watch takes fiendish delight in throwing traditional horror film elements into the mix of a suspense thriller.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

I was 15 years old when I saw Night Watch, and even after the nerve-wracking horror of The Exorcist,the PG-rated Night Watchscared the hell out of me. Seeing it now some 30 years later, not only does it really hold up as a crackerjack thriller that plays surprisingly fair with its surprises and twists (it’s one of those rare thrillers – like Hitchcock’s – that keeps paying dividends the more you see it), but there’s the added bonus of the whole 70s feel of it.

Liz, not having an easy go of it

For those uninterested in taking either Elizabeth Taylor or the film seriously, Night Watch has much to recommend it in camp appeal for the terrifically glossy 70s look of the whole thing. There's Taylor at her 70s diva best, photographed flatteringly and sporting a host of conceal / reveal 70s finery. There is much to take in visually, from big hairstyles, glam makeup, bulky jewelry, turtlenecks, positively enormous sideburns, wide ties, and even an ascot.
Though rarely referenced and seen by very few, Night Watch is one of my favorite thrillers, and I'd recommend it to anyone with a fondness for the magnificent Elizabeth Taylor, or for anyone interested in atypical curios from this favored actress's career.
Happily, the Warners Archive Collection DVD has been beautifully remastered and is a huge improvement over the exceedingly dark, pan and scan VHS release from several years back. Scenes once taking place in near total darkness (those who've seen the film know what I mean) are startlingly clear. Also, and I might be mis-remembering here, but I thought there was once a terrible George Barrie / Sammy Cahn theme song played over the end credits that has since been removed (hooray!). I see the song exists in the IMDB credits (title: "The Night Has Many Eyes") and I seem to recall it being sung by a Tom Jones sound-alike. In any event, my recollection of it was that it was 100% not the kind of MOR Sinatra-esque ditty you wanted to be played after the jolting finale of this thriller. It puts me to mind of Henry Mancini's equally mood-killing and inappropriate "love theme" from Wait Until Dark.

Night Watch reunited Taylor with her Butterfield 8 (1960) co-star, Laurence Harvey.

Note: I usually try to mix up the kind of films I write about each month, but in looking over my posts for December, I'm pretty sure the preponderance of thriller / suspense films represented this month (Carrie, Eye of the Cat, Night Watch) is in direct response to all that sugary, family-oriented programming one is subjected to on television during the holiday season. However, the highlighting of two Elizabeth Taylor films (A Little Night Music and Night Watch) is without a doubt an attempt on my part to divest myself of the memory of that "Liz & Dick" TV-movie that aired on Lifetime last month. Boy, talk about your horror films!

They cast WHO to portray me?

Beyond the obvious need to lure the American public away from their TV sets with size and spectacle impossible to match on the small screen, I’m not sure I've ever been totally clear on the thought process behind the 60s epic. I can understand when the subject’s a heroic historical figure (Lawrence of Arabia), or the backdrop something as broad in scope as the Russian Revolution (Doctor Zhivago). But when the roadshow treatment (widescreen, two-plus-hours running time, reserved seats, intermission) is imposed upon relatively intimate stories of love, relationships, and the flaws of character that lead to tragedy (Ryan’s Daughter), I can’t help but feel that the outsized visual scale of the epic can sometimes work to undermine the effectiveness of the human drama. Such is the case with John Schlesinger’s otherwise superior adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd.

Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdine

Alan Bates as Gabriel Oak

Terence Stamp as Sergeant Frank Troy

Peter Finch as William Boldwood

In earlier posts I've expressed my weakness for visual ostentation and how readily I’m able to overlook a film’s shortcomings when its deficiencies are mitigated by a certain stylistic panache. However, John Schlesinger’s impressive cast for Far From the Madding Crowd, is so compellingly fascinating in their own right (Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp) that all the pomp and spectacle of the production around them makes a perfect case against the need to gild the lily.

Far from the Madding Crowd is an outsized film of subtle emotions that would have greatly benefited from the kind of intimate style employed by Ken Russell for Women in Love.

MGM’s handing over the reins of a $4 million adaptation of a Thomas Hardy classic to the creative team behind the modestly-funded, ultra-mod, youth-culture hit, Darling(1965), was either an inspired stroke of genius or a simple act of crass commercialism. Inspired, certainly, in conjecturing that the very contemporary talents of producer Joseph Janni, director John Schlesinger, screenwriterFrederic Raphael, and actress Julie Christie (with the added assist of her Fahrenheit 451 cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg) could bring to this Victorian-era period piece the same verve and freshness they brought to their cynical evisceration of swinging London. Crassly commercial, undeniably, in a studio attempting to hit boxoffice paydirt merely by reassembling the hot-property talents of a current success, heedless of their suitability to the material at hand.

While I tend to think MGM was thinking with their pocketbooks more than their heads (Hollywood at the time was literally throwing open its doors to any and everyone who displayed the slightest trace of knowing what young audiences were looking for) I have to also admit that in many ways, Thomas Hardy’s take on Wessex countryside life in 1874 and Schlesinger’s view of 60s London are a better fit than first glance would reveal.

Bathsheba finds herself the focus of the amorous attentions of three men

As embodied by Julie Christie, Far From the Madding Crowd’s Bathsheba Everdine is easily the spiritual cousin of Darling’s Diana Scott. While lacking Diana’s heartlessness, Bathsheba, like Diana, is of an individualistic, determined, and headstrong nature tempered by the foibles of pride, vanity, and a kind of reckless self-enchantment in her own powers of allure. Nowhere near as passive as Hardy’s most popular heroine, the unfortunate Tess of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Bathsheba is a non-heroic heroine of unfailingly human-sized passions and idiosyncrasies. Conflictingly led by her heart, her indomitability, and a barely-masked need to have her beauty regarded by others—for no reason beyond the immature, yet very human desire to be reassured of their worth from time to time—Bathsheba is less the traditional romantic heroine ruled by her passions than a kind of rural Circe, bewitching and dooming the hapless men who cross her path.

Self Enchanted
A landowner, a businesswoman, and an independent spirit

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

I’m not one to demand that a film adaptation of a book hew slavishly to the written word. Of course, I love it when a film made from a favorite novel is translated to the screen in terms compliant to the way I envisioned it (Goodbye, Columbus), but I’m just as happy if a filmmaker deviates from the text if they are able unearth something new, something wholly cinematic that captures the book’s essence, if not its exact plot (Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining). I only got around to reading Far From the Madding Crowd last year, some 34 years after I saw the film version, and beyond the then-controversial casting the of the blond Christie in the role of the fiery brunette Bathsheba, I found Schlesinger’s film to be surprisingly faithful to the book and both equally pleasing.

A highlight of both the book and the film is the "swordplay" seduction scene

Perhaps too faithful, as the self-deprecating director indicated to biographer William J. Mann in the book, The Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger. In addressing claims that the film far too long and atypically slow in pacing, Schlesinger states: “We didn't take enough liberty with the film because we were too worried about taking liberties with a classic.” There is indeed a kind of reverence to text in Schlesinger’s film that makes Far From the Madding Crowd the kind of film perfect for high-school literature classes, but for me, the movie is more atmospherically leisurely than slow. I love the time Schlesinger gives over to giving us colorful views of country farm life, and the romantic quadrangle at the center of the film (pentagonal if one includes the tragic Fanny Robin, the farm girl with just about as much luck as the traditional heroine of Victorian literature) is engagingly and dramatically evoked.

Prunella Ransome portrays Fanny Robin, a young servant girl in love with the dashing Sergeant Troy (Stamp). Were this a epic musical taking place in 19-century France, hers would be the Anne Hathaway role.

I fell in fell in love with Far From the Madding Crowd chiefly because of Julie Christie (surprise!) but mostly because it was refreshing to see an epic film with a strong woman at its center. A woman whose actions not only propelled the events of the story, but hose destiny was shaped by what she does or does not want, not merely by the vagaries of fate that befall her.

As far as I'm concerned, the film has a tough time recovering from a huge loss of credibility when Julie Christie rebuffs the matrimonial advances of that absolutely gorgeous slab of hirsute hunk, Alan Bates. Seriously, what was she thinking?

PERFORMANCES:

I’m afraid if I log one more post in which I wax rhapsodic on the wonders of Julie Christie, my partner is going in search of professional help (for me or himself), so I’ll make this brief. In Bathsheba Everdine, Christie is cast as yet another shallow petulant—a character of the sort she virtually trademarked in the 60s with her roles in Darling, Fahrenheit 451 (Montag’s wife, anyway), and Petulia. Christie’s artistry and gift in being able to convey the emotional depth behind the superficial has been, I think, the obvious intelligence that has always been an inseverable part of her beauty and appeal. It takes a lot of brains to play thoughtless.

Mad Love

As good as Christie is (and for me, her star quality alone galvanizes this monolithic movie) the top acting honors go to Peter Finch who gives the screen one of the most searing portraits of tortured obsession since James Mason in Lolita. One of my favorite scenes is a silent one where the camera is trained on Finch’s face as Christie’s character rides by in a wagon. In his eyes alone you can see a wellspring of hope rise and fall in a matter of seconds. It really takes something to upstage Julie Christie, and she is very good here, but Peter Finch really won me over by giving the films most moving and complex performance.

Scenes depicting English country life are beautifully rendered

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

The production values of Far From the Madding Crowd are absolutely first rate. The time and place is richly evoked in lavish costumes, painstaking period detail, and vivid depictions of rural life. Still, while the large-format Panavision does well when it comes to dramatically demonstrating the tempestuous forces of nature that underscore the impassioned carryings-on of Hardy’s characters, the sheer size of Far From the Madding Crowd keeps me at an emotional remove. Nicolas Roeg’s ofttimes startlingly beautiful camerawork strives rather valiantly to imbue the picture-postcard compositions with as much humanity and sensitivity as possible. The story is so engaging and the performances so good that one longs to be brought closer, but too often the film leaves us feeling as if we are looking at these lives through the wide-lens end of a pair of binoculars.

Cinematographer, later-turned-director Nicolas Roeg was the unofficial caretaker of the Julie Christie "look" early in her career. He also photographed her to breathtaking effect for Fahrenheit 451, Petulia, and in 1973 he directed her in Don't Look Now

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Far From the Madding Crowd did not do too well at the boxoffice in 1968. A fact likely attributable, at least in part, to the film being promoted as a romance when in actuality the real love story begins about 60 seconds before the 168-minute movie ends. To its detriment in hoping to be the next epic romance in the Doctor Zhivago vein, Far From the Madding Crowd is chiefly a drama about people who are either in love with the right people at the wrong time or the wrong people at the right time.

The Valentine that sets the tragic drama in motion

As for me, Far From the Madding Crowd is a movie I like to revisit because in it I find a poignant meditation on love. The three men seeking the hand of Bathsheba offer her three distinct types of love: passionate and sensual; a near-paternal adoration; and finally, the calm, even-tempered love of respect and friendship. Which is truer, which is preferable? The film never answers, but there is much to read into the film’s final scene. Look at it carefully, there’s a lot going on. Look at the expressions on the faces, the placement of the characters, take note of the weather, the significance of the color red, the recurring clock and timepiece motifs, the framing of the final shot…then try to draw your own conclusions. Everyone seems to come away with a different impression of what the ending signifies.

Check out the blog Random Ramblings, Thoughts and Fiction for another review of Far From the Madding Crowd (lots of great pics!).

Copyright © Ken Anderson

Ask me the name of my absolute, #1 all-time favorite film director and I’ll say Roman Polanski without hesitation or equivocation. From the time I was old enough to know what a director was, Polanski has always been a filmmaker whose work I both related to and respected. In the trifecta of most-admired directors that form my own personal, sub-Freudian model of personality and attraction: Ken Russell speaks most eloquently to my passionate, sensual tastes; Robert Altman I love for the absurd humor he finds in the human condition; and Polanski, more than any director I've ever I known, gives voice and vision to those subtle nightmares that hide out in the darker corners of my psyche. The ones so scary that you either have to laugh or scream.

No One Does It to You Like Roman Polanski

Cul-de-Sac, his 3^rdfeature film and a true artifact of the -“Now what was that all about?” - era of college campus cinema of the 60s, is Polanski at his quirky best and it’s a real favorite of mine. And while it's a masterfully shot confirmation of Polanski’s skill as a visual storyteller, actually describing just what kind of film Cul-de-Sac is is another matter. Take one of those gangster-holds-strangers- hostage American noir thrillers like The Petrified Forest(1936), He Ran All the Way (1951), or The Desperate Hours (1955); cross it with a French nouvelle vague art film about marital discord and the inability to communicate, à la Jean Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963); then top it off with a dose of Theater of the Absurd tragicomedy (the film’s original title, When Katelbach Comes, being an obvious homage to Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, and a less obvious borrowing of the name of an actor from one of Polanski’s early short films) and you have some idea of what Cul-de-Sacis. Or isn't.

Polanski's trademark skill at using locations as if they were another character in the story is atmospherically evoked by the remote 11th-century castle that serves as the fortress/prison in Cul-de-Sac. Situated high atop a craggy hill on the British peninsula of Holy Island, a major plot point has it that the access road to the castle is obliterated twice daily by high tides (a device that was used to good effect in the 2012 Daniel Radcliffe thriller, The Woman in Black).

In 1966 neither audiences nor critics were particularly responsive to trying to sort the whole thing out, so Cul-de-Sac’s subsequent failure at the boxoffice threatened to sink Polanski’s newfound reputation almost as quickly as Knife in the Water (1962) and Repulsion (1965) had established it. But in the famous words of John Huston’s Noah Cross in Polanski’s 1974 masterpiece, Chinatown, “Politicians, old buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough,” and indeed, Cul-de-Sachas enjoyed a major revival over the years. Embraced by Polanski as one of his best and most cinematic films, it's hailed by contemporary film enthusiasts for many of the the very things it was reviled for back in the day.

Donald Pleasance as George

Francoise Dorleac as Teresa

Lionel Stander as Richard (Dickie)

Jack McGowran as Albert (Albie)

Dickie and Albie, gangsters wounded during a botched “job” of an undisclosed nature, take refuge at the secluded retreat of retired businessman George, and his much younger wife, Teresa. Seeking nothing but a place to hide while awaiting rescue by the mysterious, Mr. Katelbach, the fugitive pair hold the newlyweds hostage and sets off a bizarre chain of power struggles, game-playing, and revelatory disclosures that ultimately lead each character to their personal cul-de-sac.

The brainchild of Roman Polanski and longtime collaborator Gerard Brach (The Tenant, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Tess, Frantic) Cul-de-Sac represents the specific cinematic aesthetics, sensibilities, and humor of the pair. “When we were writing this script, we simply wanted to create a movie that would reflect our taste in cinema,” said Polanski to biographer, Denis Meikle, stressing a point one can find difficult to contest. Similar in tone to many of Polanski’s short films, Cul-de-Sachas the look and feel of an extremely accomplished film-school thesis project and is the nearest Polanski has come to making the kind of 60s New Wave art film he spent a large part of his early career ideologically distancing himself from.

Forsaken by whom? Katelbach? God? Godot?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

One of the biggest thrills to be had in watching Cul-de-Sac is to once again see a motion picture that demands attentiveness. The economics of filmmaking today (to be profitable, movies have to appeal to as broad a demographic as possible) has resulted in an uptrend in cinematic obviousness. Movies today can’t afford to be misunderstood. Everything is spelled-out, underlined, and explained with such pedantic literalness that a kind of passive, dull-wittedness has replaced active engagement in the moviegoing experience.

(An irksome side effect of this distrust of ambiguity can be seen on internet movie sites like IMDB. The comment sections of these sites, meant to promote dialogs about film, have been taken over by a combative fanboy/fangirl mentality and a zero-tolerance for differences of opinion, conflicting points of view, or multiple-interpretations when it comes to sacred cows…I mean favorite films.)

In one of Cul-de-Sac's many allusions to identity and role-playing, straight-laced George reacts to his sexually mischievous wife dressing him in her peignoir and applying makeup.The gown worn by Pleasence recalls that of Catherine Deneuve (Dorleac's real-life younger sister) in Polanski's Repulsion

Movies that explain every detail do audiences no great service. In fact, I think they rob viewers of a marvelous opportunity to “experience” a film instead of merely trying to “understand” it or figure it out. Cul-de-Sac is a textbook case on how a film can be entertaining, suspenseful, touching, dramatic, and tragic (and at the same time entirely coherent) and still leave considerable aspects of the plot open to individual interpretation.

Things left vague or unexplained in Cul-de-Sac:

George and Teresa’s relationship

The circumstances behind the dissolution of George’s first marriage to the unseen Agnes.

Why the couple chose to live in such a remote location.

The particulars of what actually brings Dickie and Albie to the castle for shelter.

The interrelationships of the uninvited guests (specifically Jacqueline and Cecil).

The motivation behind almost all of Teresa’s actions.
Katelbach himself.

Confining oneself exclusively to what is disclosed in the film; Cul-de-Sac supports myriad interpretations. And therein lies both its genius and its fun. It’s a film people can talk about afterward, sharing impressions and comparing notes. At a table full of friends, no two are likely to see Cul-de-Sac in exactly the same way. (And beware the literal-minded that insist on one "correct" understanding of the film. These are the kind of folks who can't tell you what they feel about a painting until they've read the museum card.)

I'm crazy about the composition of this shot. It kicks off a virtuoso 7-minute sequence shot in one take.

PERFORMANCES:

Anyone familiar with Donald Pleasence’s somnambulistic performances in the Halloween horror film franchise will be properly thunderstruck by what an expressive and animated actor he can be in the right role. With his shaved head a burlesque of the hundreds of eggs on display throughout the film (a surprise to control-freak Polanski), Pleasence is all repressed agitation and pent-up passion. His unfocused feverishness (he never quite knows where to channel it, and when he does it comes out all wrong) is met in equal doses by the icy assurance of Francoise Dorleac. Playing a paradoxical female with plenty of yin and yang to spare, Dorleac is the impulsive catalyst in this combustible mix of characters. Some critics have decried what they see as yet another misogynist Polanski fantasy in the character of Teresa, but I found it interesting that she is portrayed as not only fearless, but also the strongest and most resourceful character in the film. Self-servingly so, perhaps, but better that than one of those helpless, always in need of rescue types that proliferated in movies throughout the 60s and 70s.

Does Teresa feel a kinship with the survivalist gangster, Dickie?

Blacklisted veteran actor Lionel Stander, all gravel-voiced and possessed of old-Hollywood bearing, is an inspired choice for a film that derives a great deal of its tension (and absurdist comedy) from the oil/vinegar chemistry of its characters. He’s like a gangster from an old Warner Bros. movie who somehow got himself teleported into a 60s art film. There's a comical lack of complexity to this man (although there's a lovely moment when he's shown gently looking over the belongings of his friend) as he struggles to get his neurotic hostages to just shut up and do what he says.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

A terrific storyteller with a taste for the idiosyncratic, Polanski is unsurpassed in mining the tension and gallows humor to be found in disparate characters forced into interaction under claustrophobic circumstances. As he does explicitly in Carnage, Death and the Maiden, Bitter Moon, and Knife in the Water, and more subtly in Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, and Frantic; Polanski likes to have fun with the idea that anybody actually knows anything about anyone— least of all themselves.

Typical Polanski/absurdist humor: In the midst of a deadly hostage situation...uninvited guests! That's a very young Jacqueline Bisset back there radiating reams of 60s sang-froid behind those shades.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:
By all accounts an extremely difficult and unpleasant film to make, Cul-de-Sac was nevertheless a labor of love for Polanski, and that, above all, really shines through when watching it. Even without it confirmed (as it is in the Criterion Collection DVD interview with Polanski) one can sense from Cul-de-Sac that it is a film made with little thought given towards commercial concerns, and all energies trained on making the kind of film that inspired Polanski to want to be a filmmaker in the first place. It's a story about character and consequence told almost entirely through image and atmosphere. Pure cinema, as Polanski would call it.

Superficially speaking,Cul-de-Sac is just one spectacular-looking film. Every exquisitely-composed shot bears the stamp of having been labored over and lit to perfection. But it's also a marvelously layered film of the sort that keeps feeding you more information the more you see it. It's in this realm that Polanski's legendarily persnickety nature and eye for detail pays huge dividends, providing a rewarding cinema experience of the kind that grows increasingly rare. For fans of Roman Polanski, Cul-de-Sac is a must-see. What am I saying? It's a must-see for anyone who loves film!

Existential Despair

Amongst the glut of socially satirical black comedies that came out of Hollywood in the post-Kennedy years, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963) has the respect and Tony Richardson’s The Loved One has the classy pedigree (a screenplay by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood adapted from an Evelyn Waugh novel). But the only one I find to be even remotely funny at all is George Axelrod’s strenuously off-beat (and unrelentingly hilarious) skewering of 60s Southern California culture, Lord Love a Duck.

Obvious filmic merits aside, I just personally have no taste for Strangelove’s brand of paranoiac political lunacy, nor do I find much that amuses me in The Loved One’s theater of the grotesque lampooning of the Los Angeles funeral industry (although I do adore Anjanette Comer's performance and Rod Steiger’s Mr. Joyboy has to be seen to be believed). In all aspects relating both to my peculiar sense of humor and uniquely twisted world-view, Lord Love a Duck (an expression of surprised bemusement much like, “I’ll be damned!” or Fred Mertz’s exasperated, “For corn’s sake!”) hits me where I live. Choosing for its satirical targets the idiosyncrasies of 60s American pop-culture that are near and dear to my kitsch-loving heart (celebrity worship, youth culture, beach party movies, consumerism, the California school system, pop-psychiatry, religious attitudes about sex…and that's just for starters), Lord Love a Duck is virtually made-to-order for a guy of my retro-centric sensibilities. Of course, what really pays dividends when a satire is as perceptive and acerbically witty as Lord Love a Duck (adapted from a 1961 book I haven't read by Al Kine) is that you can look at it some forty-plus years later and marvel at how the jokes still hit home and maintain their relevance because people (God love 'em) really don't change all that much.

Tuesday Weld as Barbara Ann Greene

Roddy McDowall as Alan Musgrave

Ruth Gordon as Stella Bernard

Lola Albright as Marie Greene

Lord Love a Duck is a sun-baked Faustian farce about Southern California teen, Barbara Ann Greene (Weld), one-time Head Cheerleader and most popular girl at Longfellow High School, now facing an uncertain future of dreaded anonymity as a senior at the ultra-modern Consolidated High. The day before school is to start, Barbara meets the mysterious Alan Musgrave (McDowall), a transfer student from Irving High School with a checkered past. Calling himself Mollymauk (the name of an albatross-like bird, a replica of which Alan has hanging from his keychain as a kind of hypnosis charm) Alan professes to have the ability to make all of Barbara’s deepest desires come true…she need only give voice to them.

"Barbara Ann. Whose deepest and most heartfelt yearnings express, with a kind of touching lyricism, the total vulgarity of our time."
Change the name and this 47-year-old quote could apply to anyone who has ever appeared on American Idol, America's Got Talent, The Bachelor...or any reality TV show today.

As it turns out, there is indeed something awful about Alan, especially in the way he goes about (without benefit of making explicit either motivation or method) seeing to it that each and every one of Barbara Ann’s tinpot dreams come true. Unfortunately, in the grand tradition of fairy tales and aphorisms that warn, “Be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it,” Barbara Ann’s dreams consistently fail to measure up to her expectations. A lamentable realization for the not-very-bright baton-twirler, one compounded by the fact that the undisclosed “cost” of each wish (a sacrificial disaster or tragedy befalling someone in Barbara Ann's orbit) seems to escalate exponentially.

High school "fast girl" Sally Grace (the marvelous Lynn Carey, right) humiliates Barbara Ann into joining the Cashmere Sweater Club ("All you need are twelve cashmere sweaters to join!") when she makes mocking reference to Barbara Ann's sweater made of the moth-proof, rust-proof, fireproof chemical: Acrison Silipolatex.

If at the start it looks as if the selfless Alan is but a tool to be used by the self-interested Barbara Ann to achieve her ambitions, towards the end it begins to dawn that perhaps Alan is harboring a secret agenda of his own and it's in fact Barbra Ann who's been the dupe. (Alan, like an asexual Myra Breckinridge, appears to be on some kind of personal crusade to dismantle and subvert the fabric of American culture one myth at a time.)
Lord Love a Duck not only uses its fairy-tale structure as a framework on which to hang a broad array of satirical jokes and sight gags, but as a device to dispense with anything resembling world-as-we-know-it realism. A scathing, surreal, jet-black comedy baked under a smoggy Southern California sun, Lord Love a Duck is a film I only recently discovered (thanks again, TCM!) but has fast become one my favorites.

The Devil You Say?: Mollymauk vs Pazuzu
Above, Barbara Ann signs a Faustian "pact" in cement with Alan (Mollymauk) Musgrave, a possibly Satanic character who represents himself with a drawing of a creature that looks alarmingly like the evil demon Pazuzu, replicated in poster-paint and clay by a pre-possession Linda Blair (below) in The Exorcist (1973)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

As I commented upon in an earlier post about Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc?, I don’t really understand comedy well enough to know why it works sometimes and at others it falls flat on its face. Satire in particular seems a particularly dicey realm given how important a role the establishment of tone and balance plays into the comedy payoff. If the world presented is too lunatic, there’s no reality in which to ground the humor and everything just comes off as silly. Lord Love a Duck wins points by giving Los Angeles and 60s pop-culture (and its already built-in absurdities) just enough rope of verisimilitude to hang itself.

Lord Love a Duck's Drive-In Church (presided over by Rev. Phillip Neuhauser and his wife "Butch") spoofs the real-life Garden Grove Community Drive-In Church of former televangelist Robert Schuller (The Crystal Cathedral) which opened in Orange County in 1961.

Alan and Barbara Ann A-Go-Go
The teenage Beach Party movies of the 60s are a major target of Lord Love a Duck's scorn. The fictional titles of which don't sound very different from the real thing: Bikini Vampire, I Was a Teenage Bikini Vampire, I Married a Teenage Bikini Vampire, The Thing That Ate Bikini Beach, Cold War Bikini, Bikini Countdown, and Bikini Widow.

PERFORMANCES:

Actors, both comic and dramatic, attest that comedy is infinitely harder than drama, and I’m inclined to agree. I’m guilty as the next person of devaluing good comedic performances (Gene Wilder should have won an Oscar by now) but that can’t be said of my assessment of Lord Love a Duck, a film that succeeds largely due of its very talented and funny cast. While I’m less fond of Roddy McDowall in this (during this time in his career he seemed to be giving the exact same performance from film to film) Lola Albright and especially Tuesday Weld (doing her best work EVER) are pure gold. Albright brings unexpected pathos to her role as Barbara Ann’s promiscuous, cocktail waitress mother (“Honey, you know I never go out with a married man on the first date!”). Her brief yet memorably tragi-comic performance has a heartbreaking poignancy to it.

Under less than favorable circumstances, uptight society matron, Stella Bernard (Gordon) meets Marie (Albright), the alcoholic mother of potential daughter-in-law, Barbara Ann.

Long one of Hollywood’s most underrated talents —her career hampered by an I-dare-you-to take-me-seriously name and a baby doll voice— Lord Love a Duck’s happiest surprise is Tuesday Weld (not really a surprise, actually. She’s splendid in the 1974 TV-movie, Reflections of Murder, and brilliantly ups the ante on playing maladjusted cheerleaders in 1968’s chilling Pretty Poison). Lord Love a Duck showcases Weld’s talents as a truly gifted comedienne and affords her the opportunity to show what a nuanced dramatic actress she can be when given the right material.

It's a pity that Lord Love a Duck was so ignored on release. Weld is remarkable in it. In this scene in which Barbara Ann discloses to Alan her deepest desires, she humanizes and gives depth to a character that in less talented hands would be a one dimensional cartoon.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:
Every film that sets out to offend (as most black comedies do) needs at least one setpiece moment of sublime vulgarity. Lord Love A Duck boasts an irresistibly over-the-top shopping spree for cashmere sweaters that erupts into a father/daughter consumer orgy.The screwball/suggestive colors of the sweaters provide as many laughs as the incestuously orgasmic reactions they elicit: Grape Yum-Yum, Banana Beige, Lemon Meringue, Pink Put-On, Papaya Surprise, Periwinkle Pussycat, Turquoise Trouble, Midnight A-Go-Go, and Peach Put-down. At this point in the film I was aware that I liked Lord Love A Duck, but after this scene, I knew I LOVED it. This sequence is the absolute best in mainstream cinema weirdness!

The inimitably demented Max Showalter (as Howard Greene) is the more than appreciative audience for Barbara Ann's hysterical impromptu fashion show.

I could go about Lord Love a Duck's many other merits, but in the interest of space, let me call attention to the top-notch turns by Ruth Gordon, Harvey Korman, martin West, and Donald Murphy.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Lord Love a Duck was promoted with the tagline “An act of pure aggression,” but truth in fact; it’s mostly an act of pure cantankerousness. For all its outrageousness, at its core it’s a middle-aged, middle-class diatribe by the older generation (those more amenable to the comedy styles of Alan Sherman, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, or Sid Caesar) against America’s burgeoning youth movement. A movement that was swiftly rendering director/ writer George Alexelrod’s patented brand of "tired businessman" comedy (The Seven Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?How to Murder Your Wife) old-fashioned, if not obsolete.

1965 Playboy Playmate of the year, Jo Collins, is really a hoot as Kitten, the bored Beach Party movie starlet whose dialog consists entirely of variations on the sole retort she has for anything said to her by producer/sugar daddy, T. Harrison Belmont: "Oh Harry, you're such a drag!"

Forty three years-old at the time this film was made, Axelrod was well past the age of distrust for the teenybopper set, and one can almost taste his vitriolic annoyance at what had become of his world of martinis, big bosoms, and smirky sex jokes. All of which probably accounts for why I find Lord Love a Duck to be so terribly funny. There's a really pissed-off, old fart sensibility behind it all that gives each satiric barb a particularly acrid sting not possible were the film made from a place of affection. Or even understanding. I guess that's something I can relate to.

If you’re among those who are of the mindset that we currently live in a society of Smartphones and ignorant people, then the hedonistic, amoral, anti-intelligence, youth-centric world lampooned in Lord Love a Duck provides irrefutable and entertaining evidence of the fact that we didn't just arrive at this state of affairs overnight. It’s a course we've been headed on for quite some time.

"Talk to me. Just tell Mollywauk."

Sometimes being a movie star just means having enough “brand name recognition” to bring to each movie a kind of distinct, firmly established name-association (a personality cachet, if you will) fully-formed and locked in place from a previous film.

For example: to a large segment of the population, Mia Farrow was and always will be Rosemary Woodhouse of Rosemary’s Baby. The films See No Evil (1971), The Haunting of Julia(1977) and the 2006 remake of The Omenall banked on the public associating Farrow with the macabre and horrific. None perhaps so blatantly or swiftly as Joseph Losey’s difficult-to-market 1968 psychological thriller, Secret Ceremony,which was released only four months after Rosemary’s Baby opened. Although the film starred Hollywood heavyweights Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum in their only screen pairing, ads emphasized what was then the film’s one sure-fire property: Mia Farrow (“More haunted than in Rosemary’s Baby!” the posters screamed).

Satan Place
Occult rituals are just one of many perverse diversions in Games

After the success of Halloween(1978) critics began hailing director John Carpenter as a worthy successor to Alfred Hitchcock. Hoping to further encourage such comparisons, Carpenter cast perennially Hitchcock-associated actress, Janet Leigh, in a thoroughly arbitrary role in his 1980 film, The Fog. Janet Leigh, who should be commended for not having turned the entirety of her latter years into one long series of stunt-casting parts cashing in on her iconic Psycho role, did allow her image to be exploited just one more time - in the 1998 Halloween sequel, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (check out IMDB’s Trivia section for details) although it must be said these nothing roles at least afforded her the opportunity to appear onscreen with real-life daughter Jamie Lee Curtis.

Desensitization
A well-appointed game room features violent Roy Lichtenstein pop-art and a pinball machine that awards points for driving fatalities

In 1968, if American audiences knew much about French film star Simone Signoret at all (and they didn't it was on the strength of three films. Her Oscar- winning role in Room at the Top (1959); her Oscar-nominated turn in Stanley Kramer’s prestige flop, Ship of Fools; and… most popularly and most likely, the highly acclaimed and influential thriller, Diabolique (1955). Internet sources maintain that the starring role of Lisa Schindler, the mysterious visitor in Games, was originally written for Marlene Dietrich, and when producers balked, the role was offered to Jeanne Moreau, who declined. All of which may well be true. But after looking this clever thriller full of twists and mysterious turns, the overwhelming evidence leans towards my belief that Games was conceived and written expressly to capitalize on the American public’s familiarity with Signoret’s starring role in Clouzot’s bloodcurdling French chiller.

Simone Signoret as Lisa Schindler

Katherine Ross as Jennifer Montgomery

James Caan as Paul Montgomery

Like most good thrillers, the premise of Games is marvelously simple. A well-to-do but eccentric young couple (Caan and Ross) who like to engage in elaborate games and hoaxes meets their match when a mysterious French woman (guess who) enters their lives. The couple, both blasé dilettantes dabbling in chic nihilism, prove no match for the genuine article.

Brando-ish 70's TV stalwart, Don Stroud (who five years later would appear as a nude centerfold in Playgirl magazine) plays Norman, the oversexed box boy. Another player in Games

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Compensating perhaps for all these years I've been a dancer, I’m discovering of late that I’m remarkably adroit at being sedentary. It's a revelation to me that in my free time these days, I find I no longer go in search of thrills, I prefer my thrills come to me. Ill-disposed as I am to amusement park rides, fast cars, or any activity calling for the deployment of adrenaline, I have become a huge fan of armchair adventure. I love mysteries, suspense thrillers, horror films (horror as in dread, not gore) and any movie that can keep me guessing. Even when a film has plot twists that can be figured out if one really puts one mind to it (as some claim to be the case with Games), I so enjoy the big “reveal” in these kinds of movies that I've learned over the years how not to spoil my own fun. (A subtle form of self-hypnosis, I allow the plot to unfold before me and just let myself surrender to the director’s pace. I never try to put the pieces of the puzzle together unless the film leads me there first.)

Identity and Illusion

Games is almost theatrical in its construct, as it’s sparsely populated (four principal characters) and takes place primarily in a single location (the tony townhouse of Paul and Jennifer Montgomery). Tension is derived from the uneasiness of having a cast of characters, none of whom we’re told very much about but all overtly fond of playing mind-games, interacting in both real and contrived situations. As it becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain whether a game has begun, ended, or is underway, it soon dawns that the film itself is but another of the games. One that we in the audience (like several of the characters in the movie) weren't aware we were playing.

PERFORMANCES:

Regrettably, for all the fun to be had in watching Games(like the 1972 film adaptation of Anthony Schaeffer’s Sleuth, its pleasures don’t diminish even after its surprises are revealed) I can’t say it’s a film one is likely to remember for the performances. In just a few short years the producers of Games wouldn't be able to afford either Katherine Ross or James Caan, but at this point in their young careers the future superstars are shown visibly trying to find their footing in this stylish thriller. Though falling short of making me really feel for the plight of the caracters, I've no real complaint with the beautiful Katherine Ross who is always an appealingly natural presence and is, I think, actually better here than she is in The Graduate. She definitely comes off much better than Caan, who seems a tad stiff.

Simone Signoret claimed responsibility for bringing Katherine Ross to the attention of director Mike Nichols when he was casting The Graduate

The ever-watchable Simone Signoret has had many finer moments on the screen and has certainly been photographed to better advantage than she is here, but for me, she gives a marvelous performance just the same. Little is demanded of her and perhaps it's in comparison to the relatively flat, low-key acting of the younger leads, but in scene after scene, Signoret commands the screen and exudes exotic style and mystery.

Something Wicked This Way Comes?
Oddly unsettling artwork (Roy Lichtenstein?) dominates this shot and adds a sense of apprehension and danger to the scene

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:
Paul and Jennifer Montgomery are modern art collectors, making their spacious and wildly decorated New York (I think...it's a set, you see) townhouse a major player in Games. Attributed to the creative input of individuals both credited onscreen and not, the art direction and set decoration of Games is a dazzling eyeful of swinging sixties decor and colorful pop art.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:
The first time I saw Games was when it aired on NBC-TV back in the 70s. At the time it kept me on the edge of my seat and the unexpected turns of plot not only took me by surprise but scared the hell out of me. No longer a kid and revisiting it on DVD some 30 years later, I was prepared for it to be a nice, tame nostalgia trip with maybe the distraction of camp to spice things up for me where suspense once led.
Not the case. The years may have taken a little of the originality off the plot, but the effectiveness of the film itself - the sustaining of mood, the building of suspense, the unforeseen twists - it all worked for me just as persuasively as when I saw it as a kid. (Better actually, as I now see all the foreshadowing and get all the allusions made to an aimless culture of pop-art and pop-morality.)

Although the term hipster didn't exist in 1967 in the context it's used today, James Caan and Katherine Ross play a 60s version of just the kind of obnoxiously trendy urban couple you might find yourself rooting for something bad to happen to.

Games is no classic, and to some it will look a great deal like a well-made 70s TV movie. But as suspense thrillers go (and when was the last time a good one of those appeared on the horizon?), I have to say, flaws and all, it comes out looking like a winner.

It’s my feeling that one can easily gauge what one’s overall response to this film is going to be simply based on how one reacts to its title. If Puzzle of a Downfall Child strikes you as a potentially profound, enigmatically poetic title conjuring up images of Paradise Lost and existential disillusion, you’re likely to fall in love with this long-considered-lost exemplar of European-influenced, 70s “personal statement” cinema. On the other hand, if the title reeks of self-serious pretentiousness and needlessly arty ambiguity…well, little about the film itself is likely to alter that perception.

Me, I fall a little into both camps. For one, I've always been crazy about about the title. Perhaps that's because I was 13 years-old when the movie came out and the title sounded just gloomily cryptic enough to appeal to my adolescent taste for high-flown self-dramatization. (In an interview, director Jerry Schatzberg has stated that the title alludes to a plot element involving an abortion that was deleted in an early draft of the screenplay.) I adore Puzzle of a Downfall Child for its introspective examination of the elusiveness of happiness and the human desire to connect in the face of reality-distorting conceptions of image, sexuality, self-worth, and success. In the telling, few of the film’s insights are very acute, but there’s a psychological authenticity to the screenplay and performances that greatly mitigate the sometimes arthouse excesses of the film’s visual style.

Which leads to camp #2. As much as I love Puzzle of a Downfall Child and believe it to be both a beautiful and moving film, I’m the first to admit that at times it can feel like a parody of a 70s art film. The debut effort of photographer turned-director Jerry Schatzberg, Puzzle of a Downfall Child falls prey to the minor sin of over-determined significance. There’s a kind of naïve foolhardiness to be found in acts of absolute sincerity, and if Puzzle of a Downfall Child suffers from anything, it’s from a heartfelt conviction it is saying something “important” about the human condition. To some, such ponderousness can come off as pretentious, humorless, or just plain exasperating. But me, I’ll take a self-serious film that tries to be about something over today’s cynical, eye-on-the-boxoffice, market-research product any day.

Faye Dunaway as Lou Andreas Sand

Barry Primus as Aaron Reinhardt

Viveca Lindfors as Pauline Galba

Roy Scheider as Mark

Faye Dunaway plays Lou Andreas Sand (nee Emily Mercine), an emotionally fragile former high-fashion model who has retreated to a solitary beach house on Fire Island following a crippling nervous breakdown. Visited by long-time photographer friend and former lover, Aaron Reinhardt (Barry Primus), Lou recounts her troubled life in a taped conversation Reinhardt hopes to fashion into a film. With her life revealed to us in flashbacks that come at us in stylized and realistic non-linear stretches devoid of obvious hints as to their veracity as memory, fantasy or both, Lou reveals herself to be the most unreliable of narrators. Yet the tone of these mental images, playing out like scrapbook pages torn from an album and reassembled, reveals the truth of the woman, if not always the truth of the events. It's a fascinating narrative path made all the more so due to Puzzle of a Downfall Child itself having been created in much the same manner. The experience of viewing a dramatization of the gestation of the film we're actually watching is just one piece of Puzzle’s continually self-referential puzzle.

Two magazine covers photographed by Jerry Schatzberg
Left: Anne St.Marie -1956 / Right: Faye Dunaway - 1968

Director Jerry Schatzberg, who had worked for more than 20 years as a photographer for magazines like Vogue, Esquire, and McCall's, based Puzzle of a Downfall Child on taped interviews he conducted with one of his favorite subjects, 50s supermodel Anne St. Marie. St.Marie, like her film counterpart, retired from modeling after suffering a nervous breakdown. To further the whole wormhole effect of this enterprise, Schatzberg, who was rumored to have had an affair with St. Marie (as does his screen doppelganger, photographer Aaron Reinhardt with Dunaway's Lou Andreas Sand) in real life photographed Dunaway for many fashion magazines, and for a time the two were engaged to be married. Their relationship had already dissolved before Puzzle of a Downfall Child went before the cameras.

"If one can't keep some friends somewhere, then something is really wrong."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

I think perhaps my favorite thing about Puzzle of a Downfall Child is that it combines two of my favorite film genres: the 70s trying-to-find-oneself character drama and the 40s suffering-in-mink women’s weepie. How perfect is that? When I first saw this film, Faye Dunaway’s too-sensitive-for-this-world fashion model was an oasis of estrogen ennui in the testosterone-leaden desert of male-centric 70s films romanticizing male identity crises and masculine existential moments-of-reckoning. To my taste, there was a decided oversupply of movies featuring Jack Nicholson, George Segal, Richard Benjamin, or Elliot Gould grappling with the meaning of life while an uncomprehending female (usually a sweet-natured dumbbell, and almost always played by Karen Black) stood around on the sidelines. Aside from the vastly inferior (by comparison) Jacqueline Bisset drama, The Grasshopper (1969), Puzzle of a Downfall Child was one of the few films from this era to grant a female character an equivalent navel-gazing opportunity.

To update Easy Rider's famous tagline, Puzzle of a Downfall Child could have been subtitled: "A woman went looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere."

To its credit, Puzzle of a Downfall Child tries to find the common thread of humanity in the privileged-class despair of Lou Andreas Sand. And as embodied by Dunaway and captured by Schatzberg’s loving camera lens (actually cinematographer Alex Holender of Midnight Cowboy), Lou may never look less than exquisite (even when in the throes of a foaming-at-the-mouth nervous breakdown), but her pain is recognizable and real.

Have you ever seen an old detective movie or TV show and marveled at the perversity of cops and reporters at a murder scene going on and on about how beautiful or desirable a female corpse was. I can't count the number of films I've seen where men stand over a dead woman's body lamenting the "waste" of a beautiful woman and how particularly tragic it is that said woman, so pretty or sexy in life, is now dead. It’s like there’s this overriding mentality that a woman’s looks and physical appeal matter even in death. Or worse, that one can be too beautiful to die...as if the loss of life is sad, but the tragedy is compounded if the corpse is attractive.

Beauty: Fetishism and Objectification

Puzzle of a Downfall Child sensitively addresses the high value we, as a culture, place on beauty, and the price enacted on those who fall prey to it. In placing this character drama in the appearance-fixated world of fashion photography, Schatzberg and screenwriter Carole Eastman take an insightful look at a woman whose entire existence and sense of self-worth is tethered to her beauty. Whose need to please and always be seen as desirable under the male gaze is both a desperate, deep-seated search for approval and a profound denial of self.

Distorted Image
Troubled Catholic School girl Emily Mercine attempts to lose herself by adopting a pretentious name (perhaps borrowed from Nietzschean psychoanalyst Lou Andreas Salome) and engaging in casual sex with father-figure strangers. Like a character out of Damon Runyon, Lou Andreas Sand speaks in a mannered style totally devoid of contractions, and compulsively re-imagines events of the past in order to protect her fragile image of herself.

PERFORMANCES:

Faye Dunaway’s participation was instrumental in getting Puzzle of a Downfall Child to the screen, and her passion for the project is evident in every frame. And it’s a good thing too, because to the best of my recollection there isn't a single scene in which she does not appear. Mind you, I'm not complaining, for in much the same way that Liza Minnelli is so good in Cabaret that she almost makes you forget “Liza Minnelli: The HSN Years”; Faye Dunaway so thoroughly blows me away in Puzzle of a Downfall Child that I'm reminded of everything her career promised before the whole Mommie Dearest / voicemail meltdown thing. One of my favorite but most problematic actresses (you have to have a taste for her mannerisms), Dunaway has every reason to be very proud of her work in this. After Bonnie & Clyde, Puzzle of a Downfall Child ranks as my all-time favorite Dunaway film. She is phenomenal in it.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

I tell everyone, even if you don't have the patience for the entire film, just watch the first 15 minutes. The sequence chronicling Dunaway as a fledgling model navigating the battlefield of her first fashion shoot is cinema gold. Shot with an eye for detail only possible from knowing this world very well, Schatzberg peels back the illusions we hold in our America's Next Top Model preoccupation the fashion industry and reveals the dehumanizing reality. Sure it's satirical, sure it's depicted from the overwrought perspective of the heroine; but from the performances, the dialog (tellingly, Lou's voiceover describes the men on the set all looking at her as if they were sex maniacs. The visuals reveal her to have been largely ignored), and the stylish cinematography, this sequence is a great example of MY kind of moviemaking.

Dunaway reacts (I'll say) to being required to share her close-up with a live falcon. This terrifying sequence recall actress Tippi Hedren's accounts of working with Hitchcock on The Birds.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

One of the good things about viewing an old film (and at 43 years-old Puzzle of a Downfall Child definitely qualifies) is that one gets to watch it in an environment entirely different from that in which it was created. Puzzle of a Downfall Child bombed in part because it came at a time when audiences were wearying of the glut of European-influenced, tarnished American Dream films that filled theaters after the breakthrough years of 1967. When viewed from the comic book / 3-D / blockbuster perspective of today, the film looks nothing short of miraculous.

Throughout her modeling career, Lou Andrea Sand compiles a list of photographers she refuses to ever work with again due to their abusive behavior. Boldly written in red on this list is the name of the film's director, Jerry Schatzberg. In her memoir, Looking for Gatsby, Faye Dunaway explains that this was an improvisational impulse on her part born of a particularly difficult time the director gave her after actor Marcello Mastroianni (the man she left fiance Schatzberg for) visited her on the set. Schatzberg liked the touch and kept it in the film.

As a culture, we’re guilty of attributing great profundity to the existential midlife traumas of male characters in films, while women undergoing the same are dismissed as merely neurotic. (I don’t know where I read it, but someone once observed that The Graduatemissed the boat in focusing on the petulant Benjamin Braddock when the film's most compelling story and most interesting character was Mrs. Robinson and her midlife dissatisfaction.) It’s difficult not to think this subtle double-standard played into the critical response to Puzzle of a Downfall Child, but as good as the film is (and I think it’s a really excellent film) there’s no ignoring that it falls into the usual traps that beset movies that ask us to feel sorry for the beautiful people.

Film is a storytelling medium and all manner of human experience should be explored. But films like Puzzle of a Downfall Child seem to forget why movies exist and who attends them. No matter how masterful the film, it’s difficult to ask an audience to listen to a woman as breathtakingly beautiful as Faye Dunaway complaining about how unhappy she is in her (perceived glamorous) job as a fashion model, and how empty she finds her life (after amassing enough wealth to live in financially independent solitude in a spacious beach house). We all know that the rich and beautiful can suffer as much as the rest of us, but any film that attempts to dramatize a shared humanity with people whose lives offer far more options than those of the average person has to walk a precarious tightrope. If the world is to glossy,the people too lacquered, it can actually end up glamorizing that which it's trying to vilify. Ultimately sending a message similar to the one expressed by those cops in the old movies bemoaning the fact that certain people are just “Too beautiful to suffer, too lovely to die.”

The DVD of Puzzle of a Downfall Child is currently only available in France (released Feb. 2012), but fellow blogger Graham Russell at Bitterness Personified made this 70s film fanaticist extremely happy by informing me that the entire film is available for viewing on YouTube. I can't thank him enough. I hadn't seen this film since the 70s.

So, whether you take the film to your heart (as I did), or wish to wallow in its camptastic splendor (Puzzle of a Downfall Child is an exquisite, sumptuous-looking film that has a scene involving a toilet that is sure to send Mommie Dearest fans into wild ecstatics), this artifact from the days when movies sought to do more than make Variety's Top Ten weekend boxoffice list, has a little of something for everybody.

No matter how you prefer your Dunaway, overdone and theatrical or touching and deeply affecting, Puzzle of a Downfall Child is a lost miracle of a film that is worth taking the time to discover (or rediscover).

"One only breaks oneself apart in order to put oneself back together again...better."

To view some of Jerry Schatzberg's magnificent photographs, visit his website HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson

The occasion of a recent TCM screening of the R-rated edit of this forgotten minor masterpiece from the late 60s (one of several by director Frank Perry yet to make it to DVD - Play It As It Lays, Diary of a Mad Housewife) inspired me to seek out the X-rated version I still remembered so vividly from my youth. And as memories go, that’s really saying something, for the youth I speak of is the summer of 1969 when I was 12 years old. In 1969, the newly-instated motion picture rating system (G, M, R, and X) designated the X rating for films with mature themes from which anyone under the age of 17 was prohibited. Contrary to what “adult” and “X-rated” has come to signify today (porn), back in 1969 Hollywood harbored the idealistically naïve hope that such a restrictive rating would both serve to protect local standards of decency while ensuring filmmakers maximal artistic freedom and minimal censorship interference.
(Boy, just writing the above sentence made me all wistful and nostalgic for why the late 60s and 70s remains my favorite era in American film. The notion that mainstream Hollywood believed, even briefly, in the notion that there was such an animal as a mature adult audience is near unimaginable in today’s climate of pandering, lowest common denominator comic book franchises.)

At left: The vague, rather arty newspaper ad for Last Summer containing it original X-rating. Right: The provocative wide-release one-sheet poster with the R-rating. (Newspaper image courtesy of Obscure One-Sheet).

Before America’s repressed and essentially hypocritical attitude about all things sexual reared its head, a slew of intriguing X-rated films were released (The Damned, Midnight Cowboy, Last Tango in Paris, Last Summer, A Clockwork Orange, Medium Cool), giving the false impression that American movies had at last grown up. Alas, it was not to be, and soon “X” was appropriated by the porn industry and the MPAA (the industry rating board) embarked on a course of action — doling out harsh ratings for minor displays of sexuality, yet showing absurd leniency with acts of extreme violence — that over the years rendered it, if not a laughingstock, then certainly irrelevant.

Barbara Hershey as Sandy

Richard Thomas as Peter

Bruce Davidson as Dan

Catherine Burns as Rhoda

The summer of 1969 saw the release of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy and Frank Perry’s Last Summer within months of one another. Everyone was talking about these two high-profile, controversial X-rated features, and, thanks to the lax admittance policies of my local movie theater, I was able to see both that summer, in spite of my tender years. Midnight Cowboy, of course, went on to great acclaim and a Best Picture Academy Award win, but Last Summer (in spite of having garnered a Best Supporting Actress nod for newcomer Catherine Burns) has been all but forgotten.

I’m not sure whether it was when the film went into wide release in theaters or when it made it to home video, but eventually some of Last Summer’s X-rated intensity (centered mostly on the film’s harrowing climax) was edited down to an R. If you weren't around in 1969 and you managed to catch this film at all, the R-rated cut is most likely the only one you’re familiar with, and it’s this version that Turner Classic Movies recently aired. Mind you, even this mildly truncated version of Last Summer is still pretty strong stuff, its brief omissions only marginally softening the effect of the film’s intentionally blunt sexuality and merciless depiction of a particularly base aspect of human cruelty. Still, this wasn't the film I remembered and I felt cheated. Happily, thanks to the trusty internet, I was able to track down an unedited copy of Last Summer (as well as a copy of the long out-of-print soundtrack album!) and I have to say, getting to see this film in its entirety for the first time in 43 years has been every bit the emotionally wrenching experience it was when I first saw it as a pre-teen movie theater scofflaw. (Taking into account changing times, even in its unedited form, Last Summer would only garner an R-rating today. A soft one, at that.)

In a scene emphasizing Sandy's sexual acquisitiveness and dominance over the boys' relative inexperience, she and Dan come across two lovers making out on a remote part of the beach. When it's discovered that the lovers are two men, Dan wants to leave but Sandy insist they stay and watch.

With its title a darkly ironic harkening back to the innocent, sun-and-sand Gidget movies of the sixties, or those sexually innocuous Frankie & Annette Beach Party romps, Last Summer is perhaps one of the harshest eviscerations of adolescent social dynamics I've ever seen. Neither a youth-pandering idealization of the Pepsi Generation of the sort typified by late-60s films like The Graduate and Easy Rider, nor one of those nostalgically sentimental coming-of-age films that would later flourish in the 70s (The Summer of ’42, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti); Last Summer is adolescence viewed through a doggedly nihilistic prism.

A trio of teens vacationing with their parents on Fire Island strike up an intimate friendship when callow, future fratboy, Dan, and sensitive go-alonger, Peter (Davidson and Thomas) come upon sexually precocious brainiac, Sandy (Hershey- “Well you asked me, so don’t think I’m boasting, but my IQ is 157.”) tending to a wounded seagull on the beach. Bonding over their shared isolation, sexual restlessness, and an overweening, heretofore unplumbed disdain for the feelings of others, the threesome find the dynamics of their tightly-knit group challenged with the appearance of Rhoda, a bright but shy and awkward girl who insinuates herself into the fold.

Loners
One of the film's few sympathetic characters, Rhoda is introduced committing a simple act of decency: she tries to get the trio to stop tormenting the seagull they're attempting to make into a pet.

Plump and pale to their tall and tawny; braces- wearing and happy to act her age to the trio’s fevered acceleration into adulthood; it’s fairly obvious from the start that Rhoda’s emotional self-assurance and killjoy, sober decency is a wrong mix for this crowd (who find in Rhoda another “project” like the injured gull). Yet the point is keenly made by the film that in adolescence, the pain of loneliness can be so acute that even the belittling company of those who fail to see your value is sometimes preferable to being alone.

Poignance is derived from the realization that all four teens come from broken or troubled homes and that together they could have faced their shared loneliness, alienation, and struggles for identity in ways enriching for them both as friends and individually. That summer could have been memorable for a lot of good reasons. But, being at its heart an existential parable on authenticity, dread, and the concept of decency as a choice one makes as readily as one can choose cruelty, Last Summer is a season made memorable for our protagonists in ways none of them could have foreseen and none will likely ever forget.

Rhoda and Peter's tentative friendship threatens the dynamic of the group

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Like so many of my favorite films from this era: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Midnight Cowboy, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, even Rosemary's Baby; Last Summer is for me a brilliant example of how fascinating the results can be when mainstream movies and art films combine. What all these films have in common is their being accessible narratives that nevertheless convey the darker aspects of American disillusionment in the late 60s. Movies today tend to feed audiences comforting images of themselves and set out to reinforce tissue-thin myths we harbor about everything from sexual politics to racism. Although I don't require it in every film I see, I must say I enjoy it when movies hold up a mirror to American culture that reveals the decay behind the gloss.

Last Summer fails to skirt the uncomfortable racist implications behind the privileged arrogance of the Aryan blond teens in their all-white enclaves who idiotically mimic the contrived slave dialect of Gone With the Wind, and, in this painful scene, make cruel, racist jokes at the expense of Anibal Gomez (Ernesto Gonzalez) a sweet and lonely Puerto Rican computer date set-up for the reluctant Rhoda.

Movies in the 60s/70s were comfortable with revealing the darker shades of human nature. In fact, one of my strongest memories of seeing films during this period was getting the distinct impression I was never going to see a movie with a happy ending again. I loved that I was seeing movies that were making me think, making me feel...but at times it seemed as if every movie released during my teens ended in some devastating tragedy. Even the musicals were downers (Sweet Charity)!

PERFORMANCES:

Playing perhaps on type and using his young cast's relative acting inexperience to their benefit (Last Summer is the film debut of all but Barbara Hershey, who appeared in Doris Day's last film, With Six You Get Eggroll just the year before) Frank Perry gets natural and surprisingly complex performances out everyone, particularly Catherine Burns. Although lacking in the sort of easy, obvious camaraderie Peter Bogdanovich was able to achieve with his cast in The Last Picture Show(most apparent in an uncomfortably forced, "teens bonding" sequence that gives credence to Hershey's claim that despite the intimacy required of their roles, the cast didn't become close during the making of the film), each actor achieves a kind of heroic bravery in allowing themselves to be presented so unpleasantly.

New Blood
Bruce Davidson found success starring in the 1971 thriller, Willard; Barbara Hershey went go on to make headlines throughout the 70s for being David Carradine's "old lady" and breast feeding their child on The Dick Cavett Show; and Richard Thomas became world famous as TV's John-Boy Walton. Ironically, it would be Cathy Burns, garnering the lion's share of the film's best reviews and Last Summer's sole Academy Award nod, who, after being reunited with Richard Thomas in 1971's Red Sky at Morning, disappeared into oblivion after years of TV appearances.

Much has been made of Burn's virtuoso monologue that most deservedly won her an Oscar nomination, and indeed, Burns does give the film's most shaded performance. But Barbara Hershey's assured and dynamic performance as the dreamgirl sociopath is one that has really stayed with me over the years. Carnal, conniving, straightforward and deeply troubled, I think her characterization is so genuinely terrifying because she is just such a recognizable brand of emotional / intellectual bully. Long a favorite of mine and a definite object of my boyhood crush, I'm glad she's still around making films (even scarier as the ballet-mom in Black Swan!) and proving herself a talented and enduring actress.

Barbara Hershey (born Barbara Hertzstein) briefly changed her name to Barbara Seagull after she claimed the the spirit of a seagull accidentally killed during the making of Last Summer had entered her body. She stated that it was a moral choice born of feeling guilty about its death. It was also a very hippie-esque one for the actress who would later name her illegitimate son by David Carradine, "Free," and planted the child's afterbirth under an apricot tree in her back yard "...so he can eat the fruit nurtured by our own bodies." Coming to her senses, Hershey eventually dropped the Seagull, and her son now goes by very un-Flower Child but less giggle-prone name of Tom.

Poster for the 1975 film, Diamonds, featuring Barbara Hershey with her "Seagull" billing

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

Perhaps the parallel symbolism is all too heavy-handed for some, but what I loved about this film in 1969 and what still stands up marvelously in 2013 are the parallels drawn between the film's early sequences involving the attempt to rehabilitate and then train the wounded seagull, and the introduction of the character of Rhoda into the group. The foreshadowing of the film's agonizing denouement is as clear-cut and unalterable as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but what grips me is what lies behind why it happens at all.
To see this film now is to understand what occurs inside any group or individual in power when threatened with the loss of that power. Whether it be the behavior of the GOP in the last election or the reluctance of certain states to grasp the inevitability of same-sex marriage; it all fit paints an ugly portrait of cowardice cloaked in entitled domination. To find all of this within a teenage coming-of-age film is just brilliant, and why this film deserves to be seen.

The casual distractions of an idle summer gradually escalate into experimentation with sex and drugs.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

For years on the internet there have been reports of Last Summer finally getting a DVD release. Its reemergence on cable TV and a recent American Cinemateque screening of a long-lost, uncut 16mm print hint that perhaps one day soon this will be be the case. I certainly hope so. Not only is it one of the best of several forgotten films of the late 60s and 70s worthy of re-discovery, but its themes are no less relevant today than they were in 1969. Sure, the antisocial behavior and so-called explicit dialog of these teens looks positively quaint in the face of what goes on in the hyper-sexualized, accelerated world of adolescents today, but one of the points Last Summer makes clear that still applies, is that play-acting at being grown-up by engaging in adult behavior is by no stretch of the imagination the same thing as genuine maturity. A smart and insightful character-driven motion picture, Last Summer is a reminder of how good movies can be when filmmakers care about something beyond being a hit at the boxoffice.

Notes:

I read Evan Hunter’s novel Last Summer not long after seeing the film and I’d highly recommend it. Eleanor Perry’s screenplay is a faithful adaptation of the book, which is every bit as disturbing as the film. The slight novel provides a bit more backstory to the characters and is told in the form of a flashback memory recounted by an emotionally shattered Peter to his psychiatrist. In 1973 Hunter wrote a sequel to Last Summer titled, Come Winter. I’d say that both novels are unavailable and out of print, but is anything really out of print with eBay around?

Evan Hunter, famous for the novel Blackboard Jungle, is also well known to Hitchcock fans as the screenwriter of The Birds. He was fired from his duties on Hitchcock’s next film, Marnie, for reasons far too ironic to recount here. Those who are interested can find the info in the trivia section of IMDB’s Marnie page.

The late director Frank Perry, largely forgotten today, was one of the heavy hitters in the Golden Age of the New Hollywood. He is responsible for two of the best films to come out of the era: Last Summer and Diary of a Mad Housewife. Making it all the more incomprehensible to me that this is the same Frank Perry who gave us the execrable laugh-fest, Monsignor (1982), and the exquisite awfulness of Mommie Dearest. Talk about your loss of innocence.

You pretty much know what you’re in for in this, the third screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, when the film begins with a series of loving, beautifully lit, perfectly framed, Architectural Digest-worthy shots of property and objects. Instead of a haunting rumination on romantic obsession as an attempt to recapture the past poetically framed by a bitter indictment of materialism, the American Dream, and the emotional recklessness of the rich; this is The Great Gatsby as told from the perspective of nostalgia fetishism.

The Great Gatsby suffers a bit from a confused point of view. When the camera lens is trained on Gatsby's beautiful objects, I suspect we are supposed to feel the hollowness of materialism. Unfortunately, the images are so arrestingly beautiful that viewers are likely to ohh and ahh over their lavishness. In essence, to see these things from the possessive, money-enamored perspective of Daisy. A bit of a problem given that she is one of the more superficial and morally corrupt characters in the film.

In this Jack Clayton-directed (The Innocents, Room at the Top) adaptation of an overly-reverential screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, the unrequited love affair between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan takes a back seat to the love affair the camera has with all the 1920s Art Deco knickknacks, gimcracks, and gewgaws on display throughout. This The Great Gatsby is a fashionista’s orgy of breathtaking period costuming, a production designer’s wet-dream of glittering Jazz Age opulence, and an antiquities museum curator’s idea of a motion picture. Lovely to look at, yet emotionally arid, antiseptic, and hermetically sealed.

Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby

Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan

Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan

Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway

Karen Black as Myrtle Wilson

Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker

Miscast, misguided, and overproduced (which is an odd thing to say about a movie that revels in the excesses of the wealthy), that this film ranks at all amongst my picks of memorable movies to write about for this blog is largely due to The Great Gatsbybeing one of my top, all-time favorite novels and this version being a particularly faithful big screen adaptation. Painstakingly so, in fact. Indeed, one finds that the paradox of this nearly $7 million mounting of The Great Gatsby is how it is able to so faithfully replicate so many intricate details of the novel (including sizable chunks of dialog and virtually the entirely of the book's events and characters) yet still manage to leave out both its passion and pathos. It’s like one of those lifelike celebrity waxworks at Madame Tussauds: identical in every superficial detail but falling short of being a true representation of life because it lacks a soul.

How this came to be can perhaps be traced to the film’s troubled genesis, recounted in fascinating detail in Bruce Bahrenburg’s book, Filming The Great Gatsby (my own yellowed and tattered copy, purchased in the heat of 1974’s studio-generated “Gatsby Fever”). Originally conceived and developed as a wedding present vehicle for Ali MacGraw by then-husband Robert Evans, The Great Gatsby was derailed when MacGraw threw a gold-plated, 14-carat monkey wrench into the works by falling in love with her The Getaway co-star, Steve McQueen. While the hunt went out for a new Daisy (in which several credible applicants like Faye Dunaway and Candice Bergen were passed over for, in my opinion, the absolutely incredible choice of Mia Farrow), an ailing Truman Capote was fired as screenwriter and later sued the studio, and the beautiful but inexpressive Lois Chiles was entrusted with the showy role of Jordan Baker simply because she was the girlfriend of the cuckolded Robert Evans and studio head Charles Bluhdorn figured the poor guy needed to catch a break.

Daisy & Gatsby
Mia Farrow (absolute perfection in Rosemary's Baby) is an actress I greatly admire, but for me she was totally out of her depth as Daisy Buchanan. Lacking the ability of say, Julie Christie, who can somehow play shallow and self-absorbed as interesting and sympathetic, Farrow's Daisy is mostly annoyingly fey and shrill. To be fair, F.Scott Fitzgerald's daughter, Frances, told People magazine at the time, "Mia Farrow looks like the Daisy my father had in mind." However, this was said during the filming. I've no idea what she thought after seeing the finished product.

Most movies have tortuous paths to completion, but The Great Gatsby is one of those cases where it looks as if an inordinate amount of time and energy had been invested in engineering a marketable property, not making a film. We still have the basic story of a millionaire with the shady past who attempts to reignite an old love affair with the idealized socialite who threw him over years ago when he was poor, but that's almost all we have. There's very little that's effectively done with the story's themes involving class, idealism, and morality. One never gets the sense that anyone involved in the making of The Great Gatsby had even read the novel, much less understood any of the book’s themes or tried to figure out what Fitzgerald was trying to say about our culture. Otherwise surely someone would have pointed out the contradiction inherent in making an ostentatious, large-scale behemoth about the pernicious vulgarity of the rich. I have a hunch that Paramount, in having made a fortune with Erich Segal’s Love Story, hoped to combine the crowd-pleasing sentimentality of Love Story (1970) with the big-boxoffice, romanticized nostalgia of The Way We Were (1973) and never gave a thought to much else.

Hype Gripe
The amount of publicity surrounding the release of The Great Gatsby was near-suffocating and ultimately off-putting to the public. In 1974 Warner Bros. had Mame waiting in the wings, Paramount had Gatsby (both released in March and featuring eye-popping period costumes by Theadora Van Runkle) as well as Chinatown. The entire country was swept up in a nostalgia craze that even the decade's eventual disco-fever couldn't quell.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

For all my complaining about what a mechanized piece of Hollywood machinery The Great Gatsbyturned out to be, I nevertheless get quite a kick out of the film—in spite of not finding it to be particularly good—due to a few Gatsby-esque reasons of my own. The pleasure I derive from watching The Great Gatsby these days is directly (sentimentally and nostalgically) related to the memories I have of my sixteen-year-old self in 1974. Back then I was caught up in all things movie-related and willfully swept up in the Gatsby hype. I read the articles, bought the soundtrack album, dragged my family to see it…I did everything short of insist my mother purchase and serve our meals on the limited-edition The Great Gatsby dinnerware by Corelle® they sold at the local department store.

At that time I hadn't yet read Fitzgerald’s novel, so I didn't have any expectations waiting to be dashed. Nevertheless, in spite of my enthusiasm, I was underwhelmed when I finally got to see the film. It was nothing like the touching romance I was expecting, but it was a great deal like a film adaptation of a campy, self-serious Harold Robbins novel. Then, as now, I find it a gorgeous film to look at and in each passing year I grow ever fonder of the old-fashioned movie magic of large crowds of extras, big sets, period detail, all accomplished with no CGI. But it's impossible for me to regard it seriously and it remains on my DVD shelf, a treasured guilty pleasure.

A Fine Romance
If Gatsby and Daisy failed to sizzle, their lack of heat is nothing compared to the non-romance of butch professional golfer, Jordan Baker and Tony Perkins-esque narrator Nick Carraway. According to IMDB trivia, original screenwriter Truman Capote wrote Nick as a homosexual and Jordan as a lesbian. Sounds about right to me.

I wish it were otherwise, but the joys I currently find in this surprisingly joyless movie (Gatsby’s parties look well-populated and busy, but not the least bit fun) are of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. I honestly could watch this film every day, yet I wouldn't recommend it to a soul. It's a very watchable, amiable kind of failure that yield new campy treasures and glaring misjudgments with each viewing.

A couple of examples:

Daisy’s hair. In her memoirs, Mia Farrow felt her performance was “undermined” by the unflattering wig she was forced to wear, claiming that for the duration, it “...felt and looked like cotton candy.” Can’t disagree with her there.

The clothes fetish. I know everyone in this movie is supposed to be rich and can afford fancy garb, but this is one of those movies where all the clothes have that distracting “never been worn” look. This also applies to the never-lived in sets and all those pristine automobiles on display. These cars are so drooled over by the camera that when Myrtle meets her end at the fender of Gatsby’s gorgeous yellow Rolls Royce, I'm tempted to think audiences were left in a quandary...were they upset by her death, or because she left such a big, ugly dent in that perfectly lovely automobile?

Author Tom Wolfe: "I'll never forgive the 1974 version of 'The Great Gatsby,' which was the Fitzgerald novel as reinterpreted by the garment industry. Throughout the picture Robert Redford wore white suits. They fitted so badly that every time he turned a corner there was an eighty-microsecond lag before they joined him."

PERFORMANCES:

According to Roman Polanski, his dream casting of the role of Guy Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Babywould have been Robert Redford. Upon seeing the lack of chemistry displayed between Mia Farrow and Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby, I tend to think he dodged a bullet there. Certainly the Clark Gable of the 70’s, Robert Redford is a strikingly handsome man (I could write a sonnet about the way the sun hits the blond fur on his upper thighs in his swimsuit scene) but he is woefully stiff and colorless as Gatsby. It’s unimaginable that anyone that bland could harbor an obsessed fixation on anything other than Miracle Whip.

Most of the acting in The Great Gatsby falls into one of two categories: stiff or fussy. As garage owner George Wilson, actor Scott Wilson (so good in In Cold Blood) somehow manages to combine both as he's allowed to go through the entire film with the exact same watery-eyed, self-pitying expression you see here. The exasperation expressed by wife Myrtle (Karen Black) is pretty much on par with my own.

By way of contrast, we have my personal 70s fave, Karen Black, giving what can most charitably be described as a ridiculous performance as 20s hotbox, Myrtle Wilson. Karen Black won a Golden Globe for it, so perhaps it’s just a matter of taste, but I don’t believe her Myrtle for a minute…which is not the same thing as saying that I don’t love her performance. Acting her ass off in an almost alarmingly mannered fashion, Black is terrible in that Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara way, and as such, she’s close to being the only life the film has. Whether falling down stairs, shoving her hands through plate windows, or bugging her eyes with rage, hers is a black comedy performance (pun intended) that's true to the idiosyncratic skills of the actress, tone and tempo of the rest of the film be damned.

Actress Brooke Adams, (l.) who would star in 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and actor Edward Herrmann (r.) who played FDR in the 1982 musical, Annie show up in bit parts as party guests in The Great Gatsby.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

There’s not a lot that Mia Farrow does right in The Great Gatsby, but there is one scene where she so completely nails it that it almost makes her being so poorly cast worthwhile. It’s the scene that takes place in the Buchanan household when everyone is sitting around the dinner table complaining about the heat (taking place over the course of one summer, everybody sweats a lot in this movie…from the neck up,anyway. No one’s clothes are ever damp). In this scene Daisy forgets herself and speaks to Gatsby as if the others aren't there. “Ah, you look so cool. You always look so cool,” she says dreamily. Catching herself, she blushes and starts to rattle off an explanation that hilariously trails off to nowhere. Farrow seriously knocks that little bit of business out of the park. It’s the single most authentically character-based acting she does in the film and she’s great. In that one minute I can see what kind of woman Daisy was perhaps supposed to be all along.

Very Pretty People Capable of Very Ugly Things

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Trusting a book like The Great Gatsby to an industry comprised of individuals who wouldn't know a moral imperative if it tapped them on the shoulder and asked if it could park their Hummers for them, is a little like asking Donald Trump to act like a human being for a five minutes. The desire may be there, but the tools to pull it off aren't.

This version of The Great Gatsby is almost valueless as drama, but it's the perfect kind of screen adaptation of a literary classic for showing in high school English Classes. For while it is a faithful visual representation of the body of the text, at no time does the film tip its hand toward revealing what the novel’s underlying themes are, leaving that to the students.

OK, so I guess you can tell what I think is so great about this particular Gatsby.

Because in my heart I consider The Great Gatsby to be a book of ideas and moral concepts poetically dramatized, I have my doubts as to whether it’s the kind of book that will ever lend itself to a satisfying screen adaptation. I must say I’m intrigued by the little I've seen of Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming adaptation (although I'm not sure if I'm up for another one of Tobey Maguire's stare-a-thon roles), which, in its considerable visual dazzle once again raises the issue of whether or not it is possible for a film to simultaneously condemn and chronicle extreme wealth. If not, I guess we'll be left with another example of the past repeating itself...in 3-D, no less.

Gatsby reaches out towards the light at the end of Daisy's dock.

Nick: “You can’t repeat the past.”

Gatsby:“You can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.”

Before seeing The Sterile Cuckoo in 1969, I had only the vaguest impression of Liza Minnelli. I had a dim memory of her as this somewhat hyperactive, inauthentic personality that popped up occasionally on her mother’s variety show, and another as an over-earnest Red Riding Hood in a 1965 musical TV special titled, The Dangerous Christmas of Little Red Riding Hood. Having missed her film debut in the 1967 Albert Finney vehicle, Charlie Bubbles, The Sterile Cuckoo marked my first encounter with Liza Minnelli the actress, and, in the character of Pookie Adams, my first exposure to what eventually evolved into the Liza Minnelli screen persona.

Liza Minnelli as Mary Ann "Pookie" Adams

Wendell Burton as Jerry Payne

The Sterile Cuckoo, the first film effort by late director Alan J. Pakula (Klute, Starting Over) is a fairly straightforward, bittersweet tale of first love represented as a touching, coming-of-age character study. Soft-spoken biology major Jerry Payne (Wendell Burton) encounters bespectacled oddball, Pookie Adams (Liza Minnelli) as both are waiting for a bus to take them to their first semesters at neighboring colleges. The extroverted but socially awkward Pookie either misinterprets Jerry's passive malleability as interest or willfully disregards the possible indifference masked by his mostly silent countenance, and insists that the two share a mutual attraction ("We got along terrifically on the bus!" she asserts). Pookie, an outcast who aggressively overcompensates and guards her lonely vulnerability behind the labeling of others as “creeps,” “weirdos,” or “bad eggs,” is clearly drawn to the nice, button-down sweetness of the biology major, but one senses that she's a type who habitually latches onto strangers. For his part, the overwhelmed Jerry doesn't so much warm to Pookie’s charms as succumbs to the force of her persistent will.

Pookie worms her way into yet another heart

Yet in that strange way in which a relationship can be forged out of an individual of somewhat amorphous character being drawn / surrendering to the superficially dominant character of another, the very dissimilar Pookie and Jerry embark upon a swift but tenuous romance. Taking place over the course of one school year, The Sterile Cuckoofollows the couple’s evolution and eventual dissolution as Jerry shows signs of beginning to grow into himself just as Pookie’s love-starved neediness starts to reveal itself to be part of larger, more deep-rooted emotional problems.

Tim McIntire plays Jerry's roommate Charles Schumacher (or Shoonover...the film can't seem to make up its mind). A typical macho, sexual braggart, hard-drinkin' fratboy. On the surface. The reality of this ostensibly "popular" character's life underscore The Sterile Cuckoo's theme that all teens struggle to find their identities. Pookie's self-absorbed wallowing in her own problems blinds her to an awareness of the feelings of others.

As a 12-year-old kid enamored of too-mature films I scarcely understood, The Sterile Cuckoo was one of the few movies I saw during this period that didn't feel like a two-hour excursion into the uncharted territory of mysterious adulthood. Although the characters are supposed to be 18 or 19, the issues plaguing Pookie and Jerry (friendships, identity, loneliness, peer group acceptance) were, for the most part, things I could both relate to and recognize within myself. I identified with Jerry’s timidity and deliberate, watchful approach to others. Likewise, as a gay youth, I empathized both with Pookie’s perception of herself as an outsider, as well as her reject-them-before-they-reject-you, knee-jerk defense mechanisms.

The painful paradox of finding yourself snubbed by the very group you profess to have no interest in being a part of is brought to almost excruciating life by Minnelli in this scene at a campus hangout. Hoping to have found someone to share in her outcast isolation, Pookie is unnerved to discover that Jerry, by all appearances a quiet loner, is actually rather socially poised and liked by others.

But what I think I responded to most was the film’s insight into the dynamics of a relationship between two loner personalities drawn together in their isolation. Both Pookie and Jerry are insecure, but each responds to their circumstances differently. Pookie’s insecurity causes her to alienate all others except the one person she selects to smother with all the love she has, and emotionally drain with all the love she needs. Jerry lacks confidence as well, but as his insecurity is neither fear-based nor self-protecting, he's capable of recognizing that everyone is a little afraid to reach out to others and that it matters if one makes a little effort.
Unlike the offensive message behind the beloved 1978 musical, Grease, whose moral is to encourage teenage girls to change everything about themselves in order to gain peer acceptance, The Sterile Cuckoo is not a film about the need to conform... it's about the inevitability of growing up.

"Pookie, maybe they aren't all so bad. Maybe everybody's just a little cautious of everybody."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Always a sucker for movies about vulnerable characters (and movies that make me cry), I fell in love with The Sterile Cuckoo and saw it about six times back in1969. It sold me on Liza Minnelli as a genuinely talented actress and inspired me to read the surprisingly different-in-tone John Nichols novel. For the longest I harbored a memory of The Sterile Cuckoo as just a sad/funny look at first love, and perhaps that’s all it's intended to be. But seeing the film today, in light of all we've come to learn about mental illness (coupled with our culture’s obsession with medicating all idiosyncrasies out of the human personality), I’m struck by how seriously disturbed Pookie seems to me now. That certainly wasn't the case when I was young. She starts out as some kind of early exemplar of the Manic Pixie Girl cliché, but what with her self-delusions, pathological lying, death-obsession, mood swings, and crippling persecution complex, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Pookie is considerably more than just a wounded misfit in search of someone to love her.

Death-fixated Pookie likes to hang out in cemeteries

PERFORMANCES:

Liza Minnelli deservedly won an Oscar nomination for her intense and deeply committed performance in The Sterile Cuckoo. Cynics and the industry savvy might take issue and label such an ostentatiously underdog role as Pookie Adams (significantly altered and made more pathetic/sympathetic than in the novel) to be just the sort of calculated Oscar-bait to attract Academy attention. But given that a similar gambit didn't work for Shirley MacLaine that same year for what many consider to be an equally manipulative and maudlin turn in Sweet Charity; I think it’s fair to say that Minnelli put this one over in spite of Pakula’s and screenwriter Alvin Sargent’s (Paper Moon, Ordinary People) determination to stack the emotional deck so heavily in her favor.

The character of Pookie Adams was conceived for the screen as one far more tragic than depicted in the novel.

It’s popular to dismiss the less-showy work of newcomer Wendell Burton in the reactive, relatively thankless role of Jerry Payne, but I think his low-key naturalism and likability provide the perfect contrast to Minnelli’s character’s hyperactivity (it’s impossible to watch her Pookie Adams and not think of Anne Hathaway's legendary eagerness to please). His character’s subtle growth is very well played, and to Burton’s credit, he’s never wiped off the screen by Minnelli (no easy feat, that). At the time of The Sterile Cuckoo's release, Wendell seemed poised for stardom. But after next appearing in an almost identical role as a soft-spoken prison inmate in Fortune & Men’s Eyes (1971) he worked primarily in TV before retiring from acting in the late 80s.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

Earlier in this post I mentioned how The Sterile Cuckoo marked my introduction to the Liza Minnelli screen persona. By that I mean that in The Sterile Cuckoo’s Pookie Adams there lies the genesis of the entirety of Liza Minnelli's screen image. Nowhere is this more obvious than in her Oscar-winning role in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1971). Fans of that film are apt to recognize in Pookie Adams a nascent version of Sally Bowles.
Pookie & Sally: A Comparison

1. Both sport waifish, gamine bobs.
2. Both mask their inherent insecurity behind masks of delusional self-confidence.

3. Both win over reluctant, passive men through the sheer force of their personalities.

4. Both suffer from neglectful fathers.
5. Each has a big emotional breakdown scene that virtually screams, “Give that girl an Oscar!”
6. Both have pregnancy scares.

7. Both have gaydar issues. Pookie thinks (perhaps correctly) that Jerry’s roommate is gay, while Sally fails to detect that her boyfriend and her lover are bisexuals.
8. Both wind up scaring off their lovers.

Come-on: Would you like to peel a tomato?

Come-on: "Doesn't my body drive you wild with desire?"

The Sterile Cuckoo (top) and Cabaret (bottom) share scenes of Liza Minnelli as the sexual aggressor. Here she attempts to seduce lookalike males with her supine figure.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

The Sterile Cuckoo is one of those forgotten movies that need rediscovering. It’s not heavy on plot, Pookie’s character can prove more annoying than poignant to some, and if you take a dislike to the film’s Oscar-nominated theme song, “Come Saturday Morning,” you’re likely to be sent screaming into the streets, for it comprises the totality of the film’s soundtrack. But to me it’s a perfectly wonderful film of humor, sensitivity, and great emotional insight. Beautifully shot and an authentic-feeling record of the late 60s, The Sterile Cuckoo has terrific performances throughout (Minnelli is at times phenomenal in this) and I think the conveyance of the brief romance is beautifully handled...both its beginning and its painful end. Definitely worth a look.
Oh, and as to the significance of the title? Nowhere to be found in the film (allegedly cut), but referenced in the novel as a poem Pookie writes about herself.

At the start of the film, we don't understand the silence between the two characters sitting on a bench waiting for the arrival of a bus. When this image is duplicated at the end, we have a better understanding of the pattern of Pookie's life and sense that this has been and will be a scenario played out again and again.

Mark, at Random Ramblings, Thoughts & Fiction and a few internet friends have all shared tales with me of having had their encounters with real-life Pookie Adams', so I figured I should share my own. My particular Pookie was a bit of an outcast, wore glasses, and was ragingly funny. She was keenly perceptive and cutting when it came to the shortcomings of others, yet oblivious to her own. She was a deeply loyal friend, but somewhat suffocating in that if you were her friend, you had to be only HER friend. There was no room for anybody else. She was happiest in having the two of us share all of our time together sitting apart from others and putting them down. In my own insecurity, this felt for a time like a kind of strength to me too, but it wasn't long before I recognized what a self-defeating, one-way street this attitude was. We were an insulated, impregnable world of two, but it was a world of cowards. As much as I enjoyed her company, the ultimately toxic nature of her mean-spirited humor (it was so obvious that she was in such pain and so afraid of others) drove us apart. I see in The Sterile Cuckoo and Liza Minnelli's excellent performance an exacting depiction of a certain kind of wounded personality. One I'm learning is not as unique as I once thought.

Playwright Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in 1890) has been adapted to film at least ten times, not counting several silent versions and numerous movies made for television. Of these, I've seen a kind of low-rent, Dark Shadows-esque version produced by Dan Curtis in 1973; a visually well-turned-out and significantly altered 2009 British theatrical adaptation for the Twilight generation; and the uniformly excellent 1945 film version which boasts George Sanders playing what is essentially Addison DeWitt five years before there was an Addison DeWitt.

Each film possesses its own unique assortment of assets and liabilities, but by no stretch of the imagination could any be labeled the definitive translation of Wilde’s allegory of the corporeal vs. the spiritual. So, being that as far as I know the definitive adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray has yet to be made, I proffer this, my absolute favorite version of Wilde’s oft-told-tale: the irresistibly loopy Dorian Gray - 1970. A film that stands head and shoulders above the rest for its appealingly tawdry Eurotrash aesthetics, its flawless evocation of Swinging 60s mod, and its flagrant, unabashed sleaze factor. Loaded with entertainment value every bit as visually exquisite and shallow as its protagonist, Dorian Gray (titled The Secret of Dorian Gray or The Evils of Dorian Gray in Europe) is a deliciously prurient Italian/German collaboration produced by American schlockmeister Samuel Z. Arkoff (the “brains” behind virtually every Beach Party or outlaw motorcycle gang movie made in the 60s) and released through his American International Pictures.

Helmut Berger as Dorian Gray

Herbert Lom as Henry Wotton

Marie Liljedahl as Sybil Vane / Gladys Mormouth

Richard Todd as Basil Hallward

Margaret Lee as Gwendolyn Wotton

Directed by onetime Sergio Leone cinematographer Massimo Dallamano, Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s Victorian Gothic provocatively updated to Swinging Sixties London at the peak of the Sexual Revolution. Fairly faithful to the novel’s Faustian plot about a handsome young innocent led down the path of hedonism and debauchery whose portrait comes to reflect the decay of his soul while he himself remains the unsullied ideal of youth and beauty; Dorian Gray is, in every and all aspects, a Dorian Gray that could only have come out of the late 60s.

Mac Daddy Dorian

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

There is something conceptually so perfect about positing Dorian Gray smack in the middle of the youth-obsessed 60s. Removed from the wholesale repression and prudery of Victorian era morality, this particular incarnation of Dorian Gray proposes what seems to me to be a far more compelling question: When arbitrary ethical judgments of good and bad are replaced with the freedom to do what you wish in a world that worships self-fulfillment, beauty, youth, and living for today, of what authentic value is a moral code?
In the year this film was released, folk rocker Stephen Stills had a Top 20 hit with a song containing lyrics espousing the then-popular "free-love" philosophy of the younger generation - “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” (Which in itself was a retooling of an E.Y. Harburg lyric from a song from the 1947 Broadway musical, Finian’s Rainbow: “If I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near.”) The timbre of the times literally reflected the philosophy of Dorian Gray's Henry Wotton: life is to be enjoyed freely and openly, and youth is a briefly bestowed gift best utilized to its fullest while one possesses it.

Prince Charming and Juliet
Prior to embarking on a long-term love affair with himself, Dorian falls in idealized love with virginal (but not for long) aspiring actress Sybil Vane

The 60s atmosphere of moral relativism would seem to suggest that this particular incarnation of Dorian Gray was perhaps conceived as a means of addressing Oscar Wilde’s themes in a manner relevant to the changing times. To reflect upon what distinctions exist, if any, between being a liberated individual and being a libertine. Alas, from the film’s first gaillo-influenced frames (gaillo being a stylized genre of Italian thriller), it’s clear that this Dorian Gray is less interested in exploring the complex themes of aestheticism vs. morality so much as exploring how far the newly relaxed standards of cinema censorship can be pressed into the service of chronicling Dorian’s heretofore only-hinted-at depravities and sins of the flesh.

Desire Under the Elms

PERFORMANCES:
Italian cinema’s long history of dubbing and post-synching dialog frequently makes it tough to access an actor’s performance. Although Dorian Gray’s multi-national cast speaks its dialog in English, the entire film is nevertheless dubbed by other actors (save for Herbert Lom, who provides his own voice). This might spare audiences the sometimes ear-gnarling clash of dueling accents you get with international productions, but it also tends to rob performances of a great deal of vitality. This is especially true of the dynamic Helmut Berger, who possesses a sexy, melodic voice and whose charming Teutonic lisp I greatly miss.

Action films and mostly-silent spaghetti westerns fare better under this practice, but a dialog-heavy film like this — with its attempts at Wilde-ishly witty banter — make for a particularly clumsy aural experience. The effect of all these somewhat flat, disembodied voices is that already dodgy performances are rendered thoroughly ineffectual (I’m sorry, but lovely Marie Liljedahl seems like a pretty awful actress in any language), and potentially good performances (Berger, Isa Miranda, Renato Romano) are de-fanged and neutered. In its place is a form of acting I tend to associate with those Hammer horror films from the 60s: underlined and over-indicated to the point of pantomime.

"Do you want to sell it, Mr. Gray?"
In a minute, randy millionairess Patricia Ruxton (Isa Miranda) will make it obscenely clear that she isn't talking about real estate

Happily, Dorian Gray, having been fashioned as an erotic exploitation film from the get-go, isn't really a film fueled by its performances. Like a trash novel by Sidney Sheldon or Jacqueline Susann (fans of Valley ofthe Dolls would love this), Dorian Gray is a movie devoted to surface gloss. And on that score - from its photogenic cast, sumptuous color photography, lavish locations, outrageous mod costuming, and climate of glamorized sleaze - Dorian Gray more than delivers.

Tearoom for Two
Dorian Gray, Sexual Outlaw

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

A hurdle for any screen adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is the casting of a Dorian whose looks correspond to enough people’s wildly subjective notions of male beauty so as not to render the narrative absurd, or at the very least, puzzling. For my money, director Dallamano hits pay dirt with the casting of Helmut Berger. A man so staggeringly beautiful that he makes personal fave Joe Dallesandro (certainly one of the most gorgeous men to have ever walked the planet) look like Ernest Borgnine.

Something not possible in earlier adaptations, contemporary Dorian Gray becomes a porn star!

Protégé and life-partner of director Lucino Visconti, Berger appeared prominently for the director in The Damned, Ludwig, and Conversation Piece. Dubbed by the press at the time as the most beautiful man in the world, Helmut, smooth, slim, and marvelously devoid of tattoos, was like the Richard Gere/Ewan McGregor of his day...he couldn't keep his clothes on. In the 70s, female stars were jumping out of their clothing in record numbers, but one had to rely almost exclusively on Andy Warhol-produced Paul Morrissey films to catch male nudity of any consequence. Lucky for us connoisseurs of male pulchritude, Helmut Berger obligingly doffed his trousers in film after film. A fact that certainly leaves me wondering to what degree my affinity for this film is tied to the filmmakers taking every opportunity to feature our leading man in various states of undress. I'll have to think about that.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:
Someone once said, "Everyone has trash, but what distinguishes us is the quality of our trash," (it sounds like something John Waters would say). I apply this philosophy to my taste in movies. I'm well aware that a great many of the films I get the biggest kick out of are films many would perceive as pure cinema trash, but there's not a soul in the world who could convince me that my particular brand of trash isn't some of the most superior trash you're likely to come across. It's often the very best that the worst has to offer.

The striking actress Beryl Cunningham portrays Adrienne, Dorian's amoral partner-in-blackmail

In Dorian Gray you have the typical youth-directed sexploitation stuff American International released with assembly-line regularity in the 60s and 70s (Three in the Attic, Angel, Angel , Down We Go), only this time cloaked in the veil of literary significance. In most aspects superficial (those centering on the libidinous exploits of Dorian), the film does right by its conceit in updating the tale to modern times. But it fails to go much below the surface in examining even a fraction of the ideas and concepts its premise suggest. Curiously, its the passing of time that has granted Dorian Gray the subtextural gravity it lacked in 1970. Albeit perhaps, uncomfortably.
Actor Helmut Berger has gone on record about his disdain for Los Angeles and Hollywood, and has thus, outside of a small part in The Godfather: Part III and a year's penance on TV's Dynasty in 1983, mostly worked in Europe. High living (literally...drug and alcohol abuse) eventually got the better of him, and like Marlon Brando, that other physical specimen that ceased to care for maintaining a youthful appearance for the comfort of his fans, Helmut did the unspeakable...he allowed himself to age naturally.

Renato Romano portrays Dorian's boyhood friend, Alan Campbell, a chemist

Certainly his current condition is to some degree a result of youthful excesses, but at almost 70 years of age, part is merely due to a thing that has become increasingly rare among public figures: actual aging. A phenomenon practically unheard of in Hollywood, our culture reveres beauty so completely that an individual who allows his looks to "go" is considered more a figure of pity than one who pathetically clings to eternal youth. Personally, I find Helmut Berger's current relaxed-into-himself countenance very refreshing, and it speaks of a self-image perhaps a good deal healthier than the plastic-surgery nightmares that proliferate in Hollywood today. I've read many online comments about how sad it is that Berger has failed to maintain his looks as he ages, but little speculation along the lines of how he might be happier and more at peace with himself now than in his cocaine-thin days.

Helmut Berger in his 60s / Berger at 25

The questions about inner vs. outer beauty that Oscar Wilde dramatized so artfully years ago (and if you've never read The Portrait of Dorian Gray, I heartily recommend it) are still with us... maybe now more than ever. In our looks-obsessed culture in which beauty is so often seen as a virtue, is youth really a thing worth trying to hold onto forever, prizing it above all? And what value does beauty have to the possessor (we on the outside benefit from gazing upon it) if there's not also peace of mind? It's a pity that Dorian Gray, an exploitation film distracted by its own sensationalism, failed to delve deeper into the many questions raised by its enduringly appealing premise.
But take a look at the film now, through the prism of 43 years having passed. Like a real-life Dorian Gray, Helmut Berger in this movie provides a record of himself in a state of near-perfect youth. A moving portrait frozen, unchanging, and captured on film for all time. Knowing now what we couldn't have known in 1970 (what ultimately becomes of Helmut's celebrated beauty, his battles with drugs and alcoholism and the toll they take on his face, body, and mind) raises the very issues Oscar Wilde's novel proposed all those years ago, and makes us question our own attitudes about beauty, aging, and the value we place upon such things.

"The world belongs to the young and beautiful," Wotton tells Dorian. Perhaps that's true. But it's an ownership with a very short lease. Beauty is indeed something, but it's sobering to ponder, when considering Helmut Berger's troubled life and how little peace his good looks brought him, how obviously beauty isn't everything.

Sure, Bye Bye Birdie is a bright, lively, tuneful, only intermittently funny satire of teenage pop culture in the 60s. But as far as I’m concerned, Bye Bye Birdie has two huge assets that make it one of my all-time favorite movie musicals (I know what you’re thinking…and you should be ashamed of yourself!). Those assets: the unstoppable star-quality of Ann-Margret, and the ingenious staging of the musical numbers by choreographer Onna White.

Ann-Margret as Kim McAfee

Bobby Rydell as Hugo Peabody

Dick Van Dyke & Janet Leigh / Albert Peterson & Rose DeLeon

Mary LaRoche & Paul Lynde / Doris and Harry McAfee

Jesse Pearson as Conrad Birdie

Adapted from the 1960 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Bye Bye Birdie pokes gentle fun at America’s burgeoning youth culture by spoofing the real-life pandemonium surrounding hip-swiveling pop star Elvis Presley being drafted into the army in 1958. Standing in for Elvis in the musical is the fictitious rocker, Conrad Birdie (Jesse Pearson). A beer-swilling, ill-mannered hillbilly who wreaks havoc on prototypical Midwestern small town, Sweet Apple, Ohio, when he arrives to bestow a symbolic coast-to-coast televised goodbye kiss on an adoring female fan before being shipped overseas.

Cue the generation-gap complications and small-town vs. show-biz culture clash hijinks. None of which, I might add, should anyone having even the most cursory familiarity with 60s-era sitcoms will have trouble staying one step ahead of. Bye Bye Birdie, when it’s either singing or dancing, is the most engaging and sprightliest of musicals, full of fun and as eager to please as a puppy. In its quieter moments—scratch that, there are no quieter moments—in its non-musical moments, Bye Bye Birdie’s amusing, if not particularly funny screenplay feels a tad labored and more than a little creaky. Rooted in a kind of broad, over-emphatic acting style of a Gilligan’s Islandepisode (a style that struck me as riotous when I was nine, a good deal less so now) and over-reliant on moldy, near-vaudevillian comedic shtick of the sort that considers silly names (Hugo Peabody) and wacky plot contrivances (that deadly speed-up pill subplot) the height comic brilliance; Bye Bye Birdie stays afloat chiefly through its simple desire to entertain and because of the buoyant charm of its talented and energetic cast.

The Sweet Apple chapter of The Conrad Birdie Fan Club (fronted by Ann-Margret and Trudi Ames) pledge undying allegiance.

The film version of Bye Bye Birdie was significantly (and, as per the voiced consensus of Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Paul Lynde, and Maureen Stapleton, controversially) retooled from the stage version which won Tonys for Best musical, Best director, Best choreography (both Gower Champion) and Best actor (Van Dyke). By the time it reached the screen, director George Sidney had turned it into a $6 million valentine to vivacious protégé, Ann-Margret, in this, her third film. With Van Dyke and Lynde the only carry-overs from the Broadway show, numerous songs jettisoned and plotlines abandoned or reworked, Bye Bye Birdiebecame the ironic embodiment of all that the Broadway play had spoofed. What began life as an anti-rock and roll musical fashioned to reflect the middle-age mentality of adult Broadway audiences reeling from rock & roll upstarts like Elvis stealing the Sinatra crown, had arrived onscreen as a youth-centric glorification of teenybopper culture that effectively allocated once-prominent adult plotlines and relationships to the sidelines to make way for the fresh vitality of its young cast members(aka Ann-Margret). Bye Bye Birdie, hello to the first multimillion-dollar teenage musical!

Paul Lynde's comedic number, "Kids" was a showstopper that brought down the house on Broadway. When speaking of his much-abbreviated screen role, Lynde was fond of saying of the film, "They should have retitled it, 'Hello, Ann-Margret'!"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

One look at Bye Bye Birdie and it’s easy to see why it has become one of the most imitated and referenced movie musicals since The Wizard of Oz. Each number in the bouncy Charles Strouse / Lee Adams score is given almost cartoonishly vibrant life in increasingly clever and dazzlingly cinematic ways. So many large-scale musicals fall into the trap of thinking that mere size and expense alone is enough to make a film fun and energetic. Bye Bye Birdie is that rare example of a musical whose scale perfectly fits its subject, and whose accumulated talents (dancers, singers, cinematography, color, choreography, staging, and special effects) have all somehow managed to remain on the same creative page. Every number throughout is infused with a lighthearted wit and silliness that remains true to the escapist tone of the entire enterprise. Musical films that work are almost a lost art, but Bye Bye Birdieis a glowing example of the genre done right. Small wonder that musicals like Grease and Hairspray, and entertainments as diverse as music videos, TV’s Mad Men, and Disney’s High School Musical franchise, have all owed a debt to Bye Bye Birdie.

The combined talents of director George Sidney (Pal Joey, Annie Get Your Gun) and choreographer Onna White (The Music Man, Oliver!) result in a movie whose clever, eye-popping musical sequences are a great deal of silly fun and still have the power to captivate after all these years.

"Going Steady" predates the look of MTV music videos; "Put on a Happy Face" makes imaginative use of cute, if primitive special effects; and "A Lot of Livin' to Do" is a powerhouse production number of unparalleled energy and witty choreography.

Oscar and Tony Award-winner Maureen Stapleton makes her musical debut in Bye Bye Birdie as Mae Peterson, Albert's dominating mother.

PERFORMANCES:

In her 1982 book, 5001 Nights at the Movies, fave film critic Pauline Kael wrote the following about Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie...and I couldn't have said it any better: “Ann-Margret, playing a brassy 16-year-old with a hyperactive rear end, takes over the picture; slick, enameled, and appalling as she is, she’s an undeniable presence.”

OK, I might have left out “appalling.”

Real-life teen idol Bobby Rydell makes his film debut as Ann-Margret's love interest

Other than that, Kael pretty much nails Ann-Margret’s appeal for me in this film and why any director would have been a fool not to have kept the camera trained on her every second. She's a dynamo! Members of the film’s cast may have felt slighted, and fans of the stage show may cry foul, but in my book, if Bye Bye Birdie is remembered at all today, it’s due in large part to Ann-Margret. She is camp, a little over the top, and perhaps artificial as hell, but she is undeniably talented and you literally can’t your eyes off of her. She’s a star.

In the Broadway show, Bye Bye Birdie paid tribute to iconic, stone-faced TV host Ed Sullivan (that's him on the left, for all you youngsters) in the song, "Hymn for a Sunday Evening." Director George Sidney snagged the genuine article for the film. Appearing with Sullivan here are Janet Leigh and Robert Paige.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

There aren't many lines across which the life experiences of gays and straights of my generation cross, but one thing that many males (and a good many females) my age have in common—regardless of sexual orientation—is the memory of their first time seeing Ann-Margret singing the film’s title song. Whether we saw it on the big screen in full color or in black and white on our TV sets, like the moon landing, few of us ever forgot or recovered from that image. Wow!

At the start of the film, Ann-Margret's performance of "Bye Bye Birdie" is girlish and plaintive. Next time you see it, take note of how her performance at the end of the film has become assured, teasing, and not a little sexually aggressive.

The 50s had Marilyn Monroe standing over that subway grate, and we children of the 60s had Ann-Margret on that treadmill. A sequence so obviously tame, perhaps it's a testament to our nation's level of sexual repression at the time that Ann-Margret, in those few short minutes at the start and end of the film, made men, women, children, straights, gays, lesbians, and adolescents of all stripes fall in love/lust with her.
The first time I saw Bye Bye Birdie was in black & white on late-night TV. I remember being just thunderstruck (I'm positive my jaw dropped open). I'd never seen anything like her! Advancing and retreating against that endless void, Ann-Margret was nothing less than a celluloid Venus emerging from the sea.

The dancer assuming the puppy hands pose with Bobby Rydell here is Lorene Yarnell, who found fame in the 70s as half of the popular mime duo, Shields and Yarnell.

The blonde staring agog at Jesse Pearson is 70s TV personality and Match Game stalwart, Elaine Joyce. Pearson himself would go on to write and direct porn films in the 70s until his untimely passing in 1979 at the age of 49.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:
As I've stated, Bye Bye Birdie is one of my favorite movie musicals, but primarily due to its songs, musical sequences, and the rapturous presence of Ann-Margret. I have no complaint with anyone in the cast except to say that they're sorely ill-served by the weak script and they're all goners when it comes to having to share any scenes with Miss you-know-who. Predictably, I'm finding that the older I get the more certain aspects of the film seem to strike me as charmingly camp or comically dated. Some of these things are fun: the middle-class suburban milieu, the fashions, all those rotary phones; other things less so: the all-white cast, that Shriner's Ballet when it starts to get out of hand (the 2009 Broadway revival removed the number entirely claiming, in the words of its star Gina Gershon, "It seemed a little too gang rape-y").

Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye
When I saw Bye Bye Birdie on the big screen for the first time in the 80s, the film's biggest laugh came from the intentional misunderstanding of this sweet, totally innocent lyric.

So whether enjoyed as camp, escapism, or an idealized journey to a past that never existed, Bye Bye Birdie is, at 50-years, still the most fun-filled musical around. And best of all, it has Ann-Margret!

Anyone know who's responsible for this great caricature? I love it!

Before there really was such a thing as a high-concept movie, in 1967 Warner Bros. released this doozy of a nail-biter whose intriguingly unorthodox casting and high-concept thriller premise resulted in lines around the block and a boxoffice ranking as 16th highest-grossing film of the year. The film: Wait Until Dark. The casting: All the heavies are played by actors best known for comedy roles. The concept: Somebody wants to kill Holly Golightly!

Audrey Hepburn as Susy Hendrix

Alan Arkin as Harry Roat, Jr.

Richard Crenna as Mike Talman

Jack Weston as Sgt. Carlino

Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Sam Hendrix

As if drawn to the theater for the collective purpose of forming a militia in her defense, 60s audiences—long-accustomed to spending a pleasant evening being charmed by the winsome, doe-eyed, Belgian gamine of Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany's—turned out in droves to witness Hepburn as a defenseless blind woman tormented by a gang of sleazy, drug-dealing, New York thugs. The Old-Hollywood zeitgeist had shifted in a big way! And if you don’t think placing cinema’s much-beloved eternal ingénue within harm’s way is a concept both incendiary and controversial, you must have missed the 2010 Internet war raged against Emma Thompson when she dared utter but a few disparaging remarks about everyone’s favorite sylphlike waif.
Then writing a remake of My Fair Lady, Thompson (ignorant or indifferent to the fact that, at least on this side of the pond, anyone trash-talking Audrey Hepburn is just begging for a major ass-whippin’) drew the heated ire of millions when she expressed the opinion that Hepburn couldn't sing and “Can’t really act.” There's no reason to believe there's any connection between this public outcry and the fact that Thompson's My Fair Lady reup has seemed to hit a snag, but if there’s one thing Audrey Hepburn elicits from movie fans, it’s the near-unanimous desire to shield and protect her. A quality exploited to entertainingly nerve-racking effect in Wait Until Dark.

What did they want with her?
Poster art for Wait Until Dark prominently featured the image of a screaming Audrey Hepburn accompanied by the above tagline. Yikes!

From the moment I first saw her in Roman Holiday, I've always thought of Audrey Hepburn’s screen persona as akin to that of a butterfly. A creature so exquisitely fragile and beautiful that you couldn't bear seeing harm come to it. Sure, Hepburn was drolly menaced in Charade, and, most certainly, pairing the then 27-year-old Hepburn with 57-year-old Fred Astaire in Funny Face constitutes some form of romantic terrorism; but for the most part, Audrey Hepburn has always seemed to me to be a woman far too adorable and classy for anybody to mess with.

That being said, I don’t number myself among her fans who would have been happy to have seen her continue along the path of taking on the same role in film after film. When Hepburn made the heist comedy, How to Steal a Million, in 1966, she was 36 years old, a wife and mother, yet still playing the sort of girlish role she virtually trademarked in the 50s. While that comedy revealed Hepburn in fine form and as radiant as ever, it was nevertheless becoming clear that in a world making way for Barbarella, Bonnie Parker, and Myra Breckinridge; it was high time for the Cinderella pixie image to be laid to rest.

Taking on the role of the tormented blind woman in Wait Until Dark was a concentrated effort on Hepburn's part to broaden her range and break the mold of her ingénue image. Earlier that same year Hepburn appeared to spectacular effect opposite Albert Finney in Stanley Donen’s bittersweet look at a troubled marriage, Two for the Road. Giving perhaps the most nuanced, adult performance of her career, Hepburn in modern mode revealed a surprising depth of emotional maturity that signaled, at least for a time, she might be one of the few Golden Age Hollywood stars able to make the transition to the dressed-down 70s. While Two for the Road ultimately proved too arty and downbeat for popular tastes, Wait Until Dark was a resounding boxoffice success and garnered the Oscar-winning actress her fifth Academy Award nomination.

Wait Until Dark was adapted from the hit 1966 Broadway play by Frederick Knott (Dial M for Murder) which starred Lee Remick in the role that won her a best Actress Tony nomination. Recreating the role she originated on Broadway, actress Julie Harrod (above) portrays Gloria, the bratty but ultimately resourceful upstairs neighbor.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

I really love a good thriller. And good thrillers are awfully hard to come by these days. When a suspense thriller succeeds in its objectives to send a chill up my spine, keep me guessing, or, better yet, induce me to spend a restless evening sleeping with all the lights on…well, I’m pretty much putty in its hands and will willingly follow where I’m led. Wait Until Dark does a marvelous job of duplicating the formula that worked so well for Ira Levin in both Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives--two of my all-time favorite suspense thrillers. Wait Until Dark takes a vulnerable female character (a woman recently blinded in a car accident, just learning to to adapt to her loss of sight); pits her against an enemy whose degree of malevolence and severity of intent she is slow to recognize (Susy is the unwitting possessor of a heroin-filled doll her tormentors are willing to kill for); and (most importantly) takes the time to develop its characters and methodically build suspense so as best to encourage empathy and audience identification. Simple in structure, yet rare in its ability to sustain tension while providing plenty of nightmare fodder, Wait Until Dark is one of those scary movies that still packs a punch even after repeat viewings.

When it comes to strict adherence to logic, most psychological thrillers don't hold up to too-close scrutiny. Wait Until Dark is no exception. Plot points and theatrical devices that play well on the stage don't always translate to the hyper-realistic world of motion pictures. But when a thriller is as fast-paced and full of spook-house fun as Wait Until Dark, head-scratchers like the one above (I won't give anything away, you'll have to see the film) won't hit you until long after your pulse has returned to normal and the film has ended.

PERFORMANCES:

A while back I wrote about how refreshing it was to see Elizabeth Taylor tackle her first suspense thriller with 1973’s Night Watch. In thinking back to 1967 and my first time seeing Audrey Hepburn’s genre debut in Wait Until Dark, the word that comes to mind is traumatizing. Yes, it was quite the shock seeing MY Audrey Hepburn keeping such uncouth company and being treated so loutishly in a film without benefit of a Cary Grant or Givenchy frock for consolation. Like everybody else, I had fallen in love with Audrey Hepburn’s frail vulnerability in Funny Face and My Fair Lady, so seeing her brutalized for a good 90 minutes was a good deal more than I was ready for at the tender age of ten.

Javier Bardem's creepy psychopath of No Country for Old Men owes perhaps a nod to Alan Arkin's equally tonsorially-challenged, undies-sniffing nutjob in Wait Until Dark.

Over the years, my shock over Hepburn’s deviation from type has given way to an appreciation of the skill of her performance here. Actors never seem to be given the proper credit for the realistic conveyance of fear and anxiety, yet I can't think of a single thriller or horror film that has ever worked for me if the lead is unable to convince me that he/she is in genuine fear for their life. Audrey Hepburn delves deep into her character and unearths not only mounting apprehension at her circumstances, but taps into the frustration and helplessness the character feels when confronted with the obstacles her lack of sight places on her means and options of escape and self-defense. Hepburn's is the emotional linchpin to the entire movie, and she is incredibly affecting and sympathetic. Without benefit of those expressive eyes of hers (she somehow allows them to go blank, yet finds ways to have all manner of complex emotions play out over her face and through her body language) Hepburn keeps us locked within the reality of the film. Even when the plot takes a few turns into the improbable (once again, my lips are sealed!).

60's model Samantha Jones (yes, Sex and the City fans, there IS a real one) plays Lisa, the inadvertent catalyst for all the trouble that erupts in Wait Until Dark. Jones' fabulously 60s big-hair,big-fur, slightly cheap glamour seems to have been borrowed by Barbra Streisand's prostitute ("I may be a prostitute, but I'm not promiscuous!") in 1970s The Owl and the Pussycat.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

Having been born too late to experience the mayhem attendant the release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, with that famed shower scene, I'm therefore thrilled to have had the experience of actually seeing Wait Until Dark during its original theatrical run, when exhibitors turned out all of the theater lights during the film's final eight minutes. Jesus H. Christ! Such a thunderous chorus of screams I'd never heard before in my life! My older sister practically kicked the seat in front of her free of its moorings. At least I think so. I was on the ceiling at the time. Without giving anything away, I'll just say that while that experience has since been duplicated at screenings I've attended of the films Jaws, The Omen, Carrie, and Alien; it has never been equaled. At least not in my easily-rattled book.

I hope William Castle appreciated the irony.
At the exact moment that director William Castle - the great granddad of horror gimmickry - was making a bid for legitimacy with Rosemary's Baby, Wait Until Dark, a major motion picture with an A-list cast, was attracting rave notices and sellout crowds employing a promotional gambit straight out of his B-movie marketing playbook.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Audrey Hepburn ventured into the damsel-in-distress realm just once more in her career (with this film's director, Terence Young, no less). Unfortunately, it was in the jumbled mess that was Bloodline (1979). An absolutely dreadful and nonsensical film I've seen, oh, about 7 times. As theatrical thrillers go, Wait Until Dark is not up there with Sleuth or Deathtrap in popularity, but it does get revived now and then. Most recently, a poorly-received 1998 Broadway version with Marisa Tomei and Quentin Tarantino, of all people. In 1982 there was a cable-TV adaptation starring Katherine Ross and Stacy Keach that I actually recall watching, but, perhaps tellingly, I can't remember a single thing about.

As a kid, I only knew Jack Weston from the silly comedies Palm Springs Weekend and The Incredible Mr. Limpett. Richard Crenna I knew from TV sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks and The Real McCoys. Producer Mel Ferrer (Mr. Audrey Hepburn at the time) is credited with casting these two talented actors against type to disconcerting and bone-chilling effect

When people speak of Wait Until Dark, it is invariably the Audrey Hepburn version that's referenced, and it's this film to which all subsequent adaptations, like it or not, must be compared. Even when removed from the fun exploitation gimmick of the darkened theater and the novelty of seeing Hepburn in an atypical, non-romantic role, Wait Until Dark holds up remarkably well. Delivering healthy doses of edge-of-the-seat suspense and jump-out-of-your-seat surprises, it's a solid, well-crafted thriller with a talented cast delivering first-rate performances (save for Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who just does his usual, bland, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.thing).
Still, it's Audrey Hepburn—age 37, inching her way toward adult roles— who is the real marvel here. Being a movie star of the old order, one whose stock-in-trade has been the projection of her personality upon every role; Hepburn is never fully successful in making us stop thinking at times as if we're watching Tiffany's Holly Golighty, Charade's Regina Lampert, or Roman Holiday's Princess Ann caught up in some Alice-through-the-looking-glass nightmare. But in these days of so-called "movie stars" who scarcely register anything onscreen beyond their own narcissism, I'm afraid I'm going to favor the actress whose sweetly gentle nature comes through in every role she's ever assumed. That's a real and genuine talent, in and of itself.

In the overheated melodrama, Queen Bee, the Joan Crawford we’re given is one so tailor –made for the post-Mommie Dearest crowd, I find myself hard-pressed to even imagine how this film was originally received. Who was its intended audience? Certainly, its dominant female lead and soap-opera histrionics qualify it as a late entry in the “woman’s film” genre so popular in the 40s. But the camp factor is pitched so high in Queen Bee, at times the entire enterprise feels like a well-financed drag act pandering to Crawford’s legion gay fan base. Like All About Eve (1950), Queen Bee seems to be operating on two levels at all times: 1) The straightforward southern-fried potboiler (aka, the clueless level); 2) The gay-friendly parade of camp-diva posturing, elaborate costuming, and bitchy dialog. But whether self-aware or inadvertent, the ever-present gay sensibilities that make Queen Bee such a rip-snorter of an entertainment are thanks solely to Joan Crawford ruling the roost in full female drag queen mode. Always in charge, always fascinating to watch, in Queen Bee, Crawford rolls out the entire arsenal of her patented, crowd-pleasing shtick: mannered delivery, mannish countenance, slaps to the faces of co-stars, pointed barbs delivered with haughty disdain, menacing eyebrows, teary-eyed close-ups…the works-- as reliably and on cue as if she were taking requests from the audience.

Joan Crawford as Eva Phillips

Barry Sullivan as Avery Phillips

Betsy Palmer as Carol Lee Phillips

John Ireland as Judson Prentiss

Lucy Marlow as Jennifer Stewart

Based on the novel The Queen Bee by Edna Lee, Queen Bee is a curiosity in that its plot, on reflection, seems to have no real point to it. It's like a monster movie where an unprovoked evil - embodied by a beast of single-minded malevolence - is presented purely for the fun of watching the havoc it can wreak, then quickly dispatched so that normalcy can be resumed. Eva Phillips is the monster in question (Joan Crawford, surprise!), a character whose sole defining character trait is Bitch on Wheels, with little to no variance or shading. Eva is a southern socialite who tricked her way into the moneyed Phillips clan (true to Joan Crawford movie tradition, Eva comes from humble beginnings) and is hell-bent on making everyone pay for having made her feel like an outsider. This manifests itself in her pathologically keeping a mean-spirited, ankle-strapped heel on the necks of anyone foolish enough to stay under her roof. In spite of the fact that her behavior seems to gain her very little, Eva gives herself over to it with a spontaneity and enthusiasm, which her victims seem to greatly mind, but not so much that it ever occurs to any of them to leave the comfy confines of the Phillips mansion/plantation.

Eva Phillips, spreading joy wherever she goes

It's gently alluded to that Eva's contemptibility stems from a frustration born of her embittered, guilt-ridden husband, Avery (Sullivan), having emotionally and sexually abandoned their marriage to retreat into the bottle. You see, in order to wed Eva, Avery jilted his-then fiancé, Sue McKinnon (the lovely Fay Wray in a small role); one-time southern belle, now local Ruby Red Dress. But considering the fact that Eva herself dumped Avery's best friend, Jud (Ireland), for the bigger fish that was Avery (by way of a faked pregnancy), it's clear Eva was quite a piece of work to begin with.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:
People I know who are unfamiliar with Queen Bee are always surprised when I set about summarizing the plot, for it truly boils down to just Joan Crawford behaving badly for 95 minutes. That's it. For the average moviegoer, that's a mighty slim entertainment prospect. For a guy like me, a man capable of simultaneously appreciating Crawford as both a talented-underrated actress, and a laugh-a-minute camp-fest, Queen Bee is the gold-standard. I've covered in previous posts for the films Harriet Craig and Mommie Dearest what it is about Joan Crawford that so appeals to me. Suffice it to say that there has never been anyone like her before or since, and a true original is hard to resist. I love her when she's really on her game and delivering a solid, serious performance (she's terrific in A Woman's Face), but I'm just as gaga when she succumbs to excess and self-parody, as she does here. She's Joan Crawford, she doesn't have to be anything else!

A slap in a Joan Crawford movie is as sure and anticipated as a back-lit close-up in a Barbra Streisand movie.

PERFORMANCES:

If it's a Joan Crawford movie, it's a pretty safe bet that the only star one is apt to walk away from the film singing the praises of is Joan Crawford. In Queen Bee Crawford dominates the movie screen with the same iron will she dominates the lives of the Phillips household. And I couldn't be happier about it. When playing bad, both Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis are more capable of delivering performances that are dimensional and based in a recognizable reality. But Crawford's appeal for me is the how she so often plays everything (her character's high and lows) in such boldface type. She's often unsubtle and frequently full-tilt over the top, but I find her to be SO magnetic a screen personality. I love watching her. I just wish I could tell if my adoration is ironic or not.

A scene where we get to watch the tears well up in her eyes is always a favored part of any Joan Crawford movie.

Ingenue Lucy Marlow (is that a great name for an actress, or what?), considerably deglamorized from the first time I saw her in A Star is Born (1954), does fine with a purposely colorless role (Eva: "Jen you really must learn to join in conversations. Otherwise you give such a mousy impression!"), and while not being a particular favorite of mine, should be credited with not simply fading into the woodwork. Toothsome Betsy Palmer, whom I barely recognized without a game show panelist podium in front of her, is rather appealing and wins camp points by playing her role as Avery's sister, Carol, with so much misdirected ponderousness. Taking the proceedings all-too-seriously, Palmer actually comes close to overacting opposite Crawford! When not trying to wise up the wide-eyed Phillips house newbie to the pernicious ways of the Queen Bee, her character is otherwise a walking bullseye target for Eva's frequent scorn (Eva:"My, Carol, you look sweet! Even in those tacky old riding clothes!").

King Kong's inamorata, Fay Wray, makes a brief but welcome appearance as Sue McKinnon, a left-standing-at-the-altar, Blanche Dubois type. Although the film is set in Atlanta,GA.,Wray is the only actor considerate enough to supply us with a southern accent.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

When Christina Crawford gave Crawford fans and detractors the heads-up about the films Harriet Craig and Queen Bee supplying the closest (not to mention safest) glimpses into what real life was like inside the Crawford household, both films rose to the top of my must-see list. No one will ever know the truth of all that Christina disclosed in her book, but I tell you this, these films make a hell of a double feature. Based exclusively on what Joan Crawford's image has become of late, both films bear that indelible stamp of re-enacted documentary. You can't watch either without your mind going to some bit of nightmarish lore attached to the whole Mommie Dearest legend. Depending on your taste for celebrity self-exposure, this can come off as either highly entertaining or uncomfortably squirm-inducing.

In this scene where Eva lays waste the bedroom of a particularly disliked in-law, it doesn't take much imagination to picture one of those "night raids" so vividly evoked in Christina Crawford's book, Mommie Dearest.

And for those who are most familiar with Joan through Faye Dunaway's portrayal of the actress in the legendary Mommie Dearest, there's still plenty of déjà vu cross-referencing to call your grip on truth / illusion into question.

A criticism consistently leveled at Mommie Dearest on its release was how many scenes appeared to have been culled from Crawford's films, and not her life. I have no idea what Crawford's real-life home looked like, but these staircase scenes definitely suggest that someone was doing a little Late, Late Show research.

The Jean Louis costumes for Queen Bee were one of two Oscar nominations the film received (the other, Best Cinematography). Here you see Faye Dunaway sporting a Jean Louis-inspired creation (and a Joan Crawford-inspired expression) in Mommie Dearest.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Perhaps it's a sign of age, but the soporific blandness of so many contemporary "movie stars" is one of the reasons Joan Crawford - considered by many to be more a defined screen personality than an actress - is starting to look better to me with each film. The dull beigeness of actors like Channing Tatum, Jennifer Aniston and Ryan Reynolds, makes me long for Crawford's brand of imposed-personality intensity.

Although John Ireland brings a kind of perpetually peeved severity to his role, and I'm fascinated with Barry Sullivan's ability to deliver most of his dialog through clenched teeth; true to form for movies with strong female leads, the males are an oddly stiff bunch.

Joan Crawford is first and foremost a star. And a movie like Queen Bee needs a true star at the helm. Obviously relishing every moment, Crawford isn't stretching very far with her performance here, but in tapping into the character's narcissism and malicious manipulativeness with such fiery gusto, one can't help but admire her style and commitment (hell, this is the actress who approached even her role in Trog with straight-faced earnestness), even as you're giggling at her mannered excesses. Although I would truly love it were I to detect a note of knowing self parody in Crawford's Eva Phillips, I nevertheless enjoy her performance here very much. It has command, humor, touches of pathos, and there's a scene or two where she borders on the terrifying. I only recently discovered Queen Bee through TCM, but I have since placed it at the top of my list of all-time favorite Joan Crawford films.

The Queen Bee...who stings all her rivals to death.

Bonus Materials
Hear Barbra Streisand sing the unofficial theme song to "Queen Bee." For Joan Crawford screening parties, may I suggest playing this over the film's closing credits for full camp diva effect. Begin music immediately after Barry Sullivan says the line: "The sun is shining. I didn't expect the sun to be shining." Click Here.

Hey Pepsi fans! Joan Crawford appears in and narrates this 1969 Pepsi-Cola sponsored video. A kindler and gentler Joan (who, oddly enough, comes off as even more terrifying) visits a supermarket...complete with hat, gloves, and a really obnoxious kid! The fact that she doesn't wallop the just-asking-to-be-slapped child is a testament to Mommie Dearest's control. (At least when a camera is around.) Click Here!

The Queen of Showmanship herself. (Image courtesy of Joancrawfordbest.com)

The musical biopic, as a genre, is one grown so homogeneous and formulaic over the years, even films I’m seeing for the first time have a sense of déjà vu about them. Irrespective of the subject or its title - The Helen Morgan Story, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, Funny Girl, Star!, or Lady Sings The Blues - these films hew so closely to a standard Hollywood rags-to-riches soap opera blueprint that their basis in biographical fact matters, at most, only tangentially.

Doris Day as Ruth Etting

James Cagney as Martin (Moe the Gimp) Snyder

Cameron Mitchell as Johnny Alderman

For a public never tiring of being fed endless variations on the same Horatio Alger myth, celebrities and their alternately sordid/glamorous life stories have long been a wellspring of source material for Hollywood's dream machine. Hollywood and the old studio system has always trafficked in the wholesale packaging and commodification of reassuring fantasies designed to both titillate and tranquilize. And as such, movie biographies, musical or otherwise, have never really been about the actual lives of their chosen subjects so much as they were middle-class cautionary tales detailing the perils of pursuing the very sort of fame, glamour and wealth that make going to the movies so alluring in the first place. These interchangeable tales of sin and sequins always start out advocating the virtues of hard work, talent, and ambition; only to pull a moralistic about-face in the last reel, revealing the brass ring of success to be only nickel plate.
(America’s perverse love/hate relationship with celebrity demands that our glorification of wealth and notoriety never be rewarded with stories about famous people who are actually happy. In the end, it always seems as if our innate puritanism gets the better of us, allowing only for the depiction of stardom as a fundamentally empty, joyless kind of ambition. A goal fraught with heartache and awash with tears behind the tinsel.)
Love Me or Leave Me follows a similar course, but distinguishes itself by making the road it takes toward its anticipated comforting conclusion one of the bitterest and bumpiest I've ever encountered in an MGM musical.

The biographical musical's claim to being "Life-inspired," "Told as it really happened," or "Based on a true story," is less an assertion of verisimilitude so much as a marketing ploy allowing for the recycling of "showbiz melodrama" tropes dating back as far as 1929's Broadway Melody.

If queried about its track record of making biographical films that bear little to no resemblance to the actual lives of their subjects, Hollywood’s response would most likely be along the lines of: “If you want facts, go see a documentary!” And indeed, dramatic interest and entertainment value always trumps truth in movie bios. And so it goes with Love Me or Leave Me, the reasonably accurate (read: mostly made-up ) story of Ruth Etting, popular jazz singing star of the 20s and 30s.

During the 20s and 30s, Ruth Etting gained fame as "America's Radio Sweetheart" and "America's Sweetheart of Song."

When we first meet Ruth Etting (Doris Day), it’s the 1920s and she’s working as a taxi dancer in a seedy Chicago dime-a-dance dive that’s being squeezed by small-time racketeer, Marty Snyder (James Cagney). Recognizing an opportunity for exploitation when he sees one, Snyder attempts to put a squeeze of another sort on the spunky, well-put-together Etting after she's sacked for defending herself against the physical advances of an over-ardent customer. In a romantic song-and-dance as old as Herod and as topical as an episode of Judge Judy; Snyder hopes to curry the favor of Etting through the gracious bestowing of a lot of strings-attached assistance. Although initially apprehensive, Ruth, a woman not unfamiliar with bread and knowing which side hers is buttered, soon finds herself the begrudging recipient of the diminutive mobster’s largesse. (That sentence reads smuttier than perhaps intended).

As Martin Snyder, Cagney adds another memorable character to his Rogues Gallery of cinema bad guys. My favorite character touch: Snyder's inability to remember Ruth Etting's last name (he calls her "Ettling" for the longest time!)

In spite of an awareness of Snyder's increasingly possessive actions on her behalf being motivated by a romantic interest she cannot return, Etting—the nakedly opportunistic possessor of both a burning ambition to be a singer and a moral compass desperately in need of adjustment—nevertheless permits the gangster to bankroll and promote her career while she strings him along. Not exactly a problem until continued success incites in the songstress a longing for independence that increases in direct proportion to Snyder’s obsessive need to control her every waking moment. Further fanning the flames of discontent is the ongoing flirtation between Etting and onetime on-the-Snyder-payroll pianist, Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell). Yes, for a brief period, both Etting and Alderman are being paid by Snyder while making goo-goo eyes at one another behind his back. A mobster, an opportunist, and a double-crosser: what a lovable cast of characters!

Although Love Me or Leave Me was made with the compensated consent of then-living Martin Snyder, Ruth Etting, and Myrl Alderman (changed to "Johnny" for the film), upon release, Etting is said to have dismissed the film as, "Half fairy tale."

That I even enjoyed spending time in the company of three such largely unsympathetic and self-interested individuals is a testament to the irreproachable charm of both Doris Day and James Cagney; the tuneful score of period standards made famous by Etting; and the obfuscating dexterity of Daniel Fuchs Oscar-winning story and Isobel Lennart’s (Funny Girl) Oscar-nominated screenplay.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

If the above statement gives the impression I’m less than thrilled by Love Me or Leave Me’s somewhat flinty cast of characters, let me clarify that nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, the hard-bitten characterizations and refreshingly cynical tone of Love Me or Leave Me place it far beyond the pale of your typical, sentimental, MGM musical fare. And by me, that is just fine. I truly love movie musicals, but a rarely-discussed downside to this pop-cultural predilection of mine is how frequently I'm forced to endure the most cloyingly false and saccharine plotlines just to get to the singing and dancing. Love Me or Leave Me is such an atypically dark depiction of ambition and obsessive love that one immediately senses there is no way this film would have ever been green-lighted were it not purportedly based on true events.

Doris Day has had just about enough of your shit.

Succeeding where Martin Scorsese’s not-dissimilarNew York, New York failed, Love Me or Leave Me finds the humanity behind its hard-boiled characters and delivers a solid musical drama that takes an unflinching look at the kind of relationship that is doubtless more common in show business than we're usually shown. It all makes for a remarkably gripping viewing experience as anticipated romantic clinches and cliches are dashed left and right by characters with scarcely a sentimental bone in their bodies. Chiefly due to the powerhouse performances of Doris Day & James Cagney, what would otherwise be abhorrently unpleasant becomes truly compelling human drama. Marred only by the occasional lapse into perhaps Production Code-mandated, tacked-on morality.

Although the film's production values are all top notch, one has to keep reminding oneself that Love Me or Leave Me is set in the 1920s. The musical and visual tone is decidedly 50s. Doris Day's big musical number,"Shaking the Blues Away," owes more to Judy Garland's "Get Happy" than The Ziegfeld Follies.

PERFORMANCES:

If you’re a fan of the extensive catalog of mobsters, hoods, and mugs that made James Cagney one of the biggest stars at Warner Bros. in the 30s & 40s, then his performance in Love Me or Leave Me might feel like a late-career (Cagney was 55) “best of” reprisal of the kind of roles he near-copyrighted in his heyday. Fair enough. For Cagney doesn't do a lot here that he hasn't done before. But whether his pugnacious, poignantly lovesick Moe the Gimp is your first or fiftieth exposure to James Cagney onscreen, there’s no getting past the fact that the man kicks serious ass. Looking very much throughout the film like a fist with eyes, Cagney— whether combative, funny, wounded, or monstrous— is such a magnetic, menacing, and dynamic a presence, you literally can’t take your eyes off of him.

I never fail to marvel at Cagney's ability to create sympathetic monsters. As versatile an actor as they come, Cagney could have you rooting for a character in one scene and booing him in the next. Pictured here with character actor Harry Bellaver, Cagney gives one of those looks you really don't want to be on the receiving end of.

I’m a Doris Day fan from way back. But unlike most, my least favorite films of hers are those so-called sophisticated sex comedies she made with that interchangeably bland lineup of lantern-jawed stiffs: Rock Hudson, Rod Taylor, and James Garner. I know I’m alone in this, but I've always felt Doris Day — an actress of untapped versatility and an effortless appeal that made her considerable talent all too easy to dismiss — was sabotaged throughout her career by always being paired with handsome-but-dull leading men. Doris had a lot more danger and sex behind that million-dollar smile than she was ever able (or willing) to take advantage of, but in Love Me or Leave Me, she more than rises to the occasion. She delivers what is to me the best performance of her career and meets Cagney’s intensity head to head. She drinks, she's tough, she fires off her hard-bitten dialog as if to the manner born, and she's one helluva crier (her sobs are so body-wracking they break your heart). There’s no way to look at her work here and not wish she had ventured into more dramatic roles in her career. (Perhaps the story is apocryphal, but if it’s true Doris Day was offered the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, based on her performance here, more's the pity she didn't accept it.)

In this particularly harrowing scene, Doris Day is nothing short of phenomenal. How she failed to receive an Oscar nomination for her performance is a mystery (of the film's 6 Oscar nods, Cagney's was the only nomination in the acting categories). The scenes these two share crackle with a vibrancy and tension thoroughly absent from Day's scenes with Cameron Mitchell. (Day and Cagney had previously appeared together in the 1950 musical, The West Point Story).

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

Lest one begin to think Love Me or Leave Me is nothing but a lot of sturm und drang, rest assured that things are enlivened considerably by a passel of songs Doris Day gets to sing and dance to (quite marvelously, I might add). Although the songs are period-perfect, the arrangements are strictly 1950s, and Ms. Day sounds absolutely nothing like Ruth Etting, which is all to the better since she looks nothing like her either. Day is in fine voice and for once her spectacular figure is shown off to full advantage...in a series of sexy, form-fitting gowns totally wrong for the 1920s, but who's complaining?

A staple of show-biz biographies is the played for laughs "starting at the bottom" scene where the neophyte star "amusingly" ruins a musical number by not knowing the steps. In Funny Girl it was "Roller Skate Rag," in Star! it was "Oh! What a Lovely War." In Love Me or Leave Me, Doris flubs the dance steps to "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" Curious how in all of these scenes the least experienced dancer is always placed front and center...

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Tossing aside any need for Love Me or Leave Me to actually be a historically/narratively accurate biography of Ruth Etting (If you must, you can see and hear her on YouTube, and read her considerably seamier story on the Internet), I have to say that I have nothing but praise for this film. In fact, I admire it a great deal and consider it to be one of the best of the overworked musical biopic genre. It isn't often that a mere musical offers up so gloomy a portrait of obsession, or showcases characters of such ambiguously complex motives and attachments. Love Me or Leave Me's old-school, MGM gloss is considerable, but there's a maturity to the whole enterprise that more than makes up for the film's occasional adherence to by-the-numbers movie bio plotting. In a way that feels very contemporary now but must have been jarring in 1955, Love Me or Leave Me maneuvers its tricky shifts in tone expertly. The songs never bring the story to a halt and the drama always feels honest (sometimes brutally so) to the characters.
Of course, what brings me back to Love Me or Leave Me time and time again are the performances of Doris Day and James Cagney. Who would ever guess that Doris Day could be so rivetingly sexy playing sullen and cynical? And as for Cagney...well, they don't make 'em like him any more. A polished diamond in the rough if there ever was one.

I'm happy to say this post is part of the James Cagney Blogathon, hosted by The Movie Projector. For a complete schedule of posts and information on how to win a FREE DVD of "Yankee Doodle Dandy," click HERE.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

In my previous post about the James Cagney / Doris Day film,Love Me or Leave Me, my praise for Doris Day’s remarkably accomplished, against-type assaying of the dramatically intense role of Jazz-Age songstress, Ruth Etting, was followed up by a lengthy harangue about stars who play it safe and fail to venture very far beyond the narrow parameters of their carefully crafted images. An extremely talented actress and singer, Day’s choice of film roles may have made her a star (she worked that fresh-faced, girl-next-door thing well into middle age), but they were in films that largely ignored her considerable versatility and dramatic range. Day is so effective in playing a not-so-nice character that it led me to further lament the perceived cultural loss of her having turned down the role of Mrs. Robinson (that sexually predatory, chain-smoking, alcoholic) in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate.

Of course, all this tsk-tsking about the failure of image-conscious Hollywood stars to take creative risks is a stance nurtured exclusively by memories of those instances where said risks actually paid off. Eternal ingénue Audrey Hepburn gave the best performance of her career playing a disillusioned wife in Stanley Donen’s Two For the Road(1967); while perennial sex-kitten Ann-Margret’s moving portrayal of an aging party-girl in Carnal Knowledge (1971) garnered her an Oscar nomination.

My guess is that this was Jennifer Jones' mantra throughout the entire filming of Angel, Angel Down We Go

What tends to fade from memory are the far more plentiful instances when the harebrained and ill-conceived don the cloak of creative risk-taking, and actors, in a sincere attempt to break from type, inflict untold damage to years of hard-won legitimacy and respect by taking on roles that make them look ridiculous rather than courageous. One such doozy of a miscalculation is the aptly titled Angel, Angel Down We Go. A film that has Oscar-winner and old-school Hollywood royalty, Jennifer Jones, extend herself so far out on a wobbly limb that the only trajectory can be downward.

Angel, Angel Down We Go is a marvelously loopy artifact from the age of culture-clash psychedelia and a primo example of that weird transitional period in motion picture history (roughly 1966 through 1970) when it appeared at times as if Hollywood had completely lost its mind. How else to explain the green-lighting of a film that casts classy Jennifer Jones as a former porn star unhappily married to a gay industrialist (Charles Aidman), saddled with an unwanted, overweight teenage daughter (Holly Near), and seduced by a Jim Morrison-esque rock star (Jordan Christopher)?

American International Pictures hoped to hit counter-culture pay dirt twice with this youth rebellion flick from the writer of AIP’s 1968’s sleeper hit, Wild in the Streets. They didn't.

Jennifer Jones as Astrid Steele

Jordan Christopher as Bogart Peter Stuyvesant

Holly Near as Tara Nicole Steele

Charles Aidman as William Gardiner Steele

Rock star/mogul/cult-leader Bogart Peter Stuyvesant (“My mother went into labor pains during a Bogart flick...she almost dropped me in the lobby!”) first deflowers, then insinuates himself into the life of unloved, overweight debutante, Tara Nicole Steele. Stuyvesant and his motley band of sky-diving cultists (an uncomfortable-looking Lou Rawls; obligatory pregnant flower child, Davey Davidson; and a underutilized but probably just-happy-not-to-be-wearing-monkey-makeup. Roddy McDowall) see in Tara a symbol of overindulged, fat America. In her decadent parents: the personification of older-generation corruption and greed. Beyond possibly talking them to death, what is the seriously unhinged Bogart’s plan for this family? Your guess is as good as mine. ("You're insane!" people keep shouting at him, as if he hadn't noticed.) All I know is that along the way he sings a passel of pop/rock songs (written by the Oscar-nominated songwriting team of Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann), spouts a lot of anti-establishment gibberish, then winds up seducing mom, dad, and daughter. Not necessarily in that order.

"We say hip hooray, hip hip hooray for fat!"
The newly liberated Tara dances to Bogart's composition to corpulence: "The Fat Song." Barely considered chubby by today's Big-Gulp, Super-Size standards, 19-year-old Holly Near, making her film debut, gained five pounds for the role (the studio asked for 20).

According to screenwriter Robert Thom (a Yale graduate [so much for higher education] and the man with the mixed-bag resume of All the Fine Young Cannibals, The Legend of Lylah Clare, and Death Race 2000 to his (dis)credit), Angel, Angel Down We Go is adapted from his 1961 play and was intended as, “A far out version of a (Michael Arlen’s) The Green Hat kind of play about a wild girl heading for destruction…a present day type of F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine.” (Source: Jennifer Jones: The Life and Films by Paul Green).

It being adapted from a play certainly explains the film’s talkiness (you've never encountered a lippier group of flower children in your life), but the rest of that quote is a bit of a stretch. Anyone detecting even a note of F. Scott Fitzgerald in this monumentally disjointed morass has likely gone the way of Zelda. Angel, Angel Down We Go was Robert Thom's debut/swansong as a director.

Pills with an alcohol chaser accompany Jennifer Jones' explanation for why she named her daughter Tara. Meanwhile, David O. Selznick, Jones' recently-deceased real-life hubby and Gone With the Wind producer, can be heard spinning in his grave.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

The economic power of the newly-emboldened youth audience of the late 60s really threw old-guard Hollywood for a loop. Long out-of-touch and more concerned with capitalizing on the counterculture zeitgeist than trying to understand it, Hollywood during this period produced some of the oddest most out-there films ever. Angel, Angel Down We Go is an unholy marriage of studio system aesthetics trying to pass itself off as an underground college campus youth-rebellion flick. The result is a work of pandering insincerity that manages to alienate both its target audience (trying to pass off 40-year-old Roddy McDowall and 35-year-old, receding hairlined Lou Rawls as agents of an impending youth revolution is very close to science fiction) and those most likely to know the name Jennifer Jones, the easy-target older generation (in these kind of movies, all adults are depicted as villains beyond redemption).

The Mild Bunch
(L.to R.) Popular soul singer Lou Rawls makes his embarrassing film debut as Joe. Jordan Christopher fronted the rock group "The Wild Ones" and was married to Sybil Burton (Richard's ex) at the time. Holly Near is a well-known folk singer and activist. Davey Davidson as pregnant Anna Livia is known to fans of the sitcom, Hazel, as Nancy, Mr. B's virginal niece. Roddy McDowall as Santoro was friends with director Robert Thom and clearly owed him a favor.

For fans of bizarre cinema, however, all of the above are merely ingredients for the creation of obscenely entertaining train-wrecks from major studios that could not have been made at any other time in cinema history. Get a load of this dialog:

Jennifer Jones yelling at her husband- “Oh, you’re out of your Chinese skull!" (He's not Chinese.)

Jennifer Jones playing the truth game- “I made 30 stag films and never faked an orgasm!”

Jennifer Jones to her masseuse- “Stop it, Hopkins you’re hurting me. You’re a bloody, sadistic dyke!”

Jennifer Jones in a moment of self-reflection- “In my heart of hearts, I’m a sexual clam.”

Jennifer Jones rebuffing the advances of the man who just bedded her daughter- "There's a word for you, but I don't think I even know what it is."

Yes, Miss Jones has the lion's share of quotably bad dialog. She delivers it with so much gusto and bite, one wonders if perhaps she thought she was appearing in another absurdist hoot like John Huston's Beat the Devil (1954). Unfortunately for her, Robert Thom is no Truman Capote.

Only in the 60s
My favorite film of five-time Oscar-nominee Jennifer Jones is Madame Bovary (1949). Who would guess that 20 years later the 49-year-old actress would appear in a film requiring she rest her head near the crotch of a naked, 26-year-old balladeer?

PERFORMANCES:

Jennifer Jones in Angel, Angel Down We Go is less a instance of against-type casting as much as it is “What the hell is she doing in this?” casting. If you can get over the shock of seeing the star of The Song of Bernadette wallowing in the sordid gutter of sex and drugs exploitation, you can catch glimpses of a sensitive performance that never had a chance. She’s particularly good in a scene where her character revisits the Santa Monica Pier cotton candy stand she worked at as a girl. Alas, the quiet moments in this film aren't allowed to last too long.

The ever-refined Astrid Steele responds to her daughter's compliment on being, "The most beautiful woman in the world."

Watching an actress as good as Jennifer Jones in a film as crude and intentionally vulgar as this, you never get a chance to applaud her "bravery" at breaking out of her Selznick-Shell. Why? Because not only is the film so far beneath her, but because you're never quite sure whether she's in on the joke. Her participation feels like it's part of a secret put-down, and you feel a little embarrassed for her. Angel, Angel Down We Go joins the ranks of the many Hollywood films from this era that made it their business to present former leading ladies of the silver screen in as unflattering a light as possible: Lana Turner, The Big Cube (1969) / Eleanor Parker,Eye of the Cat (1969) / Rita Hayworth, The Naked Zoo (1970) / Miriam Hopkins, Savage Intruder (1970) Mae West, Myra Breckinridge (1970).

"The Biggest Mother of Them All!"
Astrid builds up a head of indignant steam listening to Bogart's newest insult composition, the spritely ditty, "Mother Lover." In the meantime, Tara nervously waits for the shit to hit the fan.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

One of the niftier byproducts of Hollywood’s embracing of the economic potential of the sexual revolution was the industry’s fascination with homosexuality, bisexuality, and narratives in which opportunistic young men sleep their way through entire families (Entertaining Mr. Sloane - (1970), Something for Everyone -1970, Teorema -1968). As I first saw Angel, Angel Down We Gowhen it came out in 1969 and I was just 12 years old, my fondest memories, and what got me hooked on it enough to have seen it four times that summer, are of the copious amounts of male nudity. It's one of those rare exploitation films where the women remain dressed and the guys doff their clothes left and right. The movie made absolutely no sense to me then (nor now, for that matter) but with all that male skin on parade, who was I to complain?

How can you hate a film whose first 4 minutes feature a girl's voiceover talking about her perfect parents, only to reveal her idealized father in the shower with a young man!

The ever-game Roddy McDowall shows that his celebrated boyish charm didn't stop at the neck.

Bogart Peter Stuyvesant (Jordan Christopher, bottom tier) literally takes the place of Mr. Steele's previous boy-toy (top tier, actor unknown).

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:
Filmed in February of 1968, Angel, Angel Down We Go was released in August of 1969, the same month as the Manson murders. This was the film’s title when I saw it at the Embassy Theater in San Francisco that year. I had no idea until many years later that Angel, Angel Down We Go had been re-released the following year and renamed Cult of the Damned in a tasteless effort to capitalize on the film’s eerie similarities to the Manson case (those similarities extend as well to the Patty Hearst kidnapping case in 1974, but by then, this movie had long been forgotten).

Jordan Christopher was just one of several actors (among them Christopher Jones and Michael Parks) that tried hard to work a James Dean vibe in late 60s exploitation films

A bomb under either title, Angel, Angel Down We Go has more or less disappeared into what some might say is well-deserved obscurity. But for those with a taste for the bizarre, a taste for the jaw-droppingly weird, a taste for the clumsy collision of old-Hollywood and the shape of things to come…well, Angel, Angel Down We Go is a psychedelic mind trip well worth taking.

Much of Angel, Angel Down We Go was shot at Marion Davies' Beverly Hills mansion, standing in for the Steele Estate. Fans of old Hollywood will get a kick out of seeing this beautiful palace, which still stands today Check it out HERE.

Literally high on drugs, Tara finds she can't get down from the ceiling (I told you this movie was weird).

NAME DROPPERS CORNER:

In 1995 I worked as a personal exercise trainer for the late Jennifer Jones. I remember her as an extremely gracious lady with a wonderful sense of humor and terrific discipline when it came to exercise. After working with her for about 4 months, I found the courage to tell her that Angel, Angel Down We Go was the first film of hers I ever saw. Laughing, her response to me was, "I'm sorry to hear that. I'm afraid I might owe you an apology." When I said that it inspired me to see her other films,she said, "I'm glad of that. But I hope you've forgotten about it...I have."

As much as I wanted to bring the subject up again over the next few months (I wanted to know what everyone wants to know when they see this movie, "What was she thinking?"), I nevertheless erred on the side of caution and kept my mouth shut on the topic. It felt like the polite and professional thing to do, but it certainly did nothing for the film-geek side of me.

The reviews are in!

The weird thing about sexual repression is how it first creates, then proceeds to foster and perpetuate, the very atmosphere of shame and sin it purports to be on guard against. Case in point: so-called "family" entertainment.

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1955) is the dirtiest movie I ever saw. Really. This corn-fed ode to spring, sparkin’, and spoonin’ is nothing but a wall-to-wall smut-fest obsessed with fornication. Or, fornicatin’ as the characters themselves would probably drawl were the film able to stop being so coy and wholesome for five minutes and just lay out on the table what is obviously its sole purpose, preoccupation, and focus. For nigh on 2 ½ hours (dialect helps to get into the spirit of things), horny farmhands in tight jeans and overheated farmer’s daughters in calico dresses and bullet bras talk and think of little else but sex. Sure, it’s all coded and cloaked in innuendo-soaked songs and double-entendre choreography, but Oklahoma! is like one long, whispered-behind-the-barn dirty joke. A rumps and udders horse opera. There’s your dim-witted, semi-nymphomaniac who “cain’t” say no; Kansas City bur-lee-cue dancers going just as “fer” as they can go; randy traveling salesmen; rape-inclined farmhands; and, lest we forget, that sexual assault disguised as a kiss: The Oklahoma Hello.

If a ten-year-old is capable of moral indignation, then indeed I was. By the time that surrey with the fringe on top rolled in at the end, my cheeks were hotter than Hades and I could barely look my parents in the eye.

"A raging torrent of emotion that even nature can't control!"
OK, that's actually the ad copy for the 1953 Marilyn Monroe film, Niagara, but it so succinctly captures Splendor in the Grass' metaphorical use of rushing waterfalls barely contained by dams (not to mention the film's overheated, Freudian themes) I just had to use it.

I’ll admit my scandalized reaction to Oklahoma! might seem a tad incongruous coming from someone who saw all manner of R-rated movies during his adolescence, but I’m really not kidding about how vulgar this musical seemed when I was young. The comparatively straightforward approach of movies like Barbarellaand Midnight Cowboy had the effect of demystifying and normalizing sex for me. Their explicitness made it feel as if sex and nudity was no big deal. Oklahoma!, on the other hand, mirrored my repressed Catholic upbringing. By figuratively and literally dancing around the film’s all-pervasive topic of sex, they succeed at turning it into a sinful no-no suitable only for giggling and snickering about in empty, euphemistic codes of indecency.

A very strong memory I hold from my adolescent movie-going years is how filthy I considered the family films of my era (the 60s): David Niven’s The Impossible Years, Doris Day's Where Were You When The Lights Went Out, Debbie Reynolds’ How Sweet It Is – compared to the permissive, let-it-all-hang-out R-rated films that were coming into fashion.

The pernicious effect of repression and guilt - its power to distort and pervert natural sexuality - is the theme dramatized in Elia Kazan’s sensitive film adaptation of William Inge’s original screenplay, Splendor in the Grass.

Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean "Deanie" Loomis

Warren Beatty as Arthur "Bud" Stamper

Pat Hingle as Ace Stamper

Barbara Loden as Virginia "Ginny" Stamper

Audrey Christie as Mrs. Loomis

Splendor in the Grassis set in a small town in Kansas in 1928. Not, as immortalized by Rodgers & Hammerstein, a Kansas corny in August, but one overrun with oil derricks born of an oil boom. And all that pumping, pumping, pumping of the land serves as unsubtle, metaphoric counterpoint to all the pent-up sexual energy of the town’s young folk. Experiencing the first rushes of jazz-age permissiveness, the air is full of sex (in a nice touch, almost all the half-heard background conversations have to do with sex, sin, or something forbidden) and high-school sweethearts Deanie Loomis (Wood) and Bud Stamper (Beatty), find their barely-understood passions clashing with the repressive, Victorian-era values of their parents. Archaic notions of propriety and decency intrude upon natural urges and the young lovers suffer painfully and unnecessarily under the strain of trying to do “what’s right.”

"Mom...is it so terrible to have those feelings for a boy?"
"No nice girl does."
"Doesn't she?"
"No...no nice girl."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Wiliam Inge is one of my favorite playwrights. His works, among them: Picnic, Come Back Little Sheba, The Dark at the Top of The Stairs, find the poetry and tragedy in small lives – recalling for me the best of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. In Splendor in the Grass, Inge’s gentle evocation of the subtle frustrations, conflicts, and inchoate desires festering below the surface of otherwise tranquil small town life is engagingly realized by director Kazan (A Streetcar named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden).

William Inge appears as the sad-eyed Rev. Whiteman whose sermon on holding onto what's real in times of material prosperity falls largely on deaf ears. Inge's original screenplay for Splendor in the Grass won an Oscar.

In this story about “innocent” passion, a young couple, excited by newly awakened feelings but confused by their intensity, is left without guidance by well-intentioned adults incapable of doing anything but projecting the failures and frustrations of their own lives onto the pair. The young feel an obligation to live up to the ideals of those who have sacrificed to give them a better life, yet in trying to orchestrate the happiness of their children through the stressing of false morals, shame, and repression, these parents succeed only in passing on a legacy of compromise and regret.

The Stampers
This awkward portrait sitting pretty much says all there is to say about the functionality of the town's richest family

PERFORMANCES:

Stage director and Actor’s Studio co-founder, Elia Kazan, is heralded as an “actor’s director” for the sensitive performances he’s credited with eliciting from those under tutelage. It’s not a title I’m likely to argue with in that I think Splendor in the Grass is a remarkably well-cast movie with everyone involved giving colorful and fleshed-out performances that avoid some of the fussier flaws of Method Acting.

Barbara Loden, the future Mrs. Elia Kazan, makes an indelible impression as Ginny Stamper, the flapper-out-of-water in the small, conservative Kansas town. Her screen work is minimal (she died of cancer at age 48), but in 1970 she wrote, directed, and starred in the noteworthy independent film, Wanda.

As deserving as all the players are of recognition, I just have to single out Natalie Wood. Tapping into a natural edginess and heartbreaking eagerness to please that had only been hinted at in previous roles, Wood gives what I consider to be the best performance of her career. As the lovesick, worshipful Deanie, she displays an emotional daring I always find so compelling in actors. She is tragically vulnerable throughout, and she and the absurdly beautiful Warren Beatty (making his film debut) make a stunningly beautiful screen couple and display a palpable chemistry. (Tip: watch her in scenes where she's not the focus. She's fully in character and reacting to everything at each moment in a way that feels so wonderfully spontaneous. I can't say enough about her in this film. The Oscar nomination she garnered was so very well deserved.)

Zohra Lampert as Angeline
I have always had a thing for this appealingly sensitive, low-key actress (and marvelous comedienne) who deserved a bigger career. She has a bit of a cult fan base built around the horror film, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, but outside from her scene-stealing performance here, I mostly know her as the Goya Beans spokeslady.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

Splendor in the Grass is a tragic love story in the grand tradition. True love, in the form of Deanie and Bud, finds no solace or sanctuary in small town (small-minded) mores that support the curious distinction that the pursuit of happiness is good, but the pursuit of ecstasy is sinful and wrong. The playing out of the tensions as Bud retreats into confusion and Deanie into madness, makes for a poignant commentary on innocence and morality.

Understatement

Aside from Natalie Wood's stubbornly contemporary look throughout most of the film, Splendor in the Grass has one of its greatest assets in its detailed depiction of small-town life and attention to period. It's a great-looking film from the atmospheric cinematography (Boris Kaufman), to the costumes, to the eye-catching art direction.

Personal favorite Sandy Dennis (l.) makes her film debut as Kay, a somewhat fair-weather friend of Deanie's.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

I first saw Splendor in the Grass in 1969 and was struck by how much the film’s chronicling of a uniquely American brand of sexual restlessness in the face of cultural change (rampant horniness crossed with faith-based guilt), echoed the cultural climate of my generation. At least when it came to having to confront changing attitudes about things like morality, sex, family, religion, double-standards and women’s roles; the America in 1969 was not that dissimilar to the America of 1929. A reality even 1961 audiences must have encountered when confronted by the relative sexual candor of Splendor in the Grass hot on the heels of the conservatism of the Eisenhower era.

Comedienne Phyllis Diller makes her film debut as real-life nightclub owner, Texas Guinan

12 years old at the time, I can’t say I really understood Splendor in the Grasswhen I first saw it. Thrown by the film’s portentous manner and the pedigree of talent both behind and in front of the camera; I simply thought the film had gone over my head when I went away from it thinking I had just seen the most poetic film about blue balls ever made.

But reflecting on sexual repression’s way of making the beautiful seem ugly, perhaps there is something to be said for a film that succeeds in making the prosaically natural into something beautiful and, indeed, poetic. Maybe I understood the film better than I thought.

CACTUS FLOWER 1969

CARRIE 1976

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC 1977

EYE OF THE CAT 1969

NIGHT WATCH 1973

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD 1967

CUL-DE-SAC 1966

LORD LOVE A DUCK 1966

GAMES 1967

PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD 1970

LAST SUMMER 1969

THE GREAT GATSBY 1974

THE STERILE CUCKOO 1969

DORIAN GRAY 1970

BYE, BYE, BIRDIE 1963

WAIT UNTIL DARK 1967

QUEEN BEE 1955

LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME 1955

ANGEL, ANGEL DOWN WE GO 1969

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS 1961