DREAMS ARE WHAT LE CINEMA IS FOR...

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Therefore, many crucial

plot points are revealed and referenced for the purpose of analysis.

It’s Déjà vu All Over Again

I’m not sure which is worse: being a living, still-functioning film director and having to endure reading about every film school upstart and wannabe hailed as the “new” you, “next” you, or heir to your throne; or being a young filmmaker striving to make your mark, only to have your work evaluated exclusively in terms of homage, pastiche, tip-of- the-hat- to, or outright rip-off of an artist you admire.

For as long as I can remember, from Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique) to William Castle (almost everything he’s ever done), Alfred Hitchcock has been the go-to name of comparison for directors working in the thriller genre. Director Brian De Palma, from the days of his breakout 1972 feature Sisters (whose poster prominently featured the Hollywood Reporter quote: “The most genuinely frightening film since Hitchcock’s Psycho!”) has been saddled with—and openly courted—comparisons to Hitchcock.

In our label-centric, brand-driven culture this certainly makes it easier for critics to pigeonhole artists or for marketing departments to sell their product; but for film fans, it’s all a bit like settling for a tribute band after the genuine article has cut back on touring. You may enjoy how much the tribute band sounds like the original and evokes fond memories, but no matter how good they are, they’re an imitation. Plus, in focusing so much on how successfully the tribute band has approximated the sound, feel, and experience of the real-deal, you never give yourself the chance to appreciate how talented the tribute band is (or isn’t) in its own right. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but making do with a copy can sometimes feel like an act of willful self-deception.

As it just so happens, willful self-deception both describes the theme of Brian De Palma’s Vertigo-inspired film Obsession and my experience watching it.

Cliff Robertson as Michael Courtland

Genevieve Bujold as Elizabeth Courtland/Sandra Portinari

John Lithgow as Robert Lasalle

Following on the heels of the sleeper success of Sisters (which openly culled from Psycho, Rear Window, and featured a score by Hitchcock-associated composer Bernard Herrmann), and the undeserved flop of 1974 Phantom of the Paradise (a De Palma departure from type that seized upon the glam-rock zeitgeist mined in 1973s The Rocky Horror Show); the relatively high-profile Obsession gave Brian De Palma his first mainstream commercial success. A modest success, to be sure, but in grossing $4.47 million on its $1.2 million budget, Obsession, was a surprise hit. A hit that flew in the face of Columbia studio’s over-cautious distribution, which saw the studio releasing the film, after having sat on it for almost a year, with an indifferent ad campaign and during the “dog days” of August.

Alas, before Obsession had the chance to build up much steam or word-of-mouth, Carrie, De Palma’s second 1976 release, opened in November, its overwhelming critical and boxoffice success (the film grossed $15.2 million against a $1.8 million budget) fairly obliterating Obsessionfrom theater screens, and, until very recently, a great many people’s minds, as well.

Florence, Italy 1948

Written by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) from a story by Brian De Palma after the two had taken in an LA County Museum screening of the then long-out-of-circulation Hitchcock classic Vertigo, Obsession is a romantic thriller about love, loss, grief, guilt, deception, and emotional fixation. Pretty much everything you’ve come to know and expect from Hitchcock and those who seek to sincerely flatter the Master of Suspense through imitation.

And while Paul Schrader’s derivative screenplay flatters the hell out of Hitchcock, calling Obsessiona romantic thriller (the film was promoted with the tagline: “The love story that will scare the life out of you,”) would be a bit of a stretch. Inarguably romantic in theme and possessed of several intense moments of emotional conflict; anyone coming to Obsession expecting the kind of excesses of violence associated with De Palma after Dressed to Kill or Scarface, would do well to be reminded that Obsession is rated PG and its thrills (mercifully) on the restrained side. So if I'd have to label it at all (oh, and I do) I’d call Obsession a romantic suspense film or romantic mystery.

Changing Partners
Paul Schrader's original screenplay for Obsession (titled: Deja vu) called for the prescient use of Patti Page's 1953 song "Changing Partners" for this scene in which Michael, Elizabeth, and Amy waltz together at their 10th wedding anniversary party. Perhaps it was initially used and eventually overscored by Bernard Herrmann's sweepingly romantic "Valse Lente"

The time is 1959. Michael Courtland (Robertson) is a successful New Orleans real estate developer whose beloved wife Elizabeth (Bujold) and 9-year-old daughter Amy (Wanda Blackman) are kidnapped. A botched effort to capture the kidnappers without paying the ransom results in the violent deaths of both wife and child, a tragedy for which Courtland blames himself and is haunted by for years.

A great many of Brian De Palma's by-now trademark stylistic flourishes are in full evidence throughout Obsession. His familiar swirling camera effect is put to particularly effective use in a 360° pan that takes Michael Courtland from grieving widower in 1959 (top) to morose obsessive in 1975.

A broken man consumed with guilt over the role he perceives himself to have played in his family’s death, Michael is stuck in 1959 and unable to move on with his life. Even going so far as to thwart the desires of friend and junior business partner Robert Lasalle (Lithgow) by allowing a prime piece of valuable New Orleans real estate lie undeveloped for the sole purpose of erecting a doleful monument to his wife and child on the site.

In an effort to dislodge Michael from his crippling depression, Lasalle persuades Michael to accompany him on one of his frequent business trips to Florence, Italy. It’s there that Michael, while sentimentally/morbidly visiting the church where he and his wife met in 1948, catches sight of an art restorer who (wouldn't you know it) happens to be a dead ringer for Elizabeth.

Restore the Original or Uncover the Copy?
This is the question - both literal and existential - put to Courtland by Italian-born art restorer
Sandra Portinari (Bujold, again) as she preps a Madonna and Child altarpiece by
Renaissance painter Bernardo Daddi. Clues aplenty, folks!

Upon being reassured by Lasalle that doppelganger Italian-style was no mere hallucination or trick of the brain, Michael, thrown into a tailspin by the uncanny coincidence of locale and resemblance, becomes consumed with the idea that fate has offered him both a second chance at love and a stab at redemption.

Embarking on a whirlwind course of seduction consisting of stalking, persistent courting, and matrimonial proposal, Michael in due course whisks Sandra back to his New Orleans home where the remaining line between fantasy and reality can only become even more blurred. And it does. While awaiting their rushed wedding day, Michael, happy at last, exhibits a marked improvement in disposition and demeanor that his friends and associates interpret (with good reason) as his becoming more detached from reality by the day. Meanwhile, Sandra, ensconced in his shrine-like home and left on her own to study Elizabeth’s old photos and diaries for hours upon end, cultivates an obsession of her own. She becomes so immersed in the past life of the dead woman that she begins progressively making herself over in Elizabeth’s image.

Love and desire figure in all this somewhere, but it takes a backseat to the morbidity of Michael and Sandra's escalating Folie a deux. A double-fantasy/shared-delusion speeding headlong on a collision course to an inevitable, preordained destination: the reenactment and hoped-for reversal of that fateful night that changed Michael’s life forever. But can one really repeat the past? And if so, how wise is it to do so?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’m not sure if you can make a really riveting film about obsessive love if you approach the material academically. I have no idea what Schrader and De Palma had in mind after they watched Vertigoand struck on the idea to collaborate on a film, but I would hope that each had something particular and personal to say on the topic of love unending that turns into an all-consuming fixation. Not having read the entire original screenplay (said to have included an entire third act which was jettisoned before filming began), I can only say that the finished movie plays out like the most expensive film school thesis project ever made.

And mind you, I say that not as a put-down, but from my personal sense that Obsession came out of Schrader and De Palma being impressed with Vertigo and wanting to try their hand at a similar style of film. It’s in their success in achieving this goal that most impresses me, for Obsession is a fine, handsomely mounted romantic mystery which does all that I believe it sets out to do. From a filmmaker’s perspective, that is. From the perspective of a guy sitting in the audience, Obsession is what I call a transfusion film: it has no blood of its own.

Sandra immerses herself in Elizabeth's past

Obsession has all the technical and stylistic pluses of Vertigo, but what it lacks is the crazy. Both Michael and Sandra are individuals caught up in something eerie, neurotic, and deeply rooted in pain; but I know this only because the film tells me so. I don't feel it. I don't feel any of the strangeness in the characters or in the director's approach to the material that a story this unusual demands.
Vertigo, for all its late-1950s restraint, is one weird movie. There's a creep-out factor in Jimmy Stewart's portrayal of the character of Scottie which informs all of his actions. He comes off as disturbed and creepy even when he's supposed to appear normal. But mostly Vertigo benefits from Hitchcock’s personal demons and obsessions seeping in through the edges of every frame. Hitchcock himself doesn't seem to be aware of it, but by his very treatment of the story he keeps providing inadvertent peeks into the darkest corners of his psyche. All of this gives Vertigo that quirky, kinky kick which didn't exactly sit well with audiences in 1958.

Obsession on the other hand, is a meticulously crafted genre film that manages to hit all the right stylistic marks, but comes of short by lacking the requisite fever heat of its overheated premise. Robertson's Michael Courtland looks tortured and haunted, but he never seems like a man capable of being out of control. Perhaps this is due to the discarded third act, which begins where the current film ends and would have placed the characters in 1985, involving them in a third episode of obsession. Or maybe it’s the studio’s insistence that the unappetizing incest subtext be removed and reworked though editing (a pivotal scene which was to occur in real life has been changed into a dream sequence). Whatever the source, there’s a big hole at the center of the rather sumptuous package that is Obsession, and what’s missing is the kind of passion that comes with the perverse.

Sandra visits Elizabeth's grave

PERFORMANCES

Brian De Palma had this to say about making Obsession in the 2015 documentary De Palma: “I think the weakness of the movie is Cliff and the greatness is Geneviève. I mean she carries the movie.”

Citing Robertson’s awareness that Bujold was taking over the film, De Palma states that Robertson resorted to tricks intended to sabotage her performance, and that overall he found Cliff extremely difficult to work with. Clearly having an ax to grind, De Palma he goes on to relate an anecdote conveying his frustration over Robertson, playing man who is supposed to look drawn and pale from having locked himself away out of grief, insisting on applying coats of bronzer to his face. So much so that the cinematographer one day forcibly placed Robertson against the mahogany set, shouting “You’re the same color as this wall! How am I supposed to light you?”

While I don't share De Palma's opinion that Robertson is the weakness of the film (he hasn't much range, but his Michael Courtland is rather heartbreaking), I wholeheartedly agree that without Bujold, I'm not at all certain Obsession would have worked for me at all. A longtime favorite, she is an endlessly resourceful actress of intensity, warmth, and complexity. An intelligent, natural actress like Bujold doesn't have the ethereal vulnerability of Kim Novak, but what she brings to the table is an emotional verisimilitude that does wonders for making the implausible feel real. And in this film that quality alone is worth a king's ransom. Bujold (as always) is a stunner, and gives Obsession its mystery and ultimately its poignancy.

In this, the first of three films he would make with De Palma, John Lithgow plays a character described in the script as "The slightly souring cream of the old south." I mention this because without that knowledge, Lithgow's performance comes off as a tad overripe. Southern accents have to be pretty solid not to sound like dinner theater Tennessee Williams, and if Lithgow's doesn't exactly convince, its inauthenticity fits the potential duplicity of his character. Not helping matters much is that he's also saddled with an absolutely terrible fake moustache (at least I hope it's fake) and an arsenal of cream-colored suits straight out of Rex Reed's closet. That all of these potential drawbacks more or less work in Lithgow's favor has as much to do with the actor's talent as it does with his character needing to come off as both smarmy and charming in equal measure.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Without a doubt the most persuasive obsession on display in Obsession is Brian De Palma’s love of film and reverence for Hitchcock. When it comes to the De Palma arsenal of visual tricks (split screen, swirling camera, weird angles, deep focus through use of split diopters…) I honestly don’t know which are genuinely his or which are attributed to Hitchcock’s traditional style. In essence, it shouldn’t really matter, but the problem presented by the rash of young 1970s directors who built their careers on paying homage to the films they grew up on, is that they invite you pay attention to such things.

Making A Spectacle
The thick glasses worn by Courtland's therapist (Stocker Fontelieu) in Obsession evoke
Kasey Rogers' pivotal eyewear from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train

When, under normal circumstances, all I want to do is sit back and enjoy a film on its own merits, this league of self-conscious, self-aware, and self-referential filmmakers (Peter Bogdanovich comes to mind) invites me to participate in an insider’s game. One side of my brain is supposed to watch the film as a direct narrative, while simultaneously the other side of my brain is induced to play “catch the homage.”

Keeping track of all the cinematic references, comparisons, re-creations, and outright thefts can be a lot of fun for a film geek like me, but it comes at a price: all that attention to style keeps me at an emotional remove from the story being told. Each visual nod to well-known film, each insider reference to a beloved filmmaker's technique is like a tap on the shoulder reminding me not only that I'm watching a movie, but of the director drawing attention to him or herself. I watch the film, even enjoy the film, but since the filmmaker is "playing" with cinema...I never surrender to it.

Scissors figure prominently both in Obsession and Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder

Obsession is a film bursting at the seams with style. It looks great: Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) bathes the film in a dreamy, diffused-lit glow that creates an appropriately unreal reality. It sounds great: This is perhaps my favorite Bernard Herrmann score. It’s a compelling mystery, well-told: Distracting as it may be, no one can say Obsession's showy visual style isn't perfectly suited to the story.

But for all the engaging performances and cinema storytelling savvy, for the life of me I can’t say the film ever swept me up in the obsessions that are the key to making the film really work. There's a lot going on that keeps you in your seat and keeps you wondering (and even caring) what will happen next, but a like Obsession should be haunting. Once the film is over there should be something about this eerie narrative that is difficult to shake off. Personally, I think if half the care lavished on the look and atmosphere of the film had been applied to the characters and performances, Obsession would have been the De Palma film you couldn't forget instead of the De Palma film almost no one remembers.

The Vertiginous Circle
The camera swirling around two individuals locked inside their own world is easily my favorite effect

In writing about the Hitchcock style that runs throughout Obsession, I suppose it's worth noting that the real Alfred Hitchcock released his 53rd (and final) feature film, Family Plot, the very same year, just four months before Obsession was released. I don't recall if critics made any comparisons between who was more Hitchcockian at this point: the pretender or the real-deal; but I do remember that so much nostalgia was attached to the release of Family Plot (Hitchcock was 77 and ailing) that few dared hint that his latest effort was not really all that memorable, either.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
There's an old axiom in film that goes something like: They'll forgive you anything if you have a good ending. Paul Schrader has been on the outs with Brian De Palma ever since (under the insistence of Bernard Herrmann) he dropped Deja vu's third act. I've no idea how the original ends (the uncut screenplay is featured with the UK DVD version of Obsession) but for my money, the ending as it stands is sheer perfection.
Many a good thriller finds itself fizzling out to a so-so or anticlimactic conclusion after a promising buildup. Obsession is the exception. Starting with a great, albeit familiar, premise, the film builds methodically and atmospherically throughout, even managing to sustain suspense as the key to the relatively easy-to-figure-out mystery reveals itself.

Late in the film things grow worrisome as it appears as though Obsession's measured pacing is to be abandoned in favor of a hasty denouement; but De Palma has one more trick up his sleeve and it proves to be so good that you honestly do forgive the film its implausibilities (big and small) and its short-shrifting of character motivation.
The ending is a suspenseful, startling, and very moving bit of pure cinema. Pure cinema because it is gratifying in ways that have nothing to do with narrative logic or reason, but everything to do with the overwhelming power of the mechanics of style. The sequence works simply because it visually fulfills, in those final minutes, all the romance, passion, and mystery its premise had always promised. Perhaps it's an example of too little too late, bit it's only during the film's final scenes that Obsession finds its "crazy." And when it does, it's simply beautiful. Too bad that crazy passion took so long to rear its head.

Past or Present?

Neo-noir is the inevitable by-product of 1970s nostalgia-craze sentimentality colliding with post-Watergate pessimism. If inflation, the gas crisis, and a culture in flux (religion, Women’s Lib, civil rights) prompted much of America to seek comfort in the pop-culture romanticizing of the past and a so-called “simpler” time; then post-‘60s cynicism and Vietnam War malaise most certainly inspired many a filmmaker to outfit their rearview spectacles with a filter of healthy skepticism. A filter not at all certain that the Good Old Days were really all that different (or better) than the here and now.

With its distinct period visual style and built-in fatalism, the 1940s film noir—particularly the ’40s private eye movie—proved a perfect fit for '70s revisionism. There were serious entries in the field: Chandler (1971), Chinatown(1974), The Long Goodbye (1973), Robert Mitchum’s aging take on Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1978). Some were serio-comic spoofs: Gumshoe (1971), Pulp (1972), Peeper(1975). Some were updates: Night Moves(1975). And some were broadly comedic: The Black Bird (1975), The Cheap Detective (1978), Murder by Death (1976). America's appetite for retrieving and redrafting the past was insatiable in the 1970s, and the updated film noir remained a plentiful and popular sub-genre, even if the results were sometimes wildly uneven.

One of the better films to come out of this era is Robert Benton’s The Late Show. Robert Benton is the 3-time Oscar winning director/writer behind Kramer vs Kramer (1979) and Places in the Heart (1984) in addition to being a collaborator on the screenplays for Bonnie & Clyde (1967), Superman(1978) and What’s Up, Doc? (1972). The Late Show is Benton’s second feature as director (his debut was the 1972 western Bad Company) and his first solo screenwriting effort.

I bring all of this up because the first time I saw The Late Show (it opened at my then place of employment, San Francisco's Alhambra Theater, and was one of the last features I recall playing there before I quit to move to LA) I honestly thought I was watching a Robert Altman movie. In terms of tone, structure, appearance, and cast, The Late Show looks and feels like the best Robert Altman film Altman never made. To be fair, Robert Altman did produce, but like that strange alchemy that occurs with actors who appear in Woody Allen movies (wherein they all take on Allen’s speech inflections and mannerisms); directors working on films produced by Altman (Alan Rudolph - Welcome to L.A. 1976; Robert M. Young - Rich Kids1979) tend to make films that look exactly as though they were directed by Altman himself.

Art Carney as Ira Welles

Lily Tomlin as Margo Sperling

Bill Macy as Charlie Hatter

Thirty years ago, retired Los Angeles private eye Ira Wells (Carney) was—to hear him tell it—one of the best in the business. A hard-boiled detective in the mold of any number of 1940s tough-guy gumshoes dreamed up by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler; Ira is still possessed of a steel-trap mind and continues to pepper his speech with the outmoded shamus slang of dime-store pulp novels. But Ira Well’s glory days are behind him.

Gray haired, paunchy, outfitted with glasses and a hearing aid, Ira downs Alka Seltzers for his ulcer, limps due to a bum leg, and gets around town—a Los Angles he barely recognizes—by public transit. A self-styled loner, Ira rents a small room in the home of an elderly widow, one Mrs. Schmidt (Ruth Nelson), and spends his time reading the racing forms and writing his memoirs: “Naked Girls & Machine Guns: Memoirs of a Real Private Detective.”

Eugene Roche as Ron Birdwell

When former partner Harry Regan (Howard Duff, radio’s Sam Spade during the ‘40s) suddenly turns up at his door, mortally wounded from a gunshot to the stomach, yet talking of a sweet deal that could mean “a lotta dough” for the both of them; loyalty compels Ira to embark on an investigation to uncover the identity of his friend's killer. This decision almost immediately brings him into contact (though not entirely by chance) with two fringe L.A. types not-so-tangentially connected to the mystery of the murder: oily Charlie Hatter (Macy)—a sometimes talent agent, full-time bartender, and equal-opportunity informant; and eccentric Margo Sperling (Tomlin)—one-time actress, now jack-of-all-trades dress designer, pot dealer, transporter of stolen goods, and would-be talent manager.

At first glance, this motley trio of mismatched associates appears ill-suited to even tackle a task as elementary as unearthing the whereabouts of a kidnapped pussycat (which, as it turns out, is precisely the CATalyst [heh-heh] for the film’s labyrinthine murder mystery plot); but, much like The Late Show itself, the disparate tonal contributions of these brought-together-by-circumstance individuals makes for a uniquely harmonious alliance.

Circumstances propel this unlikely trio into situations which put them increasingly
at risk or in way over their heads. More often than not, both.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In retrofitting the tough guy conventions of the private-eye film to the laid-back rhythms of Los Angeles in the Me Generation ‘70s; The Late Show deftly juggles tonal shifts in the narrative accommodating mystery, comedy, and character study. The film depicts Los Angles as a seedy, morally-relative wasteland of faded Hollywood glamour populated by wannabes and small-time operators living unstable, anything-to-make-a-buck existences.

By way of contrast, Ira Wells is a living throwback to another time. Amidst all the L.A. denizens chasing trends, half-hearted careers, and try-on-for-size identities, Ira is constancy personified. In fact, he’s consistent to the point of fossilization.
One senses that not much has moved forward in Ira’s life for some time, and he likes it that way. Ruled by a principled moral code and a personal sense of dignity that brands him old-fashioned from the outset, he lives a smallish, solitary existence that hasn’t made much room for the passage of time.

The Big Nap
Aging private eye Ira Wells has to remove his hearing aid before firing his gun,
take the bus to his stakeouts, and do his own washing at the launderette

The Late Show, with its irresistible blood-orange color scheme and glimpse back at the Los Angles I remember when I moved there in 1978, is at its best in its culture-clash scenes where the cool-headed Ira has to work closely with the excitable and rather spacey Margo. Ira's world of girls, gats, and goons seems an ill-fit for the faddish world of psychoanalysis, mood rings, crystals and biorhythms, but Robert Benton's script and the film's exceptional cast do a remarkable job of making the incongruous blending of these two worlds amusing and moving.
Mismatched partners are a timeworn staple (read: cliché) of cop/detective films, but the generation gap sparring matches between Ira and Margo (conflicts relating to both gender and personality) have genuine spark. Much of which I attribute solely to the onscreen chemistry of Carney and Tomlin (although mutually respectful, I've read that it took a while for the actors to settle comfortably into each other's method of working).
It certainly isn't lost on me that at times Tomlin's talkative Margo feels as though she could be the offspring of Art Carney's hyperactive Ed Norton character from The Honeymooners, and Carney's convincing underplaying of the hard edges of his character is reminiscent of how good so many comics can be (The Honeymooner's Jackie Gleason in The Hustler) when tackling drama.

The Late Show is extremely funny and human, with witty, character-revealing dialogue and performances that ring so true-to-life that when the film occasionally explodes into unexpected bursts of violence, it’s not only startling, it’s upsetting. Without knowing it you've found yourself really caring about these people.

Joanna Cassidy as Laura Birdwell embodies the contemporary update of
the vulnerable-yet-dangerous femme fatale

PERFORMANCES

Tony-nominated actor and multi-Emmy-Award-winning TV star Art Carney won an Oscar for his first starring role in a feature film: Harry & Tonto (1974). I actually saw Harry & Tonto when it came out, but perhaps because it wasn’t a movie of my choosing (I think my mom dragged us kids to it) I’m unable to remember a single frame of it.

I owe it to myself to give it another look because Art Carney in the Late Show is simply a marvel. Not exactly an actor known for his tough side, Carney convinces as the aging, street-wise, former gumshoe drawn out of his solitude for one more caper.

Although Benton is said to have based the character of Ira Welles on his father, Carney—who was 59 at the time and did indeed wear a hearing aid and suffer a limp—brings so much strength, dignity, and frustration to the role, it’s hard not to feel as though it were written expressly for him.

Bill Macy (then riding high on the popularity of the TV series Maude) is The Late Show's most valuable player. In the tradition of supporting actors who enrich a film by supplying first-rate performances that rarely get the attention they deserve, Macy's double-dealing Charlie Hatter is pure gold. That's actor John Considine on the right, playing sadistic enforcer Jeff Lamar. Considine wrote the screenplay for Altman's A Wedding, in which he and several members of this cast also appear

I’ve been a fan of Lily Tomlin since first seeing her on the short-lived 1969 TV show Music Scene. From Laugh-In to seeing her onstage in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe to Netflix’s Grace & Frankie, she is a truly inspired performer who always finds the humanity in humor. (As per Grace & Frankie, seeing Tomlin in The Late Showportraying the kind of psychobabbling enlightened type we used to call a “granola,” it’s difficult to watch her Margo Sperling these days and not think I’m getting a look at Frankie: The Early Years.)

One's enjoyment of The Late Show might depend on whether or not one finds Tomlin's character appealing or annoying. To me, Tomlin is nothing short of a comic genius (1978's Moment by Moment notwithstanding) and a remarkable actress. I can't get enough of her in this film, and her scenes with Carney are an oddball delight

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Art Carney won the National Society of Film Critics Award for his performance, and Lily Tomlin was nominated for a Golden Globe, but when Academy Award time rolled around only Robert Benton's screenplay nabbed a nomination. And deservedly so.
Like many a good detective thriller The Late Show has a very complicated, if not convoluted, crime caper at its center (one which only recently made sense to me thanks to the replay benefits of DVD), but Benton's dialogue is the real star. The rhythm of the divergent speech patterns of Ira and Margo (a great deal of the latter attributed to Tomlin's not-always-welcome improvisational skills) is almost musical. Here are a few examples of my favorite lines.

Margo-isms:

“Mr. Welles, I can understand your feeling that way. I mean, as an actress I understand it as a motivation…”

“My shrink says I’m a very conflicted personality…plus my astrologer.”

“And Brian’s not very evolved, in fact, he’s rather de-evolved. I’m very sensitive to the vibrations he gives out and I know what kind of karma he has."

"Do you know that people who play with guns are generally impotent?"

“Mr. Welles, a truly evolved person doesn’t go around ratting on her friends, if you catch my drift.”

"I am finished! Finalisimo!"

“It’s very lucky for you that I just happen to be a very self-destructive person.”

“This car is not only a toilet but you are the attendant!”

"Everything’s copacetic."

"If you lay a hand on me I’m telling you, you’ll pay for it in your next life.”

"I really cannot relate on this level."

The Wit & Wisdom of Ira Welles:

“Somebody puts the breeze on Harry Regan, next thing I know you show up at Harry’s funeral with some dolly and a song and a dance about a stolen cat and all that hot comedy. What’s it all got to do with Harry?”

“Put that thing down Charlie, you haven’t got the ass to swing it!”

"Back in the '40s this town was crawling with dollys like you. Good lookin' coquettes tryin' their damnedest to act tough as hell. I got news for you...they did it better back then! This town doesn’t change; they just push the names around.”

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The only real point that I can see behind making a film about the past as seen through a contemporary prism is to ruminate on the differences (if any) that time has wrought in people and places; to contemplate the advantages/disadvantages of youth vs. aging; or to ponder what has been gained and what has been lost culturally, with the inevitable passing of time. What’s remarkable about The Late Show is that it manages to hit on all of the above while weaving a pretty nifty crime caper.

In 1985 Woody Allen made a movie called The Purple Rose of Cairo in which a movie hero stepped out of the screen and tried to live in the real world with the same idealism and values his character had on the screen. Ira Wells in The Late Show is very much like that character. Wells is a self-styled throwback to the 1940s private-eyes in the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe mold who somehow managed to survive into the ‘70s without benefit of changing. But Ira is aware he has outlived his time, and worse, he fears he’s outlived his usefulness.

The Late Show—humorously, with heart, and a good deal of bloodshed—makes the case that no matter how much time passes and how significantly things appear to change, all of us....life's misfits, dinosaurs, and fringe-dwellers, have something unique to bring to the table.

BONUS MATERIAL
The film's credits sequence provide brief glimpses into Ira Welles' past.

In the photo on the left, Ira and partner Harry proudly stand before the offices of Welles & Regan: Private Investigators. On the right Ira and a woman we can assume to be his wife (we learn she eventually left him) pose with their friend Harry

The woman in the photo that sits framed on Ira's desk beside his typewriter is actress Martha Vickers, who played Carmen Sternwood in the granddaddy of all private eye films, Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946).

Her entrance is particularly memorable

“That’s just what this town has been waiting for; a broken down old private eye

with a bum leg and a hearing aid…and a fruitcake like you”

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Therefore, many crucial

plot points are revealed and referenced for the purpose of analysis. If you've never

seen The Conversation and are interested, don't spoil your fun. The mystery is too good.

Although Francis Ford Coppola began writing his script sometime in the late ‘60s and the film went into production well before all the details of the Watergate scandal became known to the public (it was released mere months before then-President Nixon’s resignation): few ‘70s films capture the wary pessimism of post-Watergate America quite like The Conversation. A small-budget, studio-interference free, auteur project Paramount granted Coppola in a bid to secure his services for a film he wasn’t interested in making (that would be The Godfather Part II); The Conversation is a detective film crossed with a character study, reimagined as the quintessential 1970s paranoid thriller.

Gene Hackman as Harry Caul

John Cazale as Stan

Harrison Ford as Martin Stet

Teri Garr as Amy Fredericks

Cindy Williams as Ann

Frederic Forrest as Mark

Robert Duvall as The Director/Mr. C./Charles

Harry Caul (Hackman) is a career wiretapper. A skilled audio surveillance man who’s (ironically) well-known in the spy-for-hire field of surreptitious information-gathering. A loner and an outsider, Harry is ideally suited to his craft not only because he’s a man of such unprepossessing countenance that he doesn’t even seem to occupy the space he’s inhabiting; but because he lives his life by the credo: Don’t get involved. Amongst the many complex gadgets and devices in his professional arsenal, Harry’s emotional detachment and studied lack of curiosity are his most valued. Indeed, “Nothing personal” could be the byline on his business cards. That is, were Harry the type of man to actually use business cards. I’m sure he thinks they divulge entirely too much personal information.

Like defense lawyers who revel in thrust-&-parry courtroom skirmishes, triumphant in victory yet heedless of the drunk drivers and hardened criminals their legal machinations assist in getting back on the streets; when it comes to gathering secret information, Harry enjoys solving the strategic and electronic puzzles posed by his job, but never gives a thought as to why his clients want his services, what they will do with the material he provides, or whether he is in any way culpable for any misfortune that may befall others as a result of his actions. "I am in no way responsible"and "It has nothing to do with me"are his career mantras.

But unless one is a sociopath, indifference to human suffering always comes at a price. And for Harry (a man haunted by the memory of the part his work played in bringing about the brutal torture deaths of an entire family) the price is that he has become a man who strives not to be seen or known by others because he most vehemently wishes he didn’t have to see or know anything about himself.

Nowhere Man

Harry’s trademark professional detachment is put to the test when a logistically complex, otherwise routine surveillance job (involving the recording of a conversation between a man and a woman in San Francisco’s crowded Union Square) unearths a probable a murder plot. In listening and re-listening to his recording of what on the surface sounds like a wholly innocuous conversation between two clandestine young lovers (Williams and Forrest) Harry comes to believe, with mounting certainty, that he is once again in a situation in which the plying of his trade will bring about the deaths of innocent people—in this instance, a young couple who speak as though dire fear of someone.

Compelled by equal parts empathy (the woman reminds him of Amy, his neglected girlfriend), the dread of history repeating itself, and the chance for (self)absolution; Harry breaks his cardinal rule of not allowing himself to feel anything about the subjects of his surveillance work, and, devoid of any clear plan of action, resolves to prevent what he only just suspects, but most unquestionably fears.

As Harry Caul delves deeper into an investigation of the mystery, The Conversation chillingly reveals that there’s more to matters of comprehension, interpretation, and perception than meets the ear.

"He'd kill us if he had the chance."
The virtuoso opening sequence was shot by cinematographer Haskell Wexler (although Bill Butler shot the rest of the film). The contributions of editor Richard Chew, and the brilliant Oscar-nominated sound work of Walter Murch & Art Rochester can't be overstated.

If post-Depression Era films are typified by films reinforcing the power and influence of the individual (Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Meet John Doe), narratives wherein the Little Man, though noble means and honesty, triumphs against corrupt institutions and governments; then post-Watergate cinema hammered home the impotence of the average man in the face of widespread moral decay and venality. The Vietnam War and Watergate forced America to lose its illusions about itself. Sixties films like They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,then later, the ‘70s films The Parallax View and Chinatown (both released the same year as The Conversation) all hammered home the notion that no matter what one did, the decks are stacked, the die is cast, and human intervention is futile in the face of life’s inexorable crush of evil.

Roman Polanski’s Chinatownhas a lot in common with The Conversationin that both lead characters (Jack Nicholson’s private eye / Gene Hackman’s wiretap expert) start out as individuals already corrupted by moral cynicism, but whose fortunes only take a turn for the worse once they develop a conscience.

Allen Garfield as William P. "Call me Bernie" Moran

The Conversation’s Harry Caul is the living embodiment of Vietnam America: a willing, guilt-ridden participant in morally dubious activity, who rationalizes the sometimes deadly ramifications of his actions by deluding himself that they have nothing to do with him. This spiritual deal-with-the-devil clearly plagues the devoutly religious Harry in his day-to-day life, resulting in his living a paranoid, loner’s existence of arms-distance friendships, inarticulate romances, and a near-constant suspicion of the motives of others.

Elizabeth MacRae as Meredith
(Best known to folks of my generation as Lou-Ann Poovie,
Jim Nabors' girlfriend on Gomer Pyle: USMC)

But Harry’s Achilles heel, his tragic flaw, is that despite best his efforts, he hasn’t completely lost his soul. His “uncharacteristic” decision to involve himself and try to save the lives of the two lovers in the park may not, in fact, be so out-of-character for the real Harry—the one whose dream/nightmare reveals a soul that longs to be known—and certainly can be interpreted as an act of trying to save his own (spiritual) life, as well.

"This is no ordinary conversation. It makes me feel...something...."

A characteristic of the '70s paranoid thriller is that they provide no reassurance that conspiracies aren’t real, nor do they contradict the notion that paranoia is a rational response to a corrupt reality. Perhaps as a means of conveying that Harry Caul is a better man than his choice of profession would belie (he's more a gadget-geek than a spy), from the get-go The Conversation establishes that Harry, though paranoid, is singularly ineffectual when it comes to keeping his life as private as he’d like, and is in no way as stealthy or opaque as he believes. In addition, the film suggests that rather than being too paranoid, Harry is perhaps not paranoid enough.

In spite of multiple locks on his door, an alarm system, and a failure to divulge personal information to anyone, Harry's landlady not only finds out his birthday and how old he is, but manages to leave a gift for him inside his apartment when he is away. This scene, coming after the opening sequence detailing how anyone can be observed anywhere, is notable for the open blinds and the construction occurring outside Harry's window. A point that perhaps plays into the late-in-the-film disclosure that Harry’s mysterious employer has a disturbing awareness of his comings and goings.

Harry grows uneasy when his girlfriend Amy lets on that she knows
he spies on her and listens to her phone calls

A recurring motif contributing to the bleakness of The Conversation's world view is that Harry really is the most vulnerable person in the film. Unable to connect with anyone (not even the couple he's trying to save), he is easily followed, bugged, tricked, spied upon, and, in those moments when he tries to open up, easily betrayed. In the end, Harry is both a victim and a (unwitting, perhaps) victimizer in danger of dying by the very sword he's lived by.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The Conversationis a marvelous, genuinely chilling thriller. One of my favorite things is when a traditionally plot-driven genre (in this case, the detective suspense thriller) shakes things up by placing the usual tropes in service of a script that’s more a character study. In The Conversation,the people take precedence over the plot, but what a doozy of a plot! I particularly like how the film establishes mood by making the audience question what’s hidden behind the banal and mundane. The boring conversation, the gritty squalor of the characters’ lives, the bland ordinariness of the characters themselves…it reminds me of the way Alan J. Pakula made New York look so sinister in Klute (1971). And for evoking paranoia and isolation, the purposeful use of San Francisco locations in The Conversation recall for me Philip Kaufman’s brilliant 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

There's a big retro kick to be had seeing the primitive sound equipment on display

PERFORMANCES

The Conversationwas not a success when released in April of 1974, and come December’s release of Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, it was all but forgotten. It did garner three Academy Award nominations (Best Picture, original Screenplay, & Sound), but in a tough acting year crowded by the likes of Jack Nicholson (Chinatown), Dustin Hoffman (Lenny), Al Pacino (The Godfather Part II), and Albert Finney (Murder on the Orient Express), Gene Hackman's terrific performance was crowded out (I love Art Carney, but his Harry & Tonto nomination and win is baffling in context of what was around in 1974).

All the supporting performances in The Conversation are outstanding, but
Elizabeth MacRae as the sad-eyed trade-show model is surprisingly good

In Harry Caul, Gene Hackman (2nd choice after Marlon Brando turned down the role) gives what I consider to be the best performance of his very impressive career. Portraying a closed-off character is always a challenge; playing one who must convey to the audience the gradual reawakening of conscience is something else again. The entirety of whatever dramatic effectiveness or potential for audience involvement The Conversation has rests on the credibility of Hackman’s transformation (tellingly, the film doesn’t require that you like Harry). On that score, Hackman—with the inestimable contribution of the uniformly remarkable cast—is nothing short of magnificent.

Not sure if it's true, but I remember reading that Hackman gained weight and partially
shaved his head for the role. The latter proving so problematic to grow back that it contributed to
his refusal to shave his head for the role of Lex Luthor in Superman: The Movie (1978)

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

If you’re familiar with The Conversation at all, you’ve likely read or heard about the fortuitous transcription error which resulted in the original last name of Gene Hackman’s character being changed from Call (perhaps a little too precious for a serious film about a wiretapper, anyway) to the homophonous and oh-so evocative Caul; the name given that transparent protective membrane surrounding a fetus. Not one to spit in in the eye of serendipity, Coppola builds upon this happy spelling error and uses it as both an allusive reference to Harry’s overly self-protective personality, and a springboard for a series of recurring visual motifs dramatizing the human instinct to emotionally insulate out of fear, regret, and guilt.

Rain or shine, the emotionally embryonic Harry is rarely seen without
his "protective" transparent plastic raincoat

The motif of protective membranes simultaneously protecting and isolating individuals is further conveyed in The Conversation's use of obfuscating veils of semi-transparent surfaces.

In this scene depicting a cagey Harry talking to a colleague he doesn't trust (Garfield)
Hackman is filmed through a plastic sheet that could just as well be a barrier

The crucial details of a harrowing event are obscured behind a gauze curtain

A glass partition prevents intervention while revealing only enough to horrify

A figure lies shrouded in a membrane of clear plastic

Through the dramatic use of space and presentation of visual information in ways that cut the frame into individual sections (frames within a frame), Coppola and cinematographer Bill Butler (Demon Seed) emphasize The Conversation's themes of isolation, loneliness, and the inability to communicate or emotionally connect.

The wide angle and strong vertical lines created by the support beams in Harry's vast warehouse work space create a sense of emotional desolation while simultaneously conveying a feeling of being hemmed in

In this office set, vertical lines once again create isolated frames distancing the characters from one another. Meanwhile, the membrane motif is recalled by the clear plastic window shades, the central image dominated by an instrument of invaded privacy (the telescope)

Separate, Yet Connected
One of my favorite images from the film, Harry stands on the balcony of the Jack Tar Hotel
in San Francisco, its design and layout creating a wall of isolated, sealed-off environments

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Beyond its obvious Watergate-era appeal and glimpse into a cultural zeitgeist I still remember vividly; I have to say that what most makes The Conversation a film I can rewatch endlessly is that (per my tendency to gravitate to films from which I can glean insights into the human condition) it is a powerful and persuasive allegory about the risk in allowing oneself to be vulnerable.

Watched

Characters in The Conversation film are fond of repeating phrases like “You’re not supposed to feel anything” and “Nothing personal”; but as (I hope) we all know, life is very personal, and any attempt to connect authentically with another human being is fraught with risk. It hurts; it’s messy; it invades your space and disrupts order; it leaves you exposed to betrayal, misunderstanding, and rejection. And worst of all, it comes with no guarantees. On the contrary, it comes with the unequivocal assurance that the closer you get to someone…the better they know you…the more open and exposed you allow yourself to be...the greater the potential for them to do you harm.

Watching

But what of the alternative? To exist among others with life’s only objective being the hope that your path never intersects with another, and that “nothing personal” ever transpires or invades your heart to cause you pain? As Harry Caul learns, one does so most assuredly at the cost of one’s soul and humanity.

Watcher

The Conversationis a peerless ‘70s paranoia thriller, one certainly not lacking in present-day parallels. But the film's paranoia/conspiracy theme is but one of the many layers making up this intelligent, superbly-crafted film. Like the audio tapes that plague Harry throughout the film, The Conversation imparts more information, more insights, the more you watch it.

BONUS MATERIAL

This is the stationery letterhead for Coppola's American Zoetrope San Francisco offices when they were housed in the Columbus Tower on Kearny. I had written to them in my senior year in high school inquiring about film schools.

Elizabeth MacRae in a 1967 episode of Gomer Pyle: USMC highlighting the character of aspiring singer Lou-Ann Poovie.

Professional mime Robert Shields, then a real life annoyance, er...I mean, entertainer in San Francisco's Union Square when I was a kid, appears as himself in the film's opening sequence. He teamed with wife and fellow mime Lorene Yarnell in 1977 for the Shields & Yarnell variety show on CBS. Both are very skilled and talented, but since I'm personally terrified of mimes, their having their own hour-long TV program constitutes one of those "only in the '70s" phenomenons.

The Conversation on DVD & Blu-Ray

I haven't heard the commentary Francis Ford Coppola supplies for the most recent DVD release of The Conversation, but from what I've read it offers a wealth of info into the making of the film (Harrison Ford got a bead on his character when Coppola informed in that he was gay) and deleted elements of the script (in an early draft, Harry is revealed to be the secret owner of the apartment building he occupies, there was a subplot involving a niece, and the betrayal he suffers at the hands of a character was not as conspiratorially sinister as it is in the finished film).

Copyright © Ken Anderson

I had such a good time watching the Joan Crawford/ Bette Davis cable TV series Feud that when its eight-episode run on the FX channel was over, it left me with both a lingering taste for biographical films that play fast and loose with the facts, and a hankering for outsized performances by actors whose scrupulously-engineered screen personas are inextricably linked to their public image.

So naturally, I thought of Barbra Streisand. That is, Barbra Streisand by way of Fanny Brice; Fanny Brice by way of Funny Girl; and ultimately, Streisand and Brice by way of the misguided, contractually-mandated Funny Girl sequel—that rapturous, cotton candy fashion parade, ego-stroke of a musical guilty pleasure known as Funny Lady.

Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice

James Caan as Billy Rose

Omar Sharif as Nick Arnstein

Roddy McDowall as Bobby Moore
(I wanted to give McDowall his own screencap, but the
poor guy hasn't a single close-up in the entire film)

When the narrative of the 1964 Broadway musical and subsequent 1968 film adaptation of Funny Girl concluded sometime in the late 1920s, we all knew there was more to the Fanny Brice story (punctuated by brief forays into film and television, Brice's success as a radio star lasted up to her death in 1951). Whether or not that story was anything worth telling is another matter.

Funny Lady (which some of you may know by its alternate title:“The Back of James Caan’s Head”) is ostensibly the continuing saga of Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, who, when last seen in Funny Girl, was photogenically torchin’ on a dark stage, crying her Egyptian-eyelinered eyes out after having been dumped by recently-sprung-from-jail-for-embezzlement hubby Nicky Arnstein.

An admitted highly-fictionalized account of Brice’s later years, Funny Lady picks up roughly where Funny Girl left off (very roughly, in fact); with Brice shown backstage, still-pining-for-Nicky, being served final divorce papers by Arnstein in absentia. Romantic rejection of this sort is usually the stuff of tragedy, but as this sentimental setback grants Streisand the first of many opportunities to fling her head back in classic “suffering diva” mode (treating fans to the actress’s regal profile and shapely septum) Funny Lady instantly establishes an unfortunate precedent for a musical entertainment: Streisand is at her best when Fanny is at her worst.

Indeed, given the degree of care Oscar-nominated cinematographer James Wong Howe lavishes on La Streisand when in the throes of heartbreak, from a fan's point of view, the glow of a happy Fanny Brice is no match for the luminous sheen of a miserable Barbra Streisand. So, in essence, the worse things go for Fanny, the better things go for the Streisand-watchers. This is going to be a fun musical.

Am I Blue?

What's bad for Miss Brice is super for Streisand-watchers

At what point in history this all transpires is rather nebulously conveyed, for the film’s vaguely delineated timeline is actually a mashup of Brice’s real-life 1927 divorce, the 1929 stock market crash, and the onset of the Great Depression. Meanwhile, it’s taken as a given that enough time has elapsed allowing for Fanny’s transmogrification from the optimistic, likable, gently self-deprecating “People” person of Funny Girl, to the overdressed, perpetually scowling, foul-mouthed know-it-all of Funny Lady.

Funny Girl was the rags-to-riches, broken-heart-for-every-bulb-on Broadway saga of a gangly waif whose prodigious talent triumphed over humble beginnings and unconventional beauty. Audiences responded to it because it took the usual Horatio Alger clichés of the celebrity bio, added a duckling-into-a-swan fairy-tale, and crossed it with a Cinderella love story.

Funny Lady, on the other hand, showcases a Fanny Brice who’s a firmly established star. Successful, confident, glamorous (to an almost parodic degree), calling her own shots, and without a single insecure bone in her body. This proves marvelous for Streisand, who gets to look fabulous throughout without once having to endure a single joke made at the expense of her looks; dominate in numerous scenes depicting her offering people professional advice and basically telling others how they can better do their jobs; and finally, she doesn’t have to be the least bit funny due to a screenplay which has characters tell her…at regular intervals…to her face…just how delightfully funny she is.

Funny Girl was a Cinderella fantasy, which everyone loves. Funny Lady is built on a Have-It-All Fantasy (I have talent, wealth, fame, and beauty...why can't I find love?) which is kinda annoying

A screenplay highlighting a self-possessed Fanny Brice no-doubt proved instrumental in getting Streisand to agree to appear in a sequel she really didn’t want to do, but the lack of character conflict leaves Funny Lady with almost no narrative thrust. Sure, there’s a Depression going on, but the film has Streisand parade around in so many outlandishly glamorous Bob Mackie/Ray Aghayan outfits, Brice merely comes off as living in a bubble of privilege.
Similarly, the plot sets up Brice as professionally rudderless in her post-Ziegfeld years, weathering the financial storm of the Great Depression by having to team up with novice-showman/seasoned-huckster Billy Rose in order to stay afloat. But after approximately two lines of expositional dialogue and a couple of brief exchanges, Bruce’s money woes are quickly dispatched, never to be mentioned again.

Down on her luck, Fanny Brice goes slumming in a casual daytime frock

No, Funny Lady’s single dramatic arc (milked for all its worth for close to 2½ hours) concerns whether or not Fanny can shed her romantic illusions about the dashing Nick Arnstein in time to realize that falling “in like” with the sloppy, unsophisticated, very Henry Street, Billy Rose is perhaps where her happiness lies. But even THIS minimal, not terribly compelling conflict is undermined by the casting of athletic, macho James Caan as the diminutive (4' 11"), unprepossessing Billy Rose. What could have been an interesting gender-reversal of Funny Girl’s “opposites attract” relationship is reduced to Fanny having to choose between the extraordinarily handsome guy who says “tomato” and the extraordinarily handsome guy who says “tomahto.”

Streisand in an interview; "It comes down to whom the audience wants to see me kiss.
Robert Blake [an early Billy Rose contender], no. James, Caan, yes."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I get a kick out of Funny Lady in spite of the fact that it’s fairly useless as biography, bloodless as a love story, and too disjointed and episodic to even satisfy as a cohesive narrative (it’s impossible to keep track of how much time has elapsed between scenes). But Funny Lady works best, makes the most sense, and proves both an invaluable source of information and entertainment when taken for what it really is: a Barbra Streisand report card.

Here, Streisand grants the audience permission to get a load of her

Think about it. Beyond the old “If they liked it once, they’ll love it twice” maxim that serves as the inspirational catalyst for most movie sequels; the only reason Funny Lady exists at all is that Streisand owed Funny Girl producer Ray Stark one more film on their four-picture contract. Press releases claim the reluctant Streisand had initially informed Stark that he’d have to sue her before she’d do a Funny Girl sequel, but changed her mind after reading the script.

Not buying it. Anybody who’s seen Funny Lady knows that its script is more likely to instigatea lawsuit, not stop one. No. My gut tells me that Streisand agreed to appear in the sequel because, after a long musical hiatus (her last was 1970s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever) Funny Lady provided her with a showy vehicle that amounts to being a $7.5 million dollar progress report showcasing how far she’s come in the seven years since Funny Girl.

Funny Lady is an investors presentation of a movie, furnishing fans and the public at large irrefutable evidence that, in spite of Oscar-winning Johnny-come-latelys like Time magazine’s “New Miss Show Biz” Liza Minnelli (Funny Lady enlists the talents of Cabaret’s songwriting team [Kander & Ebb] and screenwriter [Jay Presson Allen]), Barbra Streisand—after one Oscar; eight films; and countless albums, awards, and TV specials—still has the ol’ musical comedy poop.

Funny Lady is Streisand as she enters the most self-aware (and self-serious) phase of her screen career. In this film Streisand moves to shed the old screen persona she helped create—that of the self-effacing, pigeon-toed kook with lungs of brass—and presents herself as strong, self-confident, glamorous, and in control. Admirable qualities, to be sure, but not exactly conducive to fun. In fact, this Fanny is a bit of a pill.

In place of the ingratiating, eager-to-please woman we met in 1968, 1975 Streisand doesn’t appear particularly concerned with whether or not you like her. You’re welcome to worship her, if you like; but this Streisand doesn’t need your validation. Nor does she need anyone to tell her how fabulous she is. She knows it. (In fact, this is the least smiling Streisand ever…she actually looks angry 90% of the time. But as any woman who’s been told by a perfect stranger on the street to “Smile!” can tell you, a woman choosing NOT to smile is practically an act of social rebellion.)

Let's Hear It For Me...or else

PERFORMANCES

Leaving Streisand aside for the moment (dare I?), I’d like to give a quick shout-out to all those shuttled to the wings while the funny ladycommands center stage.

James Caan is one of the more underrated actors to come out of the ‘70s, and I’m as guilty as the next of never quite giving this versatile actor his due. While I’m of the mind that Robert Blake would have made the most intriguing Billy Rose, James Caan is no slouch. He's actually very good here, playing Rose as a fast-talking sharpie reminiscent of Jimmy Cagney in comedy mode. He sings well, is charming, and as Streisand co-stars go, he’s one of the strongest. Too bad the overall effectiveness of his performance is sabotaged by editing which relegates him to co-star status rather than leading man.

For a gay icon with a gay son, Barbra Streisand has a pretty shady reputation for onscreen gay representation. Several of her films have characters uttering homophobic slurs (in The Owl and the Pussycat and For Pete’s Sake, she’s the culprit), and in Funny Lady, the points Roddy McDowall’s openly gay character gets for inclusion (he’s her best friend and world’s oldest chorus boy) are subverted by a script which seldom misses an opportunity to refer to him in “period appropriate” derogatory ways.

I can’t speak to McDowall’s performance because, as in 1965s Inside Daisy Clover, he doesn’t actually have anything to do, but there’s something old-Hollywood comforting about seeing him.

It’s doubtful Tony Award-winning performer Ben Vereen had a very sizable role to begin with, but most of what he did contribute became a casualty of all the editing Funny Lady underwent before release. With a brief verbal interaction with Streisand excised, and the three-minute “So Long Honey Lamb” number cut to three seconds (a bullet dodged, in my opinion); only Vereen’s dynamic singing and dancing in “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie” remains. He’s marvelous, of course, and gives the film a much-needed kick in the pants, energy-wise, but it feels disembodied from the rest of the action, like those Lena Horne novelty sequences in MGM musicals which were filmed in ways that made them easy to be removed in Southern theaters.

It’s poor Omar Sharif who fares the worst, however. His character set up to be knocked down; so much dialogue is given over to Streisand (“No, you don’t have any lines here. It’s my turn” she actually says to him in one of Funny Lady’s many startlingly meta moments) he merely shows up, smiles, and bows out. Twice!

Streisand draws our attention to her favorite co-star: Her nails

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Like a great many musicals, Funny Lady is at its best when no one is talking. The film looks spectacular, thanks to the contributions of no less than three on/off cinematographers: Vilmos Zsigmond, Ernest Laszlo, James Wong Howe; and the nifty musical score is a combination of period classics and five new numbers by John Kander & Fred Ebb (though the fan-worship pandering of “How Lucky Can you Get?” and “Let’s Hear It For Me” is so shameless you might find yourself blushing). Adding to the film’s pluses are the witty, Oscar-nominated costumes by Mackie/Aghayan, which capture the theatrical, over-the-top appeal of classic Hollywood musicals.

Streisand in a little knockabout crowd-pleaser she throws on
for those nights when she just doesn't care what she looks like

Funny Lady’s production numbers play better now than they did in 1975, when the musical arrangements and intentionally garish costuming made 1930s Broadway look like 1970s outtakes from The Carol Burnett Show (not exactly a coincidence since Funny Ladyfeatures Burnett show alumni Peter Matz [Oscar-nominated musical director], Mackie [costumes], and several members of Carol Burnett's dance chorus.)

The "Great Day" number featuring Streisand surrounded by an all-black dance ensemble (top), perhaps found its inspiration in the similarly staged "High/Low" number Ethel Merman performed with an all-black chorus in the 1936 musical Strike Me Pink (bottom).

Although I hate it when movies feature scenes of seasoned theater professionals breaking
character simply when things go wrong on stage, I absolutely adored this set design

You're forgiven if you assume the above screencaps are from The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, The Donny & Marie Show, The Captain and Tennille, or The Brady Bunch Hour...all '70s TV variety shows looked like this.

Portraying a Fiend of Fanny Brice Proves Risky Business
Actress Carole Wells, as Brice's friend Norma Butler in Funny Lady, suffered a fate similar to that of Anne Francis in Funny Girl: finding that the bulk of her scenes had been left on the cutting room floor

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Funny Lady debuted in March of 1975, the very same month that saw the release of Ken Russell’s Tommy and Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love. Tommy was such a revelatory thrill to me that I went to see it practically every weekend during its entire run at SF’s Northpoint Theater, so by the time I got around to seeing Funny Lady, I had grown so besotted with Tommy’s mind-blowing innovation that Streisand’s film seemed positively underwhelming by comparison. Having not yet seen Funny Girl at this point—Funny Lady was just my third Streisand film—I didn’t even have sentimentality on my side (the significance of that yellow rose featured so prominently in the film’s advertising was lost on me). It was only when Funny Lady was in second-run and came to the Alhambra Theater (where I ushered) that I came to appreciate it: the patchy musical playing significantly better when viewed à la carte.

Critics seemed to hate the unconvincing old-age makeup used in Funny Lady's s final scenes, but I thought Caan and Streisand looked absolutely adorable. Certainly preferable to when in 1991 Caan teamed up with Bette Midler in For The Boys and the old-age makeup applied made both actors look like reptile people

These days, Funny Ladyremains both a guilty pleasure and the last of the enjoyable Streisand musicals. More Grande Lady than Funny Lady, it’s a marvelous film to revisit whenever I find myself in need of a Streisand fix.

A Streisand fix being akin to my Joan Crawford fixation: both being stars of such unique talents; they fascinate even when they’re awful. I like Barbra Streisand considerably more as a singer than an actress, but in these cookie-cutter times when I honestly can’t tell a bland Chris Pine from a vanilla Bradley Cooper, I find I’ve grown fonder (or at least more tolerant of) her distinctive screen persona. When Streisand is on her game (Funny Girl, On a Clear Day, What’s Up, Doc?) there isn’t anyone better. And while Funny Lady is not much of a showcase for Streisand the actress or comedienne, it’s a helluva showcase for Streisand the star.

BONUS MATERIAL

Distributed in theater lobbies: My Funny Lady promotional foldout from 1975.

For those interested, the terrific The Barbra Streisand Archives offers more info than you'll likely ever want to know about the making of Funny Lady. From deleted scenes and interviews to costume sketches and behind-the-scenes trivia.

You forgot you said you loved me/swore you’d never cause me pain

while you’re forgetting, baby/remember my name

This Not-On-Video classic PLAYING ON TCM: Sunday July 16, 2017 10:30 pm PST

I’ve wanted to write about Remember My Name since I started this blog, but held out in the hopes that I’d no longer have to rely on my fuzzy, TV-recorded DVD+R copy, and this forgotten '70s gem would one day receive a pristine, DVD or Blu-Ray release. (Or any kind of release, for that matter. For it seems music copyright issues have kept this longtime favorite from being released to the public in any format, whatsoever.)

Well, it’s been several years now and Remember My Name seems no closer to seeing the light of DVD day; so fuzzy screencaps, here we come.

Remember My Name is a moody, disconcerting, not-to-everyone’s-taste update of the classic 1940s women’s melodrama. not to everyone's taste in that this Altman-esque neo-noir (it was written and directed by Robert Altman protégé Alan Rudolph) takes its time and resists standard genre structure in dramatizing this exploration of the femme fatale mystique through a distinctly ‘70s, decidedly feminist prism.

Geraldine Chaplin as Emily

Anthony Perkins as Neil Curry

Berry Berenson as Barbara Curry

Moses Gunn as Pike

Jeff Goldblum as Mr. Nudd

Alfre Woodard as Rita

When I was growing up, movie theaters screened films in “continuous performance.” This simply meant that movies (usually double or triple features) were screened continuously throughout the day, often without benefit of intermissions, and patrons were free to come and go as they wished.

What this meant for me and my three sisters—the eldest harboring a near-manic aversion to coming in on a movie already in progress—was that every trip to the movies involved an elaborate lobby ritual built around ensuring our not hearing or catching a glimpse of the ending of feature #1, yet making certain we were in our seats in enough time for the start of feature #2.

When arriving at a theater before movie #1 had ended, my elder sister would insist we stand in the lobby—balancing our popcorn, drinks, and candy—assigning a reluctant electee (me) the task of periodically peeking through the slats of the auditorium double doors, so as to be on the lookout for scrolling end credits: this being the sign to give my sisters the “thumbs up,” indicating that the coast was clear and it was at last safe for us to enter a spoiler-free environment.

Most times things proceeded without a hitch, for when I was on my game, I was practically the Sherlock Holmes of listening without hearing and watching without actually taking any information in. I was a crack at discerning end-of-movie themes and gauging the length of closing credits. However, once in a rare while my technique was gummed up by those deceptive films which crowd all their credits into the opening, thereby ending on a lone “The End” title card or silent fade-to-black.

On one such occasion I suffered such an error in judgment that, in mistaking the opening credits of film #2 for the closing credits of film #1, I gave the signal to my sisters only after the second feature had already BEGUN. Yes, for all our waiting and stealthy machinations, thanks to me we all wound up missing the beginning of the movie (all sixty seconds of it, I might add). Nevertheless my sister was livid. In fact, had she been able to devise a reasonable explanation to offer our parents for my absence, demise, I’m certain she would have pushed me over the theater’s balcony that day.

I too always prefer to see a movie from the beginning, but in instances where it can’t be helped, I find there to be something uniquely enjoyable in trying to pick up and assemble the threads of a film’s plot from the middle working backwards. To, in essence, play “catch up” with the events of a film; taking bits of plot and character information revealed out of context in the present, and ascribing to them, in reverse order, a kind of imagined order and motive.

This phenomenon is used to great effect in this, Alan Rudolph’s second film (his first being 1976s Welcome to L.A.), for like a lot of good movies and most great mysteries, Remember My Name feels like a story we’ve picked up in the middle. The film opens with the image of a lone, late-model car winding down a California highway mountain road. Its driver: a slight, flinty-looking woman in dark glasses who, when glimpsed roadside with her ever-present cigarette, is revealed to be dressed in the drab khaki and blues of institutional clothing. Is she an ex-convict…a parolee…an escapee from an asylum? At this point we don’t know. What we do know is that she is following a man in a car. Very closely and very intently.

When the man arrives at his destination‒a residential construction site‒the woman of mystery lags behind, affording him time to exit his vehicle. As she drives slowly past, she pauses just long enough to give two blasts of her horn; an act which both draws attention to herself, and elicits from the man a response betraying something deeper than the rattled curiosity over the identity of a stranger in a car.

Things really start to percolate when we at last get a good look at the stranger (sort of, for her eyes are obscured by large aviator sunglasses) who, as it so happens, is in the process of making a harassing phone call to an unidentified woman. What these three individuals have in common, if anything, has yet to be discerned. But in plopping us smack dab in the middle of what already feels like a situation fraught with portent, Remember My Nameintensifies our desire to know who these three people are, what their history is, and how their lives will intersect. As its mystery unfolds, Remember My Name reveals itself to be a suspense thriller set in the present, concerning three people attempting to build a future, yet confronted with the fact that they must first come to terms with their pasts.

Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) has just been released from prison after serving 12 years for involuntary manslaughter. Rarely far from a cigarette, walking furtively about with downcast eyes, arms pinned to her sides, muscles-coiled and body braced for either attack or defense; Emily navigates open spaces as though still behind bars. Clearly unversed in the relaxed give-and-take of casual conversation, she speaks in the blunt and deliberate manner of one accustomed to only answering questions.

But if the outward appearance of Emily’s actions offer the superficial reassurance of an ex-convict making a sincere effort to adapt to society—in rather rapid order she purchases new clothes, lands a cashier’s job at a Thrifty Mart, snags a seedy downtown apartment, and undergoes a curiously over-femme makeover (getting an elaborate bouffant hairdo perhaps more in vogue back in the late ‘60s when she was jailed)—one can’t also help but detect in it all, an air of impermanence.

For in her private moments, moments dedicated to reciting well-rehearsed, melodramatic speeches; re-acclimating herself to high heeled shoes; and practicing feminine poses of seduction; it’s obvious that Emily’s single-minded determination is less about personal reform and adapting to freedom, and more about settling a score with construction worker Neil Curry (Anthony Perkins) and wife Barbara (Berenson). With a vengeance.

Emily embarks on a campaign of stalking, harassment, and breaking and entering

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I suppose I always get such a kick out of revenge thrillers because in real life, investing so much effort in “getting back” at someone really is such an exhausting and colossal waste of time. But as vicarious thrills go, Remember My Name ranks high on my list of movies that traffic in what I call The Theater of Methodical Payback. These studies self-help justice are so engrossing because, as structured, they tend not to clue you in on the “whys” of the revenge plot until well after you’ve come to know the characters. By the time all is revealed, the viewer—in coming to know and/or identify with these individuals—has hopefully come to develop an emotional investment in the outcome. No longer mere voyeurs, we each have a stake in the proceedings: do we want to see Emily triumph, or do we hope her plans are thwarted? Best of all, just when we think we know where Remember My Name is headed and what’s in Emily’s mind; the film throws us one final curve. And it’s a good one.

Confrontation

During the nostalgia-crazed ‘70s, several filmmakers used the public’s preoccupation with all things retro (with all its inherent desire to escape into an imagined “simpler” past) as an opportunity to make significant comments about contemporary times. Certainly Robert Altman with his updated private eye thriller The Long Goodbye (1973) and Robert Benton’s nourish The Late Show (1977)...also produced by Altman. But to my recollection, Remember My Name was the only one of the lot to offer up neo-noir from a female perspective and devise an updated take on the once-popular “woman’s film” genre of the 1940s.

Masculin/Féminin

Remember My Name offers provocative commentary of issues of masculinity and femininity. Some of it intentional: as in the mannish/aggressive behavior Emily exhibits intermittently with the studied, mannered femininity she adopts when she sets about using the male gaze to her advantage. Some of it unintentional: the pairing of the bisexual Perkins with real-life wife Berenson in her film debut makes for a curiously androgynous couple, their male/female similarity adding to the film's gender provocation.

Cumbersome feminine allure / male vulnerability / woman self-defined

In Geraldine Chaplin’s Emily, Remember My Name has a female anti-heroine at the center of its narrative. A complex, inarticulate, study in contradictions; she’s hard and soft, pitiable and terrifying, understandable and opaque, protagonist and villain. Emily operates under her own instincts, agency, and agenda, none of which is ever made fully clear to us. The thrill of watching her, in all her unstable unpredictability, is that her actions alone propel the entirety of the plot. She’s the reason it starts, and she’s ultimately the one who decides how it ends.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Remember My Name is a character drama cloaked in a genre film. What Alan Rudolph’s moody screenplay (in no great hurry to get to where it’s headed) and eye for character detail does is place very unexceptional people in the extraordinary, heightened-reality framework of film noir, then sits back (there’s that leisurely thing again) as they struggle to cope with how little effort it takes for the bedrock of lives to be demolished.

For the viewer, this ordinary/extraordinary contrast creates a subtle tension born of wanting the story to flow and progress along the traditional lines and tropes of the genre, only to have one’s expectations entertainingly subverted at every turn due to the erratic idiosyncrasies of the characters and the near-certain combustibility of their interactions.

Alan Autry as Rusty, Rita's bullying boyfriend

There’s Jeff Goldblum as the harried manager of a thrift store who employs the ex-cons his mother recommends (she, just happening to be incarcerated for killing his father); Alfre Woodard (making her film debut) as Goldblum’s suspicious assistant, a snooping agitator who has no idea what she’s taking on wrangling with the volatile Emily; and Moses Gunn as Pike, the brusk building manager with whom Emily forges something resembling a relationship—or at the very least, the closest thing to a relationship her sealed-off heart will allow.

And then of course there’s Barbara and Neil Curry, the focus of Emily’s obsessive harassment. Anthony Perkins’ Neil seems an Average Joe type, but there’s something a bit off about him (it IS Anthony Perkins, after all). In an instance of an actor’s real-life discomfort in his a role working to a film’s advantage (Perkins felt he couldn’t convincingly play a construction worker, and he’s right), Neil comes across as a person attempting to hide something unsavory about their past in the adoption of a new persona that’s an ill fit. As ill-fitting as his marriage, it would appear. For while no mention is made of how long they’ve been together (Neil’s plans to build the two of them a cabin hint of being somewhat-newlyweds), cracks are already beginning to show in the relationship, evident in Neil’s prolonged absences and Barbara’s perpetual bewilderment (alas, the sole character trait afforded Berry Berenson’s character).

In Remember My Name, a film that can be looked upon as a kind of cynical treatise on love as life’s ultimate natural disaster (earthquake reports play incessantly on TV sets in the background); no relationship is easy, no associations are clear-cut, and in the end, a woman may find it necessary to toughen up in order to save herself from the collateral damage of romance.

PERFORMANCES

This is my absolute favorite of all Geraldine Chaplin’s screen performances. In fact, I’d rate her Emily as one of the most memorable, intriguing characters written for a woman. Movie femme fatales come in all stripes. Most, regrettably, embodying some aspect of men’s fear of women. A great many of these films ask us to view the femme fatale from the lead male character’s perspective. What I find so fascinating about Emily and Chaplin’s intense, internal portrayal, is that, in being a study in contradictions, she belongs to no one but herself.

Emily, giving few fucks, as usual

You can try to peg her as a villain/victim, hard/vulnerable, insane or determined; but at every turn she resists pigeonholing. Eventually you’re forced to surrender your expectations and all those familiar names attributed to women in these kinds of movies, and simply let her character be who she is. In the end, you may come away with name for the type of woman Emily is revealed to be, but it’s a conclusion arrived at by knowledge, not assumption. Chaplin fleshes out her character with unique depth. So compelling I can’t imagine anyone else in the role. She’s terrific.

Geraldine Chaplin was the 1978 Best Actress winner at both the Paris Film Festival and the Miami Film Festival

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Appropriately enough, my introduction to Alan Rudolph was his first film Welcome to LA. Unfortunately, all that I found enjoyable about his very Altman-like look at Los Angeles bed-hopping was marred by how unbearable I found Richard Baskin’s music (I find it to be so hard going that when I watch it, it's either with my remote at the ready so I can mute it, or with the sound completely off, reading the subtitles). Rudolph's second film is considerably more to my liking and tastes, for while music still figures prominently in Remember My Name, it's jazz, which I like, and the songs composed and sung by Alberta Hunter are uniformly wonderful and serve as the eloquent emotional voice of the film’s inarticulate and closed-off characters.

Jeff Perry as Harry, a co-worker who gives Emily no trouble. Lucky for him

I can’t say enough good things about Remember My Name, fully aware that my praises are of a subjective nature and that everything from his screenplay to his overall direction here just suits me to a T. Rudolph directs with flair and the film is punctuated by stylistic touches enhanced by Tak Fujimoto’s descriptive cinematography.

Emily is haunted by the sound of cell doors closing (it's the very first sound we hear, before the Columbia logo is off the screen). Bars become a motif throughout the film, suggesting imprisonment, confinement, and emotional distance.

And for those in search of a motive for Emily's revenge, I think it can be found in the film's title Remember My Name; which to me shares an intersectionality sisterhood with the current hashtag social movement #SayHerName devoted to raising awareness of black female victims of violence and police brutality. Too often in our culture, women are labeled the victim, the wife, the girlfriend, the ex; etc. When a woman demands that her name be remembered (or spoken) it's a demand to be humanized and not dismissed or marginalized. I like to think that Emily's quest is simply the insistence not be easily swept into the past. And based on how the film ends, there's little danger of that.

BONUS MATERIAL
In creating the soundtrack for Remember My Name, Alan Rudolph sought out 83-year-old retired (for 25 years) jazz great Alberta Hunter to write and perform nine songs for the film. It's said she has a brief walk-on in the film, but I've yet to catch it. Popular in the '20s & '30s, she enjoyed a late-career resurgence that lasted until her death in 1989.

Anthony Perkins and Barry Berenson had been married about four years when they began work together in Remember My Name. Berry, the younger sister of actress/model Marisa Berenson, was a photographer and model herself. She and Perkins had two sons and remained wed until his death in 1992. Berenson died tragically at the age of 53, a passenger on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

It's your time now/But it's gonna be mine some sweet day

The "woman-in-peril" melodrama is a popular subgenre of film which fell neatly under the banner of the "woman’s picture” of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Early films in this mold (Rebecca - 1940, Suspicion - 1941, Gaslight -1944) combined aspects of the horror film, film noir, and the romance gothic in suspense narratives with female protagonists bedeviled by men who, under usual circumstance, would be considered both dashing and desirable.
In the postwar years, when Hollywood took to aggressively reinforcing more traditional gender roles, these sophisticated romantic dramas became decidedly more domestic in focus (Loretta Young in Cause for Alarm -1951, Doris Day in 1956's Julie - the original "The stewardess is flying the plane!" thriller), and more noticeably fashioned to appeal to a female audience.

The relative drab of these black & white suburban suspense thrillers eventually gave way to the tonier, full-color escapism of a the “posh women in peril” subgenre; which substituted aproned-housewives for moneyed ladies of leisure, and offered the diversion of seeing well-turned-out heroines menaced in plush surroundings. To this latter category belongs producer Ross Hunter’s Midnight Lace, an appealingly glossy, routinely effective, thoroughly predictable woman-in-peril melodrama graced by a persuasively committed performance by Doris Day.

The Victim:

Doris Day as Katherine "Kit" Preston
Overdressed + Overactive imagination = Patronized 24/7

The Suspects:

Rex Harrison as Anthony Preston
Neglectful husband with one too many last-minute "business" emergencies

Myrna Loy as Aunt Bea Coleman
Oversolicitous matron with a penchant for comic headwear

John Gavin as Brian Younger
Phone-happy, shell-shocked veteran with appalling British accent

Roddy McDowall as Malcolm Stanley
A Gen-X prototype. The entitled, ne'er-do-well son of the Preston's Dickensesque housemaid.

Natasha Parry as Peggy
Smartly-dressed neighbor with an absentee husband and a too-canny talent for
always being at the right place at the right time

Herbert Marshall as Charles Manning
Avid gambler & worrier possessed of the staggering ability to look guilty absolutely all of the time

Anthony Dawson as Roy
Silent skulker who might as well wear sandwich board reading "Suspicious Character"
A Dial M for Murder alumnus

John Williams as Inspector Byrnes
Literally phoning in his identical performance from Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954)

Midnight Lace is the very last of Doris Day's regrettably few forays into drama (a gifted and versatile dramatic actress, Day nevertheless put herself so emotionally through the wringer for this film that she hereafter only appeared in comedies and one musical: Billy Rose' Jumbo - 1962). This high-toned hand-wringer about an American heiress in London who can't get anyone to believe she's being terrorized by threatening phone calls from an unseen assailant who's also making sundry attempts on her life is a suspenser catering shamelessly to the Ladies Home Journal/Women’s Wear Daily crowd. At frequent intervals director David Miller (Sudden Fear -1952) and producer Ross Hunter (Portrait in Black - 1960) find it necessary to pad out events and throw mis-en-scène to the wind in an effort to play up the film's “feminine” distractions:

Thrill at the splendor of the ballet! Featuring excerpts from Giselle, Petrouchka, and Swan Lake!

Gasp at the divoon frocks and bed jackets designed by wrested-out-of-retirement
"Irene," who earned herself an Oscar nomination for her trouble

Even Don Loper would swoon over the magnitude of millinery on display!
(Although I don't recall if any are in fuchsia and purple)

Midnight Lace is the kind of movie you can imagine Lucy and Ethel taking in at a matinee after luncheon at Schrafft’s (with hats!), then talking animatedly about Doris Day’s gowns and the relative “dreaminess” of Rex Harrison and John Gavin as they take the train back to Westport.

Midnight Lace wastes no time in getting underway, swiftly setting a wobbly foundation of emotional instability for Doris Day’s harried heroine to hurl herself from. As American heiress Katherine Preston, Day plays a newlywed “work widow”: a lonely London expatriate three months married to a British financier (Harrison) whose unforgiving work schedule leaves her with far too much free time. Too much time to roam the unfamiliar city alone; too much time to grapple with the confusing monetary exchange rates; and (as per the plot) too much time to fabricate phantom assailants in an effort to garner the attention of her neglectful husband.

Though the film makes us privy to the fact that she is indeed the target of threatening phone calls and a series of near-fatal mishaps, Kit’s nervous excitability, combined with a septet of vaguely suspicious supporting characters, conspire to create just enough doubt as to whether Mrs. Preston is actually the victim or the agent of her torment.

When one settles down to watch a film like Midnight Lace—the motion picture equivalent of those paperbacks you buy at drugstores and airport gift shops for the sole purpose of reading poolside or on the beach—certain rules must be applied: you either surrender yourself to its contrivance, artificiality, and slavish adherence to form, or else you’re simply better off watching something else.

In movies like this, you buy into the fact that characters never say anything directly when they can confuse and obfuscate with round-robin statements like, “It was the man on the phone! I saw him! I mean…I didn’t actually see him, but I KNOW it was him!” You allow for characters never alleviating another character's fears by announcing their arrival, letting their presence be known, or merely introducing themselves. You accept that all normal fearful responses to unsettling events will be met by the suggestion to “Put it out of your mind,”“Don’t give it another thought,”or the laziest cliché of all, “Get some sleep.”

In order for films like this to work, a ringing phone has to be treated like a summons from the Queen; it simply cannot be ignored. Friends and loved ones know you're being harassed by a phone maniac, so of course they will be placing calls to you at regular intervals. And it goes without saying that just hanging up on the pervert is never an option. Not when the victim can ask the same question over and over again ("Who are you?!?) certain that the 12th entreaty will yield a result different from the 7th.

But the necessity to check your brain at the door doesn’t mean one can’t simultaneously marvel at the manner in which the entire plot of Midnight Lace hinges on and is propelled by the Freudian fear (and subsequent dismissal) of the “hysterical woman,” complete with its psychological tie-in to sexual frustration.

Midnight Lace was adapted by two male screenwriters from the play Matilda Shouted Fire by British playwright Janet Green. Green was co-writer of two of the UK’s most influential “social problem” films: Sapphire- 1959 (racism) and Victim -1961 (homosexuality).

I have no idea how closely the motion picture hews to the original play, but I suspect the entire enterprise would clock in at roughly 23-minutes had it dispensed with the presupposition that women are inherently emotional creatures, strangers to logic, and prone to coming unglued under stress.

Midnight Lace's overweening patriarchal tone—apparent in the galling level of male condescension Day’s character has to contend with—would all seem rather quaint and easy to shrug off with a “That’s how it was back then,” were it not rooted in a “protect women from themselves” cultural mindset that persists today (Google: Roomfuls of men legislating women’s bodies).

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In spite of its creaky sexual politics, Midnight Lace is a surprisingly watchable little thriller that shares a lot in common with another of my favorites, Elizabeth Taylor’s sole foray into the suspense thriller genre, 1973s Night Watch. In both films a neglected wife’s claims of being terrorized are met with both suspicion and disbelief by male characters. In each film the women are driven to the brink of hysterical madness, suspected of fabricating an emotional crisis out of a neurotic response to loneliness. The similarities in plot and tone are intriguing, but the more contemporary feminine perspective of Night Watch (another film adapted from a play written by a woman) recognizes and incorporates the sexist tropes of the woman-in-peril genre and subverts them to startling effect.

Like a great many genre films, Midnight Lace hews rather religiously to form, but thanks to its sleek production values and old-fashioned style, manages to entertain even while offering few surprises as it wends its way to its conclusion. A conclusion which took me very much by surprise when I first saw this on late night TV as a kid, but which seems embarrassingly obvious to me now. Midnight Lace was released just a month after Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and as with that film, trailers for Midnight Lace encouraged patrons to see to the film from the beginning and not to divulge to friends “the shocking surprise ending!”

Myrna Loy, whose career spanned the silent era through to the 1980s, is a welcome presence

PERFORMANCES

In the loony disaster film Airport 1975 Karen Black played a stewardess left to fly a commercial jet after the flight crew is injured. The fact that Black played her absurd scenes with the utmost of conviction drew both laughs and criticism at the time, but in a 2009 interviewthe actress explained that her oft-parodied intensity was a result of having seen the film’s rushes. It seems she noticed the cabin sequences were being played for laughs or soap opera (Midnight Lace’s Myrna Loy is present as a comic dipsomaniac) and none of the characters were reacting to the impending danger of the plane crashing into the Utah mountains. Karen Black’s acting choices for the cockpit scenes came down to “I realized that if I didn’t care that the plane got over the mountain, no one in the audience would.”

McDowall, Loy, and even Day had little good to say about working with Rex Harrison, his well-documented unpleasantness in this case perhaps attributable to the recent death of wife Kay Kendall

Well, Doris Day pulls off something similar in Midnight Lace. Surrounded by a talented (if decaffeinated) cast giving earnest, stiff-upper-lip performances (Harrison, Parry, Williams) or outright rotten ones (John Gavin), Day being in a near-constant state of distress, panic, terror, and sobbing may come off as shrill to some, but her 100% commitment to the material is the single element providing Midnight Lace with whatever thrill factor it has. In a plot bordering on the preposterous, Day makes the menace believable and her character's emotional disintegration compelling. Doris Day is one of my all-time favorites, and though she's well-respected and beloved by many, has never been given what I think is her due as an actress (WHEN is the Academy going to give her an Honorary Oscar?)

In Midnight Lace, Doris Day’s natural delivery and grounded, level-headed bearing works miracles with the film’s artificial dialogue and contrived plotting. No matter what histrionics the script requires of her, Day's innate practicality prevents her character from appearing neurotic or unhinged. Indeed seeing such a healthy, uncomplicated screen persona crumble under pressure give her scenes of torment an unsettling authenticity. No pretty "movie star" screaming here. Day cries, wails, and lets out with guttural sobs that are positively heart-wrenching. The movie itself may be a tad overwrought, but I find nothing lacking in Doris Day's impeccable performance.

In her memoirs, Doris Day recounts that for this scene she channeled memories of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her first husband. So successful was she at working herself into a state of near-hysteria, Day actually suffered something of a breakdown and the production had to be briefly shut down.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Midnight Lace is an old-school Hollywood “movie” movie at its best. If you have a taste for such things, these last-gasp studio entries before Hollywood shifted to experimentation and naturalism can offer many amusing diversions. For instance, I was surprised to learn that the film was actually shot in England (unless IMDB refers to second-unit work), for everything looks as though it was filmed on a soundstage.

Similarly, for a film of this period, I was impressed with the color photography. At a time when flat, overlit sets were the order of the day, Midnight Lace’s cinematography (Russell Metty, Oscar winner for Spartacus) has a richness and depth that makes marvelous, atmospheric use of shadows and color. It's one of those movies where everybody is always being offered a drink, women sleep in full makeup, and there is no such thing as dressing casually. And of course it’s difficult not to giggle every time a scene is contrived to be filmed in longshot so as to better showcase one of Day’s many lovely, matronly costumes.

I really think I have to reassess my longstanding indifference to Roddy McDowall. Cropping up on this site in no less than seven films, I'm starting to not only grasp that he was the Kevin Bacon of his time--appearing with practically everyone in Hollywood at one time or another--but I see that what he lacked in versatility, he more than made up for in dependability. He consistently turns in solid (albeit, one-note) performances in one thankless role after another.

These days I'm not really sure what condition the woman-in-peril film genre is in (my hunch is that TVs Lifetime Network pretty much wore it into the ground), but 1960s Midnight Lace stands as a high-style entry with plenty of retro appeal and boasts Doris Day giving one of her best dramatic performances. Forget that it was originally targeted to female audiences, this Lace is one size fits all.

BONUS MATERIAL

Midnight Lace's sole Academy Award nomination went to the costume designs by Irene (Lover Come Back). Universal made available to theaters a promotional featurette titled High Style Elegance showcasing Doris Day modeling the many costumes from the film. Along with fashion-centric ads placed in leading national ladies' magazines, the featurette was intended to inspire hoards of female theater patrons to stampede their nearest department store and demand it stock the Irene, Inc. line of Women's Wear.

Here Ms. Day models a leopard-print crowd-pleaser that never made it into the finished film. Watch the featurette (German soundtrack) HERE.

For a time in the 1980s, it seemed as though every third woman starring in a motion picture was portraying a TV reporter. Here, a year before Morgan Fairchild (Flamingo Road) portrayed a TV reporter terrorized by a stalker in the feature film The Seduction (1982), Dallas's Mary Frances Crosby played a TV reporter terrorized by a stalker in a truly wretched 1981 remake of Midnight Lace. Its plot retooled to dispense with a great deal of the original's patriarchal tone (along with a great deal of the original's coherence); in its place is almost unwatchable mediocrity and tedium. Those with a masochistic streak and taste for the obscure can catch this thrill-free thriller on YouTube while you can.

She asked me why. I'm just a hairy guy.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court -1949

An American in Paris - 1951

An American Werewolf in London - 1981

To this contradistinctive cinema canon of culture clash colonists, quixotic visitors to strange lands, and vagabonds on physical/spiritual journeys of self-discovery—I add a new title: An American Hippie In Israel. The timeless story of one man’s dirty-toenailed quest to find a pot-hazed Shangri-La where one can live “Without clothes, without government, and without borders!” A lost film, rediscovered. A vision of a simpler, sweatier world long past. A top contender for worst film ever made. So, of course, I love it.

Take the naïve idealism of San Francisco's Summer of Love (albeit, four years after the fact), cross it with the inept earnestness of Ed Wood, Jr. (after one too many screenings of Easy Rider - 1969 and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point -1970), shore it up with the technical polish and solid performances of Manos:The Hands of Fate(1966), and you have a pretty good idea of the myriad pleasures awaiting those who choose to throw a good 95-minutes to the wind to go “thumb tripping” with An American Hippie In Israel.

Asher Tzarfati as Hippie Mike

Lily Avidan as Elizabeth

Shmuel Wolf as Komo

Tzila Karney as Francoise

An American Hippie In Israel is a has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed, late-to-the-party artifact of the ‘60s counterculture movie revolution sparked by The Trip (1967); actualized in Alice's Restaurant (1969); documented in Woodstock (1970); Hollywoodized in Butterflies Are Free (1972), and musicalized in Jesus Christ Superstar(1973).
Movies devoted to “The Gentle People” (hippies, flower children, peaceniks, the Love Generation) showing us both the light and the error of our ways through symbolism-heavy anti-war allegories. Utilizing avant-garde techniques borrowed from experimental films; these movies celebrated the counterculture philosophy and proffered bohemian alternatives to the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, imperialism, and knuckling down to "The Establishment."

An American Hippie in Israel opens with the image of an unmanned steamroller crushing a field of wildflowers while news footage of the Vietnam War is intercut over the sounds of bombs and machine gun fire. This student film level of subtle metaphor is likely one of the reasons why the film was never able to find a U.S. distributor.

Mike (Tzarfati) is a disillusioned Vietnam vet hailing from New York who travels the world in search of a better way of life. A bearded Dorothy Gale, if you will, on a quest to find his personal somewhere over the groovy rainbow: “I’m looking for a place far away from everything. A place where I can live with a bunch of people who think like me. Without anyone telling us what to do.” Of course, what Hippie Mike's actually describing here is a cult—a fact not at all helped by his resemblance to Charles Manson—but I've always found it curious that so many of the Flower Power Generation believed the road to individual freedom required a tour guide and a map.

And now, a Public Service Announcement from Hippie Mike

After bumming around Europe for a few years, Mike arrives in Israel looking for all the world like a lycanthropian Janis Joplin: barefoot and resplendent in floppy hat, dirty bellbottomed jeans, love beads, and sheepskin vest. But we soon learn that, as movie hippies go, Mike is one of the good ones. No anti-hero or rebel without a cause, he. For although he has a considerable ax to grind when it comes to society as a whole—“World, you’re so full of shit. You’re so badly contaminated, it’s impossible to find a corner free of smell!”—he’s a hippie conspicuously lacking in political convictions (not a peace sign flashed or "Power to the People" fist pump throughout the entire film); he's just a guy who wants to do his own thing, man.
Sure, he's a bit of a windbag when it comes to spouting off about his philosophy of life, but his credo is basically live-and-let-live, and he's quite the affable, easygoing sort. It's nice to know that even though the Vietnam War turned our hippie hero into a self-professed “killing machine,” it doesn’t prevent him from thanking the flight crew with a smile as he disembarks his plane, or helping a lady with her luggage at the airport. He’s just that kind of a hairy hippie guy.

As Mike hitchhikes to Tel Aviv (the film allowing just enough drivers to pass our hero by to hammer home its man’s-inhumanity-to-man themes) he ultimately gets a ride from a comely redhead in a ginormous convertible who invites her scruffy pick-up back to her parents’ home—“They’re abroad at present”—for coffee and a quick bout of hippie hanky panky. But not before narrowly missing getting into an accident with a black Ford Fairlane driven by two gray-faced men in black suits and top hats.

Described in various sources as everything from murderous mimes to "the painted men";
to me these guys look more like zombie gangsters. Or, given their top hats,
the ghosts of aging Las Vegas chorus boys past

Just who these gentlemen are and what they want is a mystery, but Hippie Mike recognizes the pair immediately. Accusing them of harassing him and chasing him all over the world, he calls them “Shithead” and “Scum of the earth” before threatening the silently glaring pair with physical harm —“Next time I see you, I’ll bust your ugly faces wide open!”

Were they a hallucination? An acid flashback? A costume shop metaphor for The Man always hasslin' the hippies? Hmmm...

Oddly enough, neither Mike’s violent outburst nor the overall bad drug trip weirdness of her run-in with Messrs. Shithead and Scum of the Earth seems to concern Elizabeth very much. Her "play the hand you're dealt" attitude perhaps explaining why, after one brief afternoon of flower-child proselytizing and naked frolic, she's ready to abandon her comfortable life ("I'm an actress!") and join Hippie Mike on his quest for an elusive Utopian paradise.

Mike mansplains freedom to Elizabeth while putting his dirty feet on her sofa

What follows next is a kind of Hippie’s Guide to Tel Aviv as Mike and Elizabeth gambol about the city in a montage of self-consciously free-spirited breeziness that for a time was a staple of every self-respecting counterculture film. In due time the duo’s spiritual carefree footin’ draws the attention of two more like-minded souls: the lanky, non-English-speaking Komo (Wolfe), whose indignantly retreating hairline makes him seem a little “mature” for all this, and his bi-lingual girlfriend Francoise (Karney).
As our duo becomes a linked quartet, one is made instantly aware that certain conventions persist even amongst the most vehemently unconventional. The women are both young, slim, and in no way challenge the traditional Eurocentric beauty standard. The men, on the other hand...to put it charitably, don't exactly pose a threat to Joe Dallesandro's status as underground film's reigning male sex symbol.

As an interminable folk song wails on the soundtrack (courtesy of Fran Liberman-Avni and Suzan Devor, who also appear in the film) Mike continues to pick up followers like bellybutton lint, becoming the Pied Piper of the granny-gown/headband set. Undeterred by being wholly unfamiliar with the city, he leads a caravan of Tel Aviv’s hippiest hippies to a seaside warehouse (a communal crash pad outfitted with posters, pillows and “found object” art) for a far-out afternoon Be-In.

The Age of Aquarius took a little while to reach Israel

For the unversed in hippie communal celebrations, this simply means they lie around, listen to folk music, drink, smoke pot, screw, and "Laugh-In dance" (aka: indiscriminate wiggling, arms in the air, eyes rolled back in their sockets). Freedom! Freedom!

After thanking everyone—“Beautiful, You’re just beautiful people”—Mike gives yet another long-winded speech about freedom before it’s suggested they all join forces and establish an alternative civilization on an isolated island approximately 12 miles out of town. Hippie Mike has at last found what he’s been searching for. At the point where it looks like we might have to endure another folk song and more "dancing," the sudden reappearance of the zombie chorus boys (brandishing machine guns, yet) comes as something of a welcome intrusion.

You’ll have plenty of time to ruminate on the symbolic significance of the subsequent machine gun massacre of these harmless, peace-loving hippies (remember that steamroller...), because once the commune’s only survivors—our original quartet—embark on their road trip to their island paradise, nearly 15-minute minutes transpire during which absolutely nothing else happens. (Well, they do fuck some more, but maybe that's just out of grief.)

After an appropriate period of mourning (3 minutes), our four sun-baked Don Quixotes
decide to forge ahead with their plans and establish a free, topless society of their own

If the first act of An American Hippie In Israelwas to establish Hippie Mike’s freedom-seeking objectives; its second act, a “road movie” that takes the term WAY too literally (Mike & Co. buy supplies and visit an outdoor bazaar where they purchase a 4-legged cousin of Mike's vest); then act three, when our foursome finally achieve their goal and set up their own civilization, is when reality confronts idealism.

And it does so with alarming dispatch.

Declaration of Independence
With their color-coded swimwear making them look like contestants on the oldest Survivor episode ever, our emancipated quartet revel in their newfound (short-lived) freedom.

I won’t divulge how the film's final act plays out, but given the amount of time devoted to the redundant and undramatic road trip, what ultimately transpires feels incredibly rushed. In a turn of events likely meant to provide an ironic or twist ending, the idealistic message of the film's early scenes (suggesting life holds an alternative to the oppressiveness and violence of civilized society), takes an abrupt, totally out of left field detour into not-exactly-profound nihilism (man is an irrepressibly violent animal).
Perhaps it's a commentary on the death of idealism or a bellwether metaphor for the demise of the whole hippie revolution; but the events play out with such speed and lack of nuance, they have the effect of contradicting all that came before.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

What's not to love? I mean, they just don't make 'em like this anymore.
The world is full of brilliant comics, satirists, and parodists; but try as they might, no one as yet has ever been able to intentionally capture the special magic that is the truly awful film that fails to recognize itself as such. I've an enduring affection for ambitious, ill-conceived, overly-sincere movies which attempt to balance a surplus of pretentiousness with a shortage of money and an absence of talent. In most cases these films are merely bad, but every once in a while, celluloid dross reveals itself to be pure gold.

Hippie Mike's Silver Hammer
What's a '60s movie without hallucinatory imagery? Mike has a dream in which he wields a large silver hammer against two figures with reel-to-reel-tape players for heads. Between them is a globe painted like a chessboard upon which are pawn figures resembling soldiers. Trippy? Yes. Ludicrous? You bet!

An American Hippie in Israel is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, and indeed, some might find watching it without benefit of an audience or sans the sarcastic input of those Mystery Science Theater 3000 robots (a treatment this film cries out for) an impossible task. But being both a child of the '60s and a fan of so-bad-it's-good cinema, this movie had me laughing from beginning to end. Even when I wasn't quite sure what it was I was watching.

There's no quicker route to absurdity than solemnity; and never is absurdity as entertaining as when a film tries to be profound and deep while reducing a cultural phenomenon to its most superficial components. Everyone involved in An American Hippie in Israel is clearly taking it all very seriously, but just as clearly one is left with the impression that no one really knows what the hell they're doing. Or saying!

Someone should tell Francoise the world doesn't like to be scolded

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

An American Hippie In Israel is a no-budget, muddled, sun-baked (and altogether half-baked) make-love-not-war hippie allegory that is the triple-threat brainchild and feature film debut/swansong of independent filmmaker Amos Sefer—sometime actor, lifeguard, electrician—who managed to write, direct, and produce without actually being good at any of them.

Shot in (mostly dubbed) English and released briefly and inauspiciously in Israel in 1972 under its original title Ha-Trempist (The Hitchhiker), Sefer's film, despite ample doses of market-friendly nudity and violence, disappeared into obscurity after failing to land a U.S. distributor. (You know a movie is bad when even the cheapo exploitation houses like Screen Gems and American International won't buy it.)

The Stepford Hippies

With the help of YouTube and a host of bad film enthusiasts, The Hitchhiker was resurrected, renamed, and a cult film was born. An American Hippie in Israel had its Los Angeles premiere in 2010, but my first opportunity to see it came when it aired on TCM sometime in 2014. I'd been looking forward to seeing this oddity since journalist Joe Meyers wrote about it in his column, and it didn't disappoint. The film is currently out on DVD/Blu-Ray, and has become a cult sensation on the Midnight Movie circuit in Israel.

An American Hippie in Israel has become a new classic for me. I've seen it at least five or six times now and I keep finding new things to gasp at and enjoy. The film is mercilessly padded-out for length; the actors to a one are all endearingly awful (Hippie Mike's voice is dubbed by Israeli-American actor Mike Burstyn); the production itself has that delightfully cheesy look of those early Andy Warhol films; and from a strictly nostalgic viewpoint, who of my generation can find fault with so much dated, Flower Power grooviness emanating from screen?

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

To the untrained ear much of An American Hippie in Israel’s dialogue sounds like a drug-fueled hummus of non-sequiturs with a side of adjective/adverb salad. If it sounds tin-eared and a little forced, it's because what you're listening to is not really normal conversation, but a 30-something screenwriter’s take on the colorful, comical, counterculture dialect of the North American hippie. To better enjoy your brief visit to Amos Sefer’s vision of Israeli hippiedom, here’s a brief glossary of terms used in the film.

Bad Scene:An American Hippie in Israel is nothing if not a motion picture comprised of nothing but bad scenes, but as expressed by our hippie hero Mike, a “bad scene” means to be faced with an unpleasant or unlucky occurrence. A negative twist of fate.

Beautiful:A term of approval and approbation applied to persons, places, or things. Sometimes simply a declaration of an emotional state (See: Wonderful Feeling).

Cool It: Stop making a hassle, slow your roll, mellow the fuck out.

Dig: To understand, comprehend, or empathize. Often posed as a rhetorical question preceding endless reams of hippie mansplaining.

Do Your Own Thing: To live life as one chooses. To be yourself, not follow. No button pushing.

Don’t Sweat It: Don’t worry, overthink, or trouble your mind. Don’t get excited. The more dismissive cousin of “cool it.”

Far Out!: An interjection of surprise or excitement. Also an all-purpose term of confirmation and acknowledgement (suitable for banal questions like “Would you like some coffee?”) and expressing disbelief (for example: having one’s mind blown).

Flake Out: To bow out. To not contribute. Not to be relied upon. As used by Hippie Mike, to take a snooze.

Man: A multi-purpose word. When peppered throughout conversation, it is the hippie equivalent of “like” and “y’know.” Can be used as an expression of joy, surprise, or exasperation. Most often means friend, pal, individual. Most dreaded, when preceded by a capital “The” denoting The Establishment.

Outtasite: Wonderful, terrific, fantastic. Sixties antecedent to mid-‘70s “Dyn-o-mite!”
Pad: Home, domicile, living quarters. Wherever one lays one's sheepskin vest.

Right On!:An emphatic yes. An affirmation, as in certainly; of course; most definitely; and, you said it, brother. Also, an enthusiastic exclamation of excitement meaning wonderful or great.

Turned On:Varied meanings, but most often referring to being high on drugs, or sexually excited. As Hippie Mike uses it in the film, it’s a term meaning being very much in the moment, keyed up and attuned to sensations. Feeling very much alive, alert, and happy.

BONUS MATERIAL

Director Amos Sefer died in 2007 before he could see his only feature film become a cult success. But, happily, Asher Tzarfati (Hippie Mike) 73-years-old, and Shmuel Wolf (Komo) 83-years-old, are still with us. They appear on the special edition Blu-Ray, and both get a kick out of their late-in-coming notoriety and display a healthy sense of humor about participating in a movie they thought was long forgotten.
Links:
The movie trailer that started it all.
TV Interview with Shmuel Wolf and Yaniv Edelstein (the man who spearheaded the film's resuscitation). English closed-captioned.

What are we waiting for? Let's get on down there where we can live and be free! Free! Free!

"It's time to speak of unspoken things...."

Ad tagline for Joseph Losey's Secret Ceremony (1969)

Ghost stories have always been a bit of a challenge for me. Not so much in literature, where my imagination is free to conjure up whatever horrors necessary to raise the hairs on the back of my neck and get the goosebumps tingling; but most definitely in film. There I find the visual medium’s gift for literalism is paradoxically at odds with the degree my imagination and mind's eye need to be involved in order for ghosts to seem even remotely scary.

Through the magic of special effects, films are ideally suited to granting vivid, tangible realism to even the most fanciful narratives; thus, the representational side of ghost stories—materialized apparitions, floating objects and the like—has always been well within the scope of where motion pictures excel. But too often in the attempt to provide solid scares, ghost story movies fall prey to an over-reliance on rote genre devices like: loud noises, jump cuts, the scope of the ghost's powers, the grotesqueness of their appearance, the malevolence of their actions, etc. All standard suspense/horror devices which are fine in and of themselves, but in the supernatural realm tend to turn ghost stories into little more than paranormal stalker thrillers.

Since what has always creeped me out the most about ghost stories is the mere "idea" of ghosts—that the dead retain a presence and consciousness of life—the literal depiction of phantasms onscreen isn't enough to elicit much of a response from me. In fact, when it comes to ghosts in films, my experience has been that the more over-emphatic the visuals, the more muted its power to genuinely scare me.

Authors and filmmakers tend to agree that the scariest, most vivid horrors take place in the mind. So, when a movie comes along that appears to have its priorities in order (revealing less, calling on viewers to use their imaginations more) and takes the time and effort to really mess with my head (allowing the visual aspects of the narrative to assert themselves in service of, and in deference to, the engagement of the viewer's imagination); then I feel as though I’m in good hands.

When this occurs (as it frequently does in the thrillers of Hitchcock, Polanski, and Clouzot), I’m comfortable suspending my disbelief and surrendering to the full arsenal of cinema’s storytelling vocabulary—music, cinematography, performance, atmosphere, ambiguity, language—because my active participation as a viewer has always been a considered part of the equation.
In other words, in order for it to work, the film needs me to be alert and paying attention. All manner of information is hidden in plain sight on the screen, but the filmmaker who respects the symbiotic partnership of audience/showman knows better than to hand me everything; he/she knows that my enjoyment of said film will be richer if I am trusted and called upon to discover things for myself.

To me, this is the hallmark of any well-made film, but when speaking of horror and suspense, it's absolutely essential. One film which accomplishes all of the above spectacularly, while also embodying the cinematic principle I call "the eloquence of ambiguity," is Jack Clayton's masterpiece The Innocents.

Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens

Martin Stephens as Miles

Pamela Franklin as Flora

Megs Jenkins as Mrs. Grose

Michael Redgrave as The Uncle

William Archibald’s 1950 play The Innocents, adapted from Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, serves as the source for Jack Clayton’s decorously brooding 1961 film adaptation. This assured sophomore effort by the Oscar-nominated director of Room at the Top (1959) boasts a screenplay by Truman Capote and playwright/screenwriter John Mortimer (Bunny Lake is Missing), who contributed scenes and a touch of Victorian verisimilitude to the dialogue.

And the Victorian setting, with its demand for propriety and the appearance of order at all costs, is every bit a character in this ghost story as is the pervading presence of the tale's no-longer-living lovers. It’s a ghost story best whispered and a dark poem of life lingering, one befitting the somber corners and shadowy hallways of a gothic mansion.

The Innocents stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens; a naïvely pious governess dispatched to a remote country estate which she comes to fear is haunted by the ghosts of her predecessor (Miss Jessel) and a valet of bestial repute named Peter Quint. Both of whom died under mysterious circumstances on the estate not long before, yet still wish to make their presences felt. Compounding her dread is the mounting certainty that the nature and intent of the haunting is the moral corruption of the two children left in her charge: angelic, guilelessly morbid Flora (Franklin), and charming, disturbingly mature Miles (Stephens).

The film’s slowly intensifying disquietude—the narrative turn of the screw—arises out of both uncertainty and ambiguity. Uncertainty as to whether the children truly are the innocents they appear to be, or are, in fact, wily co-conspirators in league with the phantoms. Ambiguity relating to the possibility that the spectral terrors befalling Bly House are not real at all, but figments of Miss Giddens’ imagination; the fevered manifestations of her repressed emotions.

More than just a faithful adaptation of a literary classic, The Innocents is a visually stunning elucidation of the novella's themes. Taking great pains to distance itself from the full-color, purple gothic of the then-popular Hammer series of horror films, this British production has pedigree and craftsmanship oozing like ectoplasm from every frame.

Filmed in glorious black and white that grows increasingly starker as the film progresses,

the cinematographer is two-time Oscar winner Freddie Francis (who has the dubious distinction of being the director of Trog, Joan Crawford's last film and a horror of a different stripe). Atypically for the genre, The Innocents is shot in widescreen Cinemascope: a 20^th Century-Fox prerequisite for its “A” productions at the time.

From Jack Clayton’s perceptive direction to the affecting performances of its talented cast, everything about The Innocents: location, décor, and especially its use of sound and the innovative integration of electronic synth to its music score – has been done to capture the feel of James’ novel and remain true to its subtle horror.

Clytie Jessop as Miss Jessel

And while The Innocents is a deliberately paced, restrained film, it’s far from passionless. In fact, in its own buttoned-up Victorian way, it's near-hysterical. When one takes the time to process just what Miss Giddens' suspicions allude to, or what's to be inferred by the strange relationship she shares with Miles...well, it's really rather astonishing. Especially when considering the age of the children and the fact that this was made in 1961.
(Even The Nightcomers -1971, an ostensibly progressive prequel to The Turn of the Screw featuring Marlon Brando as Quint and Stephanie Beacham as Miss Jessel, felt it necessary to take the edge off a bit by making Miles and Flora teenagers.)

The Kiss

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The Innocents is a film I came upon rather late in the road, seeing it for the first time only a few years ago after several readers—learning of my newfound appreciation of Deborah Kerr—recommended it as both one of Kerr's finest films and the actress' favorite of all her performances.

I have a vague recollection of seeing part of The Innocents when I was a kid; a memory wedded in my mind with seeing The Haunting on TV (a film I now see owes quite a lot to Jack Clayton) and concluding in both cases that, to my Creature Features-weaned mind, the movies weren't scary enough to hold my interest because “nothing happens.”

Peter Wyngarde as Peter Quint

Now, to my mature, weary of the Rob Zombie/Eli Roth School of horror-for-the slow-witted eyes, I realize nothing could be further from the truth. Catching The Innocents on a TCM, I was absolutely thunderstruck by what an exquisite exercise in terror of the mind it is. I was especially impressed by how true to the nature of Henry James’ novella the film remains, maintaining the particulars of the ghost story and tone of Victorian repression, all the while interposing layer upon layer of menace, deviancy, and psychological dread in ways wholly cinematic and dramatically evocative.

I can’t remember when I’ve seen a more beautifully shot horror film (the edges of the frames are blurred, giving the impression of things hidden and lurking in corners), nor one with a screenplay so richly detailed in character and a sense of time and place. The real trick up The Innocents’ sleeve is its narrative ambiguity. It’s extremely skilled in establishing Bly House as a place of strange goings on, of encroaching decadence and decay, but just as deftly it hints that the principled, impressionable Miss Giddens might be something less than a reliable narrator.

Are the others unable to see, unwilling to see, or is there just simply nothing there to be seen?

The puzzle of the story is provocative and the whole film is shrouded in a disturbing sense of discordant interactions, but what cemented The Innocents as an enduring favorite (and made watching the film a genuinely frightening experience I was more than happy to repeat) is how its ambiguous structure played with my imagination just as deftly as the shadows and barely heard whispers in Bly House played that of Miss Giddens.

PERFORMANCES

I’ve recounted before on these pages my youthful antipathy toward the work of Deborah Kerr. A gross discrediting of this immensely talented actress born of my first having become aware of her work through those late career head-scratchers which hardly did her justice (Prudence and the Pill, Casino Royale, Marriage on the Rocks). Bonjour Tristesse is the film that turned me around, followed by the glorious Black Narcissus, and now The Innocents—unequivocally my favorite Deborah Kerr performance. It's in fact one of the most extraordinary screen performances I've had the good fortune to come across.

Given how often I’ve watched The Innocents merely to see the play of emotions cross Deborah Kerr’s face—some of the most complex appearing in almost imperceptibly brief flashes of brilliance—I too am convinced this film is Kerr’s finest hour. With the entire film hinging upon the arc of Miss Giddens’ character—from empathetic voice of reason to irrational, possibly unstable fantasist—Kerr moors this ghost story in a gripping emotional realism.
With no dialogue specifically addressing the source of her character’s many “issues” (the fervency of her devotion to children, the cause of her troubled dreams, the austerity of her existence, her restless sleep, her sexual repression/preoccupation) she makes The Innocents as much a film about the dangers of repressed desire cloaked in moral rectitude as it is about the corruption of innocence.

Deborah Kerr makes the movie for me, but the two child actors portraying Miles and Flora are beyond outstanding. Both Pamela Franklin (the wondrous actress from Our Mothers House and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie making her film debut) and near-veteran Martin Stephens (Village of the Damned) credit their performances with the patience bestowed by Jack Clayton, but I think that’s only partially the case. These kids bring an incredible amount of creepy plausibility to their roles.

Kids in horror movies ratchet up the jeopardy-factor, but too often the reality is, in the casting, they tend to be a pretty vacuous addition; in most instances mere vortices of irritation, sucking the energy out of perfectly good horror films. For the radiance of every Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed there are countless half-pint deadweights like the twin blank slates cast in The Other (1972); that annoying brat in Burnt Offerings (1976); the dyspeptic son-of-a-devil in the 2001 remake of The Omen; and worst-offender prize-winner, the noxious child in the TV movie version of The Shining, who had viewers praying for his REDRUM.

Compare the knowing and disturbing performances of Flora and Miles in The Innocents (Stephens managing to be also heartbreakingly touching) with their elongated, vacant-eyed counterparts in The Nightcomers and you really get a true sense of the enormous contribution Franklin Stephens' and Pamela Franklin's canny knowingness makes to the overall chilly effectiveness of The Innocents.

Purity Devoured by Evil

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

A testament to the richness of The Innocents’ ambitiously ambiguous structure is that its themes of innocence defiled and wholesomeness decayedextend to the enigmatic efficiency of its title.

Who are "the innocents"?

Taken literally, it refers most obviously to Miles & Flora, children whose innocence Miss Giddens fear has been robbed of them due to their exposure to the “indecencies” of Quint and Miss Jessel’s relationship. And, taking this tack, most certainly the sheltered Miss Giddens also qualifies as an innocent; not only due to her novice status as a governess, but born of her naiveté and misguided moral indomitability in the face of an evil she can scarcely comprehend. Even Miss Grose, with her determined refusal to entertain even the dimmest thought of anything untoward, represents innocence preserved through obliviousness.

Purity Decayed
A bug crawls out of the mouth of a garden cherub

I personally gravitate to the above interpretation of the film’s title, but equally persuasive is the theory that The Innocents is meant paradoxically, like Edith Wharton’s ironic titles for her novels The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. In this instance The Innocents alludes to the Christian concept of original sin and how all acquired knowledge—carnal or otherwise—is innocence lost. In the context of the film, this posits the notion that none of the characters are really innocent in nature, and none are as unwitting as they seem.

The self-interested uncle feigns no innocence, although his lack of full disclosure to Miss Giddens as to what truly transpired between Quint and Miss Jessel in his country home can be interpreted as the pretense of innocence in order not to lose her as a potential governess.

Miss Giddens’ innocence is called into question when one considers how her reaction to the uncle (obvious infatuation) is mirrored in her response to first meeting Miles. It has been suggested that her fervent devotion to children and lack of interests outside of their welfare, masks a repressed, embattled sexuality. Like many an overzealous “family values” politician, Miss Giddens is a mass of closeted desires and is unwholesomely obsessed with obscenity.

Mrs. Grose, the only adult in a position to be fully aware of what risk to the children Quint and Miss Jessel posed, nevertheless prefers to shun imagination, close her eyes in the dark, and meet everything she doesn’t understand with a dismissive, “Stuff and nonsense.” A means of shrouding herself in false innocence.

The question posed by the superficially benign behavior of the children is the one Miss Giddens asks herself: are they truly oblivious to the hauntings and all they have been exposed to, or do they merely pretend?

Sharing Secrets

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Owing to my having more practical, real-life experience with familial dysfunction than either ghosts or haunted houses, I like horror films which make a case for supernatural disturbances arising from emotional and psychological crisis. When I think of my favorite horror movies (Rosemary’s Baby, Burnt Offerings, The Shining, The Stepford Wives, The Omen, The Exorcist, and The Haunting) they all start with characters whose relationships and/or emotional states are already shown to be under some considerable stress.

Early on in The Innocents it’s hinted that the very qualities characterizing Giddens as a suitable governess—single (and perhaps given to flights of romantic fantasy, “You do look pleased!” remarks Flora, noticing Miss Giddens’ reaction to receiving a letter from the handsome uncle), sensitive, morally devout, a strong love of children—are the aspects of her personality which will later prove to be where she is most vulnerable.

The positive, sensual overstimulation she feels with her arrival at the manor (whose every corner of tranquil beauty also reveals an air of decay) turns feverish and detrimental only in proportion to what she learns about the children’s past and their relationship with Quint and Miss Jessel. As The Innocents reveals itself to be a ghost story, it also exposes its roots in Victorian repression; for one gets the distinct impression that for Miss Giddens, the materialization of the ghosts themselves is a horror, but one secondary to the real “evil” they represent: sex.

It’s precisely this‒the subtle overlay of human sexual neurosis upon the supernatural‒ that makes The Innocents such a compelling and uniquely creepy viewing experience. A film so intelligent and artful in execution that it can end on a note that leaves the audience with more questions than answers, yet at the same time feel wholly and utterly satisfying. Brilliant movie.

BONUS MATERIAL
Insights: The Making of "The Innocents" (2006) Click HERE to watch the 30 min. documentary

Director jack Clayton and Pamela Franklin behind the scenes during the filming of The Innocents

This speculative take on the events preceding The Innocents is vastly inferior and over-literal, but as a curiosity (Marlon Brando's accent!) worth a look. Available on YouTube (for now).

"More than anything I love children. More than anything."

Warning: Possible spoilers

All filmmakers start out as film fans, so perhaps it should come as no surprise when—and I stress “when,” not “if”—they find irresistible the urge to pay homage to the movies and directors that inspired them. I don’t mean those directors who’ve built their entire careers on appropriating the style of others (Brian De Palma, Quentin Tarantino); rather, those filmmakers brave/foolhardy enough to adopt imitation as their chosen form of flattery.

Peter Bogdanovich hit critical and boxoffice paydirt by candidly riding the cinematic coattails of John Ford and Howard Hawks, respectively, with The Last Picture Showand What’s Up, Doc?.That is, until the leaden At Long Last Love exposed the director as having no gift for the light touch required of aping the musical romantic comedies of the 1930s. Macho Martin Scorsese fared no better with his stab at the stylized realism of the studio-bound 1940s musical with his shapeless and meandering New York, New York(1977); and Interiors (1978), Woody Allen’s first dramatic film and beginning of many attempts to clone his idol Ingmar Bergman, was such a tin-eared East Coast transmutation of Bergman’s trademark Swedish existential dread, many understandably mistook it for a tongue-in-cheek comedy spoof.

Fragile Victim or Femme Fatale?

When writer/director Robert Benton (Bonnie & Clyde, Kramer vs Kramer, Places in the Heart) tried his hand at updating the 1940s private eye flick, the result was the smart and quirky The Late Show(1977): a small, unpretentious little gem (which flopped tremendously) that made self-referential neo-noir look effortless.

Kramer vs Kramer, Benton’s wildly popular follow-up to The Late Show, still strikes me as little more than a pedigreed Lifetime movie (decades before there was even such a thing as a Lifetime movie), but it nevertheless proved to be a mainstream cash-cow/award-magnet (a whopping nine nominations) netting Benton Oscars for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Success on such a grand scale does nothing if not feed expectations, so when it was announced Benton’s next film was to be a suspense thriller in the Alfred Hitchcock vein starring such heavy-hitters as Kramer vs Kramer Oscar-winner Meryl Streep (hot off The French Lieutenant’s Woman), two-time Oscar nominee Roy Scheider (most recently for the critically acclaimed All That Jazz), and actual Hitchcock alumnus Jessica Tandy (The Birds); anticipation was so high it’s likely that no film Robert Benton released could have lived up to the hype.

As it turns out, the public was spared from having to weigh in on the truth of such speculation when Robert Benton (collaborating with screenwriter David Newman) released Still of the Night. A film that, while unremittingly stylish, well-acted, atmospheric, and one of my I’m-pretty-much-alone-in-this personal favorites (Streep’s take on the Hitchcock blonde is my favorite of all her screen looks)—critics and audiences alike felt it to be a tepid toast to the Master of Suspense that failed to live up to even the modest expectations one might harbor for an episode of Columbo.

Meryl Streep as Brooke Reynolds

Roy Scheider as Dr. Sam Rice

Jessica Tandy as Dr. Grace Rice

Josef Sommer as George Bynum

While reeling from the dissolution of his 8-year marriage, emotionally insulated psychiatrist Sam Rice (Scheider) learns that one of his clients, an auction house antiquities curator named George Bynum (Sommer), has been brutally murdered. Bynum, a married, middle-age narcissist with a Don Juan complex, had come to Dr. Rice seeking treatment for difficulty sleeping due to a recurring nightmare somehow related to the much-younger, enigmatic woman he was seeing.

Following Bynum’s death, Sam is paid a visit by the very woman in question, one Brooke Reynolds (Streep); Bynum’s assistant and a fragile nervousy type with darting eyes, a hesitant manner, and a hairdo in constant need of being brushed away from her face. Sam, through his sessions with Bynum, had already developed something of a dream-girl fixation on Brooke, meeting the icy blonde in the flesh triggers within him paradoxical feelings of attraction and fear.

Killer's Kiss?

Basically an instance of an emotionally immovable object meeting a cryptic irresistible force, the fact that Sam and Brooke’s attraction intensifies in direct proportion to both the amount of danger their association places them in and the degree to which each fears and/or mistrusts the other, becomes a (grievously underdeveloped) part of their chemistry.

The investigation into Bynum’s murder, deemed to have been committed by a woman, appears to implicate Brooke, Bynum's assistant at the auction house where he's employed. On the surface, Brooke appears to be as fragile and damaged as the antiquities she oversees, but she is just as likely to be the potential target of the murderer, or indeed, a cold-blooded serial killer herself. And for Sam, the investigation proves a race against time as he tries to keep himself alive long enough to discover if his tapes of Bynum’s psychiatric sessions hold the key to the murderer’s identity.

Joe Grifasi and Homicide Detective Joseph Vitucci

In fashioning a Hitchcockian romantic thriller set in the cultured world of multimillion dollar art auction houses and Park Avenue shrinks, it certainly can’t be said of Robert Benton that he faulted on the particulars. For indeed, Still of the Night is an enormously sleek and handsome film; a sophisticated murder mystery fairly drenched in atmosphere and style. Oscar-winning cinematographer Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven, Sophie’s Choice) channels Fritz Lang and Hitchcock’s trademark closeups, imbuing Still of the Night’s color-saturated interiors and shadowy nighttime exteriors with a tension and dynamism not always present in Benton’s intermittently dormant script.

But as many filmmakers before and since have learned, capturing the look and feel of a Hitchcock film is a relative cakewalk when compared to replicating Hitchcock’s gift for storytelling, his understanding of the elements of suspense, and his mastery of rhythmic editing and pacing.

Sara Botsford as Gail Phillips

Still of the Nightis a film I rank amongst my favorite Hitchcock homage movies, a list comprised of, but not limited to: Donen’s Charade, Chabrol’s The Butcher, De Palma’s Obsession, Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, and Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath.

But as much as I take delight in Still of the Night being a smart and worthy entry in the faux-Hitchcock romantic thriller sweepstakes; I've no problem in confessing that I find the film to be somewhat lacking as a romance, and that the payoff of the ending feels like Benton's screenplay was perhaps a story meeting or two short. That or the victim of last-minute tampering, as Benton had a reputation for reshoots and rewrites.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

If any of what passes for objective observations about Still of the Nightring false in my writing, blame it on the film’s title sequence. Composer John Kander (sans longtime collaborator Fred Ebb) composed music for Still of the Night described by biographer James Leve as a “nocturnal waltz theme.” When I sat in the theater on opening weekend back in 1982 and heard this beautiful melody playing beneath an elegant credits sequence comprised of a full moon floating gently across a midnight sky…I knew instantly, no matter how flawed the forthcoming film might be, there was no way I was ever going to completely "dislike"Still of the Night. That opening gave me goosebumps.

To this day I think it’s one of the loveliest, most simply poetic title sequences for a “thriller” I’ve ever seen. So much so that while working on this piece, I made a nuisance of myself by asking my partner to play it for me on the piano nearly every day.

John Kander's theme for Still of the Night is intended to
"create an uneasy balance between romance and terror" - James Levee

As for the film itself, I largely regard Still of the Night as a sensual pleasure. I enjoy its surface pleasures while trying not to focus too much on all the lost potential. Unlike many, I actually think Still of the Night is a very effective thriller, providing suspense, mystery, and a few surprises along the way. It has style, tension, strong performances throughout, and a visual distinction that marks it as one of the few films from the '80s to emerge unmarred by hideous fashions and embarrassing hairdos.

But while I easily find myself stimulated by the particulars of the plot, the ritzy setting, and the overall glossy production values; Still of the Night never engages my heart, rouses my empathy, or involves me in any meaningful, emotional way with the characters. I watch the film at a pleasured remove; happy to be seeing so much talent assembled in the service of an impressive Hitchcock carbon; all the while suppressing my disappointment that the film doesn't ultimately live up to the potential suggested by the collaboration of Benton, Streep, Scheider, Tandy, and Almendros.

Still of the Night succeeds stupendously in capturing the look and feel of a Hitchcock film, but Benton's screenplay sacrifices character for plot. Which wouldn't be so bad if the ending were more satisfactory (the marvelously intricate dream which plays such an important role in the narrative yields such a banal Freudian secret).

PERFORMANCES
Although easy to forget now, but one of the major selling points of Still of the Night in 1982 was that it was it was one of the rare thrillers made for grown-ups. In a marketplace flooded by horror sequels, teen slasher flicks, and sleazy erotic thrillers, Still of the Night's promise of a return to the classic suspense thriller shone like a beacon.
I'd been a Meryl Streep fan since The Seduction of Joe Tynan, so the idea of my favorite actress appearing in one of my favorite film genres was irresistible. In assessing her take on the Hitchcock blonde, here again it must be said, objectivity is not likely to rear its head. I'm crazy about her in this movie. She's just so marvelous to watch. I just wish her role were better written.

Roy Scheider, perhaps one of the last of the grown-man actors Hollywood favored before switching to its current taste for superannuated frat boys, is also very good here. But again, his character is underserved by the screenplay, resulting in his chemistry with Streep being more muted than it should be for a film dubbed a romantic thriller.
An actor whose performance has improved over time is Josef Sommer as George Bynum. I was 25-years old when I first saw Still of the Night, and I remember being somewhat grossed out at the time by this "old fart" who fancied himself a ladies man. Well, remarkably, Sommers was only 47 when he made this film (15 years older than Streep), a good 12 years younger than I am now. Suddenly he doesn't seem so old (although his character has remained every bit as odious). Sommer may not be playing a very likable individual, but his George Bynum is terrifically realized.

She's not given much to do, but it's always a pleasure seeing the great Jessica Tandy onscreen

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Perhaps in an effort to stay one step ahead of Hitchcock-savvy audiences apt to figure out whodunnit by the 30-minute mark, Still of the Night clocks in at a brisk 93 minutes. And while there’s nothing wrong with a thriller being fast-paced (a wise choice in this instance, given the relative simplicity of the plot), haste of the sort that forces events to proceed too swiftly—leaving characters and relationships undeveloped—results in a story that feels rushed.

After breaking a desk statue in his office, Brooke gives Sam a Greek Tanagra figurine

Still of the Nighthandles its suspense duties nicely, taking the time necessary to set up pertinent plot points and having them pay off later, also, allowing for the gradual disclosure of past events (via Bynum’s taped therapy sessions) to inform and alter our perception of things in the present. Similarly, the film handles the central murder mystery extremely well, cleverly revealing details in dual “cherchez la femme” narratives: one told in flashback by the victim himself (Bynum) as he tries to unravel the mystery of the woman with whom he’s carrying on an adulterous affair; the other relayed in the present by Sam, who alternately fears and fears for the woman he barely knows, yet has fallen in love with. It is on this last point—the romantic relationship between Brooke and Sam—where Still of the Night could have most benefited from a few more minutes running time.

Innocent Seduction

Still of the Nighttakes two classic Hitchcock archetypes: the icy blonde-with-a-past (Kim Novak in Vertigo, Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, Tippi Hedren in Marnie) and the physician-heal-thyself emotionally fucked-up hero (James Stewart in Vertigo, Sean Connery in Marnie); and plops them in the middle of a genuinely intriguing murder mystery. Genre conventions demand they fall in love, but Benton’s screenplay devotes so little time to helping us understand these characters beyond the plot devices they signify, their union lacks the emotional intensity the film needs.

Two beautiful enigmas kissing does not a romance make

Brooke’s allure and mystique is wrapped up in our inability to quite figure her out, thus her abrupt interest in Sam fuel’s the film’s suspense. We’re never sure if her attraction to him is authentic or masking a sinister, ulterior agenda.

But Roy Scheider’s Sam is the character from whose perspective the film is told, so our being given so little information about him severely undercuts our engagement in the story. As written, Sam left me with more questions than Brooke: Is Sam’s remoteness a result of his marriage, or the reason the marriage dissolved? Why does a successful psychiatrist live a life of beige austerity? Beyond her beauty, why exactly is he drawn to Brooke? They never really even have a normal conversation.

Sam and his psychiatrist mother share a moment of "shop talk" in his
sparsely furnished I'm-not-ready-to-be-a-bachelor-again pad

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Filmmakers who venture into the land of Hitchcock homage do so at their peril, for nothing wrests a viewer out of a narrative faster, nor tugs at the willing suspension of disbelief more aggressively, than being invited by the director to engage in a game of “Spot the Hitchcock reference.”

North by Northwest
Still of the Night features an auction sequence similar to the one in the Hitchcock film,
but where Cary Grant sought the attention of the police, Scheider tries to divert it

Unlike those De Palma films where entire sequences are lifted from Hitchcock films, Still of the Night wisely adheres to “in the style of” homage when it comes to its storytelling. Hitchcock references abound (North by Northwest blonde, Marnie red, Notorious daddy-issues) but they're subtle and unobtrusive enough for the film to be enjoyed by those not possessing a vast familiarity with the works of the Master of Suspense. Of course, for those who do, Still of the Night offers a wealth of Hitchcock-related dividends, but none so overt as to prove a narrative distraction.

Saboteur/North by Northwest
The one arm, hanging-by-a-thread rescue attempt

Rear Window
Bynum watches Brooke's apartment and spies her undressing for a stranger

Vertigo
A bell tower is the site of a death suspected of being murder

Spellbound
Brooke and Sam analyze the details of a dream to solve a murder and unlock a dark secret

The Birds
An attacking bird features in the film's biggest "jump" moment

Psycho
The working title for Still of the Night was Stab, so...there you have it

BONUS MATERIAL

Although they share no scenes together in Still of the Night, Meryl Streep and actor Joe Grifasi are longtime friends, their association going back to their days at the Yale School of Drama in the '70s. Grifasi has appeared with Streep onscreen in The Deer Hunter and Ironweed. Click HERE to see them performing the musical intro to an all-star 2014 charity event.

For those who can actually stand to watch Andy Cohen (I can't...does the man ever shut up?) here's a clip of Meryl Streep from a 2012 episode of the TV program Watch What Happens: Live in which she answers the question: "Name one bad film that you have made." HERE (at the 13-minute mark).

I remember back when Still of the Night was still known as Stab, Meryl Streep and Roy Scheider were presenters on some award show. Their pairing in the soon-to-be-released Stab was announced as they approached the podium. At some point in their stage banter Streep joked, "Oh, I kill him in that!" As unlikely as it is Streep would divulge the actual ending of the film, I've never forgotten her saying this, and thus always wondered if there was ever an alternate ending for Still of the Night.

The rich are always with us. And if you’re a resident of Los Angeles, the acute inevitability of their presence and ubiquitous cultural sway is perhaps even more keenly felt than anywhere else. I’ve always envisioned myself as positioned somewhere between ambivalence and indifference when it comes to the rich; certainly not impressed by them, but neither envious nor begrudging of affluence in those for whom it holds some level of significance.

Of course, this moderate stance has shifted considerably amidst today’s political climate of wealth as god, legitimizer of systemic cruelty, and validate of all human worth. America has always harbored a rather twisted attitude towards the well-to-do; the poor being so enamored of the wealthy that in elections they consistently vote against their own best interests, unaccountably protective of the fortunes of the “haves” whom they irrationally see as guardians of the well-being of the “have-nots.” The in-your-face, historical reality of immovable wealth in America has never proved much of a match for the durability of people’s belief in the myth of the American Dream.

More to my liking and closer to my own feelings has been the attitude towards the rich reflected in European films. While America movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Great Gatsby can’t seem to make up their minds as to whether they’re repulsed or enthralled by rapacious capitalism; European directors like Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard share a singular lack of ambivalence on the topic. Often depicting the rich as parasitic exploiters casually unaware/unconcerned with the plight of others, these directors harbor what is to me a healthy (if not refreshing) disdain for wealth and the bourgeoisie.

Post-election fallout has left me with a faintly intensified antipathy towards the rich, manifesting itself in ways which are exasperatingly reactive and frustratingly internal. For example, I’ve caught myself eye-rolling to the point of strain every time I find myself witness to yet another retail establishment outburst by some “I’m used to good service!” type sporting one of those I’d-like-to-speak-to-the-manager haircuts and a look of unearned righteousness.
The only truly external reaction to the wealthy I exhibit—and mind you, I’m bearing no pride in confessing this—is one both petty and passive-aggressive. And therefore, enormously gratifying. My shame is that I’m one of those L.A. drivers more than happy to allow cars to merge and cut in on the freeway…unless I see it’s a luxury automobile: in which case, I tend to let Herr Mercedes and Monsieur Maserati fend for themselves.

Whatever name one attributes to these feelings, however irrational, whatever their degree of latency or full-blown realization; these emotions represent the seeds of festering resentment and contempt at the center of Claude Chabrol’s masterful (and often agonizingly intense) psychological thriller La Cérémonie.

Isabelle Huppert as Jeanne

Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie Bonhomme

Jacqueline Bisset as Catherine Lelievre

Jean-Pierre Cassel as Georges Lelievre

Virginie Ledoyen as Melinda Lelievre

In truth, to describe La Cérémonie as a psychological thriller or even frame its narrative in terms of mere class warfare seems somehow to diminish the complexity of the layers of intense emotional and social collision woven into this well-constructed drama with overtones of black comedy. Adapted by Chabrol & Caroline Eliacheff from the 1977 novel A Judgment in Stoneby Ruth Rendell; La Cérémonie is a bracingly easy-to-immerse-oneself-in thriller of culture, class, character, and circumstance. A film whose shifting focus of empathy and identification keeps the viewer ever on their guard and off balance.

La Cérémonie is a cause-and-effect tragedy in which characters who should never meet are nevertheless brought together by chance and fateful incident (past and present) that cruelly conspire to bring about the most dreaded of outcomes. As though on a piteously preordained course doomed to inevitable collision, these individuals, benign in isolation, become combustible when merged.

The setup is so good, the sense that none of this is going to end well, so strong; I found watching La Cérémonie to be like assembling a jigsaw picture puzzle whose final image you really don’t want to see.

And indeed, from its initial scenes (which on repeat viewing reveal themselves to be chock full of telltale clues and hints) La Cérémonie establishes itself as a puzzle.

As the film opens, wealthy Catherine Lelièvre (Bisset), chic manager of an art gallery and wife of industrialist Georges Lelièvre (Cassel), is interviewing a potential live-in housekeeper. The applicant, one Sophie Bonhomme (Bonnaire) is a wan, taciturn type who, while suitably experienced, nevertheless comes across as slightly odd. There’s something subtly out-of-step about her behavior. Behavior which, under the circumstances, could easily be attributed to nerves or a sign of a blunt efficiency.
Still, there’s a hint of something constrained and impervious in Sophie’s manner (the questions she asks, the halting vagueness of her responses) that makes her eventual engagement by the Lelièvres (rounding out the household: teenage Gilles and college-age Melinda, only there on weekends) feel less like the longed-for solution to a domestic problem than the unwitting opening of a Pandora’s Box of trouble.

Georges fails to find the new TV to be as enthralling as stepson Gilles (Valentin Merlet)

Sophie’s entrance to the Lelièvre household, a spacious mansion in the secluded French countryside, coincides with the hooking up of an enormous—by 1995 standards—TV; a trivial detail Chabrol wryly uses as juxtaposed commentary. The acquisition of this time-killing, emotion-benumbing “100 channels of nothing” device augers a threat as insidious and destructive to this erudite, cultured family as the arrival of their detached and uncurious housekeeper.

Once ensconced, Sophie proves a tireless worker, albeit emotionally undemonstrative and idiosyncratic in oddly discomfiting ways. I.e., she refuses to use the dishwasher, keeps the house immaculate save for the books in the library, and her spare hours are spent indulging in sweets and staring transfixed at the small TV in her room. In another time, Sophie’s remote demeanor would be a non-issue, her status as servant unequivocally branding her “beneath” her employers; the significance of her existence determined by how well she carries out the duties of her job.

But this takes place in the mid- ‘90s, a time by which the rich had mastered the subtle art of treating the hired help as though they are members of the family while still making abundantly clear that by no means are they actually equals.

Like a vampire at the portal of a church, Sophie finds herself unable to enter the family's library

Given Chabrol’s traditional unsympathetic depiction of the bourgeoisie, the Lelièvres appear at first to be implicated in this tale of suppressed class warfare; but they are shown to be an affectionate, kind, and intelligent family (the sound of their name even suggesting “book”). They’re the type of aware, well-intentioned rich folk who debate over what to call the housekeeper (maid, servant, domestic) and grapple with the fine line between being caring and patronizing (they offer to pay for Sophie’s driving lessons and prescription glasses).

If guilty of anything, it’s a kind of selective, blithe obliviousness characteristic of privileged classes whose wealth affords the luxury of a blinkered world-view (“You know I don’t read the papers”), and a casual self-centeredness that puts their personal concerns before consideration of others.

There are several marvelous moments when the Lelièvres exhibit near-imperceptible displays of class superiority (just like they happen in real life): Catherine conducts the entire job interview detailing what she needs in a housekeeper, completely forgetting to tell Sophie how much she'll be paid. Similarly, she treats Sophie's requiring a day off as more of an irritation than a human necessity. Georges, the autocrat, watches Sophie with a coldly judgmental eye. And even Melinda, the champion of the downtrodden, has a telling moment with a borrowed handkerchief.

"I know about you."
That line is repeated frequently in this film about secrets, gossip, and the past

But if affluence breeds a relative disinterest in the world beyond its immediate environs, its lack seems to foster a fixation on the comings and goings of the moneyed set that whiplashes between overawed captivation and bilious resentment.

This attitude is exemplified by Jeanne (Huppert), the town postmistress, gossip, and all-around troublemaking busybody who insinuates herself into the closed-off life of Sophie. Initially drawn to one another out of mutual exploitation, then ultimately, a shared, intuitively divined psychosis; the bonding of these women of no consequence evolves (a la Shelly Duvall & Sissy Spacek in 3 Women) into the pair becoming something together that neither could be on their own.

Feeding off of one another—Sophie supplying Jeanne with gossip access to the Lelièvre family, for whom she bears a grudge for real and imagined slights; Jeanne giving voice and rebellious action to Sophie’s suppressed disaffection—they are mob mentality in microcosm and cultural catharsis at its most horrific.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’m mad about good thrillers, but with La Cérémonie I’ve hit the trifecta. It’s a rollicking good suspenser that keeps tightening the screws of tension with each scene and unexpected reveal; it’s an unusually perceptive character drama and dark-hued study in abnormal psychology; and lastly, it’s a sharp-toothed, sinister social critique.

When La Cérémonie was released in 1995, TV’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, that long-running, vomitous exercise in wealth fetishism, was in its 11^th and final season. I never could figure out who the audience for that show was, but a little bit of Chabrol cynicism was the perfect antidote for America’s steady diet of “rich is good!” mythologizing (which, perversely enough, goes head-to-head with that other American myth: the one devoted to reassuring the poor and unsophisticated they are happier and better off that way).

Like One of The Family

Movies about lower-class resentment play well in America only if they are about white characters like Norma Ray and Karen Silkwood. Black characters and other people of color traditionally exist in films to reassure white audiences, not scare them. We here in the States have always been able to absorb European narratives that humanize the lower classes because the rebellious underlings in The Servant, Gosford Park, The Maids, and Downton Abbeyare white.

The majority of household staff in well-to-do U.S. homes are people of color, but America has such an uneasy relationship with its racism and unacknowledged class systems (he says, to the surprise of no one) that when it comes to the depiction of class tension, we need to feed ourselves nonthreatening pablum like The Help. Therefore, because it would require audiences to recognize and humanize the suffering of people we systemically deem invisible; an American version of a film like La Cérémonie is virtually unimaginable.

The Bane of the Bourgeois: Service Worker Insolence
Georges is convinced Jeanne opens his family's mail

PERFORMANCES

Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers are so well-constructed that I tend to overlook how often I find his casting choices to be a tad on the bland side (Robert Cummings? Farley Granger? Diane Baker?) and the acting variable. Claude Chabrol (dubbed the French Hitchcock) has well-constructed films, too, but he also had a gift for getting the best out of actors. So much so that even his weaker efforts (Masques, Ten Days Wonder) are salvaged by their outstanding and sensitive performances.

Le Boucher (1970) may be a favorite Chabrol film, but a very close second is the more accessible La Cérémonie; a film distinguished by its intelligent screenplay, deftly handled dramatic tension, and superlative cast.

In 1974 Cassel and Bisset co-starred in Murder on the Orient Express
and in 1991 (rather presciently) a comedy TV-movie titled The Maid

Jacqueline Bisset has grown more beautiful with age, and in this (my first time seeing her in a French language film) she gives an aware performance that fits like a glove with that of the always excellent Jean-Pierre Cassel. The members of the Lelièvre family are depicted in a natural way, devoid of caricature, making their subtle hypocrisies as keenly felt as the genuine intimacy and affection they share.

Isabelle Huppert appeared in seven of Claude Chabrol's films.
Chabrol died in 2010 at the age of 80

But the obvious standouts are Isabelle Huppert (whose gift is making us interested in, and maybe even understand, characters we’d otherwise find reprehensible), and Sandrine Bonnaire. First off, Huppert is a force of nature and makes any film she appears in exponentially better the minute she appears; but Bonnaire’s performance is another revelation. Unfamiliar with the actress, I was so struck by the way she made a character’s silences so eloquent. Her Sophie carries around a lifetime of humiliations she struggles to conceal, some horrific, others pitiable; but she’s positively chilling in her lack of self-pity. Also in her conveyance of the kind of pent-up anger evident in certain kinds of children who, when confronted with things they don’t understand or can’t access, resort to a kind of self-protective belligerence.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Looking over my recent posts, I see that La Cérémonie is the tenth thriller I’ve written about since the start of the year. And on my own, I’ve watched all of four horror movies in August alone. Coincidence? I don’t think so. I’ve always held that in times of stress, horror films, suspense thrillers, and psychodramas offer a great outlet for cathartic release.

Scary movies seem to fill an anxiety void by providing an environment where one can give vent to bottled up tensions and feelings of distress that in real life have no recourse or resolution.

One of the reasons revisiting La Cérémonie proved so gratifying to me is because it feels like a curiously relevant movie in our current social climate. The film touches on themes like anti-intellectualism and the baseless fear of the unfamiliar. It brushes against the kind of resentful envy you read about in this day of social media, where people preoccupy themselves with the lives of others, only to come to resent those very lives they imagine to be happier than their own. It looks at the superficial balm of religion, and explores the futility of trying to escape one’s past.

The film makes reference to how easily we pacify ourselves with television. We don’t learn anything from it, we don’t really watch it so much as lose ourselves in it. All it asks for is our undivided attention, and in exchange it helps benumb us to the pain of thinking, remembering, or feeling.

But mostly La Cérémonie (apparently an archaic term for the act of executing someone for a capital crime) offers an image of insanity that is infinitely saner than the world I’ve been waking up to since November 8^th. I was in the perfect frame of mind to see a film which framed the rich in a context of inconsequence, impotence, and unwitting perniciousness. I needed the horror. And while Chabrol films it all ambiguously and with a great deal of anticipation and élan, the ultimate effect of this remarkable thriller was like shock treatment. It jolted me so that I actually felt relaxed for the first time in ages.

“There are many things I find loathsome in men, but least of all the evil within them.”

BONUS MATERIAL

Jacqueline Bisset & Jean-Pierre Cassel / 1974 and 1995
Murder on the Orient Express / Le Ceremonie

Virginie Ledoyen & Isabelle Huppert reunited in Francois Ozon's 8 Women (2002)

Themes similar to those in Le Ceremonie can be found in Jean Genet's The Maids.
The 1975 film adaptation starred Glenda Jackson and Susannah York

“Such, my angels, is the role of sex in history”

The Lion in Winter (1968)

Well, someone could certainly write a book (and a heavy tome it would be) about the role of sex in Hollywood history. Especially when it comes to the influence libidinal urges have had on the casting of films, and the role sex has played in the launching and ruination of careers.

During award season, when film industry types love to go around giving self-serious interviews calling each other artists, lauding the challenges of “the work,” and praising their colleagues, ad nauseum, for their bravery, vision, and artistic courage; one would think that all decisions relative to the making of films are ones based exclusively on talent and artistic merit. Closer to the truth (thanks to decades worth of autobiographies, tell-it-alls, and TV talk shows) is that a great many decisions—particularly those relative to casting—seem to actually emanate from below the belt.

When it comes to casting, the Hollywood paradigm has traditionally been that of a patriarchic boys club built upon cronyism, nepotism, and cliques; its inherent misogyny and sexism feeding into the normalizing of a kind of “vertical casting couch” sensibility when it comes to the relationship between those in power (male producers and directors) and those with little (actresses).

Few behind-the-scenes Hollywood clichés are as enduring and tiresomely pervasive as that of the movie director who falls in love/lust with his leading lady. Whether it be infatuation (George Sidney and Ann-Margret: Bye Bye Birdie), obsession (Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren: The Birds, Marnie), love affair (Clint Eastwood and well…everybody), or subsequent matrimony (Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)—the faces change, but the particulars have the same weary ring: movie contact = movie contract. (I’ll save the male-on-male wing of this phenomenon [director Luchino Visconti and Helmut Berger] for another time.)

An inevitable phase of soundstage lust blossoming into true love is when the father-figure/mentor has the impulse to star his muse/protégé in a work of classical literature. Paramount head Robert Evans acquired the rights to The Great Gatsby for wife Ali MacGraw to star in before she made a literal getaway with her The Getaway co-star Steve McQueen, summarily ending both her marriage and her career. Roman Polanski had a dream of casting wife Sharon Tate as the ruined heroine of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles before her tragic death.
And, representing the only film in this category to come to fruition as envisioned: director Peter Bogdanovich, after falling in love with ingenue Cybill Shepherd during the making of The Last Picture Show, leaving his then-pregnant wife Polly Platt (the film’s production designer) and their toddler daughter, decides to star his lady love in an adaptation of Henry James’ Daisy Miller.

Cybill Shepherd as Annie P. "Daisy" Miller

Barry Brown as Frederick Forsyth Winterbourne

Cloris Leachman as Mrs. Ezra B. Miller

Eileen Brennan as Mrs. Walker

Mildred Natwick as Mrs. Costello

Duilio Del Prete as Mr. Giovanelli

Adapted from Henry James’ novella, Daisy Miller tells the story of a headstrong, somewhat spoiled young lady from Schenectady, New York traveling Europe with her family in 1876. The Miller family: vivacious, gadabout Daisy (Shepherd), bratty little brother Randolph (James McMurtry), and distracted mother (Leachman); are ragingly nouveau riche clan and the epitome of the ugly American. Uncurious, unsophisticated, and forever talking about everything is so much better back home, though they appear to be, they are not “modern” so much as they are primitive.

But Daisy, (no one calls her by her given name, Annie) imbued with enough beauty, charm, and convivial graces to mitigate her shortcomings, has turned her baseness into a kind of performance art. A mass of flirtatious affectations and frilly adornments, Daisy is a perpetual motion machine of restive parasol twirling and fan-fluttering, all choreographed to the relentless trill of her own mindless chatter.

So thoroughly is Daisy a creature of self-interest, that in the restrictive atmosphere of European society and its rigidly-adhered-to codes of conduct and decorum, her guileless impudence might easily be mistaken for nose-thumbing recklessness at worst, proto-feminist rebellion at best. But of course, given Daisy’s thorough lack of awareness—self or otherwise—what we’re really witness to is a display of America’s top commodity and chief export: entitled arrogance.

Our Daisy as you're most apt to find her...mouth open and talking a blue streak

While touring Vevey, Switzerland, Daisy meets American expatriate (the name white immigrants have devised for themselves) Frederick Winterbourne; a formal and reserved young man who has lived in Europe so long he has absorbed the repressive manners and moral customs of the people. Ever the flirt, Daisy takes great pleasure in ruffling Winterbourne’s starchy feathers, heedless of the obvious fact that her actions largely succeed in merely confounding him.

As both parties later descend upon Rome, Winterbourne’s cautious courtship of Daisy both mirrors and is impacted by the pressures of aristocratic propriety. The difficulty arising out of Daisy not caring a whit for social conventions and Winterbourne being fairly ruled by them. Though there is mutual attraction, things keep getting gummed up by the near-constant misunderstanding of overtures and misreading of gestures.

In this beautifully composed shot, Mr. Winterbourne keeps his eye on Daisy (seen in the mirror behind him, talking to the hostess, Mrs. Walker) while Mrs. Miller prattles away to no one in particular, and Randolph amuses himself with the silverware

Daisy’s greatest sin stems from the fact that she’s a self-possessed grown woman who dares bristle at the socially-mandated obligation that she conduct herself like a helpless child. The affectations of propriety requiring women to seek male authorization, maternal escort, or societal consent for even the most innocuous activities don’t sit well with the freewheeling Daisy. Thus, it isn’t long before her penchant for doing just as she pleases results in tongues wagging, invitations withdrawn, and puts her reputation and social standing (such as it was) at risk.

The romantic dilemma this poses for Winterbourne, who keeps company with far too many old gossips and is forever second-guessing himself, is whether the mere appearance of transgression is as damning as the actual thing. Winterbourne hopes Daisy is only a recklessly naïve girl and not the fallen woman everyone believes her to be, but things are not helped by his never thawing out enough to honestly express his feelings for her, nor does Daisy drop her flirt-and-tease façade long enough to be as direct with him in her words as she prides herself as being in her actions.

The outcome of Daisy Miller is foretold by the deliberate names of its characters, the combination of daisies and winter evoking images of growth restricted and certain death.

Daisy Miller is largely remembered as the film that broke Peter Bogdanovich’s three-film winning streak (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, What’s Up Doc?), and while critics at the time treated it with more kindness than its reputation would suggest, it was nevertheless a film 1974 audiences found very resistible.

Part of this, I think, is attributable to something Bogdanovich references in his DVD commentary: that Daisy Miller was made several years before the vogue in Merchant/Ivory-style period picture adaptations of literary classics. But as a member of “the public” who was around at the time, I can say that a good deal of resistance to Daisy Miller had a lot to do with the public’s oversaturation with Svengali/Trilby roadshow Bogdanovich and Shepherd treated us to on talk shows and in magazines.

Innocent flirt or fallen woman?

Bogdanovich likes to believe that people resented the couple’s happiness. Closer to the truth is that Bogdanovich and Shepherd failed to see how callous and unfeeling their public declarations of love and happiness came across given that everyone with access to Rona Barrett or Rex Reed knew it came at the cost of betraying a pregnant wife and abandoning a child.

True love may have been in flower for this “beautiful people” pair, but us common folk merely saw an oft-repeated Hollywood cliché: neophyte director dumps his lean-years wife for blonde goddess starlet at first flush of success. In addition, the public likes to think it makes stars, but Bogdanovich was shoving Cybill down our throats (he produced an ear-torture vanity project LP of his lady love singing songs by Cole Porter), branding her a star before it was earned.

I’m not sure what Bogdanovich saw when he looked at Cybill Shepherd (likely, the talented, funny, actress and singer she eventually grew to be), but at the time, I have to say I saw only a meagerly gifted girl of well-scrubbed attractiveness. She was wonderful in The Last Picture Show, but as part of a strong ensemble, not star material.

When it was announced that the inexperienced former model was to actually star in Daisy Miller, everyone (except Bogdanovich, apparently) seized on the irony of this well-known Orson Welles idolater in essence recreating those scenes in Citizen Kane where Charles Foster Kane insists on making his modestly-talented sweetheart into an opera singer for his own ego-driven reasons. No, by the time Daisy Miller made it to the screen, the public not only wanted this couple to fail, they needed them to.

While I recognize it’s unfair to judge a film based on the personal lives of the people making it, I’m also not so naïve as not to also understand that the obfuscation of reality and fantasy is the absolute cornerstone of the Hollywood star system. The public’s interest in Elizabeth Taylor’s real-life scandals helped make many an Elizabeth Taylor clunker into a hit (The Sandpiper), in fact, the studios relied upon it. The only time people in the film industry think the merging of private and professional is unjust is when it bites them in the ass at the boxoffice.

Winterbourne: "Wouldn't it be funny if they both were perfectly innocent and
sincere and had no idea of the impression they were creating?"
Mrs. Costello: "No, it wouldn't be funny."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

With Daisy Miller, Peter Bogdanovich has crafted what I feel is a handsomely mounted, exquisitely filmed and costumed, and at times, genuinely moving adaptation of Henry James’ short novel. Uncommonly faithful to its source material, not only are the locations precise and the actors fit the physical descriptions of their characters to a T; but the script adheres so closely to the text you could actually follow along with the book while watching the film.

Bogdanovich's cinematic eye is as sharp as ever, and the film never feels sluggish or airless like a great many costume dramas. Daisy Miller is a rarity in period dramas, in that it is very entertaining and watchable. Its flaws are minor and it plays very much like the old-fashioned period films of Hollywood's Golden Age, when sharp storytelling and keen pacing took precedent over the kind of over-referential stiffness that later came to exemplify films of the genre.

Indeed, so much is so ideal about Daisy Miller that it’s rather a shame my only complaint falls on the weakness presented by Daisy herself. The actress portraying her, not the character.

Daisy, making friends and influencing people. Not.

With a great deal of humor, and style, Bogdanovich has constructed a semi-tragic comedy of manners that feels like Theodore Dreiser American vulgarity meets Edith Wharton British propriety. He finds ample opportunities to dramatize the contrasts between the dreary Eurocentrism of the Miller family and the studied hypocrisy of Americans abroad who have adopted the customs of the British aristocracy.

Interweaving this with a love story that never can get started, Bogdanovich, who clearly envisions Daisy as something of an early suffragette and feminist, still leaves it up to us to draw out own conclusions as to whether Daisy’s independence is the result of a unique brand of Yankee boorishness or an admirable resistance to senseless social constriction.

This societal drama is sensitively and amusingly played out, but what’s lacking is a Daisy capable of conveying even a hint of why, beneath all the flirting and white-noise chatter, she is worthy of the attention James/Winterbourne/Bogdanovich expend on her.

Watching Daisy Miller, I was left with the impression that the fatal flaw of the film is that Bogdanovich took Cybill's appeal as a given. Certain that Shepherd was "born for the role" and that she and Daisy were one in the same, he simply plops her in front of the camera. Gone is the protective, loving care of the sort lavished on her performance in The Last Picture Show. Here the allows Cybill to merely be Cybill, but it takes talent to project yourself on the screen, Shepherd at this point was simply too green.

PERFORMANCES

For a brief moment in time Bogdanovich had wanted to star opposite Shephard in Daisy Miller with Orson Welles directing. While the idea sounds positively bananas, the side of me that loves Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Showgirls wishes it had actually happened.

In considering projects for Shepherd to star in, Bogdanovich stated that it was down to Daisy Miller and Calder Willingham’s 1972 novel Rambling Rose. Rambling Rose was made into a film in 1991 and garnered an Academy Award nomination for its star, 24-year-old Laura Dern.

I bring this up to illustrate why I think Cybill Shepherd’s largely cosmetic performance in Daisy Miller is what ultimately stops it from being the film it could be. Shepherd and Dern were roughly the same age when making these films; both stories about naïve young women who innocently threaten the pervasive social structure.

Somber Barry Brown, who committed suicide in 1978, gives the film's best performance;
his sad-eyed melancholy fairly aching to be relieved by the life force that is Daisy

Going by type alone, Cybill Shepherd would have been-well cast as Rose, just as Dern would have made a fine Daisy Miller; but to look at what these two actresses do with these roles is to understand the subtle but lethal difference between capable amateur and gifted professional.

Shepherd is not awful in Daisy Miller, she does have her moments. But her performance is largely external and superficial. Saddled with a character who never shuts up and a director fond of long single takes, Shepherd obviously had her hands full. Thus (as my partner noted with his usual perspicacity) perhaps Shepherd can’t be faulted if, after delivering - in machine gun rap - what must be page upon page of dialogue and hitting all those marks, she invariably resorts to hoisting that prominent chin of hers and adopting a look of smug self-satisfaction at having simply made it through the whole thing without having made a mistake. It's clear she's doing the best that she can. Nuance of performance be damned, she remembered it all!

Try as she might, lovely Cybill Shepherd has but a single, all-purpose expression to offer the camera when it comes in for a closeup. Ideal for magazine covers, it's a non-look that communicates considerably less than Bogdanovich thinks

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As literary heroines go, I find Daisy Miller to be a captivating (if exasperating) heartbreaker. I loved her on the printed page, her deceptively complex, out-of-step-with-the-times character fitting in with the women I fell in love with in Far From The Madding Crowd, Madame Bovary, Sister Carrie, and Anna Karenina. Perhaps because I liked the book so much and because Bogdanovich’s adaptation is so glowingly faithful to it, I can overlook the shortcomings I have about Cybill Shepherd in the role.

As I’ve stated, the film can be very moving at times (I get waterworks at the end, no matter how many times I see it), so perhaps, when I relinquish my desire for what Daisy could have been and allow myself to enjoy THIS Daisy (Shepherd is not without her charm), the emotions and thwarted romance of the story are able to reach my heart.

Mildred Natwick is a real delight in her brief scenes. This amusingly well-turned-out bathhouse is just one of many examples of Bogdanovich adding visual interest to dialogue-heavy sequences

Staying true to his devotion to creating a kind of Orson Wells-type repertory company of actors, Bogdanovich features many players from The Last Picture Show, Eileen Brennan and Duilio Del Prete going on join Shepherd in Bogdanovich's next feature, the equally ill-fated At Long Last Love.

Had I seen Daisy Miller when it was released, I'm fairly certain I would have disliked it. In the heat of huge 1974 releases like Chinatown, The Godfather Part II, The Great Gatsby,Mame, The Towering Inferno, and countless disaster films and Oscar contenders (1974 was a biggie!), I'm afraid I wouldn't have appreciated Daisy Miller's small-scale virtues.

When it comes to watching the film today, I'd be lying if I said it didn't mitigate matters considerably knowing that time and cruel fate has mellowed what once seemed so obnoxious insufferable about the Hollywood's "It" couple (Peter & Cybill) and my feelings about the project as a whole. It's easier to recognize and appreciate what a talented director Peter Bogdanovich is when he's not telling us so. Likewise, knowing that Cybill Shepherd went out and studied and ultimately matured into a very good actress and comedienne, that I like her introspective take on her younger self (her autobiography Cybill Disobedience is a great read), and respect her political activism; well...it all goes a long way toward getting me to relinquish my dogged resistance to her professional inexperience as Daisy and simply enjoy the many pleasures this film has to offer.
Funny how time has the power to work that kind of magic.

BONUS MATERIAL

When in Rome, Daisy and her family stay at The Hotel Bristol. Which also happens
to be the name of the fictional hotel where Barbra Streisand wreaks havoc in What's Up, Doc?

From 2004: Shepherd tells her favorite Elvis Presley anecdote on The Graham Norton Show
HERE

Cybill's bestselling 2000 autobiography is available for free download in its entirety on her website
HERE

"I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or interfere with anything I do."

In interviews for his 1974 adaptation of Henry James’ Daisy Miller, director Peter Bogdanovich is fond of recounting that he chose somber-faced actor Barry Brown for the role of self-serious Frederick Winterbourne because Brown was the only actor in Hollywood who looked like he’d actually ever read a book.

In a similar vein (but at the entirely opposite end of the spectrum), one of the most egregious of the countless missteps taken in bringing Harold Robbin’s relentlessly trashy 1976 novel The Lonely Lady to the screen was to cast in the lead role of Jerilee Randall—gifted English major, novelist, and aspiring screenwriter—an actress who not only looks as though she’s never read a book, but upon encountering one, might be overheard asking “How does it work?”

Of course, because that's what intellectual writer-types do

The actress is Pia Zadora: the pint-sized kewpie doll who sought to set movie screens ablaze in the early 1980s with her scorching sensuality, only to see out the decade as a household name via punchline—a female Rodney Dangerfield who got no respect.

Although Zadora had been in the business since childhood (her film debut was in 1964s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians), as an adult she fairly burst on the scene out of nowhere, ubiquitously showcased in high-profile gigs that placed her front and center like a star. This in spite of the fact that absolutely no one knew who she was.

Like that other pop-culture question mark with the exotic name, actress and Alberto VO-5 pitchwoman Rula Lenska, Pia Zadora’s assumption of fame ultimately became what she became famous for. Thanks to the bankrolling of her billionaire industrialist husband Meshulam Riklis (age 54 to her 23), Zadora became the TV and print ad face of Dubonnet, a recording artist, a Vegas headliner, and earned “introducing” billing (and a controversial Golden Globe win) for her widely panned starring role in the 1982 Orson Welles film Butterfly. She was everything but a star. If stardom could be bought, she should have been; but public consensus was that she was little more than competent as a performer, and as an actress she was (per the New York Times)“spectacularly inept.”

Hey, Looka Me! I'm A Writer!

But deep pockets don’t read reviews. So, while Hollywood was still giggling over the fact that Pia Zadora was awarded the New Star of the Year Golden Globe over Elizabeth McGovern, Howard Rollins, and Kathleen Turner, sugar daddy Riklis was ponying up more than half the budget for his five-foot inamorata to star and get above-the-title-billing in the film adaptation of Harold Robbins’ The Lonely Lady.

Pia Zadora as Jerilee Randall

Lloyd Bochner as Walter Thornton

Anthony Holland as Guy Jackson

Bibi Besch as Veronica Randall

Jared Martin as George Ballantine

Joseph Cali as Vincent "Vinnie" Dacosta

A member of that rarefied, they-don’t-make-‘em-like-this-anymore club of tantalizing cinema trash reserved for such gems as Valley of the Dolls, The Oscar, The Other Side of Midnight, and Showgirls;The Lonely Lady is a film to be cherished. For in everything from content to execution, it exhibits that one essential quality shared by all craptastic classics—a surfeit of ambition, pretension, and ego supported by a scarcity of talent, budget, and good taste.

Pared down and retooled considerably from its unwieldly and often incoherent source novel (Robbins credited cocaine for his writing prolificacy), the screenplay for The Lonely Lady is credited to no less than three writers. A rather astonishing fact given the banality of the results, but it does go a long way toward explaining why the lead character comes across as a tad schizophrenic

Borrowing from the popular “three working girls” format of movies like The Pleasure Seekers, Three Coins in the Fountain, The Best of Everything, and Valley of the Dolls, The Lonely Lady consolidates these three standard female tropes: the pragmatist, the romantic, the maker-of-bad-decisions -- into a single character: Jerilee Randall. The serious writer saddled with the name of an ‘80s aerobics instructor.

When The Lonely Lady was released in September of 1983,
Pia Zadora felt the burn of unanimous critical censure

Jerilee is inserted into your garden-variety showbiz cautionary tale depicting Hollywood as a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog business which exploits the talented and corrupts the innocent. The Lonely Lady’s ostensibly feminist angle (don’t you believe it) is that Jerilee, unlike the victimized heroines of Jacqueline Susann novels, has no interest in being an actress, model, or singer; she has brains and ambition and only wants to succeed behind the scenes as a screenwriter. But true to the genre, Jerilee just also happens to be sexually irresistible to all she meets, male and female, so sexism, misogyny, and her overall hotness prove to be major hurdles to overcome on her path toward being taken seriously as a writer.

Leaving no cliché unturned, The Lonely Lady charts Jerilee’s struggle to hang onto her innocence and principles while making that brutal climb up that Mount Everest called success. Surviving assault, impotent husbands, horny producers, philandering matinee idols, drugs, alcohol, abortion, lesbianism, and sanitariums (not a nut house!). When she reaches that peak, Jerilee stands there waiting for the rush of exhilaration to come. But it doesn't, and she's all alone. And the feeling of loneliness is overpowering... 'cause she's The Lonely Lady. (Thank you, Anne Welles.)

Vinnie Goes for the Big Pocket Shot

By the time The Lonely Lady limped to movie screens, public tastes and mores had changed significantly in regard to these Harold Robbins/Jacqueline Susann/Sidney Sheldon-style sex-power-glamour sleaze and cheesefests. Nighttime television—in the form of soaps (Dallas and Dynasty) and the miniseries (The Thorn Birds, Winds of War and Princess Daisy in 1983 alone)—had completely co-opted the no-longer-shocking genre; the boom in vhs and cable porn rendering Zadora’s frequent nude scenes and so-called steamy couplings quaint, if not downright passé.

Thus, The Lonely Ladyarrived on the scene looking like an artifact from the past; a low-budget, Cinemax-tacky take on the glossy soap operas of the ‘50s and ‘60s, with nothing new to say about Hollywood, relationships, or systemic misogyny (what could the movie say about the exploitation of women when the willing exploitation of its leading lady was its sole raison d’être?).

Worse still, it arrived with virtually none of the usual compensations movies like this offer: exotic locales, glamour, beautiful people. First off, the men. Seriously, you’d have to look far to find a less appetizing and charmless roster of male co-stars. It’s a virtual parade of receding hairlines, flabby middles, and hairy backs. Sure, the movie might be trying to make a point about the kind of slimeball our Jerilee has to fight off (several of them uncannily resembling Harold Robbins), but even the film’s so-called hunks are an uncommonly bland and unprepossessing bunch.

What Becomes A Legend Most?
Jerilee marries a millionaire and gets a fur coat

As for glamour, Zadora gets to strut around in a few becoming Armani gowns, but by and large, The Lonely Lady has the look of a cut-rate “supply your own wardrobe” production.

No, Jerilee didn't just appear in a production of Anne of Green Gables. This pigtails and pinafore getup is the film's weak attempt to make 28-year-old Zadora look like an innocent teen, while simultaneously camouflaging her "charms" (to be unleashed later, full throttle). Incredibly, the two middle-aged gentlemen flanking her are supposed to be teenagers, as well. The one on the left offering a bit of plot foreshadowing by thrusting a conspicuously tumescent wiener in Jerilee's face.

And say goodbye for any hope of this Italian-American co-production offering any escapist glimpses of faraway places with strange-sounding names. There’s the unspeakable splendor of San Fernando Valley; Beverly Hills as viewed from one interior restaurant set after another; and picturesque Rome stands in for Los Angles in a chintzily-rendered movie industry awards event populated by about 30 enthusiastic and poorly-dubbed fans (the movie doesn’t even give the fake award a name, it’s simply called The Awards Presentation Ceremony).

Let's Have Lunch...& Dinner...& Brunch...
Ingenuity not being one the film's strong suits, The Lonely Lady
stages no less than five scenes in restaurants

In light of the film’s blitzkrieg of bad acting (you expect poor performances in films like this, but The Lonely Lady seems to be trying to set a new precedent), risible dialogue (Vinnie [clearly naked with two just-as-visibly naked women] to Jerilee:“Hey doll, we’re naked!”), and the irrefutable sense that nobody involved in this slapdash production is very much invested in it (get a gander at the cover art for Jerilee’s two novels); there’s no denying The Lonely Lady fails miserably as a movie.

WTF?
These are supposed to be the covers of Jerilee's published books.
Who the hell was her publisher, Fisher-Price?

But The Lonely Lady is invaluable in illustrating the difference between a showcase and a vanity project. A showcase is intended to present a performer in the best possible light, emphasizing their strengths and minimizing weakness. A vanity project is a vehicle so ruled by ego and delusion that the performer, in so overestimating their talents, winds up only calling attention to their limitations. The Lonely Lady is a four-star vanity project.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

For connoisseurs of cinema claptrap, what’s not to love? I largely look back on the ‘80s as a nightmare decade for movie fashions, hairstyles, décor, music, and flat, washed-out cinematography; therefore, The Lonely Lady gets off on the right foot (which is to say, the absolute wrong foot) almost immediately with an absolutely dreadful theme song (sung by Larry Graham) playing over an amateurishly shot title sequence. And, like a Malibu mudslide, things just keep going down from there.

The Night Belongs To Michelob
The Lonely Lady is loaded with subtle mise-en-scene

The Lonely Lady episodically chronicles Jerilee’s pursuit of a writing career as a semi-pornographic Pilgrim’s Progress in which we’re invited to ponder the unique problems faced by an intellectual woman burdened with the dual curses of flawless beauty and low self-esteem. Because the film shares with us but a single example of Jerilee’s writing skill (and it’s a doozy), we must take her brains and talent on spec. However, the film is generous to a fault in treating us to scene after scene of Jerilee being the world’s biggest creep magnet, or compromising her sexual integrity for the sake of her ambition.

A scene from Homeland, the laughably awful-looking film-within-a-film for which Jerilee contributes
this single line of dialogue. Magically transforming a B-movie into an Oscar contender

The wrong story (over-familiar to the point of formulaic), starring the wrong actress (it's as though the film's real star refused to show up and they shot the movie with her lighting stand-in), at the wrong time (even ‘60s audiences would be hard-pressed to find it shocking); The Lonely Lady is a pungent potpourri of miscalculations, poor judgment, and ragingly bad taste. Small wonder it has earned the reputation of being the Showgirls of the ‘80s.

Every trash movie made from a trash novel needed its exploitation setpiece. Valley of the Dolls had a cat-fight wig-snatching, The Other Side of Midnight had abortion-by-coat-hanger, and The Lonely Lady had assault by garden hose. That's Ray Liotta (possessor of the phantom crotch above, as well) making his inauspicious film debut.

I particularly like how The Lonely Lady’s half-hearted efforts to be a scathing, feminist indictment of Hollywood’s rampant sexism and misogyny is consistently at cross purposes with the film’s desperate attempts (by way of clockwork-consistent nude scenes) to convince us that its wee cherub of a leading lady is a smoking hot sex symbol.

Let's Make A Deal
Current headlines reveal that after all these years not much has changed in terms of systemic sexism in the film industry. Too bad The Lonely Lady merely treats the issue as fodder for sensationalism

PERFORMANCES

It could be said Ms. Zadora dedicated her career to
making sure no one would ever refer to her by that name

There's no getting around it. Pia Zadora's performance here most definitely calls into question the credibility of her Golden Globe win, while emphatically cementing the validity of her multiple Golden Raspberry Award wins (although she lost 2000s Worst Actress of the Decade to Madonna).
In truth, Zadora is so unconvincing and inexpressive in the film, it's pushing it to call hers a performance at all. But on the plus side, it's not one of those pitiably bad performances that makes you feel bad or embarrassed for an actor. In the tradition of Patty Duke and Elizabeth Berkeley, Pia Zadora's awfulness is so robust and zestfully devoid of anything resembling technique or skill, it achieves a kind of guileless purity.

Words can't come close to expressing the full-tilt comic lunacy of Zadora's worth-the-price-of-admission nervous breakdown scene. Form her going-for-broke emoting to the acid-wash graphics and tilt-a-whirl not-so-special effects, it's a Golden Turkey instant classic.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
If The Lonely Lady works on any other level than simply high-octane camp, I'd say it works best (as he places tongue firmly in cheek) as a disquietingly self-referential exposé. The construct of the entire film places the viewer in the position of scrutinizing the Pia Zadora phenomenon through the guise of meta-fiction.

Take for example the fact that The Lonely Lady is about an author no one takes seriously simply because she doesn't look like what people expect writers to look like. Well, didn't I begin this essay stating that very thing in regard to Ms. Zadora...that I found her to be miscast because she doesn't "look" like a writer to me? What does that even mean? Sure, she can't act, but she's not believable as an author because she's petite, has a kewpie doll's face, and a teenager's voice? Sexist much, Ken?

On top of this, the movie keeps throwing Zadora's real-life circumstances into the mix. Like Zadora, Jerilee just can't get no respect. She marries a wealthy man old enough to be her father who proves instrumental in getting her into show business. A place where her success is never believed to have been rightfully earned. By the time the film finishes on the confrontational note highlighted in this screencap, I thought to myself, "Pia's playin' head games with us!"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As much as I adore The Lonely Lady for its wholesale lack of redeeming value, and how I thank the gods of cinema dross that Pia left us all this wonderful, enduring gift before retiring from acting; I must also add that I have become a big fan of the Pia Zadora of today. Like so many stars who once took themselves so seriously in their youth, only to mature into fun, easygoing personalities able to take a joke (Raquel Welch, William Shatner, Cybill Shepherd, Candice Bergen); Pia Zadora has learned how to laugh at herself.

Carla Romanelli plays a Sophia Loren-type Italian actress (complete with Carlo Ponti-esque husband) who, like everyone else in the film, finds Jerilee impossible to resist. I never realized screenwriters were so sought-after

After abandoning acting and the whole sex symbol hype (and Meshulam Riklis after 16 years) Zadora pursued what was always her strongest suit, singing, and, in a few cameo roles, revealed herself to be a natural light comedienne. She's been active and good-natured in promoting the DVD release of The Lonely Lady (which includes a spirited interview) and harbors no illusions about either the film's quality or her performance in it. She's so cool with the film's renewed cult status and everybody hailing it as one of the best of the worst, it's as though she's given us all her blessing to enjoy a great guilt-free laugh with her, not at her.

BONUS MATERIAL

Harold Robbins dedicated The Lonely Lady to Jacqueline Suzanne, and many believe the character of JeriLee Randall to be based upon her. In a November 1976 issue of Pageant magazine, Robbins denied this claim and stated he based the character partially on Peyton Place author Grace Metalious.

Pia Zadora has said she is most proud of these two comedic cameo film roles.

As a beatnik in John Waters'Hairspray (1988) - See it HERE

As herself in Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994) - See it HERE

Kenneth Nelson as Bud Weston
Nelson originated the role of Michael in the 1968 Off-Broadway play The Boys in the Band.
He reprised the role in the classic 1970 William Friedkin film

Part of the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn Blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. Click on Tracy's photo in the sidebar for a complete list of all the other entries.

On this final day in the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn Blogathon, I’m training my eye on The Actress: a film which marked the fifth and final collaboration between Spencer Tracy and director George Cukor. After teaming on Keeper of the Flame (1943), Edward My Son(1949), Adam’s Rib (1949), and Pat & Mike; Tracy and Cukor’s final collaborative hurrah was with the serio-comic domesticity of 1953’s The Actress.

From a screenplay by Ruth Gordon adapted from her autobiographical 1946 Broadway play Years Ago (which was itself based on her serialized memoirs Look in your Glass, published in several issues of The Atlantic Monthly in 1939); The Actress is set in 1913 Wollaston, Massachusetts, and chronicles, in episodic fashion, her teen years when first bitten by the acting bug. The featherlight project first caught the interest of two-time Oscar-winner Spencer Tracy—then the darling of MGM and well into the “professional father” years of his career (Father of the Bride, Father’s Little Dividend); accounting perhaps for the charming film feeling somewhat dominated by the character of the father. More of a I Remember Papa reverie than a contemplation on a young girl’s determination to embark on a life on the stage.

Jean Simmons as Ruth Gordon Jones

Spencer Tracy as Clinton Jones

Teresa Wright (given not a single closeup in the entire film) as Annie Jones

Anthony Perkins (making his film debut) as Fred Whitmarsh

When heretofore aimless 17-year-old Ruth Jones (Simmons) sees actress and former Ziegfeld Follies star Hazel Dawn on stage in “The Pink Lady,” she undergoes an epiphany: she MUST hereafter devote her life to becoming an actress.

Ruth freely shares her newfound ambition with her practical and empathetic mother (Wright), but due to his having a “disposition,” works hard to keep her aspirations a secret from her bearish father (Tracy), a former adventuring seaman currently bristling at the penurious state of his current life as a factory worker.

While her mother harbors the hope that after graduation, Ruth will simply settle down and marry Fred (Perkins), the handsome and genial Harvard student avidly courting her; her father, who paradoxically believes women should be independent and learn to earn their own keep, yet forbids his wife from lightening their financial load by taking sewing, has set his sights on Ruth becoming a physical education teacher.

Clinton participates in a YMCU fitness exhibition (married men's division)

Meanwhile, Ruth pursues her dream, albeit largely though daydreams and acting-out fantasies, but a well-placed fan letter to Hazel Dawn occasions a much-coveted meeting with the Great Lady (offscreen) and a summons to Boston to meet with the director of the company. Ruth Gordon Jones’ dream of life as an actress is set. Or is it?

Since from the outset there is never any doubt that timorous Jean Simmons will grow up to be a Tony Award nominated stage actress, a novelist, a playwright, an Oscar nominated screenwriter (with her husband Garson Kanin), and win an Academy Award for Rosemary’s Baby; the only dramatic conflict The Actress has to offer are comedic slice-of-life vignettes highlighting the domestic uproar in the Jones household born of Ruth’s decision to become an actress.

Indeed, the film’s slightness of plot and episodic nature (as delightful as I find it to be, as with Meet Me in St. Louis, not much really happens in the way of plot) proved to be an insurmountable obstacle as MGM struggled to market a film featuring one of Spencer Tracy’s finest performances in the context of a story not exactly about his character, but whose presence and contribution was indispensable.

Instead of studying, Ruth and her girlfriends engage in an impromptu
performance of Hazel Dawn's signature song "Beautiful Lady"

Reflecting this dilemma is the fact that The Actress (a title few were happy with) entertained several working titles from pre-production through preview screenings, the blunt and misleading Father and the Actress proving too reminiscent of Tracy’s Father of the Bride series, but at least reflecting the film’s proper character emphasis.

Although Jean Simmons cites it as one of her favorite films and Spencer Tracy won a Golden Globe for his performance (and a BAFTA nomination), favorable critical reception couldn’t save The Actress from fizzling at the box-office. In the book You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: Interviews with Stars from Hollywood’s Golden Era, Simmons recalls going to see the film at a theater in Westwood and being the only person in attendance.

I first came across The Actress about five years ago when it was screened on TCM. I had never heard of the film before, but found myself instantly charmed by its simple structure and old-fashioned feel. In its simple humor and nicely-drawn characters, it reminded me a great deal of the aforementioned Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), as well as The Happy Time (1952) and The Matchmaker (1957)—the latter being the play for which Ruth Gordon won her sole Tony Award nomination, the film adaptation affording Anthony Perkins another opportunity to mine the same boyish appeal in a similar role.

For all the talent in evidence both in front of and behind the camera (personal favorite Teresa Wright is underutilized, but a real treat), there’s no denying that Spencer Tracy is the film’s most valuable player. The naturalism which earned him the reputation as “the actor’s actor” serving to ground his blustering but principled character (and with it, Cukor's entire frothy enterprise) in a realism that is engagingly funny as it is occasionally touching.

Clinton's most treasured possession is the spyglass he purchased during his youth as a sailor

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The lack of a propulsive plotline seems to have been a major point of contention with many when it comes to The Actress, but for me the small scale and intimate presentation of this character-driven comedy feels wholly appropriate to the subject matter. The simple, even drab surroundings and humdrum concerns of budgeting, homework, school dances, pay bonuses, and cats attracted to Boston ferns, is the idea contrast for the larger-than-life theatricality of Ruth and her dreams.

Ruth's dreamy dissatisfaction with the confining contentment of the
life her parents have chosen for themselves

The small-scale of the family’s domestic dramas and the workaday concerns of a small-town life are grist to Ruth’s desire for a better, more exciting life. When I watch Meet Me In St. Louis, the loving home depicted is one so enchanting, I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to stray from it. But the home life depicted in The Actress, while every bit as loving, also contains an air of dissatisfaction. Clinton bemoans the overarching oppression of poverty and speaks of his past as a sailor as though it were the happiest time in his life. Annie is clearly a housewife out of love and convention, her expressed longing for a velvet dress and hint of a skill as a seamstress suggesting broader interests and desires than those of home and family.

The Actress, without criticizing those who choose to settle down and live quiet lives of simple pleasures, makes Ruth’s desire for something more into a basic, keenly felt human quest for personal fulfillment.

Watching Hazel Dawn Perform, Ruth Sees a Vision of All That Life Can Be
Any person who's ever sought a life in the creative arts has likely experienced that one moment
when all that was beautiful in the world seemed to beckon with a voice meant only for them

PERFORMANCES

If you’re going to mount a film more character-based than plot-driven, it helps to cast actors capable of creating indelible, fleshed-out personas out of sometimes slim material. The Actress distinguishes itself in its casting, even down to the smallest bits.

Former child actor Jackie Coogan (better known as "Uncle Fester" on The Addams Family TV series) is hilarious as an over-amused spectator at the YMCU fitness exhibition. Ruth is appropriately mortified.

The boyish appeal of Tony Perkins is clear in this, his first film role. What’s also clear is that after seeing his performance here and then his livelier take on same in The Matchmaker five years later; Hitchcock’s use of him in Psycho is positively inspired.

The likability of the actors cast goes far in mitigating the fact that several roles, Anthony Perkins' moony suitor Fred Whitmarsh, for example, are a tad underdeveloped

If Tony Perkins’ trajectory from boy-next-door to everyone’s favorite psychopath seems swift, it’s nothing compared to Oscar winner Teresa Wright’s swift journey from fresh-faced ingenue in 1941’s The Little Foxes to long-suffering mom. Wright was only 11 years older than Jean Simmons when cast in The Actress (34 to Jean’s 23) and would play Simmons’ mother again in 1969s The Happy Ending. Late in her career when a reporter asked Wright why she stopped making movies, she replied: “I guess Jean Simmons no longer needs a mother.”

As Far As I'm Concerned, Teresa Wright Can Do No Wrong
I wouldn't call her underappreciated, for her reputation as an actress is one respected and revered. But Teresa Wright doesn't get nearly the attention and play in classic film circles as she deserves. She brought a contemporary, genuine quality to every role she undertook, In The Actress she is has marvelous moments where she is both funny and breathtakingly real. Still, her impressive talents feel somewhat wasted in the role of caring mom, and as good as Simmons is (and she's very good) I can't help imagining how Wright would have been in Simmons' role just a few years earlier.

Without recalling the actress in any way at all, Jean Simmons is really splendid as the stage-struck teenage Ruth Gordon. Called upon to show vivacity, naiveté, rebelliousness, and ultimately determination and maturity; if her performance suffers at all (test audiences at the time to a decided dislike to her) I’d say it’s because she captures the sulky self-absorption of adolescence all too well. Gordon isn’t exactly easy on herself, and depicts her younger self’s single-mindedness in sometimes unsentimental ways. But I like that the character has an arc of growth in the film. And if perhaps she starts out as a dreamy-eyed brat, she grows into a mature woman of some empathy and understanding of what parents sacrifice in raising spirited and independent offspring.

Ruth suffers her first taste of rejection

Because he’s never been tops on my “favorite actors” list, I tend to harbor the impression of Spencer Tracy as one of those solid, reliable, studio system actors who could always be depended upon to deliver a professional performance in any film assigned. It’s only when I actually watch one of his films that I’m reminded what a valuable and rare thing that is.

It could be argued that nothing Tracy does as Clinton Jones is anything he hasn’t done before, after all, by this time in his career he’d made well over 50 films. But what’s remarkable about Tracy is that he was a star with a character actor's gift for inhabiting a part so completely, the behavior, movements, and vocal inflections all seem to exist exclusively for whatever character he was portraying at the time.

In The Actress, his character is largely identified by a gruff, irascible demeanor and a comic paternal bossiness. But to watch Tracy stay in character while delivering a monologue that's part searing tirade against the cruel aunts who brought him up/part lamenting requiem for his mother who committed suicide when he was two years old--well, it's to watch a little bit of acting genius.

Ruth hopes to convince her parents of the soundness of her decision to go upon the stage

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Much like my experience with the film adaptation of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, I came to The Actress with low expectations and found myself not only surprised by how good it is, but completely captivated by its simplicity and charm.
The film's vignette structure may play a bit of havoc with Ruth and Fred's relationship (we never understand whether it's as serious as Fred takes it or as casual as Ruth makes it out to be), but it nicely suits the photo album/scrapbook setup of the title sequence. The script is witty, the performances uniformly fine.
Of course, given my own life-changing brush with the arts (see: the Xanadupost), I can't help but find certain details of Ruth Gordon's teen years to resonate with me and have a certain universal appeal.

Ruth's reaction to seeing Hazel Dawn (Kay Williams) on the stage is not unlike my response to seeing the critically lambasted 1980 musical Xanadu. So inspired was I by that film, I embarked on a career as a dancer.

Effort and hard work are indispensable, but having dreams is where it all begins

Like the unexpected setback which threatens to ultimately derail Ruth's plans to move to New York, my own move away from home—to L.A. from Berkeley—was beset by a similar reversal. Exactly as it happens in the film, I panicked, certain that if I allowed this one problem to stop me (an apartment I had put a deposit down on was suddenly no longer available), I'd be stopped by another and another.
Happy Ending: went to LA even without a place to live, got my deposit refund, spent the entire day apartment-hunting and found a place before sundown on the very same day I arrived (on a weekend, yet).
So, you see, there's much in The Actress that speaks to anybody who strikes out on their own, armed with little more than impossible dreams and a foundationless belief in self.

The Actress is not a perfect film, to be sure, but it is certainly something of an unsung cinema gem.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

It’s strange to me how I can think back as far as my adolescence and recall with relative clarity how I responded to certain movies at the time, yet memories of films seen in my adult years often leave me stumped. I was 21 when The Amityville Horrorcame out (not exactly yesterday, were talking 39 years ago, folks); but I can’t seem to recall exactly what I thought of it at the time. I mean, did I find it even remotely scary? Did I buy into any of that “Based on a True Story” hype? Did I find it then, as I do now, to be an entertaining parade of haunted house clichés and hoary horror film tropes?

Is there something paranormally suspicious about my inability to remember? Hmmm….

James Brolin as George Lutz

Margot Kidder as Kathleen Lutz

Rod Steiger as Father Delaney

Don Stroud as Father Bolen

I have only the haziest memory of The Amityville Horror as a bestselling 1977 novel prompted as a fictionization of the purported-to-be real-life tale of a family beset by a series of paranormal events in their Long Island home that was once the site of a mass murder. I had no interest in the book, nor do I even recall having paid much attention to news stories about the real-life DeFeo Murders that gave that distinctive-looking house it’s horror reputation (on November 13, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr. killed his parents and four three siblings in the home they shared in Amityville, Long Island).

What I do remember is that the film version of The Amityville Horror opened in the summer of 1979: two months after Ridley Scott’s mind-blowing Alien; one month after the hotly anticipated (by me), but wholly disappointing John Frankenheimer monster movie Prophecy; and two weeks after the bloodless Dracula re-up with Frank Langella.

My rapturous fondness for Alien—a film which reminded me that scary, innovative, intelligent, and well-acted can peaceably coexist—had placed me in a horror frame of mind that summer. Unfortunately, the diminishing returns proffered by the genre films released in Alien’s wake left me anticipating the opening of The Amityville Horror with an enthusiasm drastically disproportionate to my actual interest in the movie.

The Amityville house lays out the unwelcome mat for Kathy's Aunt Helena (Irene Dailey)

Chiefly propelled by a hope for a repeat of the jumped-out-of-my-seat thrills of Alien, plus a desire to see what actress Margot Kidder had chosen for her follow-up vehicle to her star-making turn as Lois Lane in the blockbuster Christmas 1978 release Superman: The Movie(still playing in second run theaters at the time); I stood in a long line on Hollywood Blvd on Friday, July 27^th, to catch The Amityville Horror on opening night. The house was packed and the theater was abuzz with the kind of amped-up excitement only an R-rating, “Based on a True Story”-hype, and saturation marketing can produce (“For God’s Sake, Get Out!” screamed posters from billboards and bus shelters all over town).

Unspooling under a cloak of a collective goodwill that began to dissipate around the film’s 60-minute mark—when animated squeals of delight and nervous giggles began to take on the hollow timbre of blatantly derisive laughter—The Amityville Horror trod largely familiar haunted house/demonic possession ground. Early on it became clear that the film was going to lean heavily on claims of “This really happened!” as a means of mitigating the fact that the episodic screenplay was less a cohesive story and more of a laundry list of “Things that make you go hmmm…” events taking place in a creepy old house.

This House Pays For Itself
Kathy's brother (Marc Vahanian) preps for his wedding as the house preps for a little self-help

A more polished and technically tricked out film than I’d come to expect from the traditionally low-rent American International Pictures, for all its sound and fury (a disproportionate amount coming from grievously miscalculated performances by Rod Steiger and Helen Shaver) it was clear that The Amityville Horror was not going to pose any real threat to the legacies of The Exorcist or The Omen. The audience I was with seemed to enjoy the film’s low-wattage fright delivery system (regular as clockwork. 3:15 to be exact) and the best that I can come up with—as I’d returned the following week to see it again with a friend—is that I found The Amityville Horror to be more of a “fun” scary movie (escapist and diverting) than a legitimately frightening film.

The Amityville Horrorgoes for the semi-documentary approach in chronicling the strange occurrences that befall cash-strapped newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz (Brolin & Kidder) and their three kids (Kathy’s from a previous marriage) when they move into the spacious, obscenely affordable house that had just the year before been the site of a brutal mass killing. Charted with titles highlighting dates and times, I believe The Amityville Horrorwas a big hit with audiences at the time simply because it dispensed with a great deal of character and plot and dove headlong into trying to justify the presumptuous use of the word horror in its title.

Wasting no time, the film begins with graphic depictions of the shotgun murders of the DeFeo family (never named in the film), following this up whenever possible with closeups of characters “feeling uneasy” in the presence of odd camera angles and an imposing musical score. The house, distinctive and camera-ready from the start with its numerous jack-o-lantern closeups, is filmed so often and so flatteringly it becomes the Barbra Streisand of haunted houses, isolated (so much so that it appears to exist on another planet entirely) and always dead-center of the action.

Since the Lutz family only lived in the house for a month, it’s imperative that weird things start to happen to them right off the bat. Events unfold at such breakneck speed that only after the film is over does it dawn that those nondescript Lutz kids never go to school, or that George’s surveyor business suffers setbacks disproportionate to the brevity of his time away.

While George obsessively continues to chop logs for the fire,
Kathy laments the sudden wood shortage in their bedroom
...if you get my cruder meaning.

Because a haunted house/possession story is nothing without religious subtext, Kathy is Catholic. Or, more precisely, Hollywood Catholic. Which means she doesn’t actually go to church or display any discernible traits of devoutness, but she does paint Virgin Mary figurines, hang ginormous crucifixes all over the house, has an actual nun in her immediate family, and is given to grocery shopping in a fetish Catholic School Girl uniform.

Kathy’s Catholic background occasions her inviting priest and friend Father Delaney (Steiger) to come and bless the house. A bad idea for the puffy priest, but a bonanza for lovers of uncured ham and unbridled scenery-chewing. Rod Steiger’s appearance, ostensibly meant to signal the graveness of the Lutz’s situation and escalate the film’s drama, is so over-the-top it merely opens a hell-gate of hilarity.

Fathers Delaney and Bowen, badly in need of a St. Christopher medal

At this point the horror gauntlet has been thrown down and the Lutzes find themselves in a race against time, the forces of evil, and their own thick-headedness. And if the objectives of these forces are conveyed in the vaguest terms possible (Revenge? Demonic possession? The endless reenactment of a violent past?), rest assured that the scope and severity of these paranormal assaults (Gates of hell? Native-American burial ground? Devil-worship? Bad juju?) are mind-bogglingly elastic, inconsistent, and convenient to plot contrivance.

In the end, the scariest thing about The Amityville Horror is that this family of five occupying a three-story colonial doesn’t own a television set. The rest is an comfortably conventional, enjoyably cheesy, surprisingly by-the-numbers haunted house tale with its share of jump-cut shocks (hissing cats, loud noises, the old “I wake up screaming” trope, flashes of gore); and few genuine creep outs (the shotgun murders, the locked closet door, that weird little girl who looks like Robert Blake with a wig); and more than a few unintentional laughs (Brolin’s eye-popping mood swings, the cut-rate haunting special effects, the cartoonish reactions of visitors to the house).

While Kathy & George stare aghast at the front door that's been mysteriously blown off its hinges,
viewers get to stare at James Brolin's cobblers

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I have a hunch that both my infatuation with Margot Kidder and my initial ignorance of the story behind The Amityville Horror made that 1979 opening night screening an enjoyable one. But I’m just as certain that subsequent viewings of the film have been rooted in how enjoyably routine a movie it is. That’s certainly the case today. When I look at the film now, it plays like an end of the decade “best of” medley of all the supernatural horror films of the 1970s.

You could make a drinking game of the clichés.

The malevolent demon, ineffectual cop, the invisible friend: The Exorcist

The too-inexpensive-to-be-true, parasitic house: Burnt Offerings

Religious mumbo-jumbo: The Omen

House built over the gates of hell: The Sentinel

Serial killer possession: The Possession of Joel Delaney

Going back for the pet: Alien

And for good measure, you have an axe-wielding dad that predates The Shining by one year, plus a hyperactive house built above a burial ground that predates Poltergeist by two.

Creepy Amy (Natasha Ryan) consults with Jody, her invisible friend

The overall effect is of The Amityville Horror being something of a goulash horror creation. Everything but the kitchen sink (or bile-spilling toilet) seems to have been thrown into this mechanical mix of sure-fire horror standbys. Nothing wrong with that, but the film is so overcrowded with disparate ideas that it ends up with a ton of loose threads and setups introduced that fail to pay off. Happily, the whole undertaking manages to be repetitious without ever really being boring, so the film ends up as being inoffensively watchable as one of those Creature Features horror programmers aired on TV when I was a kid.

PERFORMANCES

No matter the relative quality of the end results, no one associated with The Amityville Horror can be accused of phoning in their performance. A fact that proves to be both a blessing and curse.

Screenwriter Sandor Stern and director Stuart Rosenberg both come from television, which may account for every dramatic scene seeming to be structured to end in a fade out and commercial. As though to compensate for the film’s episodic pacing and structure, the entire cast performs at near-operatic pitch.

Mr. Groovy Guy
Full beards and big, pouffy hair was all the rage in the '70s.
Here's Brolin with his gay porn star doppelganger George Payne

Although easy on the eyes, I can’t say James Brolin (he’ll always be Mr. Barbra Streisand to me) has ever made much of an impression on me. Here however, as the possessed George Lutz, Brolin has so many scenes where he gets to bellow, shout, and bug his eyes out, he quickly became my favorite character in the film. He's so consistently bitchy and surly, it's like watching a bearded Joan Crawford.

Margot Kidder, something of an early scream queen with her roles in Sisters, Black Christmas, and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, is the film’s bright spot, but is saddled with a role that has her doing what bad writers always have women do in horror movies: screaming and going around asking everybody if they’re OK. I love watching her though, and she remains a natural and relaxed presence even in the film’s most absurd moments.

Rod Steiger, praying for an Oscar nomination

In what I can only hope was a Karen Black-like bid on Rod Steiger's part to invest The Amityville Horror with a little emotional gravitas (Black approached her role in the nonsensical Airport ’75 with intense solemnity because she felt no one else in the film was taking it seriously), Steiger—never a particularly subtle actor—in trying to convey spiritual anguish and fear, only succeeds in going full-tilt Neely O’Hara/Mommie Deareston us.

As the concerned priest who becomes the target of the malevolent forces inhabiting the house, Steiger invests every moment onscreen with such ferocious overacting, I seriously thought in one scene his head was going to explode like that dude’s in Scanners. Steiger's is taking risks and obviously committed to the role, but it's an awe-inspiring, athletically awful performance that begs to seen at least once.

Helen Shaver and Michael Sacks (Slaughterhouse Five) as family friends Carolyn and Jeff
Playing a New-Age type, I'm not sure whose idea it was to have Shaver pitch her performance to so high on the weird-o-meter, but her big scene in the Lutz's basement is listed in the dictionary under "overkill"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The Amityville Horrorguilty of not being very scary, which is a bit of a crime given that “horror” is part of the title; but, as someone once said about life that is also true of motion pictures:“The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.”

What The Amityville Horror skimps on in thrills, logic, and coherence, it more than makes up for in unintentional laughs.

Back in 1979 when the film had its best chance of being taken seriously, the public was obviously caught up enough in the film to make it one of the highest grossers of the year, but that didn’t stop the opening night audience I saw it with from still appreciating the occasional laugh at the film’s expense.

Sweating profusely, nauseous, covered in flies, and currently witness to a door opening all by itself, Father Delaney hears a creepy voice demand that he "Get out!" Given that those words inspired the tile of Jordan Peel's 2017 horror classic, maybe those laughs this scene was greeted with in 1979 were of the nervous kind.

Those tacky-looking glowing red eyes
Margot Kidder and Lalo Schifrin's Oscar-nominated score work like Trojans trying to convince us that Kathy Lutz has seen something unspeakably terrifying outside of her daughter's second-story bedroom window. Regrettably, a cut to Kathy's POV reveals "glowing red eyes" that look like for all the world like outdoor Christmas lights

Amity meets Amityville
Actor Murray Hamilton, who played the doubting Thomas mayor of Amity in Jaws, this time out plays a doubting Thomas priest. His brief scene in the film is a memorable for the manner in which he commands a (still) frothing at the mouth Rod Steiger to the sit down. It's like he's giving a command to an overgrown Bullmastiff

Over the years, The Amityville Horror has spawned something like 15 Amityville-related sequels, remakes, and spinoffs. I don't know if this qualifies the original as some kind of minor classic or a mere franchise fluke; but for whatever reasons, The Amityville Horror (even with its always dubious claims to reality since debunked) has proved to be a movie that endures.

In 1970, decades before the topic of surrogacy became a standby staple of Lifetime TV thrillers, fodder for mediocre comedies (Paternity, Baby Mama), or a nightmare vision of a dystopian future (The Handmaid’s Tale), it was once considered a movie theme so unique and unusual that critics and audiences alike were at a bit of a loss as to how to respond to it.

Barbara Hershey as Patricia "Tish" Gray

Sam Groom as Jay Wilcox

Collin Wilcox as Suzanne Wilcox

Scott Glenn as Tad Jacks

The Baby Maker, the debut film of Oscar-nominated screenwriter James Bridges (The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome) tells the story of a Los Angles hippie (Barbara Hershey, the then go-to flower child of the movies) who, for a substantial amount of money and because she just loves being pregnant (“Proof of the reality of my own existence”), agrees to bear a child for a square-but-nice, well-to-do Brentwood couple (Sam Groom & Collin Wilcox). Combining as it does—with varying degrees of success—elements of the well-intentioned Generation Gap TV movie-of-the-week (Maybe I’ll Come Home in The Spring); the quickie cash-in counterculture youth flick (1969s natural childbirth gimmick comedy Generation), the racy and “with it” social exposé (The Christine Jorgensen Story), and the sensitive indie character drama (Five Easy Pieces); The Baby Maker proved a hard picture to categorize and an even tougher film to market.

As such, The Baby Maker was deemed too “straight” by young audiences who saw it as yet another inauthentic screen depiction of the hippie counterculture, while mainstream critics labeled it a “bizarre” movie (The Miami News) and couldn’t seem to get past framing its then-daring themes in terms of exploitation and sensationalism. Audiences titillated by the film’s teasingly salacious ad campaign: “She’ll live with a couple. Share the husband. They get a baby that’s at least half theirs. She gets the joy of making it.” (Mind you, this is back when “making it” was popular hipster slang for sex)—were disappointed to find a thoughtful, often clinical, nearly two-hour drama.

Lili Valenty as Mrs. Culnick, the sweet little old lady go-between who
facilitates the pairing of the childless couple with a willing surrogate

Further adding to the film’s woes were those who simply saw the film’s subject matter as being either distasteful or amoral, or, perhaps most damaging, the fact that just a few months prior to the release of The Baby Maker, John G. Avildsen’s low-budget social melodrama Joe (which climaxed with a vigilante massacre at a hippie commune by a pair of ultra-conservative working-class reactionaries) had struck some kind of chord with the public and became a controversial sleeper hit.

By 1970, The Baby Maker’s positive depiction of hippie culture had grown cliché and was fast becoming passé.

Thus, in spite of its having received a good share of favorable notices for its performances, actress Barbara Hershey attracting a lot of Best Actress Oscar nomination buzz in the trade papers, and actually garnering an Academy Award nod for its original song score (composer Fred Karlin was nominated for The Baby Maker the same year he won a Best Song Oscar for “For All We Know” from Lovers and Other Strangers), The Baby Maker only enjoyed a brief run at theaters and then promptly disappeared. Both from movie screens and most people’s memories.

"I was just looking at your records. You have an awful lot of Frank Sinatra."
The surrogate mother meets (and sizes up) the father

I don’t recall it ever appearing on television or even having a video release. And while I remember when it came out, I confess to having responded to the newspaper ads much the same as I suppose many did: the film looked like cheap exploitation. Not that that had ever been a deterrent to my interest in any film, but with both Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls hitting the screens that same year, I guess my reasoning was that if I was going to see trash, it might as well come from a major studio.

I finally got to see The Baby Maker in 1973 or 1974 when it played at the bottom of a double bill at San Francisco’s Alhambra Theater where I worked as an usher during high school. By this time Barbara Hershey had officially changed her name to Barbara Seagull (an ill-advised phase that had lasted about two years), and hippies in movies were starting to look as dated as beatniks. Nevertheless, for the week of the film's run, I saw it about three times. I loved it!

Tish and Tad
One of the things I like about how the character of Tish is conceived is that she never thinks twice about treating her body as her own. Although she is in an open relationship with her boyfriend Tad (for all of six months), when she decides to be a surrogate she doesn't seek his permission or approval. The scene where she finally tells him is touching and beautifully played, and feels light years away from how I imagine the scene would be written today.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

James Bridges was successful screenwriter who got his start in television (he wrote “The Unlocked Window” my all-time favorite episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour) with a background in acting and directing for the theater. Dissatisfied with the films made from his scripts, Bridges decided that he’d direct his next screenplay (“I can fuck ‘em up as good as they can!”). Bridges based The Baby Maker on a woman he life-partner/business partner Jack Larson knew from a Venice Beach bar called The Carousel. The woman was a free-spirit type who liked being pregnant and made extra money by being a surrogate mother for childless couples.

It's Complicated

The Baby Maker is a twist on the classic triangle, only in this instance the third party is engaged in the most impersonal manner to engage in the most personal of relationships. In those pre-in vitro days, the fact that the surrogate is impregnated “the old-fashioned way” may have provided the film with its gimmick and marketing hook, but the conflicts, complications, and comedy arise out of the clash of generations, cultures, and unforeseen emotions.

In all, Bridges set a heady task for himself in his first outing as director. And while he’s not always successful in balancing the shifts in tone or sustaining its narrative thrust over the length of the film’s running time; I was impressed that he seems to respond to the material as a story he wants to tell, and doesn’t appear inordinately concerned that it doesn’t meet expectations or fit easy genre description.

Collin Wilcox made her memorable film debut as Mayella in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

PERFORMANCES

Critics were divided over The Baby Maker’s merits, but the quality of Barbara Hershey’s performance was undisputed. And without a doubt her performance is the single most distinguished takeaway from the entire film. Barbara Hershey’s real-life hippie-dippy reputation may have blighted her early career (and indeed may have cost her a much-deserved Oscar nod for her role here), but it’s precisely the fact that she comes across as the real thing, that she’s not “acting” the part of Hollywood’s idea of a hippie, is what saves the film.

Hershey, who gave a truly chilling performance in Frank Perry's shattering Last Summer (1969) gives another incredible performance in this, her 5th film. Always an undderated actress, she is The Baby Maker's Most Valuable Player. In scene after scene, whether it be some bit of dialog that would sound clichéd or laughable coming from someone else, or a moment when the film feels to be veering into soapy waters, Hershey’s unselfconscious and nuanced performance moors potential contrivance to truth.

Making his film debut, actor Scott Glenn is very good as Tish's sweet but immature boyfriend.
Glenn would go on to have a featured role in James Bridges'Urban Cowboy (1980)

As the middle-class couple, Collin Wilcox and stolidly handsome Sam Groom (whose large head makes him well suited for the medium shots of television, where he indeed found his success as TV’s Police Surgeon) supply more traditional performances that, by comparison, feel more generic, but both are quite good. Wilcox in particular (whom I don’t think I’ve seen in anything since To Kill a Mockingbird) plays Suzanne as a grounded but somewhat neurotic character of emotional complexity. It’s the unique female relationships and the dominance of the women’s performances in The Baby Maker (this includes Jeannie Berlin as Tish’s activist best friend) that makes it such a surprisingly refreshing period-piece of a movie for me.

Tish uses some of her money to help support her single mom (Phyllis Coates) and her grandmother (Madge Kennedy) who both live in a Venice trailer park. In a sea of post-Easy Rider male-centric buddy films, The Baby Maker is unique for its dominant narrative perspective of women and their realtionships.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I’m a big believer in the tenet that different voices can’t help but result in different stories. The subject matter couldn’t be more heterosexual, but as one written and produced by gay men, I feel it qualifies as a keen example of Queer Cinema.

For all its progressive ideas, the youth movement and hippie counterculture (at least as depicted in films) was woefully male-centric and conventional in its attitudes toward women. The Baby Maker is the only hippie-themed film of the era with a female protagonist and told from a woman’s perspective (not a fetishized, free-love, heterosexual male perspective like Candy or There's a Girl in My Soup).

The Baby Maker producer Jack Larson (l.) & director James Bridges met when both appeared as actors in the film Johnny Trouble (1957). Openly gay, they remained lovers/partners till Bridges' death in 1993. Larson passed away in 2015

For its time, The Baby Maker’s feminist perspective, non-sexualized heroine, and unorthodox domestic relationships are a subtle challenge to heteronormative status quo; something I wholly attribute to the gay sensibilities of its creators. Like the works of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, I think what’s brilliant about Bridges’ screenplay is that it looks at heterosexuality through the outsider insights of queer.

In a reversal of a common youth film trope, the male bodies are the
ones exposed and made the object of the gaze in The Baby Maker

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Being that I was just a child when my family lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the late ‘60s, I tend not to be a very good judge of what passes for the authentic or inauthentic representation of hippie culture in movies. Largely shielded from the sex and drugs side of it all, my kid's-eye-view memory of the time is so tied to its pop-cultural trappings, my nostalgia buttons can be pushed by the most superficial depictions of the era. The Baby Makertakes place in Los Angeles, but one of its major perks its many moments of "I remember that!" memory-jogging that take me back to my SF roots.

Fringed suede/leather jackets were all the rage, and everyone seemed to know how to tie-dye but me. My elder sister (who really caught the hippie bug) was a whiz, but I used so much bleach tie-dying my jeans that they practically disintegrated. Hitchhikers were visible all over San Francisco, but thankfully, my parents weren't the give 'em a ride type. Especially since at the time the lyrics to The Doors' Riders on the Storm ("There's a killer on the road...") had scared the holy shit out of me.

War Is Not Healthy For Children & Other Living Things
I remember the many protests and picket-sign slogans of the day, the above being so ubiquitous it became a popular poster and graphic for the 1971 film Bless the Beasts and the Children. In this scene Jeannie Berlin (daughter of writer/dirctor Elaine May) leads a protest against a store selling toy guns.

Pop-Top Fashion
From roughly 1965 to 1975, beverage cans came with disposable pop-tops. Hippies, being ecology minded and all, took to using these aluminum tabs to create fashion and "art." Everything from hats, dresses, and vests were made out of these things. I hope she'll forgive me for ratting on her, but my older sister (Yes, Ms. Tie-dye) made herself a pop-top headband just like this. My Fanta root beer addiction helped her out a lot.

Home Decor
The days of gigantic stereos, door-size coffee tables, and sofas that seat 20

Candles, Candles, Everywhere
Candle stores were like the Starbucks of the Sixties; you couldn't take two steps on Telegraph Avenue without bumping into one. I remember I had a beloved, star-shaped rainbow candle in my room (back when they were, y'know, just rainbows) and, of course, my sister made her own

The Single Wing Turquoise Bird
How's that for a '60s name? Psychedelic light shows and avant-garde multimedia theater was all the rage. Not only did every youth-culture movie feature at least once sequence of freak-out visuals, but the phenomenon went mainstream with 2001: A Space Odyssey. In The Baby Maker, Tish and friends attend a light show performance by The Single Wing Turquoise Bird, a real-life troupe still in existence.

Although it’s one of my favorites, The Baby Maker isn’t some undiscovered classic. It’s shot in the flat, undistinguished style of a TV-movie, the hippie trappings and dialog can be a bit distancing, and modern audiences may find the tempo sluggish. But I find the film’s sometimes uncompromising presupposition of the inevitability of growth and change to be very moving.
A consistant theme in many of my favorite films is the human need for contact, so I'm a sucker for movies about people who misguidedly assume independence means the absence of attachments. Plus, anybody who knows me knows how much I love a good cry at the movies, and the ending of The Baby Maker never fails to get the ol' waterworks going.

BONUS MATERIAL

The Superman Connection

Jack Larson was best known as cub reporter Jimmy Olson on the TV series The Adventures of Superman from 1952 to 1958. That show's original Lois Lane (1st season only) was actress Phyllis Coates. Larson and Coates remained friends over the years, leading to her being cast in The Baby Maker in the brief role of Barbara Hersey's mother.

Phyllis Coates, Jack Larson and unknown actress in The Adventures of Superman

Phyllis Coates as Patricia's mother

Brenda Sykes (Cleopatra Jones) appears in an unbilled bit part as a woman
with whom Tad shares a flirtation (and a joint)

In 1985 I appeared as a dance/exercise extra in the virtually unwatchable James Bridges film Perfect, starring John Travolta & Jamie Lee Curtis. Although the aerobics class scenes were shot on location at the Sports Connection gym in West Hollywood, this particular scene was shot months later on a set designed to look exactly like the gym. Aside from having to do something like six hours of pelvic tucks, what's most memorable about this particular sequence is that, after filming had begun, shooting halted in order for the costume people to figure out a way to sew up the legs to Travolta's shorts in order to give him a more pronounced package. When Travolta returned a half hour later with a more camera-ready crotch, it also appeared that a bit of filler had been added. Jack Larson produced and was often present on the very "happy" set.

Warning: Spoilers galore

Looking back, I still find it hard to believe that I came to know of the existence of The Poseidon Adventure only after it had already opened in theaters. It was in December of 1972, I was 15-years-old, and my folks were treating my sisters and me to our first visit to Disneyland and Los Angles over the Christmas holidays. Disneyland and Universal Studios were, of course, a blast (this was back when Universal was ONLY a tour, not an amusement park, and the main attractions were Lucille Ball’s dressing room, the props from the Land of the Giants TV show, and the bridge Shirley MacLaine got pushed off of in Sweet Charity), but that was for the daytime.
In the evenings we drove and walked around Hollywood—you could do that back then—and I was utterly overwhelmed and enthralled by this city devoted to the movies. Hollywood Blvd was always kind of tacky, but in the early 1970s, all decked out in Christmas decorations, stars in the sidewalks, and overflowing with one first run movie house after another…to my eyes it looked every bit as magical as Main Street in Disneyland.

Who Will Survive-- In One Of The Greatest Escape Adventures Ever!

Gene Hackman as Reverend Frank Scott

Ernest Borgnine as Mike Rogo

Stella Stevens as Linda Rogo

All of the 1972 holiday movie releases had opened: Grauman’s Chinese featured Streisand’s Up The Sandbox, Diana Ross was at The Pantages in Lady Sings the Blues, the Cinerama Dome had the Patty Duke thriller You’ll Like My Mother, the Pacific was showing The Getaway with Steve McQueen & Ali MacGraw, and Paul Newman was at the Hollywood (currently a Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum) in The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean.

Adding considerably to the excitement was the fact that movie theaters still went all out in the way of promotional materials and displays, so every theater was bathed in colorful neon, aglow with bright and flashing lights, and everywhere you looked were banners, streamers, oversized posters, and huge cardboard promotional cutouts for movies currently running and others coming soon. My eyes were popping out of my head.

But what really stopped in my tracks when we came upon the beautiful and enormous Egyptian Theater. Here, towering at least two stories high above the theater’s massive, winding marquee was the poster art for a film I’d somehow not heard a single thing about: The Poseidon Adventure. The Egyptian, every bit as ornate and elaborate as Grauman’s Chinese, was in the middle of an exclusive run of The Poseidon Adventure after having hosted the film’s premiere a week prior. Remaining evidence of the glamorous event were the massive cast portraits adorning the sprawling marquee, taller-then-me cutout posters, hanging banners, production stills, posters, and lobby cards as far as I could see. Suddenly I was surrounded by images of what looked like themost exciting film I’d never heard of.

Shelley Winters as Belle Rosen

Jack Albertson as Manny Rosen

Red Buttons as James Martin

Carol Lynley as Nonnie Parry

To understand how a dyed-in-the-wool film fan type like myself managed not to hear a single advance word about a movie that went on to become not only one of my all-time favorites, but the second highest grossing film of the year, it helps to know what kind of year for film 1972 was. In both fan magazines and the legitimate press, the lion’s share of 1972 movie coverage/publicity centered around these high-profile titles: The Godfather (Brando’s comeback!),Cabaret (Judy’s daughter makes good!),Last Tango in Paris (Le Scandale!), Lady Sings the Blues (a Supreme film debut!), The Getaway (behind-the-scenes adultery!), and What’s Up Doc? (Streisand meets New Hollywood wunderkind!).

I don't many films had much of a chance of competing with the publicity juggernaut surrounding these films. Besides, given my age and cineaste pretensions, I’m certain that had any news about The Poseidon Adventure managed to reach me in the midst of rapt my absorption in all the above titles, I most likely would have leapt to conclusions concerning the involvement of Irwin Allen (whom I associated with gimmicky, cheap-looking TV shows), and made snobbish assumptions about that film’s cast of past-their-prime notables. A roster which, with the exception of Gene Hackman, struck me less like a Grand Hotel-style“all-star” movie cast and more like a TV Guide listing of a particularly feeble week on Johnny Carson’s sofa.

But there I was, standing in the middle of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, staring up at grand-scale movie hype at its best, hoping beyond hope that my parents would decide to terminate our sightseeing foot tour on the spot and insist we all go in to see this suddenly must-see movie that very minute.

Roddy McDowall as Acres

Pamela Sue Anderson as Susan Shelby

Eric Shea as Robin Shelby

Leslie Nielsen as Captain Harrison

Arthur O'Connell as John, the ship's Chaplain

The Poseidon Adventure opened on December 15^th in Los Angeles, but by the time we returned home to San Francisco, had not yet been released. The Poseidon Adventureopened at San Francisco’s Alexandria a week later on Friday the 22^nd.So, over that weekend and several more times before school reconvened, I saw The Poseidon Adventure…and what an adventure it was. For weeks afterward, I couldn’t enter a classroom, library, store, or home of a friend without imagining what it would look like upside down.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

It says a lot about the traditionalism of TV and studio-era films that by age 15 I’d already grown pretty well-versed in recognizing movie clichés. While I’d not yet seen many of the films that established the familiar tropes from which ‘70s disaster movies would later draw (The High and the Mighty, Zero Hour!, The Last Voyage); I was familiar enough with combat movies (dangerous situation + dissimilar people from all walks of life + hero = everyone discovers what they’re really made of), all-star ensemble melodramas (the aforementioned Grand Hotel), and waterlogged thrillers (Lifeboat, A Night to Remember), for the of The Poseidon Adventure’s high-concept upside-down ocean liner premise to sound both intensely original while at the same time sounding reassuringly familiar.

Reverend Scott, not looking exactly pleased to have someone besides himself talking.
Far left is actress Frieda Rentie, sister of 227 actress Marla Gibbs

On New Year’s Eve the ocean liner S.S. Poseidon (significantly, at least in terms of ironic poignancy, making her final voyage before the scrap heap) is capsized by a tidal wave. While several passengers survive the breathtakingly entertaining catastrophe; only nine of the ship’s most stock and photogenic passengers ultimately elect to follow the long-winded Reverend (Hackman) on a perilous climb to safety via navigating their way up to the ship’s bottom.

Everyone involved—save for the resourceful reverend, who oozes so much self-reliance and leadership qualities he can’t help but grow tiresome—is spectacularly ill-suited to the task, but any life-or-death struggle that begins with a ragtag group of “types” having to climb a big, tinsely Christmas tree to salvation is my kind of calamity. And so, armed with little more than pluck, guts, elderly body-shaming, and tight-fitting hot pants; our intrepid troupe begins their adventure.

Meet The Players / Character Shorthand

He's a Rebel 'Cause He Never, Ever Does What He Should
In the interest of saving time, Rev, Scott--who's such a hip, throw-out-the-(Good)book type he wears a turtleneck instead of a clerical collar--simply tells us what we might have otherwise found out from, y'know, paying attention and following the plot

The Bickersons
Common-but decent police detective Mike Rogo and his foul-mouthed former-prostitute wife Linda, are a kind of Bronx George and Martha. Mike thinks Rev. Scott is a loudmouth, Linda refers to Mrs. Rosen as "Ol' Fat ass." Ergo, they are my favorite characters in the film.

My Yiddishe Grandmama & Papa
As though their borscht-belt accents weren't a dead giveaway, the film makes sure we know Belle & Manny are Jewish by introducing Manny with his nose in an Israel travel brochure, and Belle knitting their grandson a sweater with prayer shawl stripes.

Coded and Fabulous
James Martin--the real hero of film, as he is the one who comes up with the idea to climb to the hull--is gay. No one can tell me otherwise. This 50-something bachelor haberdasher might actually have said something about it had Belle, the Hasidic Heteronormative Buttinsky ("It comes from caring"), not pressed that "What you need is a pretty wife" business. However, it's not likely anyone bought his "I'm too busy"line anyway. Mr. Martin's character would essentially be out and proud in the 2006 Poseidon remake, but the movie itself was so lousy, no one cared.

Damsel in Distress
My real-life experience has been that in moments of crisis, more men & women act more like Nonnie than Rev. Scott, but that doesn't stop this fraidy-cat, easy-listening songbird from being a bit of a pill. She's genuinely sweet though, and as one of cinema's most high-profile fag hags (you don't honestly think she and middle-aged Mr. Martin became a post-rescue romance, did you?), I like to imagine Nonnie and Mr. Martin became friends: she tagging along on his visits to The Mine Shaft, or meeting up for Sunday brunches in the Village

Susan Being Polite To Mr. You're Not Reverend Scott (Ernie Orsatti)
Although I don't ever recall a brother actually calling his sister "Sis" instead of her given name in real-life, I suppose it was important for the film to establish lovesick Susan and "all boy" Robin (so much the stereotype I expected him to say "Jeepers!") weren't some kind of Susan Anton/Dudley Moore couple.

Sure, his role is brief, but after three Planet of the Apes movies, I'm sure Roddy McDowall is simply glad to show his real face in a movie again. More a plot device than a character, what exactly is Acres' accent? I thought he was British (with a Liverpool lilt), but someone told me he's supposed to be Scots (maybe due to that bagpipes crack?)

In the 1972 shout-fest X, Y and Zee, Elizabeth Taylor has the line:“I may be the worst thing in the world, but I carry it in front where you can see it!” Well, if The Poseidon Adventure could speak, that would be its mantra. It’s old-fashioned, schlocky, and loaded with what director Ronald Neame (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) labeled “carboardy” characters; but the film carries it all out in front where you can see.

The Poseidon Adventure, a 20^th Century Fox film, wears its corniness proudly on its sleeve. It’s a big, family-friendly film that was a conscious thumb of the nose to the incoherence (Fox’s Myra Breckinridge), drugs (Fox’s The Panic in Needle Park), and vulgarity (Fox’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) of New Hollywood.

Sure, The Poseidon Adventure is hokey, cliché ridden, and a terribly contrived, but (miracles of miracles) it works. And rather magnificently, at that! I loved the premise, enjoyed the archetypal characters, and I was thrilled as all getout by the upside-down sets and the real-life special effects. Most surprising of all was that the filmmakers not only got me to care about these characters, but to also feel something about their fates. Who new a cheesy movie could be so moving?

The terrible remake (which Carol Lynley called “The biggest piece of shit I’ve ever seen”) cost 32 times more and had CGI wizardry up the ass, but I never gave a whit about what happened to anyone in it. The Poseidon Adventure was ripped apart by many critics in its day, but it has aged well. What seemed corny in 1972 looks rather sweet today. And makers of today's disposable action films could a lesson from how The Poseidon Adventure takes the time to get us to know/care about the characters before the mayhem starts). This film is now 45 years old, and in spite of its well-earned reputation as a campy favorite, I can't help but think that in the realm of disaster movies, The Poseidon Adventure is some kind of a minor classic of the genre.

As both Beyond The Poseidon Adventure and The Swarm proved, when Irwin Allen directs, the result is a guaranteed disaster. An invaluable boon to The Poseidon Adventure was handing the directing chores over to Ronald Neame and leaving the action sequences to Allen

PERFORMANCES

One of the peculiarities of the disaster film genre is that things don’t actually improve when “good” actors are cast in the roles. The genre doesn’t need performances, it needs personas. Nothing bogs a disaster film down more than a so-called serious actor trying to give a “performance.” For example--for all their innate talent, you’d have to look to an Ed Wood movie to find performances worse than Olivia de Havilland in The Swarm, or Jack Lemmon in Airport ’77.

Leslie Nielsen as Captain Harrison
Young viewers are surprised and delighted to see the Airplane and Naked Gun star in a serious role. However, those of us of a certain age know that for decades, THIS Leslie Nielsen was the only Leslie Nielsen there was.

No, with the genre’s emphasis on action and expediency, it’s often a matter of finding actors with distinct, identifiable, almost over-emphatic screen personas, capable of projecting a level of conviction appropriate to the arch dialogue and bigger-than-life goings on.
Much in the manner that Vincent Price became the master of schlock horror sincerity, disaster film actors who take their roles too seriously come off as ridiculous, while the most effective performances are those that seem to operate on a level of magic reality that hovers somewhere between authentic and artificial.

The distinction I'm trying to make is that while the cast of The Poseidon Adventure may all be quite excellent actors in their own right, what they're called upon to do in The Poseidon Adventure doesn't require "good" acting so much as "effective" acting. To make material like this believable, it matters more to strike the right tone; in which case performances ranging from hammy to hoary can prove to be 100% on the money.

My absolute favorite shot in the entire film, also my favorite moment.
No matter how many times I see The Poseidon Adventure, Linda Rogo's death remains for me the most shocking and heart-wrenching. Winters' Belle Rosen was set up from the beginning to be nobly tragic, but Mike and Linda Rogo were the couple I identified with. They weren't know-it-alls, they weren't noble, and they said the things I was thinking. They were funny, sweet, and a life-force in the film, and Linda's death reverberated like no other. Ernest Borgnine just breaks my heart in this scene and I always get waterworks from his reaction. To me has was always the film's most valuable player.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
By no means all, but just a few of my favorite things:

I don't care how dated the special effects are, the capsizing of the Poseidon is epic moviemaking
(Gotta love Red Buttons during this part. That's not acting)

No one on the Poseidon faced a bigger challenge than these two trying to find the beat

I love Mrs. Rosen

Even in 1972, the Hot Pants Under The Gown Reveal drew gasps and laughs.
Loving Linda's reaction

That Dive!
The biggest shock of the film. It got laughs, applause, and cheers

I love Linda Rogo

The Poseidon Adventure is a favorite. You'll never hear me call it one of the best films ever made; I don't buy into revisionist assessments ranking it a genuine classic (it's great for what it is, but let's not forget what it is); nor do I harbor illusions about its depiction of women (save for Belle and her big moment, the men are all active while the women are reactive) and lack of people of color in the major cast (Akers & Belle occupy the stereotypical roles ethnics in action films: "first to die" and "noble sacrifice"). But there's no denying The Poseidon Adventure is one of those imperfect films that achieves a kind of lightning in a bottle kind of excellence. It's one of the best of its breed. I think of it so fondly that over the years my laughs of derision have turned into laughs of affection. Despite its flaws, I fully understand why it has endured.

BONUS MATERIAL
In 1973 MAD magazine once again did a movie satire that hit the nail on the head. In "The Poopsidedown Adventure" the characters are named: Reverend Shout, Hammy & Bellow Roseman, Snoozin & Rotten, Mr. Martyr, Ninny, Limber, and Apers. Don't recall the parody name for Borgnine's character.

The juxtaposition of Shelley Winters' name and the film title "Fat City"causes Robert Duvall to lose it when reading the 1973 Academy Award nominees for Best Supporting Actress. And don't buy the "for public consumption" explanation Duvall gave the press saying that he was laughing because James Caan was making faces from the audience. Though it's nothing compared to U.S. norms today, Shelly Winters' weight was all anyone could talk about in 1972. HERE

The internet is loaded with information, fansites, trivia, casting factoids, reunion videos, and clips pertaining to The Poseidon Adventure film and any one of its numerous stage incarnations.

Warning: Possible Spoiler Alert. Care has been taken to conceal as much as possible, but as this is a critical essay and not a review, some plot points are referenced for the purpose of analysis.

“Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here and fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty!” Lady Macbeth

Just as we know, with reasonable certainty, that Shakespeare didn’t have in mind two New Jersey hairstylists when he wrote Macbeth in 1606; it’s also an odds-on bet that said beauticians Cynthia Kellog (Demi Moore) and Joyce Urbanski (Glenne Headly), the morality-challenged friends at the center of Alan Rudolph’s skittish Mortal Thoughts, wouldn’t recognize a Shakespearean quote if it was set to music and sung by Billy Joel.

Yet Lady Macbeth’s impassioned plea to the gods to divest her of her feminine compassion and intensify her ruthlessness—the better to realize her homicidal musings—has within it the self-same dueling conflicts of violence/guilt/gender aggression/betrayal/loyalty/survival and desperation fueling the tinpot stratagems that set into motion the fatal events in this nifty ‘90s neo-noir. The castles of medieval Scotland may have nothing in common with the brownstones of 1990 New Jersey, but when it comes to survival, woe betide the woebegone male who dares underestimate what a woman is capable of when her thoughts turn to matters mortal.

Demi Moore as Cynthia Kellogg

Glenne Headly as Joyce Urbanski

Bruce Willis as James "Jimmy" Urbanski

Harvey Keitel as Detective John Woods

John Pankow as Arthur Kellogg

Billie Neal as Detective Linda Nealon

Mortal Thoughts is an atmospheric suspenser of doggerel Shakespearean plotting and betrayals played out in the baseborn haven of Bayonne, New Jersey. Robert Altman protégé Alan Rudolph, who engagingly contemporized the tropes of film noir in his films Remember My Nameand Trouble in Mind, again delves into the realm of the character-quirk crime thriller; this time having dark thoughts motivate the actions of a motley assortment of essentially non-thinking characters, all late-1980s time-piece artifacts depicted in finely-observed detail and only the most garish of local colors.

Mortal Thoughts evokes classic film noir in both the use of a narrative framing device recalling Mildred Pierce (a loutish man is found dead, a woman interrogated, a mystery unfolds via flashback), and in the cunning application of a crisscross murder threat redolent of the unarticulated alliance that got Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train off on the right track (an amusement park even figures significantly in both films). But for all its shrewdly effective nods to the tropes of the genre, Mortal Thoughts, in training its lethal eye on the relationship of its two female protagonists, achieves—much like that other, significantly more popular 1991 release, Thelma & Louise—a kind of mordant unpredictability.

There’s a lot of tension and wit in the convincingly conveyed cronyism of Demi Moore and Glenne Headly (the latter, hands-down, this film’s MVP), making Mortal Thoughts feel like a welcome female-centric variation of all those macho “neighborhood buddies who go way back” crime thrillers of the sort beloved by Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes (whose Mickey & Nicky this film recalls).

"Your wedding was great. Except your husband...is such a...I don't know.
I mean, what groom sells tools at his own wedding?"

Cynthia and Joyce have been friends since childhood. Each now married, they work at a beauty salon where, along with several pounds of permed hair and shoulder pads, they balance friendship, husbands, work, and children.

Amiable opposites, Cynthia (Moore), the level-headed one, is married to Arthur (Pankow), a wheel-spinning go-getter type always on the hustle. Arthur is a kind and considerate spouse, but casually dismissive of Cynthia in that way common of fast-track husbands more in need of a “supportive wife” than an equal partner in life. One senses Arthur tolerates Cynthia more than he understands her, an observation driving home the equally strong impression that Cynthia’s always-in-tow children are where her chief familial priorities lie.

The emotionally volatile Joyce (Headly), has an obvious taste for Bad Boy types; explaining, but not excusing, her explosive marriage to James (Willis); a physically abusive, drug-dealing, macho hot-head. An accident waiting to happen, Joyce and James, who couldn’t even make it through their wedding day without a fight, are one of those couples for whom passion and erupt-at-any-moment violence are but interchangeable sides of the same dysfunctional coin. It’s in their marital DNA. So frequent and public are their contentious outbursts, the patrons of Joyce’s Clip ‘n’ Dye hair salon, situated just below the cluttered apartment Joyce and James share with their infant son, barely bat an eye when granted ringside seats to the duo’s regular-as-clockwork bouts.

About now Joyce's thoughts are turning to ways of unsexing James with a pair of thinning shears

Events reach a crisis when Arthur, impatient with Cynthia’s de facto role as peacekeeper to the dysfunctional duo (and none too fond of the battling Urbanskis to begin with), begins pressuring his wife to stop spending so much time with her erratic girlfriend. Cynthia, feeling the stress of playing moderator, conciliator, and referee both at home and in the workplace, responds by doing more of what she already does far too much of: spreading herself thin trying to appease everyone. Meanwhile, nobody seems to have taken notice that Joyce’s once easy-to-laugh-off threats to kill her husband appear to be graduating from thought to action.

Mortal Thoughts, in depicting the feminine side of all those urban buddy movies, does a good job of subtly drawing attention to the boys’ club network of protection that makes abused wives feel they have no options. Call the cops--they have no interest in punishing a man for what they see as “letting off steam”; appeal to the husband’s relatives--they see him as a good boy with a wife who provokes him; leave or get a divorce--invite stalking and jealous retribution.

The picture painted is bleak, but as many film noirs have illustrated in the past; a woman without power is not necessarily a woman without recourse.

“An accident, Dolores, can be an unhappy woman’s best friend.”

Dolores Claiborne - 1995

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Mortal Thoughts lets us know from the outset that someone has been killed, but only by the 30-minute mark do we discover who it is (no big surprise there, nor do I suspect it’s supposed to be). The lengthy setup is devoted to establishing the characters, relationships, and setting (late-‘80s working-class New Jersey lovingly, painstakingly captured in all its cringe-inducing glory); the remaining body of the narrative devoted to unearthing the reverse-order specifics of the crime: the motive, the means, the when, and by whose hand.

In the book Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History, author Maureen Turim cites film noir flashbacks as being of two basic types: the confessional and the investigative. The confessional (as exemplified by the films Sunset Blvd. and Detour) has the lead character looking back over the chain of events which led them to their current (often dire) circumstances. The investigative (Laura, A Woman’s Face) has a law official piecing together the puzzle of a crime through means of examination and interrogation.

Mortal Thoughtsemploys both methods. In present-time, narrative flashbacks are triggered by the questions posed by two investigating detectives (Harvey Keitel and Billie Neal) to the fidgety, on-the-defensive Cynthia regarding the murder in question.

Keitel’s Detective John Woods makes a big show of being the good listener just there to take down whatever Cynthia has to tell; but his piercing eyes (taking on a mischievous glint when one of his verbal snares yields prey) tell another story. He’s conducting a full-scale murder investigation without leaving his chair.

With a video camera trained at her anxious face, Cynthia gives what can best be described as cathartically frank answers to their questions, these somewhat guarded responses delivered with a studied directness intended (one assumes) to convey an eagerness to unburden herself.

Unfortunately, Cynthia’s recollection of events, while superficially appropriate of an individual claiming innocence and who, as she puts it, “Didn’t do anything to need an attorney,” has a nagging habit of getting away from her. In attempting to provide the detectives with “just the facts” objectivity, Cynthia's subjective impulse to protect and/or conceal tends to result in her providing considerably more detail and backstory than necessary. Always volunteering a little more than she’s asked, Cynthia’s testimony takes on an involuntarily confessional tone, her account of the past frequently being at odds with what we’re shown.

Cynthia, distracted by troubling thoughts

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

It’s precisely when Mortal Thoughts tipped its hat to the unreliability of Cynthia as its narrator (especially since hers is the sole perspective we share) that the film really clicked for me. The doubt cast on the veracity of events depicted had the effect of shifting my focus from the story to the storyteller, at which point I found myself enjoying Mortal Thoughts not only as a mystery thriller, but as a sly dramatization of the threat of female alliance.

It’s telling that Mortal Thoughts is bookended by home movie footage depicting the friendship of Cynthia and Joyce from toddler to teens. These women grew up as sisters. They are closer to each other than they are to their husbands. At first glance it appears as though the film’s central conflict is the detrimental effect Joyce's toxic relationship with James on the marriage of Cynthia and Arthur; but one is reminded that nether woman is in a marriage they deem particularly satisfactory.

No, with the most intimate relationship in the film is the sisterhood friendship of Cynthia and Joyce. With this in mind, dramatic tension arises out of the film’s many subthemes: the inequity of marriage; macho as the flip side of male inadequacy; how women’s relationships are devalued by men and how easily women internalize and adopt these same attitudes—making the film’s central conflict the threat that female solidarity represents to the male.

“I fear for my life when the two of you sit down together.”

Reflections of Murder - 1974

For example: James and Arthur both have scenes where they vent their jealousy of how close Joyce and Cynthia are, each resentfully alluding to their wives prioritizing their friendship above their marriages. These scenes are echoed in additional sequences wherein the men are shown undermining the women's loyalties or encouraging one to betray the another (Cynthia’s rebuff of James’ crude sexual advances is met with “What are friends for?”), or trying to undermine the women’s loyalties.

For years men have benefited from pitting women against one another for the same reason the rich benefit from convincing the poor that other poor people of a different color are their barriers to The American Dream: there’s power in division. Misogyny is rooted in the male anxiety of the disposable (castrated) man, and many noir films exploit this fear. I mean, what is the noir femme fatale if not the embodiment of men’s terror of women operating under their own agency? Mortal Thoughts plays on society's limited, dual image of women, Cynthia behaving in the maternal, care-giving manner that reassures, Joyce (the breadwinner in her household) acting as feminine aggression personified. The trick up its sleeve is that it dares us to assume we know what’s really going on.

“Everyone knows a woman is fragile and helpless. Everyone’s wrong.”

Remember My Name -1978

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

A number of critics took issue with the brooding, almost operatic visual style of grand tragedy Mortal Thoughts applies (dramatic events play out with lots of slow-motion and choral accompaniment) to what is arguably a shabby homicide set in a garish world among unsophisticated people. But the film’s overemphasis on kitschy ‘80s details (and truly, you’d have to look far to find a wittier application of hair, costume, and production design) and magnification of the small lives feels intentional.

There’s nothing noble, high-born, or honorable about any of these characters. They are human in the most base, fundamental sense. But in Greek mythology when the Oracle of Delphi cryptically exhorts humans to “Think mortal thoughts,” this ethical maxim to be heedful of one’s human limitations reminds us how often it is in tragedy that characters pay a dear price for thinking they are above their mortality. In other words, acting like gods and believing they have the right to take a life or decide who lives.

That these larger-than-life themes play out in the small-scale environs of Hoboken, New Jersey, makes Mortal Thoughts one of the most intriguingly entertaining and off-beat neo noirs since Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name.

PERFORMANCES

My fondness for the work of director Alan Rudolph is what initially drew me to Mortal Thoughts. But unlike most of his other features, Rudolph was not involved in either its writing or creation, having been brought in with only five days’ notice after original director Claude Kervin (who wrote the incredible and incredibly funny screenplay with William Reilly) was fired two weeks into production.

That being said, it’s difficult to know how different Mortal Thoughts would have been had Rudolph been involved from the start, for much of it plays out like a more coherent version of any number of his always-fascinating, albeit occasionally jumbled, character pieces.

For a director so skilled with actors and the intricacies of character, Rudolph’s has an impressive understanding and respect for the suspense thriller genre. He understands the importance of taking the time to establish atmosphere and mood, he knows how to build suspense, and (like Polanski at his best) he isn’t afraid of using humor even within the most intense scenes. I like films with strong women protagonists and I like mysteries; so it’s no surprise that I found Mortal Thoughts to be a slick, ceaselessly entertaining film with suspense, twists, and tension to spare. All bolstered by a uniformly excellent (and exceptionally well-used) cast.

Familiar face and frequent screen mobster Frank Vincent
(who died in 2017) appears as Dominic, Joyce's father

I’ve never been much of a Demi Moore fan and guiltily admit to never having seen her biggest hit Ghost (even after all this time I’m genuinely hard-pressed to think I’m missing anything), but she's absolutely terrific in this. My favorite performance of all (the few?) films of hers I've seen. I'm crazy about her in this. With her raspy voice (I even like her Joi-zee accent), sardonic wit, and sharp-eyed common sense, she’s like a real-life Wilma Flintstone. A pillar of rational-thinking against whom her not-wound-too-tight friend Joyce can bounce off of. And bounce she does.

As embodied by the late Glenne Headly (who passed away in June of 2017), Joyce is the quintessential Dangerous Woman. An outspoken trouble magnet, Joyce is a woman who knows how to take care of herself and get things taken care of; simultaneously the toughest and most vulnerable person in the film. Headly, a remarkably resourceful actress, is a marvel to watch from start to finish (not to mention listen to…her delivery and timing is priceless), and achieves the miracle of making her paradoxical character make absolute sense.

Bruce Willis and Demi Moore were still married when Mortal Thoughts was released, and while both were a bit off my radar at the time, I recall that they were a really annoying “power” couple in Hollywood. Both were riding high on recent successes: Moore exercising her clout by serving as producer on this film, Willis, hot off of two Die Hards (the flop of Hudson Hawk was waiting in the wings) was working off a lot of public ill-will (bad buzz from his offscreen Moonlighting behavior, a couple ofear-bleeder vanity records, and those cringe-worthy wine cooler commercials) by taking on a role in his wife’s film which played on what many thought of him anyway. It’s a film industry career ploy known as “Give the audience permission to hate you and they’ll get it out of their system.” A disliked celebrity takes on a self-deprecating or self-referential role and bingo, career clemency.

I can't vouch for those wine cooler commercial out of my system, but I do enjoy hating Bruce Willis in this.

Quick shout-out to personal fave and scene-stealer Harvey Keitel who does
wonders with his small role. Never disappoints

Mortal Thoughts didn’t perform well at the boxoffice, but to me it’s an underrated, undiscovered gem. It’s a smart, well-acted crime thriller that not only delivers in the suspense category, but invites the repeat viewing to appreciate the rich characterizations, vivid production values, and sharp execution. Pardon the pun.
Really, one of my favorites.

The film's first line of dialogue is also its last

Given the number of films in existence about colorless middle-aged men who have their lives and (reasonably) happy marriages upended by the initially-encouraged/ultimately-unwelcome attentions of a comely lass with nothing better to do than wreak ‘round-the-clock havoc on said upstanding citizen's designated symbols of stability: wife, child, home, job, reputation, household pet; you’d think I’d be able to recall at least one or two of these shopworn narratives told from the perspective of the “homewrecker.” If for no other reason than to provide some insight into what these often vibrant, attractive women see in these dull, unprepossessing, ethically challenged men to begin with.

In summary, the premise of the little-seen 1971 suspense drama One of Those Things (a Danish film with an exclusively British and Japanese cast) reads like just another—albeit early—entry in the “domestic stalker” cycle of thrillers that hit their popularity stride in the early 1990s following the success of 1987’s Fatal Attraction. But lurking behind what at first glance appears to be just another post-sexual revolution cautionary tale for the Viagra set, is in fact a psychologically complex, unexpectedly dark examination of the principle of conspicuous ethics vs. unobserved morality. All trussed up in the melodramatic trappings of the erotic thriller and crime mystery.

Judy Geeson as Susanne Strauss

Roy Dotrice as Henrik Vinter

Zena Walker as Berit Vinter

Frederick Jaeger as Melchoir

Geoffrey Chater as Mr. Falck

Forty-something Henrik Vinter (Roy Dotrice) is the respectable, upright, newly-appointed director of a Danish automobile assembly plant. Harried and ambitious, Henrik is nevertheless blessed with a comfortable apartment he shares with his loving wife, adorable child, and cuddly dog. Best of all, hardworking Henrik’s role in his company’s merger with a Japanese car firm has afforded the devoted family man the long hoped-for opportunity to leave apartment-dwelling behind and build a home in Copenhagen’s tony Bellevue district. Yes, Henrik is a fine figure of a decent, upstanding citizen whose life reflects the core values of the success ethic.

That is, if appearances count for anything.

For in reality, Henrik’s wife Berit (Zena Walker) is a dipsomaniac suffering from neglect born of Henrik's wholesale absorption in his work; Melchoir (Frederick Jaeger) Henrik's co-worker and friend narrowly passed over for the very promotion Henrik bagged, rarely misses an opportunity to passive-aggressively vent his professional jealousy; and Henrik himself, though he doesn’t yet know it, balances on the brink of a crisis of character.

Henrik Vinter sees himself as a good, moral man; a self-image both supported and reinforced by those around him. That he unquestioningly sustains this higher sense of self in the face of moral and ethical contradictions (he dissociates himself from the “business as usual” legal duplicity of his profession and is casually racist when speaking of his Asian business partners), proves to be the tragic flaw that sets in motion a chain of events which ultimately leave Henrik wondering if he ever knew himself at all.

"Can you see me?"

"Are you there at all?"

One of the wonderful things about movies is that every social movement and shift in culture brings about a subliminal, unconscious “response” in the content and focus of films. The confluence of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement in the late 1960s brought about a rash of mainstream films indicative of the middle-aged male’s unease with the shifting sexual paradigm. Women’s sexual license was represented as threatening and destructive to the status quo in films like 1969s Three Into Two Won’t Go (also starring Judy Geeson), Play Misty for Me (1971), and Something to Hide(1972). Even a period film like Clint Eastwood’s The Beguiled (1971) succumbed to the trap of only being able to picture strong women as threatening women.

One Of Those Thingsdefinitely qualifies as archetypal male angst melodrama, but like the characters themselves, there’s more going on here than what initially meets the eye.

Heihachiro Okawa (Bridge on the River Kwai) as Mr. Kawasaki

Henrik’s life path takes a fateful detour one night when, despondent over his wife bailing on an important business dinner, Henrik accepts an invitation from a beautiful young woman named Susanne (Geeson) to attend a “hippie” hash (hashish) party on the outskirts of town. Before long, Henrik’s judgmental instincts (“I mean, this is what it all adds up to? The hair, the pot, be neutral, be uninvolved, do nothing, want nothing, believe in nothing?”) clash with the more easygoing vibes of his impromptu hosts (Susanne dubs him “Nowhere Man”), sending Henrik out into the stormy night in a borrowed car, eager to make his way to a train station and return home.

Alas, the combination of low visibility, a malfunctioning automobile, and an unseen bicyclist result in a fatal hit and run. Instead of going back to the house and reporting the incident (an accident, ironically, for which no blame to either party could be ascribed), Henrik, relying on darkness and anonymity to conceal the truth, instead returns to his life; shaken, but indiscernibly so. In the realm of moral displacement, feelings of remorse, guilt, and the fear of detection all look very much the same.

"Remember me?"
Henrik's past catches up with him

Just when it looks as though his actions will bear no consequences, out of nowhere—as if summoned by an innate need in Henrik to punish himself because no one else will—(re)appears Susanne. She knows of what he’s done (“I’d have done the same in your place.”), has no interest in money (“That would be blackmail.”), but is not above resorting to a bit of subtle coercion and upfront extortion to parlay the incriminating knowledge she possesses into a press secretary job at his firm.

If Henrik initially thinks that the granting of a close-proximity job to this total stranger is a small price to pay for her silence, he soon comes to learn that the cost to his peace of mind is one far dearer. Susanne immediately embarks upon an aggressive, ever-escalating campaign of seduction, stalking, and harassment that appears orchestrated to bring about nothing less than the total destruction of Henrik’s marriage, reputation, and professional standing. But does her denial of malicious intent (“I don’t want to ruin you. I just want to get to know you.”) hint that perhaps the motives behind her actions have more to do with reclamation of his soul than revenge on his actions?

In the Middle
Perpetually guilty-looking, the object of office gossip, and suspected of not being able
to handle his work duties, Henrik's once-stable life begins to crumble beneath him

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Directed and produced by Danish filmmaker Erik Balling, One Of Those Things is based on the 1968 novel Haeneligt Uheld by Anders Bodelsen (Haeneligt Uheld roughly translates as Accidentally Accidentor Incidental Accident - which is when an accident occurs for which no one is at fault). Anders Bodelsen, who co-wrote the film’s screenplay with director Erik Balling, is a popular author of contemporary crime thrillers whose themes often involve characters grappling with morality vs. materialism. Although not particularly well-known in this country, one of his novels was the source for the brilliant but underrated 1978 thriller The Silent Partner, starring Elliot Gould, Susannah York, and Christopher Plummer. If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend.

"I'm not a toy to be played with. And you're not capable of playing that game anyway."

One Of Those Thingswas filmed in 1971, but according to IMDB, it didn’t make its way to these shores until 1974. If it did, it did so way under my radar, for I have no memory of its release at all. Considered something of a “lost film,” I first came across it just a year ago, drawn by my fondness for actress Judy Geeson (To Sir With Love, Berserk) and suspense thrillers in which women propel the action of the plot rather than serve as victims or prey.

While more of a psychological character piece than an out-and-out thriller, One Of Those Things is a pretty gripping ride as Geeson’s character (compellingly played, but no more fleshed out than the usual Destroying Angel type in movies like this) is a genuine enigma and force to be reckoned with. But while I enjoyed the suspense and melodramatic elements of the film a great deal, I was pleasantly surprised to find them to be in service of darker, more thought-provoking themes relating to character and the imperceptible nature of moral erosion.

Sobering News

A theme particularly pertinent in today’s socio-political climate, One Of Those Things examines the concept of “visible morality” vs. “authentic morality”: self-identification as a moral person based on the external, superficial appearance of goodness vs. what one is genuinely capable of when no one is looking.

It’s like that old schoolbook ethics debate about the driver who claims “entrapment” when ticketed for speeding through a stop sign when a police car is concealed behind a billboard (twisted logic: If the police car had been visible, the driver wouldn’t have done the wrong thing).

Automobiles and their potential for accidental harm serve as a dynamic visual motif in One Of Those Things, a film shot in the flat, pedestrian tile of television movies yet enlivened by a nicely-modulated tension and mounting sense of unease. The smart script, which never tells you how you should feel about these characters, engages in unexpected ways. For example, just when the film has really drawn us into the complex dynamics of the almost kinky antagonism between Henrik and Susanne, Susanne startles Henrik (and implicates us, the viewer) by asking: “Do you ever think of the man we killed?” (it was with her borrowed car). In that moment we’re caught off guard because, in allowing ourselves to be caught up in the excitement and suspense of the erotic thriller plot, have we, like Henrik, not given much thought to the fact that someone has died?

This kind of narrative slight-of-hand is typical of One Of Those Things, as our sympathies for the two not-particularly-likable leads shifts from scene to scene.

"Getting angry suits you. It's almost as if you were here."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The final image in the film turns out to be a succinct visual metaphor of all that came before: a character peers through the colored glass of a bottle and looks out at a distorted, hazy image of a world they are emotionally alienated from. For a movie this visually undistinguished, One Of Those Things is fairly spot-on in cleverly enlisting the motifs of sight, vision, and perception to underscore its themes of moral relativity.

In one of the film's many instances of black comedy, several weeks after the accident, Henrik is forced to appear on television as a representative of the automobile company. His pathetic attempt to conceal his identity turns out to be precisely how Susanne is able to track him down.

"It's strange...there you were hiding in your dark glasses. All it did was make you
look more like yourself than ever."

One of Those Things's central dramatic conflict confronts how the conspicuous ethics of those society views as persons of principle can be compromised (if not outright betrayed) when unobserved. These days it has become almost a social cliche to discover that the married, anti-gay legislator to be a closet case with a male lover on the side, or the bible-thumping, "family values" politician to be a morally corrupt adulterer. But this doesn't mean we've grown any more savvy in understanding human nature, nor does it explain why we so persistently cling to the false notion that anything which makes a human being valuable is something perceptible to the eye.

Behind Closed Doors
When Susanne breaks out the party favors, Henrik's uptight neighbors
(Ann Firbank & Frederick Jaeger) unleash their wanton side

PERFORMANCES

In speaking of One Of Those Things, director Erik Balling observed: “It did not really appeal to an American audience. It was too slow and too nice. It wore a grey suit and never went to the kind of extremes they’re used to over there. It came across a bit too serene.”

Which, if indeed anybody in America actually got to see it, is a pretty accurate description of what might be viewed as the film’s limitations. I, for one, am grateful for the lack of boiling bunnies or butcher knife standoffs, for One Of Those Thingsis at its most persuasive when the camera simply captures the subtle interplay of emotions on the actors’ faces.

Like so many others of my generation, I developed a crush on Judy Geeson when I saw her in To Sir, With Love. Since then I’ve enjoyed her work immensely over the years (10 Rillington Place), even when the material was far beneath her talent. Often categorized as the quintessential Swinging ‘60s British London dolly bird, she was nevertheless an actress who, as Daniel Oliver astutely observed, “didn’t do ‘dumb’” and brought considerable intelligence and emotional heft to many an underwritten part.

Playing a role in One Of Those Things that is in many ways similar to the character she played in Three Into Two Won’t Go (in which we’re asked to endure the sci-fi absurdity of Geeson and the exquisite Claire Bloom squaring off over the pasty, dough-boy charms of Rod Steiger [Mr. Claire Bloom in real life]); Geeson gives a remarkably strong and nuanced performance, one of my all-time favorites of hers, in fact. She gets bonus points for making flesh-and-blood a character who, as written, needs to be enigmatic, but too often crosses over into incomprehensible.

I'm less familiar than I should be with the work of the late Tony, BAFTA, and Grammy-winning Shakespearean actor Roy Dotrice (Amadeus), but if his performance here is any indication, I've been missing out on a lot. I'm astounded at the skill of an actor being able to mine the tortured humanity in such a complex and conflicted character, all the while conveying--very clearly-- the internal struggle of a Nowhere Man. The scenes he shares with Geeson are such forceful emotional jousting matches that I initially thought the film was adapted from a stage play. Both are quite impressive in this film.

Roy Dotrice is the father of actress Karen Dotrice, best known as Jane Banks in
Mary Poppins (1964)- here with Matthew Garber

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Someone once said that the human tendency to plan, organize and structure is but man’s way of dealing with the terrifying realization that a great many life-altering events occur by accident. These accidents are often neutral in nature, neither bad nor good, with nothing or no one at fault save for the fact that life has to be lived and life can’t be lived without error.

This theme flows like an undercurrent throughout One Of Those Things, and perhaps in the hands of a more inventive director it would have been applied in ways that enriched the storytelling and gave more depth to the characters.

One of the things the film does perfectly is establish a visual pattern of risk and potential danger. People are forever sitting on narrow ledges, near dangerous machinery, or, as pictured here, atop perilous heights.

As it is, One Of Those Things is a flawed but a film I found to be a very effective, very welcome ‘70s discovery. A well-executed throwback melodrama of engaging period-specific details (hippies, drug use, The Beatles, and Geeson’s mini-skirted wardrobe) and considerable suspense and emotional tension. It’s no unearthed classic, and it takes a while to get used to all those Danish locations and names, yet everyone speaking with crisp, British or Japanese accents (the latter third actually takes place in Japan); but none of this distracts from One Of Those Things being a fine, thought-provoking genre film that I wish would get a legitimate DVD release.

(It occasionally pops up on YouTube, or fuzzy VHS-burned-to-disc copies are available through sites like Modcinema or iOffer.)

One of my favorite Maya Angelou quotes (one which paraphrases an earlier quote by Carl Buehner) is: “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.” I like this quote because not only have I found it to be true in my life, but it also summarizes what I’ve always maintained to be my own experience of film: I’ll forget what a movie made at the boxoffice. I’ll forget whether critics deemed it a hit or a flop. I’ll forget if it won any Oscars. But I never forget how a movie made me feel.

A great many things go into making a motion picture: acting, direction, screenwriting, cinematography, mis-en-scène, etc....simply a host of creative and aesthetic contributions by artisans and craftspeople in collaboration. But I always contend that unless you’re discussing measurable, fact-based elements such as whether or not a scene is in focus, or if a boom mike popped into frame; the act of ascribing value to a film (to classify it as either a “good” or bad” movie) is to engage in an act of subjective evaluation rooted in opinion, interpretation, point-of-view, and personal taste.

I love movies. I’ve loved movies for as long as I can remember. I get a kick out of reading about them, discussing them, analyzing them, and especially writing about them. But one of the risks of being a devoted cinephile and immersing oneself so (too?) deeply in film theory and fandom minutiae is that I can occasionally forget what made me fall in love with movies in the first place: they’re a great deal of fun. To see a great many films over the course of one’s lifetime and yet still remain connected to the pure, sensual, escapist thrill of movies has always been a goal of mine. Something easier to tap into with some films more than others.

When it comes to most of the movies I love, I find that critical analysis which encourages me to look beyond mere sensory response doesn't diminish my enjoyment of a film so much as it contributes to significantly enriching the overall experience. But every now and then I fall in love with a film so voluptuously visual, so lyrical, so ardently impassioned in its sensibilities, that there is absolutely no diminution in simply surrendering myself completely to its sensual charms and leaving my analytical brain at the door.
For me, Camelot is such a film.

Richard Harris as King Arthur

Vanessa Redgrave as Guenevere

Franco Nero as Lancelot Du Lac

David Hemmings as Mordred

The mystical legend of King Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, and the knights of the round table is tunefully romanticized in Camelot, Alan Jay Lerner (lyricist & librettist) and Frederick Loewe’s (composer) follow-up to their wildly successful My Fair Lady. Camelot (starring Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, Robert Goulet, and Roddy McDowall) opened on Broadway in 1960, when I was three years old. When Warner Bros. released its heavily-publicized, three-hour, 70mm, $13-17 million-dollar (depending on the source) big screen film version in 1967, I was ten. In other words, I have no real memory of a world without Camelot in it.

Lionel Jeffries as King Pellinore

When I was very small, I linked Camelot to dull, suitable-for-parents-only entertainment, associating it exclusively with Robert Goulet crooning the ballad “If Ever I Would Leave You” on TV variety shows (as I had Barbra Streisand and the song “People”). Following that, the show’s title tune became married to sad memories of President Kennedy’s assassination after my teacher (per the 1963 Jackie Kennedy Life magazine interview wherein it was referenced as the late president’s favorite song) played that paeanistic anthem to our class, resulting in a roomful of first-graders bursting into tears without any of us really knowing why. Not long after this, Camelot became familiar to me as an Original Broadway Cast album that every parent seemed to have in their home, yet never played.

By 1967 my family had settled in San Francisco, and it’s then that I recall first catching sight of Bob Peak’s colorfully alluring artwork for the movie poster. Still one of my favorite movie posters, I responded strongly to it because it resembled the then-popular psychedelic/Art Nouveau-style of San Francisco rock and roll concert posters that were all over the Haight/Ashbury district where we lived.

With Camelot’s artwork staring out at me from the poster display case in front of the Coronet Theater (where Camelot had its exclusive, reserved-seat, $3 a ticket, roadshow engagement) and from the cover of the Columbia Record Club mail-order soundtrack LP that arrived at our door because my mom forgot to send back the “not interested” card the month previous; suddenly this stodgy, must-to-avoid, middle-aged entertainment became the movie I couldn’t wait to see.

Laurence Naismith as Merlin

Of course, in the days when double and even triple features were the norm, the idea of paying $3 (75¢ to $1.50 was average) to see just one movie didn’t sound all that appealing to my young mind. As it turns out, the idea sounded even less so to my parents’ older minds, both holding to the position that it was, “Out of the question to shell out that kind of money for the privilege of watching you fall asleep.” That’s what drive-ins were for.

So, until Camelotbecame available at “popular prices” and made its way to our neighborhood theater, I had to content myself with listening to the soundtrack album.

And listen to it I did. Constantly. Persistently. Rapturously.

I fell in love with the sound of Camelot before I ever saw a single frame.

I saw Camelotsometime in late 1968, by which time the film’s flop* status was common knowledge, and some 30 minutes of footage from the roadshow version had been excised in an effort to speed things along, so to speak.

*[A huge bone of contention among retro film fans is the word “flop” ascribed to a beloved favorite. Hollywood has long held to the unwritten rule that a movie needs to make at least two to three times its production costs to begin to show a profit. Thus, while Camelot saw out the year as #11 on the roster of top grossing films (meaning it was reasonably popular with the public), with its $15 million production budget, a domestic boxoffice return of $31 million translates as genuine flop material. The same holds true for many other “popular successes” that simply cost too much to promote and distribute. One of the most notable is Hello, Dolly! which came in as the #4 top-grosser of 1969. But budgeted at a whopping $25 million and marketed to the skies at a cost of at least half that amount, the $33 million it took in at the boxoffice proved that it may have been popular with the public, but nothing short of ruinous for 20^th Century-Fox.

Perhaps the most curious application of the word flop is attributed to 1967’s Valley of the Dolls. Budgeted at a modest $4 million, VOD ranked #6 at the boxoffice and raked in an astounding $44 million, making it a significantly profitable hit for the studio. However, the film proved such a critical disaster and so devastating to the careers of those involved, the label of “flop” has clung, largely in reference to its quality (or lack, thereof), not its profitability.]

In any event, once the theater lights started to dim that Saturday afternoon in 1968 (I can’t remember whether it was at the Amazon or the Castro theater), none of that made any difference, because no one else’s experience of Camelot mattered but my own. I grew up with very little interest in most of the age-appropriate movies of the time (I was an adult before I saw The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, or Doctor Dolittle), so at age eleven, I hadn’t much exposure to fantasy or magic in movies. Camelot, which looked to me like a fairy tale come to life, captivated my imagination from start to finish.

There in the dark, before this enormous screen, came a vision of opulent, extravagant fantasy that seemed to shimmer with an almost otherworldly luster. The scope, the color, the lush orchestrations, the pageantry…this creation of a world both magically artificial and hyperreal so overwhelmed my senses that I’ve no memory of what I actually thought of the story itself; only the sense memory of feeling totally and absolutely transported by a movie.

It was aesthetic overload. I was absolutely floored by how gorgeous everything and everyone looked. Even those enormous, incessant Panavision closeups that drove so many critics to distraction were positively swoon-inducing for me. Camelot was the most “movie” movie I’d ever seen.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Clearly, most of what’s recounted above is a young film fan’s response to the candy-store charms of old-fashioned Hollywood movie-making. Too young to sense the dissonance so many found (and continue to find) in having a mystical, musicalized wisp of romantic lore mounted as a massive, grandiose epic; I simply fell under the spell of cinema’s unique ability to give life to fantasy.

Looking at Camelottoday (I watched it over the Christmas holidays) I’d like to report that my adult self finds the film’s pacing to be sluggish when it should be lilting; the thin singing voices of the leads ill-serving of the score’s lovely melodies; the overall tone wavering unevenly between farce, romance, and drama; the film’s length interminable; the self-serious performances deadly to the story’s wit and humor; the sets artificial and stagey.

I’d like to, but I can’t.

I see these things and recognize them to be sound and justified criticisms leveled at the film by friends and loved ones (my partner, a man of unyielding good taste and intelligence, cannot abide a single frame of this movie); but they’re flaws visible to me only when I look at Camelot through the eyes of others. When I look at Camelotthrough my own two eyes, it’s a little like the scene where Arthur, extolling the virtues of Camelot to Guenevere, gives a brief lesson on how perspective can change perception: “When I was young, everything looked a little pink to me.”

Because I can’t separate the film from my experience of first seeing it, Camelot still shines with a kind of pinkish glow to me. I don’t kid myself that Camelot is a better movie than it is, but my adult perspective—the belief that one can derive perfect pleasure from an imperfect film—guides my youthful perception of it as a magical, majestic, utterly charming musical...in spite of its flaws.

Due to having fallen in love with the music first, Lerner & Loewes’ magnificent score will always be my favorite thing about Camelot. Preferring the movie soundtrack to the Broadway version (sorry, Julie Andrews) I adore the film’s human-sized interpretation of Arthur and Guenevere (Jenny, as he calls her) and never found fault with the smaller, more emotive voices of Redgrave and Harris, which achieve such a lovely, amatory quality in the duet “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” (my absolute favorite song in the entire show). Perversely perhaps, the one trained voice in the film—that of singer Gene Marlino, dubbing Nero’s vocals—I find to be hollow and generic in the dubbing style of Marni Nixon and those disembodied, Doodletown Piper-style vocals they used in Hello, Dolly! and Lost Horizon.

As big-budget musical epics go, Camelot, with its glorious Oscar-winning costumes and production design, is nothing short of a dream; the film’s vast scale emblematic of Arthur’s full-to-bursting idealism. I suspect it was director Joshua Logan’s intention to use of so many close-ups as a stylized means of creating emotional intimacy. While this device is sensually effective in the romantic and dramatic scenes, when the principals are required to break into song it offers too many opportunities to ponder the wonders of medieval dentistry.

PERFORMANCES

If you’ve ever seen an Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian movie or any of those straight-to-DVD action films featuring the likes of Dolf Lundgren, one can easily understand why mainstream superhero films have often found it more advantageous to hire and actor and pad his suit (Michael Keaton, George Clooney) than try to get an athlete to act. I’ve always guessed a similar mindset was behind the Hollywood custom of buying expensive Broadway properties and, rather than actually using individuals who can sing and dance, hiring actors who have minimal proficiency in either: it’s easier to teach an actor to sing (dubbing!) than find song and dance performers who come across effectively on film.

I could devote an entire essay on both the soundness (Ethel Merman and Carol Channing) and folly (Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood) of this practice; but confining myself exclusively to Camelot, I have to put forth that I find Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Harris, and Franco Nero all exceptionally well-suited to their roles.

They are certainly the most visually stunning Arthur, Guenevere, and Lancelot I’ve yet to come across (Nicholas Clay’s virile Lancelot in 1981’s Excalibur being the exception); Harris a commanding and compassionate Arthur, Redgrave (Camelot’s most valuable player) looking like a fairy princess and bringing a wistfulness to her character that’s touching; and Nero, abysmal lip-syncing aside, gives an engagingly robust, sensitive performance.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

An unanticipated pleasure in having seen Camelot when it was new and revisiting it some 50 years later, is reveling in the degree to which it embodies the attitudes and trends of the past, while its themes comment (with depressing acuity) on our current “situation.”

Camelot takes place in a fictional kingdom in the Middle Ages, but (as was common of period films in the days of the studio system) it has late-1960s written all over it. The casting, opting for up-and-coming talent over established stars, reflects who was hot at the time: Redgrave and Hemmings, fresh from cavorting nude in Antonioni’s Blow-Up; Harris only recently having bashed in Franco Nero’s brains in John Huston’s The Bible. The sound of Camelotmay be traditional Broadway, but its look (like the world’s most well-funded Renaissance Pleasure Faire) had hippie love-in vibe.

Guenevere (with her mod bangs, cascading falls, and teased hair bump…all color-coordinated with the castle and furnishings) is the world’s first flower-child; while Arthur—whose quixotic anti-war soliloquies sound like a Berkeley campus lunchtime messiah—sports a groovy pageboy haircut and adorns himself with furs, capes, boots, and abundant eye shadow worthy of a Fillmore rocker. Not to be outdone, bad guy Mordred struts about in a leather outfit that looks to have been borrowed from Jim Morrison.

Alas, with Camelot’s dark second half, quaint ‘60s nostalgia gives way to harsh contemporary relevance. As Arthur’s humane ideals crumble under his own hypocrisy (he decrees rumors he doesn’t like—Guenevere’s infidelity and Lancelot’s betrayal—to be fake news and banishes from the kingdom those who dare speak what he knows to be true), Mordred, Arthur's vainglorious illegitimate son tweets…I mean, boasts,“I’ve been taught to place needs ahead of conscience. Comfort ahead of principle. I find charity offensive and kindness a trap,” while making ready his plans to return England to a state of cruelty, chaos, and war.

When Arthur laments, “Those old uncivilized days come back again. Those days…those dreadful days we tried to put asleep forever,” he could be speaking of a dark day in Charlottesville, Ga. in August of 2017, or, more accurately, the United States every day since November 8, 2016.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Time has been kind to Camelot, which is ironic, since complaints about its length have dogged the film since its release. No longer condemned for not fitting in with the times, Camelot now belongs to the broader, nebulous past of Classic Hollywood. The cast of budding actors are now revered film industry veterans; the style of filmmaking employed, lambasted as creakily old-fashioned during the youthquake '60s, is refreshingly devoid of CGI and today's ADD style of editing (so ruinous to so many contemporary stabs at musicals); and the melodic score harkens back to a when scores had a timelessness to them that didn't date the music before the film was released.
Yet Camelot remains unique in that it is one of those movies whose dividing line never seems to shift. I've never known anyone who hated the film to ever come around to a different opinion, and those who love it (as I do) can't be talked down off of our cloud no matter what detractors say.

I can't speak for everyone, but I guess back when I was eleven I just took it to heart when Arthur said at the end of the film, "What we did will be remembered."

BONUS MATERIAL

King Arthur's Camelot took on the role of a Himalayan lamasery in the 1973 musical Lost Horizon

Camelot was revived on Broadway in 1980 with Richard Burton recreating his Tony Award-winning role as Arthur. When Burton succumbed to ill health in 1981, Hollywood's King Arthur—Richard Harris, now 51-years-old—stepped into the role. Harris would go on to purchase the rights to the stage production and toured with Camelot for six more years. This production, co-starring Meg Bussert as Guenevere and Richard Muenz as Lancelot, was broadcast on HBO in 1982 and is available on YouTube

Richard Harris passed away in 2005, nearly as famous as he was at the time of Camelot thanks to his role as Dumbledore, the Headmaster at Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films. But a real-life fairy tale romance played out for Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero who fell in love during the making of Camelot, had a child out of wedlock, made a couple of films together, separated in 1971, reconnected some thirty years later, and wed in 2006. In 2017, when she was 80 and he 75, they waltzed together on the Italian TV dance competition program Strictly Come Dancing.

Richard Harris had quite the recording career, releasing several albums throughout the '60s and '70s. His biggest success came with 1968's Grammy-nominated A Tramp Shining, which featured the #2 Billboard hit, the talk-sing version of MacArthur Park. I never owned that particular curio, but a particular favorite I never tired of listening to was Harris' guest stint as "The Doctor" (talk-singing his way through Go To The Mirror with Steve Winwood and Roger Daltrey) on the 1972 studio recording of Tommy, The Who's double-LP collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and a host of guest artists.

Don’t let it be forgot

That once there was a spot

For one brief shining moment

That was known as Camelot.

The great granddaddy (grandmother?) of “roommate from hell” movies is director Barbet Schroeder’s (Reversal of Fortune) masterfully creepy Single White Female. Sheer perfection in its straightforward simplicity, Single White Female is a splendidly taut and entertaining thriller of escalating dread and suspense built upon two basic, highly-relatable human anxieties: sharing a living space with a total stranger, and wondering whether it’s possible to really know another person…even those to whom we are closest.
Fashioned as an intertangled character drama masking a mordant feminist critique—it can be argued that the entirety of the lead character's troubles arise out of the way society conditions women from an early age to harbor a fear of and resistance to being "single"; Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female pairs the Roman Polanski urban paranoia thriller (Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant) with the Robert Altman personality-theft psychological melodrama (3 Women, Images) to chilling effect.

Bridget Fonda as Allison Jones

Jennifer Jason Leigh as Hedra Carlson

Steven Weber as Sam Rawson

Peter Friedman as Graham Knox

When an 11^th-hour betrayal results in software designer Allison Jones kicking live-in fiancé Sam Rawson out of her rent-controlled apartment, our despondent, titular SWF hastily places a classified ad (against the better judgment warnings of friend and neighbor Graham Knox) for a roommate.

Enter Rizzoli Bookstore clerk Hedra Carlson; timid, sweet-natured, and studiously amorphous; she’s a substance incapable of reflecting light, only absorbing it. Girlish and diffident in the face of Allison’s easygoing poise, resourceful where Allison is self-doubting and insecure, indistinct and shapeless to Allison’s urban sleek, the women are less an odd couple than strangely analogous opposites. Indeed, Hedra sees in Allison an image of a life she’d very much like to have. Literally.

Allison and Hedra
From the Greek, Hedra is a word used in geometry signifying many faces

In short order, roommates blossom into girlfriends (Hedy! Allie!), girlfriends bond as sisters, and sisterhood evolves into a kind of free-form female family unit into which the only male allowed is Buddy the dog. Sure, Hedra’s a little clingy, a tad furtive, maybe even a little too watchful (“(It's) like she's studyin’ ya. Like you was a play, or a book, or a set of blueprints!”– All About Eve); but for a time, each woman finds in the other what they are individually seeking. Allie gets a companion to help stave off her fear of being alone, Hedy finds someone who fills a deep, unarticulated emotional void.

The disruptive reappearance of Allison’s ousted fiancé evokes D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox (an impression reinforced by the lupine features of Steve Weber) in that the intrusion of the male has an abruptly pernicious effect on the friendship the two women have thus far forged. Feeling edged out (even the dog prefers Allie's company), Hedy makes a desperate, fumblingly inappropriate attempt to insinuate herself into the relationship of the reconciled twosome, one which only serves to further drive a wedge. As she watches her prominence in Allie's life diminish, Hedy's already troublingly possessive behavior and obsessive interest in Allie begins to manifest itself in increasingly psychotic ways.

Family Portrait
Playing on the TV set behind them is the 1957 Rita Hayworth film
Fire Down Below, about a friendship torn apart by romantic jealousy

Although Single White Female features an abundance of intriguing subthemes: urban fear, feminine identity, lesbianism, sexual harassment, duality, women's tendency to invalidate female friendships in deference to men—Schroeder's uncluttered approach to the material and film's familiar, easy-to-identify-with premise serves it extraordinarily well. The smart screenplay (adapted by Don Roos from John Lutz's 1990 novel SWF Seeks Same) simply lets the worst-case-rental-nightmare scenario play out in accordance to the well-worn tropes of the classic stalker/suspense thriller, leaving plenty of room for the actors to fully and dimensionally inhabit their characters. The result is that instead of having the characters moved along by the demands of the plot, the characters as realized by the fine performances of Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh, dominate Single White Female.

As the film is structured, we know from the outset that the roommate situation will be problematic, just as we also know, this being a Hollywood thriller, that the central conflict must resolve itself with a sufficiently over the top, crowd-pleasing payoff: usually either cathartic or ironic. Thus, it's all the more appreciated that Barbet Schroeder manages to successfully subvert the plot's predictability by giving emphasis to the relationship between Allison and Hedra, making it feel authentic, while at the same time oddly disturbing. The chemistry between these two women, vacillating between friendly, sororal, co-dependent, and adversarial...is the propulsive, compelling source of the film's suspense and considerable chills.

The Happy Couple

When an arthouse darling like Barbet Schroeder (More-1969, The Valley Obscured by Clouds- 1972) makes a genre film, watching it is a little like seeing your well-mannered nephew running with the “wrong crowd”; you worry about which will exert the greater influence over the other.

Happily, I think Barbet Schroder’s arthouse sensibilities fairly dominate the first two-thirds of Single White Female, effectively drawing the viewer into the psychological drama before the melodrama of the final third takes over. He makes the city and apartment building participating characters in the story, emphasizing the film's duality themes and appearances-can-be-deceiving angle by making New York and Allison's apartment building look simultaneously inviting and menacing.

"At least there's never a problem with privacy!"
Single White Female plays with the idea of strength and weakness, dependency and helplessness. By all appearances Allison is the character who has her life together, but the film allows her to be the one to harbor some of the more deep-rooted flaws. She is the first roommate to invade the other's privacy, yet she's made uncomfortable by Hedra's comfortable informality in undressing in front of her. In the end, the women bond over the affectionate gesture of exchanged housewarming gifts.

Barbet Schroeder displays such a sure touch with his handling of both the characters and the more rote aspects of the suspense thriller that the film’s final act, wherein Schroeder or the studio bow to the pressure to provide the ticket-buying public with the mayhem they crave, strikes the film's sole discordant note. While I have to concede that it's well executed and effectively delivers exactly what is expected of it (suspense, jeopardy, violence, jump cut shocks); and there's no denying that it's an improvement over the sprawling, drawn-out ending of the source novel; but I can't shake the feeling that it is an ending more genre-mandated than organic to the subtle, insinuating menace of the rest of the film. I enjoy the ending for what it is, but I wouldn’t be surprised were it revealed one day to be the work of another director entirely.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Single White Femalecombines two of my favorite film genres: the psychological suspense thriller and the identity-crisis/mind-meld melodrama. Perhaps because I looked to movies in my own quest for some kind of identity parallelism during my youth (I grew up a bookish, introverted, black gay male, living in a predominantly white neighborhood and attending a private Catholic boys school, the only boy in a family of four girls, with a hardworking but emotionally reserved father), I harbor a particular fondness for movies about people grappling with their sense of self. Even the first student film I ever made (a deservedly lost Super 8mm masterpiece that served as my admission application to the San Francisco Art Institute) was a movie about a man haunted by his doppelganger.

Single White Femaleis a thriller first and foremost, a genre nail-biter calculated to deliver consistent chills. But in the way it seriously cranks up the fear factor by delving into the dark side of duality and the elemental search for self, it reminds me a great deal of so many of my most beloved identity-merge films: Persona (1966), Dead Ringers (1988), Les Biches (1968), Performance(1970), Mulholland Drive (2001), Vertigo(1958), and Black Swan (2010).

When Imitation Ceases To Be The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

To varying degrees, twinning is a natural by-product of intimacy, a normal part of all close relationships. You see it in long-term couples who begin to look alike and adopt similar mannerisms. You witness it in best friends who copy and adopt identical modes of dress. It's evident in noxious "bromances" in which entire groups of male friends attend the same gym, tanning salons, and share the same tube of hair gel and bottle of Axe body spray.
But no matter how extreme the mirroring, each of us relies on the existence of subconscious boundaries of individual identity to prevent us from ever completely losing ourselves to, or getting completely lost in, others. No such boundaries exist in Single White Female.

Femme Fatale

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

An innovative director with a strong visual style and a comprehension of cinema language is a boon to any film, but such gifts are especially welcome in a genre flick. While there are many directors who’ve distinguished themselves through their association with a particular film genre: Ernst Lubitsch (comedies), John Ford (westerns), Alfred Hitchcock (suspense thriller), John Carpenter (horror); most would contend that plot-driven, trope-reliant films, whose structures require a conformity to brand, don't always leave a lot of elbow room for artistic expression.

Skeletons in the Closet
Allison discovers something scarier than wire hangers
in Hedra's closet: a wardrobe duplicate to hers

Premise and setup are the stars of the suspense thriller, the director earning accolades only to the extent to which their talents contribute to the successful realization of the narrative’s requisite “payoffs”: surprise, scares, intensity, suspense, etc. Mind you, this isn’t easy, and any director capable of pulling off an effective thriller deserves credit. But the thrillers that tend to stick with me are the ones that manage to both follow the genre dots and bear an imprint of a director’s unique world view and artistic perspective.

Barbet Schroeder approaches Single White Female as though it were a character study in which one of the characters just happens to be a psychopath. The time and care spent on defining the relationship between Allie and Hedy, shading it with a comfortable intimacy and credible eccentricity (Allie accidentally catches Hedy masturbating, but instead of turning away, she lingers, watching) lends this film the stamp of quirky distinction.

Mirrors feature prominently in Single White Female, a film
exploring the dark side of identity, duality, and self-image

A similar attribute is Barbet Schroeder’s use of mise-en-scène to amplify Single White Female’s themes. For example, the internal life of Allison, a character whose anxieties are fueled by insecurity (fear of being alone) and betrayals (her former business partner, her fiancé, her client), is reflected in her external environment.

Allison’s apartment—spacious but just cramped enough to convey urban confinement—is in a building whose derelict condition signals uncertainty and danger. The rooms of the apartment all face a circular foyer, which, once the roommates’ lives and likenesses begin to merge, contributes an element of disorientation and distortion. Meanwhile, privacy (or rather, its lack) is vividly dramatized by the many angles, doorways, and alcoves people use to conceal themselves or suddenly pop into view from behind; air vents that serve as sound amplifiers to neighboring apartments; and telephone answering machines that either divulge or are too easily erased.

Troubled Waters
Beginning with the malfunctioning faucet that precipitates Allie getting to know her better, Hedra is associated with water throughout the film. Frequently shown bathing, showering, or in some way cleansing herself (shades of Lady Macbeth), water also figures significantly in Hedra's shadowy past.

PERFORMANCES

High-concept premise aside, the performances of Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh are the prime reason Single White Female endures for me, and why it continues to be such an enjoyable thrill ride after numerous rewatchings and long after its surprises have grown familiar.
When I think of actors who have a good onscreen chemistry, my mind goes immediately to their similarities and what they have in common. But when I watch Single White Female I'm reminded that the most explosive onscreen chemistry comes from different personalities that blend with a symbiotic ease.

Who Is She?

The pairing of Fonda and Leigh—two actors who don't especially look alike; whose rhythms and acting styles contrast intriguingly; who exude, respectively, self-restraint vs. barely held-in-check—seems to draw out the inverse best in both: Fonda has never registered stronger, Leigh (in a welcome departure from her usual hookers) terrifying in her vulnerability.
The film uses both so well that, as with an ensemble piece, it's difficult to assess the work of one independent of the other. Suffice it to say that both actors inhabit their characters in marvelously realized performances that are so relaxed and natural, they manage to buff out the edges of the melodrama, making the formulaic feel fresh.

Occupational Hazard
Stephen Tobolowsky as Mitchell Myerson

As the film progresses we learn that both Allison and Hedra have the same problem of repeating mistakes. Hedy is on the rebound from an earlier, assumed to be unsuccessful, attempt to reclaim a seminal relationship from her past. meanwhile Allie shows signs of being a serial bad-decision-maker. She bounces from one disloyal relationship (a business partner who claimed credit but didn't do any work) to another (a faithless fiancé) to another (hastily opening her apartment to a woman she doesn’t know) to another (a business client whose intentions she misreads).

Provocatively, Single White Female poses the idea that Allie & Hedy's relationship has the potential to help both women, its dysfunction arguably no more damaging than what what urban life offers women on a daily basis.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I can remember the precise moment when horror ceased being for me the stuff of kid-friendly escapism (Creature Features on Saturday night TV, all monsters, vampires, and werewolves), and became a vision of a terrifying world of random violence. It began in 1967 when I was nine years old and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho had its broadcast television premiere. The kindertrauma moment of Janet Leigh’s shower murder opened a veritable Box of horror in my life.

Ken’s Domestic Terror Timeline:

1967- Rosemary’s Baby published, In Cold Blood and Wait Until Dark released in theaters, and commercials for 1965s Return From The Ashes (in which a woman is murdered in her bathtub) appear on TV.

Ken’s Social Terror Timeline:

1968- Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated. San Francisco (where we lived) terrorized by The Zodiac Killer. I see Rosemary’s Baby at the movies and have the holy hell scared out of me.

1969 brought Helter Skelter and the Manson killings.

It was over a course of a few years, but to my psyche it felt as though it had happened overnight. Suddenly the illusion of safety that family and home provided was shattered by the realization that not even bathrooms are safe havens, human beings are the real monsters, and violence can sometimes be cruelly random.

Single White Female taps into all these still-fresh-to-me horrors: Apartment buildings can be genuinely creepy places, anyone alone is justified to feel feel vulnerable in a big city, and what is more mysterious and labyrinthine than the human personality?

OBSESSION 1974

THE LATE SHOW 1977

THE CONVERSATION 1974

FUNNY LADY 1975

REMEMBER MY NAME 1978

MIDNIGHT LACE 1960

AN AMERICAN HIPPIE IN ISRAEL 1972

THE INNOCENTS 1961

STILL OF THE NIGHT 1982

THE CEREMONY (La Cérémonie ) 1995

DAISY MILLER 1974

THE LONELY LADY 1983

THE ACTRESS 1953

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR 1979

THE BABY MAKER 1970

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE 1972

MORTAL THOUGHTS 1991

ONE OF THOSE THINGS 1971

CAMELOT 1967

SINGLE WHITE FEMALE 1992