DREAMS ARE WHAT LE CINEMA IS FOR...

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

Audrey Hepburn as Susy Hendrix

Alan Arkin as Harry Roat, Jr.

Richard Crenna as Mike Talman

Jack Weston as Sgt. Carlino

Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Sam Hendrix

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

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

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

PERFORMANCES:

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

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

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

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

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

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

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

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

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

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

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

It’s Christmas in July! Or, at least that’s how it feels since I got it in my head this month to read (for the first time!) Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. An act which, in turn, brought about my umpteenth revisit to the 1970 big-budget musical flop, Scrooge (mercifully, without an exclamation point), my absolute favorite screen adaptation of this oft-told holiday allegory.

A Christmas Carol and its tale of a miserly old curmudgeon who finds spiritual redemption through the intervention of three spectral warnings, has been adapted, reworked and re-imagined so many times, and in so many different formats, that there’s scarcely a source that can agree upon a set number. I've seen and suffered through a great many over the years myself, the best of the lot being the well-regarded 1951 Alastair Sim version; that beloved staple of my childhood, Mr. Magoo’s A Christmas Carol (1962); and, a particular favorite, 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol. But no adaptation rouses me, touches my heart, or gets the waterworks flowing for me like Scrooge. I just adore it. It may not be the most faithful Dickens adaptation, or even the best, but like the tree atop the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood, it makes me feel like Christmas. And as such, it's the most thoroughly charming and satisfying of all the versions of A Christmas Carol I've ever seen.

Albert Finney as Ebenezer Scrooge

Alec Guinness as Jacob Marley

Dame Edith Evans as The Ghost of Christmas Past

Kenneth More as The Ghost of Christmas Present

A brief look at the films released in 1970 reveals a kind of battle being raged at the boxoffice. Old-fashioned, elephantine studio releases like Airport, Tora!Tora!Tora!, and Ryan’s Daughter were duking it out with smaller, youth-centric films like M*A*S*H, Five Easy Pieces, and Diary of a Mad Housewife. When my friends and I went to the movies on weekends, it was often a choice between what we called, “our parent's movies” (see above/ aka,prehistoric) or “something good,” which usually meant something pretentious, grounded in “realism,” or with nudity (preferably, all three). Old-style Hollywood movies - particularly musicals - were considered "plastic." Something which, in post-60s vernacular, was appreciably worse than old-fashioned. Plastic meant artificial, contrived, corny, and old-hat. Hollywood, which had grown increasingly out of touch with public tastes in the latter part of that decade, could have saved itself untold heartache (not to mention millions) by not continuing to sink money into pricey dinosaurs like Star! (1968), Hello Dolly (1969), and Paint Your Wagon (1969) long after interest in such films had waned.

Dancing on His Grave
The townsfolk celebrate Scrooge's demise in the exuberant (and Best Song Oscar-nominated) "Thank You Very Much,"a number owing a debt to Oliver!'s "Consider Yourself"

A good example of how abruptly tastes had changed by 1970 is apparent in the way movie fans that year avoided Barbra Streisand doing what she does best (singing) in the G-rated On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, in favor of seeing her in a more realistic milieu (crassly so, many thought) playing a foul-mouthed, non-singing, New York prostitute in the R-rated and hilarious, The Owl & the Pussycat. Even Julie Andrews, the lady largely responsible for reviving the musical with The Sound of Music, couldn't get fans to turn out for Darling Lili that same year. Tellingly, the only movie musicals young people went to see in 1970 were Woodstock, The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter, and The Beatles’ Let It Be.

The Ghost of Hollywood Yet to Come
By the 70s, big studio productions like Scrooge were already a dying breed.

A wholly British production was a hard sell from the start. Director Ronald Neame (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Poseidon Adventure) was hardly a household name, and screenwriter/ composer Leslie Bricusse was largely associated with the double-barreled bombs of Goodbye Mr. Chips (1969) and Doctor Dolittle (1967). Saddled with a terrible ad campaign practically designed to scare audiences away (“Scrooge - All Singing! All Dancing! All Heart!”, the feebly-rendered posters screamed), Scrooge opened in November of 1970 with nothing to promote save the familiarity of Dickens' story and the surprising presence of 34-year-old leading-man, Albert Finney, doing a character turn in the title role.

Albert Finney as young Ebenezer, Suzanne Neve as Isabel Fezziwig, the love he let get away

For all the above stated reasons, I steered clear of Scrooge when it came out, but when it started to make the rounds on TV every Christmas, I regretted never giving myself the opportunity to see it on the big screen. Even in its heavily-edited* state it totally captivated me.
*Perversely, TV versions eliminated most of "Thank You Very Much," arguably the most kid-friendly song in Scrooge's lovely but somewhat sluggish score, and edited out the scenes of Scrooge in hell and some of the scarier stuff involving Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Ignoring the fact that children's classics like The Wizard of Oz are heavy on both scares and cheerful music, like a death-wish, the networks zeroed instead on Scrooge's warmth...a guaranteed humbug for children's Christmastime viewing. Happily the DVD has everything restored.

Banished to Hell, Scrooge is shown the ropes (or, in this case, chains) by his old friend, Jacob Marley

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Not in any way to sell Scroogeshort, because it really is a marvelously well-acted and pleasantly conceived musical, but I have to clarify from the outset what a soft touch I am when it comes to A Christmas Carol. There is just something I find so elementally touching in the notion of personal transform and the retrieval of one’s soul through the compassionate consideration of others. It just rips me up. It’s a poor adaptation of A Christmas Carol, indeed, that doesn't have me in tears by the time Ebenezer begins to see the error of his ways. Scrooge does this job exceptionally well, and by the film’s last 10 minutes I’m fairly a mess.

Albert Finney won a Best Actor Golden Globe for Scrooge. He would sing onscreen again as Daddy Warbucks in 1982's Annie

There’s something about the fairy-tale quality of Dickens’ writing, and A Christmas Carol in particular, that lends itself to easy transfer to a musical format. The characters have great, Seussical names like Fezziwig and Cratchit (and of course, the onomatopoeic perfection that is Ebenezer Scrooge…which is like, the best name EVER!), and the broad emotions of Scrooge’s reality are almost like musical counterpoint to the melancholy tenderness of the supernatural element. When, during the last act, the two contrasting worlds mesh, it feels like a musical crescendo.

The redemption/transformation musical medley that caps Scrooge (wherein many of the songs that had highlighted Scrooge's misanthropy have been converted into anthems celebrating his magnanimity) is the star on top of this particular Christmas tree. It's funny, it's moving, and I wish I could watch it just once without getting all choked up.

In this, the melodic score of original songs by Leslie Bricusse is perhaps undistinguished, but more than up to the job, fleshing out character motivations and, most successfully, expressing joy. Unlike say, the songs of the Sherman brothers, whose melodies for Disney movies are so infectious they have almost become nursery rhymes, no matter how often I see Scrooge, I can’t remember a single song afterward except, “Thank You Very Much.” This has the bonus effect of making the film feel new to me each time I revisit it. And when I do I'm always struck by how, in the context of the film and its characters and the way the melodies play on my emotions, I can't imagine a more ideal score.

David Collings and Frances Cuka as Bob & Ethel Cratchit
I love adaptations of A Christmas Carol that deviate from the text and allow for scenes of the Cratchit family reacting to the rehabilitated Scrooge.

PERFORMANCES:

Where Scrooge surpasses so many other versions of A Christmas Carol for me, is in the pleasure I take in Albert Finney’s bilious Scrooge. He’s a great deal of fun as a devoted killjoy, barking insults at people and shoving children out of his path. So much so that one is likely to be reluctant to see him rehabilitated too soon. As should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen his Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express, Finney is a movie star with the heart of a character actor. Makeup and prosthetics that would swallow up lesser actors whole, only seem to liberate him. As Scrooge, Finney’s transformation is mostly body language, and he plays Ebenezer as a sad, disappointed man who has steeled himself from pain by stiffening and gnarling his entire countenance into a knot of meanness.

Scrooge contemplates his younger self

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

I have no idea of Scrooge's budget, but the the film looks great in that old-fashioned, shot-entirely-in-a-studio way that triggers nostalgia in mewhen I watch it. The scope of the film isn't as grandiose as its spiritual cousin, Oliver!, but Scrooge boasts a distinguished cast of British actors, pleasing period detail in costumes and sets, and the overall look of it is sumptuous. The special effects, which must have been pretty dazzling in 1970, are pretty primitive by today's standards, but rendered all the more charming by that fact (God, am I tired of CGI). Also, I think most of the cast, if not all, does its own singing!

A Page Out of Dickens
Bob Cratchit with son Tiny Tim (Richard Beaumont) and daughter, Kathy (Karen Scargill)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Christmas is my favorite holiday season. And living here in L.A., its a beautiful time where the city of glitter and glitz puts on an extra layer of tinsel that makes a simple walk down the street feel like you're starring in your own MGM musical. It's not my usual habit to watch holiday movies in the swelter of summer, but in this case, I had such a blast (and a REALLY good cry) revisiting the world of Charles Dickens. Dickens by way of a delightful musical film that just happened to have been released when delightful musical films were no longer on America's agenda of moviegoing prerequisites. If Scrooge isn't already considered a holiday classic, it should be. It stands as an excellent reminder that just because a film is out of step with the times in which it was made, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a film that's out of step.

"God bless Us, Every One!"

“Everyone that watches ‘Deep Throat’ is watching me being raped.”
― Linda Lovelace, in her 1980 book, Ordeal

“Yes, there’s a lot of nudity, but it’s a message movie about respecting women.”

― Producer Patrick Muldoon, speaking to the press about his 2013 film, Lovelace

Mariel Hemingway as Dorothy Stratten and Eric Roberts as Paul Snider in Bob Fosse's last film, the morbid and depressing, Star 80

America loves its porn, but it’s never quite sure how it feels about it. Looking at the theatrical trailer for Lovelace, the forthcoming biopic of 70s Deep Throat porn sensation, Linda Lovelace; I was struck by how much it reminded me, both in subject and approach, of Star 80, Bob Fosse’s 1983 film about Playboy Playmate, Dorothy Stratten.

Both films tell the story of unsophisticated small-town girls who come under the influential wing of sleazy, disarmingly charming - ultimately controlling and abusive - lovers/managers who pimp the women out to the sex industries. Hardcore porn in Linda Lovelace's case (nee, Linda Susan Boreman); the sanitized, mainstream-porn limbo of “men’s magazine” nude photography in the instance of Dorothy Stratten.

photo: The Times

Peter Sarsgaard & Amanda Seyfried (top) portray Linda Lovelace and husband Chuck Traynor (below) in the film, Lovelace (2013).

The trailers for Star 80 and Lovelace are available for viewing on YouTube, with their similarities extending not only to leaving vague each film’s attitude about any presumed passivity or unwitting complicity on the part of these women in their fates, but in addition: near-identical prototypical sleazeball boyfriends assayed by Peter Sarsgaard in Lovelace and Erich Roberts in Star 80 (Roberts also happens to be in the cast of Lovelace); scenes of a woman dominated and forcibly seated in a chair by an aggressive male; and, most intriguingly, a subliminal “inheritance of exploitation” element introduced by the casting of conspicuously deglamorized former sex-symbols (Carroll Baker in Star 80, Sharon Stone in Lovelace) as the mothers of these victimized women.

Given our culture’s ambiguous relationship with industries that traffic in the commodification of sex, it’s perhaps not surprising that whenever we choose to train a cinematic spotlight on pornography, it’s not by way of celebration, but through the dramatic prism of a moral cautionary tale. (Although one might think, in an industry raking in upwards of $1.8-billion annually, there must be somebody celebrating somewhere.)

Lovelace and Star 80 tell tragic true-life tales of women suffering physical abuse at the hands of a professional Svengali. Stratten was ultimately murdered by hers, Lovelace broke free. But the air of sadness that always seemed an intractable part of Linda Lovelace's liberated, anti-porn countenance, hinted at a psychological scarring that prevented one from taking much comfort in her too-public emancipation. The message one gets from the trailers is clear: pornography is dehumanizing. The analogy unassailable: the porn industry and mainstream show business are not dissimilar in their treatment and exploitation of women.

But what about the films themselves? Is it possible to make a film about sexual exploitation without inadvertently resorting to (and in effect, participating in and sanctioning) the very kind of behavior it seeks to indict?

Read the complete article at HERE at Movieline.com

Copyright © Ken Anderson

I remember first becoming aware of William Peter Blatty’s novel, The Exorcist in 1971 when I saw an actress talking about it on The Merv Griffin Show. As hard as it is to imagine now, the average person in the 70s didn't know what an exorcist was, so Griffin initially (and perhaps intentionally) misheard the title and thought the actress was talking about a fitness book. Upon hearing what a terrifying read it was, coupled with the inevitable comparisons to that fave of mine, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby– the most high-profile Devil vs. Catholicism novel to date – I went to the library and was put on a long waiting list to get The Exorcist.

Before the shot of Father Merrin standing under the streetlamp became an iconic touchstone, the image of an open bedroom window with the drapes blowing outward was the primary advertising image for The Exorcist

In 1971 I was just a freshman at Saint Mary’s Catholic High School in Berkeley, California. And while at the time devout, I wasn't quite the same religiously impressionable Catholic School kid traumatized by Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. As a novel, I thought The Exorcist reveled a little too much in detailing the grotesqueries of demonic possession for me to take it as a serious discourse on the eternal battle between Christian faith and evil its author purported it to be, but it did grab me as one of the singularly most gripping and harrowing horror novels I'd ever read. What a page-turner! It was scary, emotionally credible, and rooted in a spiritual world I was raised in. I'd never read anything quite like it, and I couldn't put it down. When the film adaptation of The Exorcist came out on the day after Christmas (!) in 1973 - with much advance fanfare, but very little in the way of actual, "How are they going to make a movie of THAT book?" details - I somehow persuaded my entire family to go to San Francisco's Northpoint Theater (where it played for six months...an unheard of run today) and we all had the supreme pleasure of having the holy crap scared out of us in stereophonic sound. Seasons Greetings!

Ellen Bursty as Chris MacNeil

Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil

Max von Sydow as Father Lankester Merrin

Jason Miller as Damian Karras

Lee J. Cobb as Lt. William Kinderman

By the time I saw The Exorcist, Mike Oldfield’s eerie “Tubular Bells” was in heavy rotation on the radio as The Theme from ‘The Exorcist,’ and advance word had it that people were passing out, vomiting , and being carried out of theaters in hysterics in reaction to the unprecedented horror of what transpired onscreen. Anticipation was so high and lines for the movie were so long that people were even passing out before getting into the theater.

Where I lucked out is that I saw The Exorcist within days of its release, before the film went into wide release, and before word-of-mouth spread and mass hysteria set in. Few people remember it, but The Exorcist was really the dark horse release of 1973. The really heavily anticipated films that Christmas season were Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in the prison escape film, Papillon; Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force, the sequel to the hugely popular Dirty Harry (1971); and The Sting: a comedy and thus the most holiday-friendly release, marking the re-teaming of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid’s Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

Jack MacGowran as Burke Dennings
The character actor, familiar to fans of Roman Polanski by his appearances in the films, Cul-De-Sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers, died not long after completing work on The Exorcist. His death at age 54 (from flu-related complications) is often cited as part of the so-called The Exorcist Curse. Details about which can be found throughout the Internet.

All the smart money was on these three films. Each was a major release boasting the absolute top-ranking stars of their day, and promoted by massive publicity campaigns and pre-sold interest. Each film had a release date jump on The Exorcist (December 16th for Papillon, Christmas Day for The Sting and Magnum Force), The Sting, in particular, blessed with the added advantage of having received largely positive reviews, and shored up promotionally by the growing popularity of its theme music: Marvin Hamlisch’s jaunty adaptation of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” which became an instant MOR favorite on radio.
By way of contrast, The Exorcist featured a cast of actors whose names (if known at all) meant absolutely nothing at the boxoffice. In fact, both bestselling author William Peter Blatty and Academy Award-winning director William Friedkin (The French Connection) were initially The Exorcist’s most exploitable elements.

Kitty Winn as Sharon Spencer

The Exorcist was based on a controversial bestseller, but advance reviews of the film were poor to mixed, and few Hollywood oddsmakers had confidence that holiday audiences would be in the mood to see a dark-themed horror film the day after Christmas. So, while most of San Francisco was lining up to swoon over Paul Newman’s blue eyes or see Clint Eastwood blowing bad guys away with his .45; my family and I got in to see The Exorcistwith comparative ease. Lucky for us that we did. The Exorcist opened on a Wednesday, and by the weekend, it became a film it was near-impossible to get a seat for. Lines wound around the block and crowd control tactics had to be employed to deal with the overflow crowds. In the course of a few days, The Exorcist had achieved phenomenon status.

Site of Where I Had the Holy Hell Scared Out of Me
The Exorcist opened at San Francisco's Northpoint Theater, located on the corner of Bay and Powell. Click HERE to see great documentary footage of theater patrons from 1973 reacting to seeing The Exorcist for the first time.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Speaking primally, what I’ll always love most about The Exorcist is its having provided me that rarest of rare cinema adventures: the viewing experience that becomes emotional. It’s a phenomenon that goes deeper than being made to feel frightened, shocked, repulsed, or even taken by surprise. It’s being drawn so completely into a fictional reality that you respond on a visceral level, far deeper than intellect usually allows (the intellect that’s always there reminding you “It’s only a movie”). As one grows older, this type of total emotional immersion becomes harder to come by, but at age 16, I was just mature enough and just naïve enough for The Exorcist to give me the thrill ride of my life!

Home & Family and the Illusion of Safety
I was just young enough to still feel that one's home and the protection of one's family was sufficient to keep harm at bay. The Exorcist, in detailing the banal normalcy of the lives Chris and her daughter (juxtaposed with the barely-acknowledged tension of familial discord and divorce), shattered the illusion of home as sanctuary.

Religious Imagery
Even though, at age 16, I was starting to question all I had been taught in years of Catholic School, the traditions of religion; its mythology and iconography, could still prove unsettling to me in a context as violent and anarchic as The Exorcist.

Adult as Protector
In a teenager's world, adults are still the figures one looks to for strength and the reestablishment of order when things went wrong. The Exorcist, in showing a mother helpless to save her child in the face of an unnamed evil, hit a raw nerve in me. This cutaway shot of Chris reacting to the horror of Regan's possession just blew me away as a kid. Even today, this brief shot still sands as one of the one of the most powerful images in the film for me.

Rev. William O'Malley as Father Joseph Dyer
Most of the teachers at my school were either priests or Catholic Brothers. A great many of them looked exactly like real-life priest, William O'Malley. A fact that only went to further cement the disturbing verisimilitude within the fantasy that was The Exorcist.

Good vs Evil
I daresay that the disheartening state of the world is a challenge to anyone's moral beliefs, but to be raised Catholic is to feel acutely the disparity between what one is taught to believe and what one encounters in the world. The visual excesses of The Exorcist have always felt like such a perfect dramatization of the inexplicable ugliness in the world that exists simultaneously with all that is beautiful. Though I'd hasten to label it poetic, I wouldn't hesitate for a minute to call it powerful (and occasionally moving).

Science vs. Religion
Today, I find the willful disavowal of science in favor of myth and ignorance to be fairly absurd, but in my youth, both Rosemary's Baby and (most explicitly) The Exorcist provocatively held forth on the possibility that science was perhaps no match for that which could not be explained. This point was driven agonizingly home when The Exorcist's scenes of medical science at work proved far more shocking and inhumane than anything the Devil was able to cook up.

PERFORMANCES:

One benefit afforded me back in 1973 that’s denied most viewers of The Exorcist today, was my wholesale unfamiliarity the film’s cast. Linda Blair and Jason Miller were, of course, making their film debuts, but outside of Lee J. Cobb, The Exorcist was the first time I’d ever seen Ellen Burstyn and Max von Sydow on the screen. The removal of that extra layer subliminal artificiality that comes from watching an actor one has seen in a previous role portraying an entirely different character, immeasurably enhanced both The Exorcist’s verisimilitude and intensity and intensity for me. The actors onscreen were the characters they played. It's something you can't always count on, or anticipate, but when a film asks an audience to accept fantastic events as realistic, it seems to me that it helps to eliminate as many reminders as possible that one is "watching a movie." In this instance, my ignorance contributed to my bliss.

Ellen Burstyn’s Oscar-nominated performance is a good example of why, even when making cheap horror films, it’s worth the expense and trouble to get good actors. Neither Damien Karras' crisis of faith nor Father Merrin's preordained encounter with the forces of evil engaged me as much as the gradual emotional disintegration of Chris MacNeil and her concern for her daughter. Burstyn's incredibly committed performance has always been The Exorcist's emotional center for me, and it's precisely the kind of grounded realism she brings to her role that makes us believe in what is going on. Even as the film's special effects begin to look quaint in this age of CGI, Burstyn's performance never gets old. Everyone in The Exorcist is terrific, but I have total confidence in my belief that the film wouldn't have worked at all without her.

I've come to look kindlier upon Lee J. Cobb's ramshackle Lt. Kinderman over the years. When The Exorcist first came out, Peter Falk's Columbo was still on the air and Cobb's takes-forever-to-get-to-the-point detective seemed then like an imitation.

The most elaborate special effects in the world don’t amount to much when there is nothing human at the center of all that carnage. Many a well-made horror film has been ruined by actors incapable of registering even the most rudimentary signs of fear, despair, anguish, or trauma…recognizable human reactions that raise the emotional stakes of the drama and gets the audience invested in the outcome. I think the ability to convincingly convey fear and dread is high on the list of underrated talents.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

No point in going on about The Exorcist's then-unprecedented shocks. Suffice it to say that I spent a great deal of the latter part of the film with my coat at the ready to shield my eyes; my little sister was reduced to tears; and a sizable portion of my popcorn went uneaten. There's been much written about what an emotional roller-coaster ride The Exorcist is, but few mention what a physical toll this movie takes. I remember my body being wound tighter than a mainspring every time a character approached that bedroom door. The sense of apprehension and dread I felt at every reveal of the degree of Linda Blair's possession was almost unbearable. And the sound! Was there ever s film with a more active and jarring soundtrack? Even when your eyes were closed the movie terrified you.

No one fainted or passed out during the screening, but such screaming and yelping you never heard in your life. People leaving the theater had the look of folks who had just been rescued off of a sinking ship or something. Some were giddy and pleased with themselves for having survived, others looked drained and in need of physical support, and many were just stumbling out as if a daze. Me? I recall wobbly knees and teary eyes (It always makes me cry when Linda Blair kisses the clerical collar of Father Dyer). Was I grossed out? Yes! Was I entertained? Oh, but yes...it was wonderful!

The Exorcist author and screenwriter William Peter Blatty (r.) makes a cameo appearance.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

The enduring legacy of The Exorcist disproves the popular belief in 1973 among the film’s detractors who claimed, that once the shock value of the gross-out effects were experienced, there was little of substance in the film for audiences to enjoy. On the contrary, my familiarity with the film’s shock effects has allowed me, over the ears, to grow ever more appreciative of what a superior example of filmmaking as storytelling The Exorcist really is. Whether one takes it seriously as the “theological thriller” it was intended to be, or, like me, merely enjoy it as one of the best horror movies ever made, The Exorcist is a bona fide, gold-plated classic of the first order. And I’m thrilled to have been around to experience The Exorcist phenomenon first-hand. I’ll never forget it.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES:

Linda Blair
Met her in a L.A. supermarket and she was such a sweetie when I asked for an autograph. I commented on how she is one of my favorite screen criers, to which she replied "You've seen those movies,...believe me, it's heartfelt!"

It’s with great sadness that I write that one of my all-time favorite actresses, Karen Black, died of cancer today, August 8th, 2013, at the age of 74. This is an actress I first fell in love with when I saw her on TV - I couldn't have been more than 12 or so - in Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), her motion picture debut.

I always think of Karen Black as the face of the 70s because she appeared to me to have been one of the most prolific actresses of the decade. During the bulk of the 1970s she seemed to be in all places at once- movies, TV, etc. (I recall seeing her sing "You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog" on some late night talk show), and it was near-impossible to avoid her. Which was fine by me. She was a colorful, eccentric, quotable personality, but she wasn't a starlet or fame junkie. She was very serious actor, passionate about her work, and she appeared in an impressive number of films, both high-profile and low, giving attention-getting performances that by 1975, made her into one of the biggest and most sought-after stars in Hollywood.

My first time seeing Karen Black on the big screen was in Peter Fonda’s counterculture hit, Easy Rider (1969) in which she played the first in a long line of what critics came to identify as her trademark “All-American Trollop” roles. It was eventually Black’s close association with playing ladies of easy virtue that brought about my not being able to see her in another film until 1974’s The Great Gatsby, as my mother thought that Karen Black films were full of “nakedness,” as she called it, and forbid me to go to any of them. Thus, I missed out on seeing Black’s Oscar-nominated turn in Five Easy Pieces (1970); the drug-addiction drama Born to Win (1971); the confused college-kid angst of Drive, He Said (a Jack Nicholson directed/penned film whose somewhat desperate print ad campaign focused on whether a particular sex scene was sodomy or not); and the I-really-didn't-think-I-stood-a-chance-with-this-one, Portnoy’s Complaint (1972). All films I would later have the opportunity to see as an adult and would greatly enjoy…sometimes exclusively due to Karen Black’s performances.

Happily, as I grew to M-rated movie age, the caliber and quality of Karen Black's films began to get more mainstream. Highlights of this period in her career are that unforgettable “The Stewardess is flying the plane!” opus, Airport 1975; the horror cult-classic 1975 TV-movie, Trilogy of Terror; and Robert Altman's Nashville, where Black got the opportunity to showcase her singing and songwriting skills (she had earlier supplied the songs and sang on the soundtrack of The Pyx - 1973, a little-seen devil worship thriller). In 1976 she appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot and re-teamed with Trilogy of Terror director, Dan Curtis, for Burnt Offerings. But it was in 1975 that Karen Black (in a controversial bit of casting) starred in my personal favorite of all of her films: The Day of the Locust. She went on record as being not particularly fond of her experience making the film, but her work in it is among her best.
If you went to a movies at all during the 70s, it's unlikely that you hadn't seen at least one Karen Black film. And, in having done so, it’s even more unlikely that you ever forgot it.

Karen Black was far too much of an original to be everybody’s cup of tea. People either loved her or hated her. Critics like Rex Reed and John Simon could never get past her unconventional beauty to ever evaluate her acting fairly. Yet she consistently turned in bold, risk-taking, emotionally committed performances typified by a naked vulnerability and sensuality many found to be either uncomfortably raw or deeply engrossing. She never seemed to do anything halfway, and in putting so much of herself into her roles and taking so many chances with her characterizations, she was sometimes apt to miss the mark or shoot way over the top. But through it all she was never less than authentic to her own vision of a character she played. She was such a surprising, inventive kind of actress that she remained eminently watchable even when she was failing spectacularly.

Labeled by columnists during her heyday as “The Bette Davis of the ‘70s,” it's a testament to her talent and one-of-a-kind appeal that Karen Black was able to distinguish herself during an era that boasted such cinema heavyweights as Glenda Jackson, Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, Liza Minnelli, Ellen Burstyn, Liv Ullman, Shelley Duvall, Diane Keaton, and Sally Field.

After her amazing turn in Robert Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), I confess to having missed a great deal of her latter, independent film output, preferring to stay away from the intentional schlock - accepting the risk that I might be missing a few gems along the way. As I look at it now, that leaves me with a vast legacy of films I have yet to explore

In 2007 I had the supreme thrill of seeing her perform onstage in Missouri Waltz, an original play she wrote. To actually see my childhood idol in the flesh was truly surreal and an almost an out-of-body experience for me. (It was at a 99-seat theater here in LA, so the intimacy of the surroundings was heady. It took a good 15 minutes for me to get into the play and forget I was in the same room as Faye Greener and Connie White!) After the show, when she stayed around to talk to members of the audience, I was such a nervous wreck I swear my extended hand was shaking long before she shook it.
She was soft-spoken and very sweet, and I felt I could have almost passed out from joy.
Although I was tempted, I spared telling her the story of how "Memphis," the song she composed and sang in the film Nashville, was my audition song for years during my days as a dancer.

It's always odd to say that one will miss an actor when they pass away, for unlike most, they remain with us always through their films. I consider this to be very true, and it gladdens me...but y'know, I think I'm still gonna miss Karen Black. A lot.

Click on the title links below to read my posts about these unforgettable Karen Black films:

The Day of the Locust

Nashville

Burnt Offerings

You're A Big Boy Now

The Great Gatsby

Karen Black 1939 - 2013

Although I like to think of myself as having a good sense of humor, I’m afraid I’m not what you might call an “easy laugher.” (My partner would beg to differ. Given my fondness for Peter Sellers, Benny Hill, and particularly Don Adams; I think he ranks my funnybone somewhere in the “easily-amused, lowbrow laugh-whore” zone.)

But be that as it may, I just don’t happen to find many motion picture comedies to be particularly funny. This is especially true of contemporary comedies, a great many of which seem little more than 5-minute skits painfully dragged out to feature-film length. My face turns to stone at just the mention of the names Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Tim Allen, Rob Schneider, or Vince Vaughn; each of whose films (of which I’ve mercifully experienced but a smattering) feels like an eternity spent in the frathouse kegger from hell.

Looking over my DVD collection, I note that a preponderance of what I consider to be my favorite comedies are actually of the unintentional variety (Showgirls, Mommie Dearest, The Oscar, The Poseidon Adventure), but also represented are the 70s comedies of Mel Brooks; Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc?and Paper Moon; the counterculture black comedies of John Waters and Paul Morrissey /Andy Warhol; and, although I haven’t found Woody Allen funny since Manhattan Murder Mystery and Bullets over Broadway, I can’t deny that I own virtually all of his early, Diane Keaton-era films.

Jane Lynch and Fred Willard do a terrifyingly spot-on send-up of those vapidly cheerful, vacant-eyed hosts we've all seen on Hollywood news magazine programs like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood.

These days, I find television to be the most satisfying and consistent source of comedy. Or, more accurately, the whole TV/Internet/DVD connection. From the brilliant The Larry Sanders Show to Arrested Development, Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy and The Comeback, Parks & Recreation, Ricky Gervais’ The Officeand Extras, and Louis C.K.’s Louie…the stuff being made for television nowadays (owing, perhaps, to the briefer format) is head and shoulders above what’s being done in film.

The sole exceptions to the above-stated criticisms about motion pictures are the (all-too infrequent) ensemble comedies of Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy & Co. This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and my personal favorite, For Your Consideration, rank, in my estimation, among the best American comedies ever made.

Catherine O'Hara as Marilyn Hack: 32-year veteran actress

Harry Shearer as Victor Allan Miller: 40-years in the business, still works for scale

Eugene Levy as Morley Orfkin: Worst Agent in the World

Parker Posey as Callie Webb: "I don't act for trophies."

Christopher Guest as Jay Berman: Alleged Film Director

Ascribable perhaps to its departure from the usual “mockumentary” format they’re known for, For Your Consideration is regarded by some devotees of the Guest/Levy films to be one of their weaker efforts. For me, it's the total opposite. While I would never attest to one film being better than another (each manages to be uproarious in its own way), I can say that due to its satirical targets being topics near and dear to my heart (movies, Hollywood, The Academy Awards, fame culture), For Your Consideration is the film I most connect with. I get all the inside jokes, I understand the characters, I recognize the absurd world depicted. For Your Consideration achieves the impossible in creating a flawless and riotously funny satire of an industry that increasingly teeters on the brink of becoming a satire of itself.

John Michael Higgins as Corey Taft (alias Jo-Jo): Movie Publicist

For Your Considerationtells the story of what happens when three otherwise rational actors in an inconsequential little independent film allow themselves to get swept up in the frenzy that surrounds the self-propigating hype of the Academy Awards. Following Christopher Guest’s usual mode of commenting on the large by focusing on the small, Hollywood and the film industry is savagely lampooned when we're allowed behind the scenes in the making of “Home for Purim” — a by-all-appearances dreadful family drama (think Lifetime or Hallmark Channel caliber) in the southern gothic tradition of Eugene O’Neill. Minus the talent.

The amusingly overwrought “Home for Purim” chronicles the domestic travails surrounding a family reunion in the Pisher household in 1940s Georgia (pisher being Yiddish slang for just what it sounds like…pisser). From its team of hack writers, to its dedicated cast of never-quite-made-its, to its barely-up-to-the-task production crew, “Home for Purim” is journeyman filmmaking in every department. Making Your Consideration a comedy that shows us that rarely-seen side of Hollywood where high-flown pretensions of “art”commingle with standard-operational workday mediocrity.

Bob Balaban (I love that guy) as Phillip Koontz (not Kuntz) and Michael McKean as Lane Iverson.
The conjointly-disregarded writers of "Home for Purim"

As was the case with the delusional regional theater thespians of Waiting for Guffman, For Your Consideration mines its (occasionally poignant) comedy from the big-time dreams and ambitions of the talent-challenged. But since it takes place in Hollywood, the absurdity ante is considerably upped, because, as we all know, being absolutely terrible at one’s job has never been an obstacle to success in the movie business. Hope springs eternal in an industry where individuals of no discernible talent (Kristen Stewart, Vin Diesel) can rake in the millions, or truly abominable, full-on crap directors like Michael Bay and Dennis Dugan (IMDB him, if you dare) never cease to be employed.

Wake Up, L.A.!
For Your Consideration's television spoofs are so off-the-chart deranged, they don't look like spoofs at all.

For Your Considerationshows what happens when career actors for whom working in the movies has always meant earning a living, not being on the A-List, are given a last-gasp shot at a ride on the red carpet of fame.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Hollywood satires are as old as the industry itself (the 1937 Leslie Howard comedy, Stand-In is a good example). But too often they’re either kid-gloved jabs at the easy targets of greed, egomania, and artifice (a la, Jerry Lewis’ The Patsy, Walter Matthau’s Movers and Shakers, Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, or the classic, Singin’ in the Rain); or embittered, not-very-funny, revenge-fueled vendettas by tarnished Golden Boys no longer at the top of the heap ((Blake Edwards’ S.O.B., Joe Eszterhas’ Burn, Hollywood, Burn). The flaw of the former is the toothlessness of the satire; the flaw of the latter: the convenient way the filmmakers tend to posit their onscreen surrogates as the principled victims of a morally corrupt industry (an industry they'd sell their mother for a chance to again be a major player in).

Jennifer Coolidge as producer Whitney Taylor Brown, and Jordan Black as production assistant, Lincoln.
Not a functioning brain cell between them.

In the end, the biggest lie of these satires is their being rooted in the questionable notion that somehow the movie industry is this monolith of empty values and avarice operating independently of the individuals it employs. If the movie industry is creepy, it's because of the Brett Ratners and Charlie Sheens it attracts, not its profit-based corporate structure.

Where For Your Consideration shines (and why I find it so hilarious) is that it presents Hollywood as an industry that is only as empty-headed and superficial as the people who seek to make their living in it. The humor comes out of the character flaws of individuals who willingly subject themselves to its rejections and petty humiliations; who delude and flatter themselves that they are absolutely NOT a part of the system; and who, pitiably, are so fueled by longing and vulnerable to temptation that they readily sell out every last principle and ideal they have when an opportunity for fame and fortune presents itself.

For Your Consideration finds both the humor and humanity in people of unexceptional gifts harboring the dream of being extraordinary.

There's not a movie made that couldn't be made better with the casting of Parker Posey
Rachael Harris as Debbie Gilchrest: "Dying is easy, playing a lesbian is hard!"

PERFORMANCES:

As is always the case with Christopher Guest’s ensemble comedies, the entire cast is absolutely brilliant, making it impossible to point out one favored bit without leaving out a dozen more. Suffice it to say there’s not a single character in the film I wouldn't have enjoyed seeing more of. Even after multiple viewing I keep catching new bits of business and finding more layers in the marvelously comic characterizations. They are all just great.

Of course, special mention must be made of Catherine O’Hara, who just shines as Marilyn Hack. Her performance here is doubly notable because it inspired real life to imitate art (O'Hara garnered considerable Academy buzz for the film. A buzz that never materialized in an Oscar nod).

There’s no way that I can watch her sympathetic portrayal of an actress who so humiliatingly loses her grip at the thought of being nominated for an Oscar without thinking of Sally Kirkland. For those unfamiliar with the name, Sally Kirkland is an actress who’d been appearing in films since the 60s without making much of an impact when, in 1987, a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Anna, thrust her into the limelight. And she ran with it.

Serious Actress Movie Star

Catherine O'Hara's transformation from dedicated professional to potential Oscar-nominee is nothing short of chilling in perfectly capturing that "perpetually startled" look of the face-lift set. Amazingly, there are no special makeup effects involved. She's just using her facial muscles!

Determined to reverse decades of obscurity, Kirkland (who in Anna beautifully portrays an unglamorous, middle-aged stage actress) launched herself into an exhaustive campaign of self-promotion that was memorable in its shamelessness. Almost unrecognizably glammed-out, wearing perilously short skirts that enhanced her always-on-display, recently-enhanced breasts, the 46-year-old veteran actress carried on like a giggly starlet on a string of nighttime talk shows - most frequently, The Arsenio Hall Show. A sad coda to her tale is while she continues to work in films, her Oscar nomination never did result in stardom. In addition, Kirkland suffered so many serious health issues as a result of her breast implants that she had to have them removed and later became an advocate for the banning of the surgical procedure.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

A few of my favorite bits of dialog.

Victor Allen Miller: "It’s just a bit silly about the Oscar stuff, don’t you think?"

Sandy Lane : Silly? It’s the Backbone of this industry!"

Victor Allen Miller: "An industry noted for not having a backbone."

Corey Taft: “In every actor there lives a tiger, a pig, an ass, and a nightingale. You never know which one’s going to show up.”

Simon Whitset (cameraman):Do you know how tight my aperture is right now? Have you any idea?”

Jay Berman (director): “If you’re being a smart-ass, you know what I'm gonna do? I’m gonna put you across my knee.”

Variety Headlines
Pointing Guy Scores Big / "Let's Shoot The Puppy" Gets Axed: Studio Pulls Plug

Lane Iverson: “You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater because then all you have is a wet, critically injured baby. And I don’t think that’s what you want to put your name on.”

Debbie Gilchrest: "I feel like it's ambiguous. I don't think it's clear that I'm gay. I mean, I got the look, but I think that we're pussyfooting around the subject."

Brian Chubb: "Thatmade you sound gay..."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:
Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy make comedies about dreamers, and as such, their humor always has a touch of wistfulness to it. Being a huge film fan and a dreamer myself, perhaps that's why For Your Consideration is my favorite of their films. Or maybe it's just that I get a kick out of a movie that takes a bit of the air out of the kind of people who go around saying things like: "It's all about the work," "It's important to hone one's craft," or refer to their voices and bodies as "my instrument."

Adapting Robert Altman’s trademark, multi-character, freeform narrative style to the formalized structure of a classic Agatha Christie murder mystery is such an inspired concept, I’m rather surprised it took until near the end of Altman’s 50-plus years in film for someone to think of it. But after tackling musicals (Popeye), westerns (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), farce (Beyond Therapy), romantic comedy (A Perfect Couple), film noir (The Long Goodbye), the psychological thriller (Images), and satire (The Player); a good, old-fashioned whodunit was just about the only genre left for one of the more resilient and versatile filmmakers to come out of the New Hollywood.

Robert Altman has been one of my favorite directors since I first discovered him in the early 70s. But following the rather (for me) dismal back-to-back entries of Cookie’s Fortune(1999) and Dr. T and the Women (2000), I really thought Altman had gone the way of another 70s favorite, Peter Bogdanovich: dried up creatively, his best work behind him. I was wrong. Like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman proved himself to be one of those directors capable of delivering surprisingly fresh and innovative work well into their 70s. Indeed, at the ripe old age of 75, Altman’s Gosford Park revealed the director in his finest form since 3 Women (1977), delivering not only one of his most solid and well-realized films, but his biggest boxoffice hit since M.A.S.H.(1970).

Maggie Smith as Lady Constance Trentham

Clive Owen as Robert Parks

Kristen Scott Thomas as Lady Sylvia McCordle

Jeremy Northam as Ivor Novello

With Gosford Park, the collaborative efforts of Robert Altman, producer Bob Balaban, and writer Julian Fellowes combined to create a marvelously layered recreation of a traditional English-style crime mystery with a decidedly Altman-esque twist. The twist being that the mystery—a murder taking place during a weekend shooting party at English country estate in 1932— is not seen from the point of view of the aristocratic set of relatives and guests, but rather, from the perspective of the servant class, below stairs. It’s a simple yet ingenious device allowing for the filmmakers to cleverly intermingle the crosscutting stories of some 35 characters, while making keen observations on everything from the class system to changing times, sexual mores, social conventions, personal relationships, and cultural differences.

Helen Mirren as Mrs. Wilson

Alan Bates as Jennings

Emily Watson as Elsie

Kelly Macdonald as Mary Maceachran

In detailing a strained weekend in the country in which virtually all in attendance have something to hide or something they’re after; Altman’s legendary virtuosity behind the camera serves the misleadingly conventional setup exceptionally well. In fact, not since Nashvillehas Altman’s celebrated “bag of tricks” (overlapping dialog, peripheral activity, cross-cutting storylines, ensemble cast of characters harboring secrets) seemed so organic to the material. Ostensibly hemmed in by the rigid constraints of the religiously-adhered-to rules of the British social class structure, Altman actually comes off as more liberated than ever. There’s something in Julian Fellowes’ (Downton Abbey) surprisingly witty, culturally-precise script that presses most of Robert Altman’s best qualities to the forefront (I can’t think of a single director capable of getting us to keep track of, let alone care about, so many characters), while suppressing a great many of his weaknesses (the English locale spares us Altman’s fondness for the easy laugh of hayseed southern accents).

Michael Gambon as William McCordle

Eileen Atkins as Mrs. Croft

Bob Balaban as Morris Weissman

I saw Gosford Park when it opened in 2001, and, clocking in at a little over two hours, it's a film I was nevertheless sorry to see come to an end (a problem happily remedied by the DVD which contains loads of deleted scenes!). In a world where one finds oneself grateful if a film is comprised entirely of smart clichés instead of stupid ones; Gosford Park is an endangered species: a film that actually surprises. Somehow, while still adhering to the genre conventions of an Agatha Christie crime drama (or, as is frequently referenced, a Charlie Chan thriller) Gosford Park manages to confound expectations.The comedy is sharp, the drama is well-played and frequently touching, the characters are dimensional, the mystery element engrossing, and its subthemes on class differences poignant and eye-opening.
Of course, the biggest surprise of all is that after all these years, I'm never at a loss for discovering new things in film.

A particular favorite of mine is Camilla Rutherford as Isabel McCordle. She and Mabel Nesbitt are characters with story arcs I'd describe as classically Altman-esque.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Perhaps the right word here is “grateful.” What I’m grateful for about Gosford Park is the depth of its intricacy. It's an entertaining film that breezes along, providing both character-based humor and genuinely affecting dramatic moments, yet Gosford Park has a great deal more on its mind than just providing a solid mystery and a houseful of suspects. It's a very smart, nicely-observed look at the kinds of surface behaviors and rituals that people engage in that mask who and what they really are. And all this is layered atop a social satire and comedy of manners contrasting self-imposed hierarchies of status within those that are socially-imposed. It's a film just brilliant in it's complexity, chiefly because you can ignore any and all of these and still enjoy the movie a great deal.
From every conceivable angle Gosford Park is a marvel of logistics. So many stories to tell, so many characters, so much information to impart...and yet, the film feels light and effortless. That Altman is able to deliver to us so many interesting characters in so brief a time is a skill he has demonstrated several times before; his being able to do so while simultaneously enlightening us to the myriad duties and rituals that go into the running of an English manor house is something else again.

Gosford Park is a great film for repeat viewings. It's staggering the amount of subtle details one misses when first just from trying to figure out "whodunit." The interwoven lives of all the characters become much clearer.

For me, it's such a delight to see a film that asks something of you. That requires your attention, mental involvement, and active participation in following along and picking up on all the layers provided. It’s great not to have everything spelled out for you, or to have a camera continually directing your gaze towards where to look and why. Gosford Park assumes an alertness from its audience and rewards you with a story that pays off as terribly smart mystery, comedy, character drama, and social commentary.

Stephen Fry as Inspector Thompson

PERFORMANCES:
The nearly all-British cast assembled for Gosford Park is an eye-popper. Made all the more impressive by having some of the most distinguished actors (Knights! Dames!) democratically blended and divided between the upstairs and downstairs cast. Dame Maggie Smith steals scenes and looks quite at home as the snobbish dowager Countess (a role that is essentially a dry-run for the one she would assume 9 years later in Downton Abbey); but it's great fun seeing Sir Alan Bates as the butler of the household, silently occupying scenes like an extra; or Dame Helen Mirren (since 2003), makeup-less and relegated to below stairs quarters. And as Gosford Park is a murder mystery, such egalitarian casting works much to the film's benefit, as it is impossible to play the "billing" game here (trying to guess the victims and guilty parties based on star rank).

Geraldine Sommerville as Louisa Stockbridge (younger sister of Lady Sylvia)
Altman films have a reputation for being well-cast, and Gosford Park is no exception. As was the case with A Wedding, Altman makes it easier for us to tell who's-who by casting actors who look as if they could plausibly be related

The performances in Gosford Park are so uniformly excellent that it's both pointless and futile to try to single out a particular actor. I confess to finding Ryan Phillippe to be the weakest link, although even in this instance his blank screen persona works well within the film's context. Nor am I too fond of Stephen Fry's Inspector Thom...(above stairs, no on lets him complete his introduction), which feels like another of Altman's risky forays into needlessly broad farce (think Opal in Nashville). Certainly certain characters and their storylines stand out more than others, but if you're like me, you'll wind up having a different "favorite" each time you view the film.

Claudie Blakley as Mabel Nesbitt, serenaded by Ivor Novello

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

There's no escaping the feeling when watching Gosford Park, that one is watching the most elegant, life-sized game of CLUE ever! The narrow, bygone world depicted is meticulously recreated in the seamless blending of locations and sets, outrageously gorgeous clothing, and an attention to period detail in makeup and hairstyles that fittingly recall the very sort of films Gosford Park pays homage to.

Derk Jacobi as Probert, Sir William's valet

All this lavish period-detail fetishism would be off-putting were it not used in service of dramatizing the huge difference in the lives of the "haves" and "have-nots" of Gosford Park. And this is why Robert Altman was one of my all-time favorites, for while the average director would be content to have us ooh and ahh over the jewels, gowns, and luxury of the life depicted, Altman matches every loving close-up and perfectly framed shot of upstairs opulence with a similar shot in the tight and privacy-free servant's quarters. He never preaches or tells us what we should feel about it all, but unlike say, the inappropriately worshipful depiction of wealth in 1974s The Great Gatsby, Gosford Park captures it all, but with a conscience.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Gosford Park ranks among my top five favorite Robert Altman films. I’m also an avid Downton Abbey fan...a fact that really intrigues me. Not only about myself but about America. American audiences aren’t known for taking British culture to its bosom, but Julian Fellowes’ tales of servants and the social classes seem to have struck a chord with us.

Speaking for myself, I suspect there is something about the distancing effect and “otherness” of British society class struggles that allows me to be entertained by them in ways unthinkable were these tales told about contemporary wealthy American households with maids, nannies and the like. We Americans still have yet to come to terms with our own race-based class systems, so it is infinitely easier to watch narratives which feature white characters both above and below stairs. A lot of uncomfortable subtext is avoided. In my own experience, I can can attest to there definitely being a distancing issue here that make these shows and this film easier to digest as just entertainment.

Gosford Park boasts a beautiful musical score
There's an absolutely charming sequence where we're shown the servants hiding in the shadows to listen to the music coming from the drawing room. Ironically, the aristocracy is bored by it, while the lower classes, prohibited from being seen listening to it, are transported by it.

Were there to ever be a film about slavery in America (or even the recent past of the Jim Crow era or the 1960s) in which the slaves are depicted not as they usually are (a social issue), but as fleshed-out, fully-realized characters with the same level of dimensional humanity as the servants of Gosford Park or Downton Abbey– varied, unique individuals with their own hopes, personalities, and emotional agonizes derived from their life circumstances…I’m pretty sure my heart would never stop breaking.

“If you take material and filter it through me like a sieve, it’s gonna vaguely have my shape. I can’t hide that ‘signature’ any more than I can create it. It’s something that occurs. It’s DNA.”
Robert Altman on the topic of directors subconsciously leaving their personal imprint on a film.

When Roman Polanski’s controversial film adaptation of Macbeth, William Shakespeare’s famously “unlucky” play (theater superstition has it that the play is cursed), flopped unceremoniously at the boxoffice, the director salved his wounded ego by complaining to any and all that the film’s poor performance was due to the public failing to believe his blood-soaked, graphically violent approach to Shakespeare's tale of a nobleman brought low by ambition and waning conscience, was in any way influenced by the Manson killings. Polanski felt his film was never given a fair chance because misguided critics and Freud-obsessed American audiences insisted on reading allusions to the brutal August, 1969 slaying of his wife (actress Sharon Tate) and unborn child into all those explicitly-rendered, Shakespeare-mandated, stabbings, dismemberments, ambushes, beheadings, and infants from their mother's wombs untimely ripp'd.
Yeah...how silly of us.

"It makes 'The Wild Bunch" look like 'Brigadoon'"
Or so one critic thought upon the film's release. Most of the bloodshed that traditionally occurs offstage in Macbeth is placed front and center in Polanski's adaptation.

Polanski was right of course. Audiences at the time most definitely reacted to Macbeth as a film made by a director exercising questionable taste in drawing upon an unspeakable personal tragedy for artistic inspiration. But how could they not? His first film in almost three years, Macbeth was Polanski's follow-up to Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and his first film since the cultural shockwave of the Tate/LaBianca Murders. I'd say at this point in his career, Polanski could have adapted The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore and audiences would still have scoured every frame looking for traces of what effect such a profound loss and personal trauma might have had on his work.

Roman Polanski is perhaps my favorite director of all time, but for him to have assumed it would be otherwise is not only naive, but smacks more than a little of a disingenuousness on his part. As one of the breed of filmmakers who greatly benefited from the “film director as star” cult that sprang out of the 70s "auteur movement," Polanski became the darling of both mainstream and avant-garde film by promoting his films as the creative result of his singular artistic vision. Whose fault is it then if audiences claim to detect traces of the director's DNA on the celluloid?

John Finch as Macbeth

Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth

Martin Shaw as Banquo

Terence Bayler as Macduff

John Stride as Ross

Both Polanski and co-collaborator Kenneth Tynan (the noted theater critic and literary manager of the National Theater Company) are terrifically faithful to Shakespeare's original text of The Tragedy of Macbeth, but make no mistake, this IS Polanski’s Macbeth. Good or bad, whether he likes it or not, Roman Polanski's cinematic fingerprints - (not to mention copious amounts of blood) - are all over this film. And rather than denying it, Polanski should embrace it; for it is the infusion of one man's real-life fixations into the fictional story of another that wrests this Macbeth from its theatrical confines and brings it to vibrant, intensely enjoyable life. All the trademark Polanski templates and obsessions are in attendance: the bleak, empty vistas under ominous skies recall Cul-De-Sac; Repulsion's hallucinatory dream sequences are echoed in Macbeth's haunted nightmares; there's the coven of nude, elderly witches that hearken to Rosemary's Baby; and the coiled, masculinity-baiting tensions that exist between Lord and Lady Macbeth, are not dissimilar to Knife in the Water's aggrieved married couple.

The Three Witches

Chaos, Darkness, & Conflict

So many familiar themes and motifs that later came to punctuate the entire Roman Polanski film oeuvre are present in such keenly-observed abundance - blunt, unsentimentalized violence; pessimism; a distrust of human nature; guilt; impotence in the face of destiny; black humor - one might be forgiven for forgetting that Macbeth was indeed written by William Shakespeare in the 17th Century...not Roman Polanski in the 20th.

Nicholas Selby as King Duncan

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

I’m not much on Shakespeare. The language is beautiful, I’ll grant you that, but the image I have of Shakespeare on film is one of lugubrious dramas with British actors in love with the sound of their own voices staring off into the distance delivering speeches. In tights, yet.

There are exceptions of course. I'm fond of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet– (1996), Titus (Andronicus) - (1999), and this, Polanski’s Macbeth - which is my favorite screen adaptation of a Shakespeare work. Macbeth, with its exceedingly high body count and concern with such relatable, base emotions as guilt, envy, and revenge, is a particularly impressive translation to film, not only because Polanski is a perfect ideological match for a tale about the poisonous imprint of ambition (Lord Macbeth and Rosemary’s Baby’s Guy Woodhouse would have a lot to say to one another), but as one of cinema’s great visual storytellers, Polanski’s command of the language of cinema enlivens the story by creating images as poetic and dramatically evocative as the words that accompany them.

As though summoned by Macbeth's own brooding temperament, dark clouds gather in the skies above Inverness castle as King Duncan approaches to meet his fate

Polanski takes the naturalistic approach to Shakespeare’s play, an approach that forges a psychological intimacy to the story that makes the characters life-size, and renders their faults not ones born of evil natures, but of human weakness. The tragedy of Macbeth is that the darkness within him is only unearthed after his fortunes have taken an upturn and his future success ordained. Lord and Lady Macbeth are only truly unhappy with their lot after it has been prophesized that it is to be improved. It’s like the “entitlement” sickness that grips Americans today. People seem to have lost the knack of being happy with what they've got, because everywhere you look they're being told that we should want more, deserve better…and worse…as citizens in the “land of plenty”, are entitled to it. Ambition for ambition's sake is the madness that grips Macbeth.

Lord and Lady Macbeth: Thwarted by vaulting ambition

Polanski, who knows all too well the corruptive allure of ambition and its close kinship to guilt, makes Macbeth’s conflict of conscience one disturbingly personal and frighteningly real.

PERFORMANCES:

In spite of Polanski's well-documented technique of micromanaging the hell out of this actors (which may well speak to the efficiency of the technique), his films really do feature some of the most amazing performances. Macbeth’s boxoffice prospects were greatly diminished by the lack of star names attached to it (beyond Polanski’s, of course), but in Jon Finch (the late actor who starred in Hitchcock’s Frenzy) Polanski has an actor capable of tapping into the man behind the monster. Finch, whose dark, anxious eyes reveal more about the demons plaguing his character’s mind than any monologue can adequately capture, makes for a persuasively vulnerable, down-to-earth Macbeth. A performance refreshingly devoid of theatrical posturing and the arch striking of surface attitudes, Finch’s Macbeth is a man driven to malicious madness by weaknesses within him he allows himself to be convinced are strengths.

Jon Finch's Macbeth is no speechifying protagonist. He's a man suffering the disintegration of his soul in pursuit of ambition he scarcely knew he harbored.

Gender, sexual politics, and women as possessors of the only true power, have been recurring themes in a great many of Polanski's films (Cul-De-Sac, The Ghost Writer, Bitter Moon, Knife in the Water, Carnage, and his forthcoming, Venus in Fur). Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth is tailor-made for Polanski's usual upending of gender roles in the service of dramatizing the subtle gynophobia that lies behind the uneasy alliance known as sex in his films. In Francesca Annis, Polanski happily departs from the usual depiction of Lady Macbeth as natural femininity perverted by the "masculine" pursuit of power, and presents her as something of an intellectual barbarian equal to the physical barbarianism displayed by the men. She is no better nor worse than those around her who plot and scheme, but hampered by the medieval limitations placed upon her sex, she operates within the only sphere allowed her: covert puppetmaster to her husband's implicit will.
Few critics in 1971 were able to get past her nude-sleepwalking scene, but Francesca Annis gives a very fine, understated performance as Lady Macbeth, both her fevered desire for the crown and eventual decline into madness quite affecting.

"What, will these hands ne'er be clean?"

From his childhood eluding the Nazis in his native Poland, to the loss of his family to the Manson madness, one attribute of Polanski's real-life acquaintance with the naked face of horror has been his inability to see the need to paint evil as anything more than human, and anything less than something that resides within each of us.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

Perhaps because I've never been partial to medieval costume dramas full of derring-do, pageantry, and heroic swordplay; I’m crazy about the squalid, gloomy look of Macbeth. Polanski gives us one of Shakespeare’s most unrelentingly bleak and depressing plays and serves it up with extra dollops of rain, murk, and medieval filth. There’s nothing romantic or even remotely cheery about it, and the effect is to ground Shakespeare’s larger-than-life themes of wrongs corrected and order restored into a cynically circular tale where suffering is as ceaseless and bleak as the horizon.

The graceful, romanticized fencing duels of the typical Shakespearean film are replaced by clumsily brutal bouts that highlight the awkwardness of the armor and the sense that what we are witnessing are not heroic battles, but lowly brawls and acts of aggression.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Although I dearly wanted to, I wasn't allowed to see Macbeth when it was opened. Not because my parents thought it was too violent for my tender age (I was 14), but because of all the pre-release publicity surrounding Lady Macbeth’s nude sleepwalking scene (so tame by today’s standards, the film could be shown in high school English classes) and the guilt-by-association tarnish of Macbeth being the premiere entry from Playboy’s newly-formed film division. (It’s reported that Polanski’s somber film got off to a bad start at press screenings when the title card, “A Playboy Production” was greeted with snorts of derisive laughter.)

The Macbeths find their nights plagued by sleeplessness

In any event, I’m grateful for having been spared seeing this film at a time when the horrors of the Manson case would have still been too fresh in my mind. As Manson's trial had only ended that same year, seeing the film just would have been too painful and depressing an experience. Now, with neither its nudity nor violence the incendiary focus they once were, it's possible to see Macbeth as one of the screen's more successful Shakespeare adaptations, yet time has not fully eradicated the cloud of sadness that hovers over this film. (Macbeth was released the same year as Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Ken Russell's The Devils. As you can imagine, the entertainment world was up in arms over what it perceived as the "new permissiveness" in films gone out of control.)

Both in interviews and in his memoirs, Polanski has spoken of how happy he was during the making of Rosemary's Baby; a fact easily attested to by Polanski delivering an ingeniously dark thriller that is nonetheless buoyed by a delicate black humor and obvious love of moviemaking. By comparison, Macbeth, as riveting a dramatization as it is, has an unshakable air of sadness about it (the real reason I think the film fared to score well with audiences), and feels at times like an act of hostility directed towards the audience. It's as if by making so much of the violence as realistic and gruesome as possible, Polanski is enacting revenge on those who blamed him and his films for attracting the violence of the Manson crimes.

Critics like Roger Ebert took issue with Macbeth's wanton barbarism and the unfortunate resemblance of many of the knights to Charles Manson and his minions

Armed with the rejoinder that all of the violence depicted in Macbeth is Shakespeare’s, not his own, Polanski, subconsciously or not, decides to rub our faces in it. Outdoing any film he’s done before or since in terms of the depiction of savagery (even going so far as to provide a startling view of jeering crowds from the point of view of the already beheaded Macbeth), Polanski, perhaps feeling he would be damned by the public no matter what he did, opts for showing us a vision of world some imagine he's inhabited all along. A world of unremitting bleakness and hopelessness.

"When you tell a story of a guy who’s beheaded, you have to show how they cut off the head. If you don’t, it’s like telling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line."

Roman Polanski

The suggestion that artists cannot help but a leave behind a patina of some aspect of themselves on their work is a concept to which I strongly adhere. And in the case of an artist as gifted as Roman Polanski, such a belief only stands to further enrich the viewing experience. For me, his Macbeth, a film of haunting images both beautiful and horrific, stands as a towering achievement in terms of one artist adapting the work of another (in this instance, a story ofttimes told) and fashioning it into something uniquely, exclusively...and to Polanski's regret...revealingly, his own.

Diana Ross is one of a kind. No disrespect to the pop stars of today (well, that’s not entirely true. I have plenty of disrespect for the pop stars of today, but this isn't the forum), but take away their wigs, costumes, and multi-million dollar stage pyrotechnics, and Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, and even personal fave, Janet Jackson, all look like suitable candidates for the “&” half of any 60s girl group (à la, Martha & The Vandellas, Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans).

Diana Ross, on the other hand, is nobody’s idea of a backup ANYTHING. She couldn't blend in if she wanted to — which, to hear childhood friend and former Supreme, Mary Wilson, tell it, is something Diana was incapable of even as a skinny teenager in Detroit’s Brewster projects. Take away Diana Ross’ wigs, makeup, and costumes (unimaginable, I know, but try), and you've still got yourself this thoroughly unique, almost bizarre little lightening rod of a woman with a thoroughly captivating, slightly nasal, honey-coated voice; that extraordinary, CinemaScope smile; enormous, Keane-size eyes; and a body I've always likened to a satin-draped straight-razor. In short; an original. Someone so unlike anyone else that she easily stands head-and-shoulders above the crowd…as is…without even trying. Add to all this a genuine talent and charisma capable of holding one’s attention without need for a phalanx of dancers and laser beams behind her, and you've got yourself Grade A star-quality of the sort conspicuously absent in today’s breed of homogeneous pop music androids culled from TV “talent” competitions and assembly-line image-stylist laboratories.

As someone who grew up on The Supremes and always thought Diana Ross looked and acted like a full-fledged movie star (read: Diva) long before she actually became one; I viewed the Academy Award-nomination she received for her film debut in Lady Sings the Blues (1972) as the realization of a professional inevitability. To some, Lady Sings the Blues was just the successful film debut of another singer/actress along the order of Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. But to the African-American community, Diana Ross making it as a movie star was recognized as the wholly auspicious, thoroughly inspirational landmark it was.

All Bow Down to the Goddess
I love how in this screencap she isn't flattered, flustered, or even embarrassed by the hand-kissing.
Diana just accepts it as her due. Like the Pope.

The 70s Blaxploitation film boom was a culturally polarizing era in which the gain of increased onscreen visibility for African-American women was mitigated by the fact that all too often in these films - the great majority of which were written and directed by white men - their participation was limited to that of sassy sexpots or badass, kung-fu mamas.
The mainstream success of Lady Sings the Blues signaled a growth and evolution in black cinema, while Diana Ross' natural crossover appeal (a classy, sophisticated soul that didn't alienate black audiences; an exotic-yet-familiar Eurocentric glamour that appealed to whites) served as a harbinger of a new age for black actresses in film. Hollywood, after having dropped the ball with Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, and Diahann Carroll, appeared at last ready to bestow upon an African-American leading lady, the status of motion picture superstar.

Throwback Stunt Queen / Diana. Doing the Most. Always.
(Thanks to images + broken language and the category is... for these consummate captions)

Unfortunately for all but lovers of camp, drag queen aesthetics, bad acting, risible dialog, and above all, haute couture excess (i.e., yours truly); Diana Ross’ follow-up to her promising debut film was Mahogany: a problem-plagued production of a creaky "suffering in mink" romantic melodrama that's a virtual 1975 soul-food gumbo of every “women’s picture” cliché of the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

Diana Ross as Tracy Chambers

Anthony Perkins as Sean McAvoy

Billy Dee Williams as Brian Walker

Jean-Pierre Aumont as Christian Rosetti

Mahogany tells the story of Tracy Chambers, an aspiring fashion designer from the slums of Chicago who finds fame and fortune, but not much in the way of happiness, as Mahogany, international supermodel. Or, as the ads proclaimed, “The woman every woman wants to be – and every man wants to have!”

Were this a rags-to-riches tale about a man, the predominant conflicts would undoubtedly be of the professional sort…obstacles impeding the hero’s achievement of his goals. As Mahoganyis a film with a female protagonist, it falls into the usual trap of career woman movies: it filters all of her professional struggles through the prism of her personal relationships with the men in her life. Mahogany inadequately juggles a trio of suitors, each progressively creepier than the last. Let’s see what she has to choose from: there’s Brian, the local Chicago politician who's an old-school chauvinist who thinks everything he is about is the shit, while everything that means anything to Tracy is ethically suspect; there’s controlling, sexually-confused photographer/Svengali, Sean, who resents any attempt by Tracy to achieve independence from him; and last, there’s 60-something Christian, a rather sweetly smarmy Italian Count who financially supports Tracy’s goals so long as she is open to a little hanky-panky payback. She can really pick 'em.

Tracy to Brian: "Something tells me there's more to you than that."
I wish the writers of Mahogany' had felt the same about their title character. In lieu of fleshing out Tracy Chamber's story (what happened to her parents?) or providing deeper insight into what makes her tick, Mahogany is all surface gloss. The film satisfies itself merely presenting Diana Ross as a glamour icon.

On paper, the casting of Diana Ross as a top fashion model must have seemed like a cinematic slam dunk. The former Supreme lead singer had long ago established herself as a thoroughbred clothes-horse whose beauty and flamboyant stage persona had launched a thousand drag queens. And indeed, had Mahogany been designed as a Vogue photo shoot, all might have gone swimmingly, for when we're asked to gaze upon the luminous Miss Ross, all is right with the world. Lamentably, this being a motion picture and all, it's only when people start to walk and talk that things really start to fall apart for Mahogany.

Calgon, Take Me Away
Mahogany, enjoying Sean's amorous attentions

For starters, the script is a disaster. The dialog is tin-eared, and it's hard to fathom the presence of so many post-Valley of the Dolls/ The Best of Everything career-girl cliches stockpiled in a film not intentionally conceived as a satirical comedy. Secondly, the performances are all over the map. No two people seem to be appearing in the same film at the same time. The clashing acting styles of Ross (over-modulated), Williams (laid-back), and Perkins (twitchy), has the feel of one of those international productions where each member of the cast speaks in their native language, only to be dubbed later.
This fluctuation in tone is perhaps due to the film's original director, Tony Richardson (A Taste of Honey, Look Back in Anger) abandoning the project - fired or quit, depending on the source - and directing neophyte/veteran control-freak, Barry Gordy taking over the reins. Ross and Gordy, former lovers, apparently clashed frequently on the set, resulting in Ross staging a walkout of her own.

Everybody's a Critic
Mahogany, here debuting one of her "originals," gets a taste of the kind of critical drubbing Diana Ross would later receive upon the film's release.

Most grievously, Mahogany fails to make good on any of the opportunities posed by Tracy being an African-American woman daring to dream outside of the narrow social confines of poverty, sexism, and racism with little to rely on but her determination and drive (successful black models were still rare in 1975). While there are a couple of token scenes broaching the complex and controversial issues of racial authenticity, selling-out, and the European acceptance/eroticization of black women, the film clearly prefers to spend its time fueling the Diana Ross success myth. At every juncture, Mahogany invites us to subconsciously blend Tracy's life with that of Diana Ross. Sometimes intentionally: Ross studied fashion design as a teen, grew up in a poor neighborhood. Sometimes unintentionally: Tracy's relationship with the psychotically possessive and controlling Sean McAvoy hits awfully close to home with what's been written about the Ross/Gordy pairing. In its determination to give Diana Ross fans the Diana they love and want to see, Mahogany ultimately avoids being about anything in particular and winds up just being another diva vanity production on par with Streisand's The Mirror Has Two Faces and A Star is Born.

Get used to Diana's throat. You're gonna see a lot of it in this film.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

While Mahogany’s somewhat sour subtext will always prevent it from being one of my top favorites (handsome or not, Billy Dee Williams’ Brian is a genuine jerk, and I can’t get past the film’s, “Men are allowed to be passionate about their jobs; women are only allowed to be passionate about men,” ideology), I do confess to having grown extremely fond of this movie over the years. For all the wrong reasons, of course, but fond of it, nonetheless.

As movies grow increasingly dumber, blander, and more market-researched, good camp is becoming increasingly hard to find. Most bad movies today are bad because they are unimaginative and lazy. Give me an old-school trash movie that jumps the track because it’s carrying a full cargo of ego, pretension, hubris, and delusion. Mahogany has plenty of the aforementioned to spare, plus the added bonus of a lead actress who never really knows when to tone it down, and a parade of ghastly, gaudy, gorgeous fashions.

A few of my favorite Mahogany moments-

The Kabuki Finale

Mahogany's "stressed out" face

The homoerotic gun battle

These Extras

The Nip Slip

The Interview

Sean playing "Dunk the Diva"

PERFORMANCES:

What makes Mahoganyso enjoyable for me is first and foremost, Diana Ross, who I could watch doing a crossword puzzle. And lucky for me she isso fascinating to watch, because for whatever reason, the sensitive, compellingly natural actress from Lady Sings the Blues (or The Wiz, for that matter) is nowhere to be seen except for in brief flashes between scenes of self-conscious, Great Lady suffering, or cringe-inducing histrionics. That and carrying on like she’s lampooning her own public image by behaving like Diana Ross female impersonator. There are several times when Ross is actually very good (she has a good rapport with Williams in their scenes) but for the most part I'm left with the feeling that she's willing to give a performance but isn't being given much help or guidance.

A favorite of mine is late-great actress and Oscar nominee (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) Beah Richards, who appears oh-so-briefly as Tracy's Aunt Florence

Years ago I was just disappointed in Mahogany and its waste of a one-of-a-kind natural resource like Ross. Now, given that she has made so very few films, I find myself grateful that there exists at least one film where Diana Ross gets to delve into Joan Crawford/Faye Dunaway territory and give her fans exactly the kind of excessive, camp-tastic drag show her recording artist persona has always played upon.

Miss Ross Killin' it.
Beyonce, JLo, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry...the whole lot. They should be thankful as hell young Diana isn't around.
They'd all be eating her dust and chilling in her shade.

The single best performance in the film is given by Anthony Perkins playing (once again) to type as the psycho photographer. He's one of the few in the film that doesn't seem to be striking well-rehearsed attitudes, and as such, his scenes have an electric unpredictability to them. Sure, he's a tad hammy, but in this cheese-strewn milieu, he fits right in.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

There are two bits of perfection in Mahogany beyond 8th Wonder of the World, Diana Ross. The Oscar-nominated theme song, "Do You Know Where You're Going To?" and the amazing, much-imitated fashion montage sequence that accompanies the instrumental version. The montage is credited to Jack Cole and it's literally the most striking bit of filmmaking skill and ingenuity in the entire movie. It could have been released as a stand-alone film or music video. It's brilliant, it's exhilarating, and I just love everything about it. (Maybe Jack Cole should have directed the whole film!)

Because the full title of the song is Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You're Going To?) I always assumed it was composed for the film. While researching this post I found out that Thelma Houston actually recorded the song first, back in 1973! You can listen to it HERE.

All Wrapped Up
Diana Ross in Mahogany (top) and Barbra Streisand (bottom, from Funny Lady) channel Modern Dance legend Martha Graham's 1930 dance piece, "Lamentation" (center).

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Representation matters. And if a film as seriously flawed and inherently silly as Mahogany matters at all (and it does), it's as an alternative vision of African-Americans onscreen. I always like thinking back on how powerful and inspiring the glamorous images in Mahogany must have appeared to young people in the 70s (I didn't see it until the 80s), raised exclusively on blacks in films depicted as maids, butlers, slaves, and criminals. That's why I always give this movie a great deal of credit while not considering it to be very good. Yet, as much as I admire Diana Ross as a role model, I have to say Mahogany has never earned any points for the double-sided message it sends to young women.

In the 70s, feminism in the movies liked to talk a good game, but when it came to love stories, a great many films ended with the female characters doing all the adapting, while the males pretty much retained the lives they led when we first meet them. In 1974s Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Ellen Burstyn’s character makes the very good point that, “It’s my life! It’s not some man’s life that I’m here to help him out with,” yet by fade-out Kris Kristofferson still has his ranch and horses and no immediate plans to move to Monterey. Alice, on the other hand, tables her dream of becoming a professional singer. The not-so- subtle implication being that her dreams were the fantasy of a young girl, her relationship with Kristofferson is the real thing.

That's Bruce Vilanch under all that hair

In Mahogany, Tracy Chambers dreams of being a fashion designer. And although her behavior in every way suggests a professional ambition backed by considerable drive (she devotes every free moment to working on her designs, she attends night classes, she takes her sketches to dress manufacturers), the screenplay seizes every opportunity to minimize her goals, subtly characterizing them as the superficial dreams of a socially unenlightened woman.

Especially when compared to the lofty, “uplift the race” ambitions of smug, self-satisfied, defender of the downtrodden, small-time politician, Brian Walker. A man who, when not reproaching Tracy for actually having thoughts and ideas that are not specifically his own, spends his time using one arm to pat himself on the back for his altruistic impulses, the other to start brawls with political hecklers. Instead of his being an example of the kind of narrow minded thinking Tracy needs to get away from, Brian is presented as the savior of her soul. And so by the time the film ends, Tracy, having left behind Rome and her successful career, is, I assume, to be applauded for being mature enough to choose love over a job, and for taking Brian’s “Curse of the Cat People” proclamation: “Success is nothing without someone you love to share it with!” to heart.

The film ends with Brian exactly as we found him. His career path unbroken. Tracy now makes a vow towards “putting her imagination to work” for the cause both she and her man believe in. The message is clear: Women have fantasies and dreams that are self-centered and superficial / Men have ambitions that are righteous and benevolent.

I guess in In a way, it's kind of good that Mahogany isn't a better film. Were it a movie people took seriously, they might actually have paid attention to its message. As it stands, Mahogany is much like a great many real-life fashion models: exciting, beautiful, stylish, a tad overdressed, but without too much of substance to say.

Bonus material:
A fun and informative review of Mahogany can be found here at Poseidon's Underworld

Diana Ross plays a haughty, arrogant, nightclub performer (surprise!) harboring a dark secret on the 1971 Danny Thomas sitcom, Make Room for Grand-Daddy.

Mahogany lip reading: Thanks to the wonders of HD TV one can lip-read Diana Ross mouthing the words "Fuck you, Brian!" while her voice says "Forget You, Brian!" in their big argument scene.
Likewise, in Rome when Brian complains that he looks like a sissy in his new clothes, you can easily tell when Tracy responds to his mimicking of her voice by saying, "Now, you sound like a sissy!" that Ross' lips are really saying, "Now, you sound like a faggot!"
Shame on you, Diana!

Ever the professional, Diana practices her dialog from The Wiz...three years early

At one time or another, everyone has had the experience of waking from a dream feeling, even if only for a second, as if the dream were real. Recently I had one of those dreams where you see yourself, as if in real time, sleeping in bed; conscious of being asleep and dreaming, yet at the same time conscious of being awake, outside of the body, and observing. The way these varied states of consciousness peel away only to reveal other, hidden states of consciousness, each with a psychological validity that crosses over into reality, is like the chimerical equivalent of a Russian nesting doll. It all happens very swiftly, fleetingly in fact, yet while it’s happening, you fear in your heart that it’s a tossup as to which of these realities is authentic.

This inability to discern what is real and what is imagined is at the core of Robert Altman’s dreamy, trippy, intriguingly abstruse psychological thriller, Images. A movie that takes the fluid dreamscape logic of 3 Women, crosses it with the volatile psychosexual menace of That Cold Day in the Park, and adds to it all the schizophrenic character-study subjectivity of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

Susannah York as Cathryn

As with Catherine Deneuve’s Carol in Repulsion, when we first meet Susannah York’s Cathryn, she is a woman already deep in the throes of mental illness. Cathryn is a schizophrenic, a fact she appears to be at least subtly aware of (or at least suspects) on some level. Married to her waggish businessman husband, Hugh (Rene Auberjonois), the rather solemn Cathryn spends a great deal of her time isolated, as she is an author working on a children’s book. (Altman incorporated In Search of Unicorns, a children’s book Susannah York was writing at the time, into the screenplay of Images. Published in 1973, York’s somewhat euphuistic fairy tale so perfectly suits the dreamlike tone of Images, it’s hard to believe it wasn't written expressly for the film. York’s melodious voiceover narration of passages from the book provides appropriately cryptic counterpoint to the action.)

As Cathryn endeavors to patch together the narrative fragments of her children’s fantasy, she engages in lengthy inner monologues that have the effect of culling forth shadowy images of her past. A vague and disjointed puzzle of images, sounds, and memories from her past that intrude abruptly upon her present.

Rene Auberjonois as Hugh
Mirrors, lenses, and prisms are a motif Altman employs throughout Images to convey Cathryn's fractured reality

Cathryn is a woman haunted. Haunted by past infidelities (lovers, both dead and alive, have a nagging way of reappearing, attempting to resume their dalliances); guilt (she vacillates between being both desirous and fearful of having a child); suspicion (she assigns her own deceitful behavior to her husband); and specifically the unwelcome, ever-encroaching memories of a lonely childhood. Memories, for reasons left unexplained, she struggles to suppress. We’re never told specifically what is ailing Cathryn, nor is it made clear what has recently occurred to accelerate the frequency and intensity of her schizophrenic episodes; what is apparent is that her illness - one the film's subjective POV makes us privy to alone - takes the form of a mercurially shifting reality which, at times, appears to be conspiring to betray her.

Dream Lover
Cathryn's former lover, Rene, (Marcel Bozzuffi of The French Connection) reappears after having died in a plane crash three years prior

Although I desperately wanted to see this when it was released in 1972, I was just 14 years-old at the time, and Images was an R-rated movie playing at one of San Francisco’s “art house” cinemas. A theater, I might add, whose policies regarding underage attendance were not as flexible as those of my trusty neighborhood moviehouse, thus necessitating many attempts on my part to persuade apathetic family members (or mature-looking friends) to accompany me. In spite of the thriller being promoted with a very eye-catching poster featuring dual Susannah Yorks reflected in the lens of a vintage bellows camera with a large butcher knife sticking out of it (see below), I found not a single taker; so I only got around to seeing Images at a revival theater sometime in the 80s.

Happily, thanks to Susannah York’s brilliantly restless performance; Vilmos Zsigmond’s (Heaven’s Gate) lush and evocative cinematography; the unsettling musical score by John Williams’ (with Stomu Yamashta); and especially the film’s stylistic similarities to the work of Roman Polanski, Images became an instant favorite that was more than worth the wait.

Fans of Robert Altman will recognize actor Hugh Millias as the bounty hunter in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Here he plays Cathryn's libidinous neighbor and former lover, Marcel

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Few things are more dismal than watching a film that so thoroughly explains, spells out, and underlines (with italics) each and every plot point and narrative twist so you’re left with nothing to talk about or ruminate on afterward. That’s something I can say about a great many of the movies-by-market-research released these days, but no one could ever say that about a Robert Altman film.

In Images, Altman takes the very intriguing tact of asking us to share, exclusively, the increasingly fragmented perspective of a schizophrenic. A choice whose not-unexpected effect on the viewer is a mounting sense of disorientation and unease as it dawns that the entirety of the story is to be told by a disturbingly unreliable narrator.

Cathryn Harrison as Susannah (Marcel's daughter)
Images plays fast and loose with the audience's reality as well. Each of the characters in the film shares the real-life name of one of the actors (Susannah, Rene, Cathryn, Hugh, and Marcel)

And therein lies the beauty of this film for me. As it grows ever more apparent that Cathryn is losing her grip on sanity, Images becomes a thriller that actively engages and challenges you to piece together the puzzle that is the character's life and the film's story as a whole. Reality and hallucination merge imperceptibly without benefit of the usual clichéd cinema vocabulary indicators of dissolves, soft focus, echoes, or slow-motion; so a great deal of the veracity of what occurs is continually called into question. I'm aware of the fact that a film can be open to multiple interpretations flies in the face of today's bullying "Internet film forum" mentality that reduces all discussion of movies into defensive arguments promoting one "right" point of view in the face of any and all dissenters; I personally find it an illuminating way of experiencing film.
Altman understands that no two people see life in exactly the same way, so he doesn't waste time trying to explain to you his point of view in his movies. He tells his story, then leaves it to each of us to make of it what we will. Even his rather brilliant DVD commentaries fail to "explain" things for the moviegoer craving answers. Altman is a director who would rather you actively watch one of his films and fully misunderstand it, rather than passively sit and be spoon fed every detail and theme.

Images is one of those films that reveal more details to you each time you watch it.
In this scene, Cathryn works on a puzzle with Susannah, the daughter of a former lover. The single POV shot shared by the two individuals - Cathryn's adult hand occupying the left of the frame, Susannah's smaller hand the right - hints at the possibility of Cathryn actually working the puzzle alone, sharing the moment with a hallucination of herself as a young girl. Even the subject of the puzzle is suspect, as Cathryn continually says that she has no idea what the image is, yet we know for a fact that it is a puzzle of the very house she is occupying...the house she spent a great deal of time alone in as a child..

To clarify, I’m no fan of the sort of studied incoherence that put David Lynch on the map (and removed him, just as swiftly); but I do love movies that demand your attention on first viewing, offer plenty of food for thought after, and later reward repeat viewings with heretofore undiscovered pieces of the puzzle…all laid out for you to find at your leisure should you just care to look. Such films hold the potential for each revisit to feel like a fresh experience.

PERFORMANCES:

It’s been widely reported (and corroborated on the DVD commentary) that due to recent news of her pregnancy and concerns about the film’s script, Susannah York wasn’t all that keen on appearing in Images. But if York’s performance is the work of a woman ambivalent about the film she’s appearing in, then her years studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts was clearly time well-spent. Without resorting to ostentatious tics, gestures, and histrionic displays of madness, York inhabits her character to a chilling degree. Never for a moment are you in doubt that you are watching a fully, fleshed-out individual; a character comprised of an intelligence, imagination, and inner-life that give you a sad sense of a personality being submerged by mental illness.

Cathryn continually confronts images of herself, whether reflected, remembered, or hallucinatory

Where York particularly excels is in conveying, without words, the vast array of emotions attendant to discovering one’s mind is operating independent of one’s will. Images compels in giving the distinct impression that something that Cathryn has probably been successful in keeping a lid on for some time, is now slipping through her fingers. Susannah York shows the panic, confusion, danger, and even the humor in Cathryn’s loss of psychological ground. Small wonder that York won the Best Actress award at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival for her work in Images.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

I'm not sure why, but for as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by movies concerning themselves with the concept of duality. From Vertigo, Dead Ringers, Don't Look Now, The Tenant, Persona, and of course, 3 Women; so many of my favorite films are psychological thrillers in which the duality of human nature and the fluid quality of reality play a part (even the short film I made as part of my application for admittance into film school was about twinning and doppelgangers).

I'm still one of those who find the inner workings of the human psyche to be a far more terrifying landscape than anything that can be dreamed up by the gore-mongers making horror films today, so I personally consider Altman's Images to be an exceptionally solid thriller that effectively packs on the atmospheric dread and character-based tension. The environment Altman designs for his film is one loaded with reflective surfaces, shadowy corners, and interiors comprised of a Caligari-like assemblage of stairs, railings, rooms, and angled archways. Add to this the near-constant tinkle of wind chimes, and an eerily deceptive (subjective) soundtrack, and you've got a thriller worthy of both Roman Polanski and Alfred Hitchcock.

Psycho

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

The best movies are journeys. Journeys that transport us to other lives, other times, other lands, and, in the case of Images, other states of consciousness. Because the written word can so perfectly capture the subtleties of thought and emotion, and music is ideal for the conveyance of mood and feeling, what I have always loved about movies is how they can make real the fantastic. The dream /nightmare phase of existence where reality and illusion mix in ways that are not always easy to put into words. Literally, the stuff of dreams I make mention of in this blog's title as well as this subcategory.

Hidden Behind Her Back
The threat of violence, unexpected and sudden, runs throughout Images

One can describe, both academically and emotionally, what schizophrenia must be like, but in Images Robert Altman finds a visual language to interpret a psychological state. Miraculously, seamlessly, Altman captures a state most of us only know through dreaming: the helpless, floating feeling of reality and fantasy existing as one, with us unable to discern where reality ends and fantasy begins. The nightmare of course would be to have this be our awake, conscious state. Images brings this nightmare to life in a way refreshingly naturalistic and devoid of melodrama.
Even if you're left unpersuaded by the film as a genre thriller, you can't help but admire Altman's ability to take you inside the consciousness of another person, allowing for the experiencing of the world through an entirely alien perspective. Although not one of Robert Altman's most discussed films, Images is a favorite of mine. One that fits neatly into his catalog of character studies of women on the verge.

Who's watching whom?

'TIS A PUZZLEMENT- Piecing together the fragments:

The wind chimes signaling a schizophrenic episode.

Elements of Cathryn's life can be gleaned from the "monologues" she shares with hallucinated others.

Note the address of Hugh's liaison given to her by a well-meaning "friend."

Note the soundtrack whenever Cathryn is using the phone (Dial tones? Busy sinals? Voices?)

Susannah's history / Cathryn's history.

Archie, the dog.

Malevolence perceived in everyday objects.

Windows or mirrors? Any difference?

I think it was either Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael who suggests the interpolation of the word "You" during several conversations where Cathryn references her husband "Hugh."

“Life is never quite interesting enough, somehow. You people who come to the movies know that.” Shirley Booth as Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker (1958)

No truer words were ever spoken on the topic of what movies mean to us “dreamers.” I, like a great many film buffs (and as the title of this blog reiterates), am a dyed-in-the-wool dreamer. And for as long as I can remember, the allure of motion pictures for me has been their intrinsic link to the fundamental human need to dream, to long for, to imagine, to aspire to, and to hope.

Because I’m essentially an impractical, head-in-the-clouds fantasist for whom dreams have often proved a contradictory source of my greatest joys and deepest sorrows; I've always been intrigued by the curiously dual nature of dreaming. Dreams are inarguably at the root of all human ambition and invention; possessing the power to ease spiritual pain by way of escapism, inciting creativity, and spurring on the imagination to all manner of human achievement. Yet at the same time, dreams are equally prone to sowing seeds of dissatisfaction...fostering discontent and delusion when they create a hunger and desire for things that can never be attained. When I think about it, a great many of my favorite novels seem to be about the pernicious nature of idealism and dreams: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and, apropos of this post, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Dreiser being specifically the author I find to be the most compelling purveyor of narratives sensitive to the healing / hurtful siren song that is the myth of The American Dream.

Montgomery Clift as George Eastman

Elizabeth Taylor as Angela Vickers

Shelley Winters as Alice Tripp

A Place in the Sun is the story of George Eastman (Clift), the poor-relation nephew of pillar-of-society industrialist, Charles Eastman, who flees a dead-end bellhop job in Chicago to be taken on as a worker in his uncle’s bathing suit factory. George is haunted by his stiflingly poor, rigidly religious upbringing, and driven - to an almost pathological degree - to overcome the limitations of his meager education and humble origins. Applying considerable initiative toward his ambitions (evinced by his taking home-study courses and devising plans for factory efficiency in his spare time) George appears at first resigned, albeit restlessly, to work hard for his modest piece of the American Dream. But as bedeviled as George is about his impoverished past, it soon becomes clear that he is equally consumed with the desire for the kind of brass ring life his Eastman lineage dangles teasingly just beyond his grasp.

Locked Out
George Eastman stands dejectedly outside of the gate of the estate of his uncle, Charles Eastman. The large, ornamental "E" on the gate serving as a caustic reminder of a birthright denied

Ultimately, fate deals George an ironically cruel hand when the realization of all of his ambitions and dreams become certainties (his professional advancement and social acceptance coincides with a blossoming romance with the beautiful and glamorous socialite, Angela Vickers [Taylor]) at the very moment news of his impregnation of Alice, the plain-but-sweet factory co-worker (Winters) just as certainly signals the end to all he has ever hoped for.

While An American Tragedy (both the novel and the original 1931 film, which is said to be the most faithful adaptation) posit George’s dilemma within the parameters of a sociopath’s conundrum: George, not feeling much of anything for either girl, weighs the most selfishly advantageous outcome and plots to rid himself of the problematic pregnant girlfriend - A Place in the Sun’s intentionally romanticized construct encourages the viewer to sympathize / identify with George’s predicament. A device that ultimately (and provocatively) implicates us in the tragic turn of events as they play out.

"The reason they call it 'The American Dream' is that you have to be asleep to believe it."

George Carlin

Theodore Dreiser's pre-Depression era novel, An American Tragedy sought to address the accepted American belief that hard work equaled affluence and advancement in a country where nepotism, bloodlines, and arbitrary class/social hierarchies impose distinct limitations. A Place in the Sun uses the false promise of post-war American prosperity as the bait that lures dreamers like George Eastman into believing "the good life" is his for the taking.

It always struck me as a little sad that George, so consumed with achieving his own dreams, never stopped to consider that a romance with an Eastman (even a poor relation) might have felt like an unattainable dream to a plain factory-girl like Alice.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

A common complaint leveled at A Place in the Sun is that the tension of the film’s central conflict is significantly weakened in having the drab and ultimately annoying Shelley Winters character rendered as such a blatantly unappealing option to the dream-girl perfection of Elizabeth Taylor. The implication being, I suppose, is that if given the opportunity, anyone in his right mind is going to try to drown the sympathetic but whiny Winters if it will help land them the exquisitely beautiful, sweet-natured (and let’s not forget, loaded) Elizabeth Taylor. If that’s true, what does that say about us?

The near-identical beauty of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor emphasize their compatibility

Therein lies my fascination with A Place in the Sun. Instead of turning Dreiser’s novel into just another crime story with a social commentary overlay, George Stevens – drawing upon the entire arsenal of cinematic devices that helped give Hollywood its reputation as America’s “Dream Factory” – idealizes the tale and subtly seduces, making us complicit allies in George’s social-climbing fantasies. He structures the film as an unabashedly romanticized, male Cinderella fairy tale about “fated to be mated” lovers threatened by the ugly specter of poverty and deprivation. The latter embodied by the likeable but difficult-to-root for Shelley Winters.

With every lovingly-photographed close up of the impossibly beautiful couple…with every lushly orchestrated romantic idyll captured in passionate tableau… we’re not only encouraged to project our fantasies onto the idealized couple, but to see them as sympathetic individuals deserving of having their dreams come true. Something not possible without vilifying the story’s real victim (Winters) as the sole obstacle to their happiness.

The genius of A Place in the Sun, and why I consider it to be a minor masterpiece, is how, through the juxtaposition of appealing images of wealth and dreary images of poverty, the audience, when faced with the issue of what to do about the blameless but problematic Shelly Winters character, are placed in the same morally ambiguous position as Montgomery Clift.

PERFORMANCES:

Only two of the 9 Oscar nominations A Place in the Sun garnered in 1951 were in the acting categories: Best Actor, Montgomery Clift and Best Actress, Shelley Winters (it won 6, including Best Director for Stevens). The always-impressive Clift brings a heartbreaking vulnerability to what I think is one of his best screen performances. At no moment do you ever feel he is being moved forward by the plot. You can see every thought and motivation play out on his face.

On A Place in the Sun’s DVD commentary track, much is made of the fact that in taking on the role of the mousy Alice Tripp, blond bombshell Shelley Winters astounded audiences by so playing against type. Winters is, indeed, very good; but if you’re like me and largely unfamiliar with the work of Shelley the sexpot, her role seems very similar to characters she played in a great many of her latter films (1955s The Night of the Hunter comes to mind), and thus her performance doesn't feel like the huge departure it perhaps once did.

If your goal is to make plausible the notion that an otherwise sane man would resort to murder for love of a woman, you're definitely on the right track if that woman is then 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. What a knockout! Overlooked by the Academy, I personally think her performance in A Place in the Sun is rather remarkable. She gives a surprisingly mature performance - one of her best, in fact - proving to be particularly effective in her later scenes. She would work again with director George Stevens in Giant (1956), and the truly bizarre, The Only Game in Town (1970).

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

My deep affection for A Place in the Sun extends to the way it uses romantic imagery to convey the illusory allure of allure desire and longing. And by illusory allure, I mean that dreams are only pleasant when they hold out the possibility f coming true. To want for something you can't have tears you apart.

George is frequently photographed surrounded by idealized images of success and wealth

Like the beckoning light on Daisy's dock in The Great Gatsby
George studies high school classes under the flickering neon reminder of the Vickers family fortune

(Above) "Ophelia", John Everett Millais' mid-19th Century painting depicting the drowning death of Shakespeare's heroine, looms ominously over George's head (below) as he ponders: how do you solve a problem like Alice Tripp?

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

A Place in the Sun is one of those rare screen adaptations of a beloved book captures the author's intent even though it plays fast and loose with the original text. Faithful adaptations are fine, but I love when a director is able to use the language of film to do more than translate. George Stevens has created a forcefully cinematic film that tells its story with a language all its own. It's beautiful to look at, wonderful to listen to (the Franz Waxman score is a real highlight), and boasts a slew of first rate performances. It's a near-perfect film. Near perfect...

Although Raymond Burr, cast as the prosecuting attorney, is actually fine (I guess. It's the same performance he's given for decades), his close association to the Perry Mason character proves a big distraction to me. When he shows up, this absolutely breathtakingly engrossing romantic drama suddenly becomes a TV program.

Similarly, and due to no fault of the actor himself, the casting of Paul Frees as the priest during the film's pivotal final minutes just sticks in my craw. Why? Because as I child, I watched Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on TV for years. Anyone familiar with the show will recognize Frees' distinctive voice as the narrator of a million Disney documentaries. And as he is also the voice of the Ghost Host at Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, every time he speaks I'm thrust out of the narrative. Frees' voice is waaaay too hardwired with Disney associations to work on any level for me. Given that he's also the voice of animated no-goodnick Boris Badenov (whom I adore), I suppose I should just be thankful Frees never resorts to speaking in a Pottsylvanian dialect.

Watching A Place in the Sun (minor flaws and all) is an immensely pleasurable experience that satisfies no matter what aspect of its story you choose to focus on: the romance, the social commentary, the crime drama, or, my personal preference, the melancholy discourse on the failings of the American Dream. If you haven't seen A Place in the Sun in a while, it's definitely worth another look. If you've never seen it before, well, prepare to be swept away. I am...every time I see it.

A Touch of Classis one of my favorite comedies. But like The Women, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Cactus Flower, or almost anything written by Neil Simon; it’s a comedy I’m only able to still enjoy if I disregard contemporary sensibilities (both comedic and social), and simply allow it to remain a time-piece firmly ensconced within the bubble of the era in which it was made.

Glenda Jackson as Vickie Allessio

George Segal as Steve Blackburn

Director / writer Melvin Frank’s A Touch of Class is a perfectly amiable, very watchable, and, upon occasion, absolutely hilarious, romantic comedy about adultery from the era of the sexual revolution. It boasts fine leading performances from then-darlings of the cinema, Glenda Jackson and George Segal; a jaunty musical score; crisp, comedy-friendly photography; some nice views of scenic London and Spain; and quite a lot of funny bicker-banter and oil/vinegar chemistry between the two leads.

That being said, it is also a rather ordinary, schticky, sometimes broadly played, middle-brow comedy thoroughly lacking in the kind of wit or distinction that would justify its having won Glenda Jackson her second Best Actress Oscar (and a Golden Globe), or explain how it managed to snag four other Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, shutting out such possible contenders as: Last Tango in Paris, Paper Moon, The Last Detail, The Way We Were, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, and Sleeper.

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs
A Touch of Class makes explicit its intent to be a frankly comedic update of the coy adultery melodramas of the past by having Steve and Vickie fall to pieces watching David Lean's 1946 film, Brief Encounter on TV. Brief Encounter tells the story of two married people who embark upon an ill-fated love affair.

George Segal is an insurance adjuster; Glenda Jackson, a fashion designer (“stealer” as she calls it). Both reside in London, he: 11 years wed with two children, she: three years wed - now divorced, also with two children. After a “cute meet” and several coincidental run-ins, the two embark upon a no-strings-attached affair that gets off to a rocky start, grows passionate, then becomes complicated when lust turns into love. How funny you find Segal’s sitcom-y attempts to lead a double life depend a great deal on how amusing you find the script (serviceable), charming you find the leads (considerable), or hilarious the concept of ceaseless lying and deception as the cornerstones of familial harmony (not very).

As Glenda Jackson's two children, Edward Kemp and Lisa Vanderpump appear onscreen for about as long as it took you to read this. George Segal's children fare even worse. A Touch of Class wants us to believe the bond of family trumps homewrecking, but George Segal's Steve Blackburn is such an absentee dad, he makes Ryan O'Neal look like Father of the Year.

The uninitiated, drawn to A Touch of Class by its Oscar pedigree or Glenda Jackson’s reputation, are apt to come away from it entertained, but perhaps scratching their heads, wondering what was being put in the water back in 1973 to result in a movie that plays out like an extended episode of Love, American Style being so widely lauded (although Pauline Kael is said to have walked out on it). I confess; on revisiting this film, it’s a question I even have to ask myself. And this from the guy who, when it was released, saw A Touch of Class more times than he can count, and considered it one of the funniest comedies he’d seen since What’s Up, Doc?.

Part of this may have to do with changing tastes in comedy. For reasons I’m at a loss to explain, some types of comedy are timeless, while others age rather badly. I saw A Touch of Classwhen I was 16 years old, and my only guess as to why I fell in love with its bed-hopping clichés is that they weren't yet clichés to me. Another explanation for the film’s success, one I fully recall, is that at the time, America was deep in the throes of a brief but passionate infatuation with Glenda Jackson.

Albeit by way of a terrible wig, audiences were pleased to see BBC's Elizabeth R let her hair down

After gaining the attention of American audiences with her Best Actress Oscar win for Women in Love(1969), Jackson was a prolific onscreen presence throughout the decade, going on to appear in many highly-acclaimed films: The Music Lovers, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Hedda, The Maids, Mary Queen of Scots, The Romantic Englishwoman, and The Nelson Affair.

She was literally was the Meryl Streep of her day. And, much in the way critics and audiences in the 80s longed to see Streep drop her accents and somber façade for lighter fare like Postcards from the Edge or Death becomes Her; 70s audiences were thrilled to discover that Glenda Jackson, the neurotic heroine of so many Ken Russell melodramas, possessed a real flair for comedy.

George Segal appeared in a staggering number of films, both comedic and dramatic, between 1970s Where's Poppa? and the flop 1979 re-teaming with Glenda Jackson, Lost & Found. Although he played essentially the exact same character in all of his comedies, nobody did bemused fluster better.

My rave recommendation of this film to my partner (followed by his subsequent, “Meh!” reaction) clarified for me that A Touch of Class has, for the first-timer, a couple of things working against it. And from highly unlikely sources, to boot. One is its title. A Touch of Class suggests a witty, sophisticated comedy of the sort that once starred Myrna Loy and William Powell. But as many critics couldn't resist noting at the time, a more apt title for A Touch of Class is A Touch of Crass; what with the screenplay's over-reliance on profanity and smirky sex jokes for laughs.

Given how Jackson's character makes reference at one point to author Edith Wharton's, The House of Mirth, I'm rather inclined to think the film's title, A Touch of Class, is used in irony. Like Wharton's The Age of Innocence.

Secondly, and this is an odd one, I think it does A Touch of Class no favors that it’s a 1973 Best Picture nominee, and that it stars one of the preeminent actresses of her time in her Academy Award-winning role. Why is this problem? Principally, because it sets the viewer up for a film far superior to the one they’re given. I truly enjoy this movie a great deal, but even in all my rabid Glenda Jackson fandom, there’s no way I consider hers an Oscar-worthy performance, nor this film Best Picture material. I'm convinced my partner's reaction to A Touch of Class would have been far more favorable had he come to it expecting an unexceptional, lightweight, early 70s comedy that's actually funny. The latter being rare as hen's teeth today.

Any points A Touch of Class gains in giving Jackson's character a gay male secretary (Michael Elwin, r.), are soon lost by having his every appearance serve as some kind of sight gag. (Even Jayne Mansfield would say this apartment is too pink.)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

What works best in A Touch of Class, and what makes it a film I literally never tire of watching, is the marvelous “opposites attract” chemistry between Glenda Jackson and George Segal. And while they don't exactly make us forget Tracy & Hepburn, the two play delightfully antagonistic foils before their romance starts to gel. Jackson's slow, boiling rages so compliment Segal's edgy exasperation, that their frequent sparring and bickering scenes crackle with the spark and energy of a well-matched tennis game. Jackson, with her crystal clear diction and mellifluous voice, has it all over Segal for hilariously sarcastic jeremiads; but she doesn't have Segal's gift for physical comedy. George Segal is a joy to watch, and he has the rubbery face (and enormous head) to pull off a veritable lexicon of comic double takes and reaction shots.

Jackson's flinty British calm contrasts amusingly with Segal's neurotic American excitability

PERFORMANCES:

A Touch of Class is essentially a two-character piece, so it’s great that Jackson and Segal are each so marvelous in their roles. That is, inasmuch as Melvin Frank and Jack Rose’s farcical, gag-filled screenplay pauses long enough to give these talented actors enough breathing room to flesh out their characters (Melvin Frank and Jack Rose, both in their 60s at the time, got their start writing Bob Hope movies). George Segal coasts a bit on charm alone (and if you don’t find him charming, the blithely immoral character he plays is sure to grate) but Jackson is a revelation. She does wonders with a character not given much more than “typically British” as a personality trait.

If my enjoyment of Breakfast at Tiffany's is ruined every time Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi shows up, so it is with A Touch of Class and the irksome and annoying "ubiquitous best friend" character played by Paul Sorvino. Each time he shows up I race for the fast-forward button on my remote.

It amuses me to have read several online reviews that state Glenda Jackson’s character is a feminist. Since no mention is made, expressly or covertly, of Jackson’s Vickie Allessio being a feminist, I can only take this to mean that young audiences raised on the female masochists typical of today’s rom-coms (Katherine Heigl, Jennifer Anniston, Drew Barrymore, Sarah Jessica Parker) can only envision smart, articulate women who speak up for themselves, know their own minds, and have their own opinions, as a feminists. Scary.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

A Touch of Class is a deliberate throwback to the sex comedies of old with its updated gimmick being the ability to tell the story with the freedoms afforded by the “new permissiveness” of the 70s. While this certainly makes for raunchier language and a less coy approach to the adulterous couplings, it also affords a few awkward moments as the old clashes with the new in unexpected (and sometimes unintentionally funny) ways.

The effortless gravitas Glenda Jackson brings to A Touch of Class significantly compensates for the film's wobbly gender politics which include a rape joke; a homey, constantly cooking mistress; and several cheating husbands but not a single cheating wife.

European films have always been able to combine nudity and comedy, but here in the States, nudity tends to stifle laughter. So, as incongruous as it is to a pair of heated lovers off on an illicit tryst in the free-love 70s, out pop a pair of his and hers pajamas suitable to a Doris Day/ Rock Hudson movie.

Traditional gender roles are adhered to pretty stringently throughout, but every now and then an unexpected curve is thrown, such as in this scene where Steve clings to Vickie at a bullfight

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

I began this post stating how much more I enjoy A Touch of Class when I don’t try to apply modern sensibilities to what is now a 40-year-old film. Not always an easy thing, but something classic film lovers frequently have to do when faced with outmoded attitudes about sex, race, and gender in otherwise terrific films. I'm not exactly captivated by the idea of a film that depicts serial adultery as just another charming personality quirk in boyish, middle-aged men (in fact, as a gay man denied marriage rights, it galls a bit to think of how films like this tend to undervalue and take for granted such a gift...even if it's just for escapist laughs); but it speaks well of the overall tidy professionalism of A Touch of Class that none of these things really occur to you until after the film is over.

Of course, my chief fondness for this film lies with Glenda Jackson, one of the absolute best of the slew of intelligent, interesting actresses that seemed to flourish in the 70s, only to disappear come the blockbuster 80s. In this, her first motion picture comedy (if one doesn't count a priceless unbilled cameo in Ken Russell's The Boy Friend) she revealed a heretofore untapped comic gift later put to good use in several films, most notably, House Calls (1977) and Robert Altman's little seen, H.E.A.L.T.H. (1980). There isn't a single moment in A Touch of Class where she doesn't dominate the screen with her lively, fully committed performance. And while it'll always be my belief that Ellen Burstyn should have won the Oscar that year for The Exorcist, in reality, could ANY acting award granted Glenda Jackson ever be considered undeserved?

Four-time Oscar nominee, two-time winner. When Jackson retired from acting in 1992 to become a Member of Parliament, film lost a true original. A versatile, intriguing, and very classy actress.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

When it Comes to Bringing F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz-Age Classic to the Big Screen, 70s Mediocrity Has the Advantage Over Modern Techno-Fetishism

After speculating in an earlier post on how Baz Luhrmann’s $127 million adaptation of The Great Gatsby would stack up next to Jack Clayton’s prosaic 1974 version (HERE); I finally got around to seeing the 2013 film (sans 3D) last night.

Well, my overall opinion is that Luhrmann’s is the better film, but then, so is the 8mm home movie I made of my first trip to Universal Studios in 1972. To say Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsbyis better than the Robert Redford/Mia Farrow starrer is not the same as saying it's a good film. It’s merely to note, comparatively speaking, that it is an improvement over the former. It wins by default.

Indeed, when taken as a stand-alone movie adaptation, I think the 2013 version of The Great Gatsby mostly proves that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is unfilmable and should hereafter be left alone. Unless, of course, Andrew Lloyd Webber has plans for turning it into a West End musical sometime soon.

What surprises me is that while Baz Luhrmann’s glittery Gatsby is more spirited, better acted (generally), and by and large a far more dramatic and romantically persuasive movie than Jack Clayton’s over-reverential take; I nevertheless could pop the seriously flawed 1974 version into my DVD player and watch it in its entirety this very minute; but I really can’t imagine wanting to see the 2013 adaptation ever again.

Gatsby & Daisy - 1974

Why? Because for all the tin-eared, uber-devotional faithfulness of Francis Ford Coppola’s screenplay; the leaden portentousness of Jack Clayton’s direction; and the hermetic, airlessness of most of the performances; 1974s The Great Gatsby is at least populated with real human beings occupying a recognizably real world. And until I saw Baz Luhrmann’s version, I never really grasped the degree to which that little detail matters in a film that's not about Transformers or superheroes.

When I see live theater, there’s this unique energy and danger that comes from everything happening right before you in real time. It adds to the overall excitement of the experience and allows for the considerable suspension of disbelief required to allow entire worlds to exist within a proscenium arch. Movies operate on a different level. They create a hyper-reality once-removed. Any emotional distance created by the fact that I’m watching flickering images staged in the recent or distant past is mitigated by the intimacy of close-ups and how I find myself drawn in by the selective, directed gaze of the camera lens.

Daisy & Gatsby - 2013

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsbymakes extensive use of computer-generated imagery, both realistic and stylized. Imagery whose sometimes flagrant artificiality gives one the impression of watching Jazz Age avatars populating the landscape of an art-deco video game. The camera swoops, dives, and darts about the action like a paper airplane hurled by a grade-schooler with lousy aim, and the 2D effect of the film’s 3D technology makes the actors appear to stand apart and separate for their surroundings...almost floating in front of the scenery - like those vinyl Colorforms cutouts I had as a kid. In short, the entire enterprise becomes a high-tech cartoon. And in cartoons there can be no human jeopardy.

The fragility of humans, both physical and emotional, is the crux of all drama. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald emphasizes human vulnerability by contrasting and juxtaposing his weak characters against the illusory shelter afforded their materialism. No matter how big the house, powerful the car, or ornate the swimming pool – they all prove insufficient citadels against pain, death, and tragedy. But for this to hit home, the material world has to be made real for us, and the characters have to feel as if they are flesh and blood.

Jordan & Nick - 1974

The 1974 Gatsby buried its characters beneath millions of dollars’ worth of production values, but at least the quirky casting of 70s stalwarts Karen Black and Bruce Dern helped to imbue the film with brief flourishes of unmistakable humanity. Luhrmann’s Gatsby wants to dazzle us with spectacle, but at the cost of grounding anything in a recognizable reality. The actors, digitized to a glossy sheen that renders flesh the same waxy burnish of department store mannequins, are impossible to care for because they have been rendered as animatronic Gatsby dolls. They posture and pose, look terrific in their period duds, and all carry on as if they're in a college production of Private Lives; but they never feel like they have any life beyond what we're being shown. How could they? They exist on a computer graphics grid.

I’m afraid 1974’s The Great Gatsby(a film I harbored no great fondness for beyond a nagging nostalgia and the sight of Robert Redford’s thighs in a bathing suit) has become yet another mediocre film from my past that’s starting to look more like a classic in the wake of a middling remake (a la: The Poseidon Adventure, Fame, Rollerball, and Planet of the Apes).

Nick & Jordan - 2013

Of course, Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby was a big hit at the boxoffice, proving most emphatically that 3D, CGI, and anachronistic music scores by Jay Z are here to stay, and what the public wants.

To which I can only respond, in the words of one Miss Jean Brodie:

"For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.”

A Few Random Observations:
1. In spite of forever looking like he's playing dress-up, Leonardo DiCaprio does a marvelous job as Gatsby. Infinitely more complex and sympathetic than Robert Redford’s Arrow Collar model interpretation, he's the major galvanizing force in the film for me.

2. I’m convinced it’s impossible to make a party on film look like any fun.

I'm absolutely crazy about Carey Mulligan, who makes a fabulous-looking Daisy Buchanan. But as her role is written, I'm not sure she fares much better than Mia Farrow

3. In an effort to try to capture the dizzying madness of the Jazz Age, by all appearances Luhrmann tied the camera to a rope and started swinging it over his head. Honestly, it's like a hummingbird was his cinematographer and cartoonist Tex Avery his editor.

4. Actress Elizabeth Debicki makes me think what a wonderful Jordan Baker Anjelica Houston would have made in the 1974 film.

5. Like the kind of digital manipulation that Vanity Fair shutterbug Annie Leibovitz passes off as photography these days, the images in The Great Gatsby, beautiful as they are, never once look organic. None of the actors appear to be in the same room together. Hell, none of the ROOMS seem to be in the same room.

6. Blending the music of Gershwin (the exquisite Rhapsody in Blue) with the compositions of contemporary pop stars only draws attention to how awful the music of contemporary pop stars is.

Isla Fisher's superficial performance as Myrtle Wilson (she plays her like Miss Hannigan in a touring company of Annie - or, more accurately, as Annie all grown up) achieved the impossible: It made me long for Karen Black's over-emotive histrionics in the 1974 film

7. There’s no denying that Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is a beautiful-looking film, but when Baz Luhrmann tries for Ken Russell operatic bombast, his images, lacking in either context or passion, at best come off as the work of a very clever Los Angles event/party planner.

8. I thought so in 1974 and I think so now; Bruce Dern's Tom Buchanan is a brilliant piece of character work. Joel Edgerton comes off as a tad too callow and weightless.

9. I very much like the framing device employed in the new film that has Nick Carraway recounting his summer with Gatsby from inside the sanitarium he's committed himself to after becoming an alcoholic. It's an inspired touch that adds a bit of depth to a character so often on the periphery of the action.

When it comes to movies, I willingly confess to being as obsessed with the past as Gatsby. But I honestly would have welcomed an adaptation of The Great Gatsby that I didn't have to watch ironically.
Copyright © Ken Anderson

I’m usually not one for seasonal posts, but this camp-tastic treasure from my culturally misspent youth is perfect Halloween viewing for those maxed-out on the usual Creature Features scare fare, and perhaps longing for a little retro 70s fashion thrills to go with their holiday chills.

Imagine, if you will, Mary McCarthy’s sorority sister soaper, The Group, crossed with Friday the 13th, add a bit of Charlie's Angels gloss (Aaron Spelling is this film's producer), and toss a 1960s Ross Hunter "women in peril" melodrama into the mix, and you've got a pretty good idea of what’s in store for you with Five Desperate Women (who can resist that title?). A minor entry in the beloved ABC Movie of the Week anthology series of made-for-TV movies that proliferated during the 1970s. The series produced a slew of amazingly durable motion pictures over the course of its seven years on the air, among them: Trilogy of Terror, Duel, Don’t be Afraid of the Dark, Bad Ronald, Reflections of Murder.
These 90-minute movies, especially the thrillers, were ALWAYS the talk of my junior-high schoolyard the following day, and I recall, at age 13, Five Desperate Women being a particular favorite – its high regard aided considerably by our being too young and lacking in life experience to take much notice of the film’s timeworn clichés and obvious plotting.

Joan Hackett as Dorian

Julie Sommars as Mary Grace

Denise Nicholas as Joy

Stefanie Powers as Gloria

Anjanette Comer as Lucy

Five school chums, all graduates of Brindley, a tony private women’s college in the East, gather for a five year reunion at a remote beach house on an island with no neighbors, no transportation and no phones. Armed only with their outsized hair, over-accessorized 70s fashions, and outré Samsonite® luggage (not a wheel or designer label in sight), the friends are a virtual Who's Who of 70's television. There's sweet and mousy Julie Sommars (The Governor and J.J.) suffering a bad case of the guilts about leaving her controlling, her mentally ill mother behind; incessantly gum-chewing wallflower, Joan Hackett (a 70s TV movie darling, treading water a bit, having made her 1966 film debut in The Group in a very similar role); self-reliant, black-power call girl, Denise Nicholas (Room 222); big-haired, big city cynic, Stefanie Powers (The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.); and dipsomaniacal southern belle, Anjanette Comer (who would work again with this film's director, Ted Post, in the 1973 cult oddity, The Baby).

A weekend of rest, relaxation, and a rehashing of the past is on the agenda for the five diverse and high-strung women, whose only other companions on the island resort are the creepily geeky charter boat captain (Bradford Dillman), and the all-business, cloyingly sincere caretaker (Robert Conrad). Oh yes, and a homicidal maniac has recently escaped from a nearby mental institution - all secluded areas have nearby mental institutions - and is stalking the grounds.

Thus, the mystery is set. Or at least one of them. The biggest one being how these five women ever became friends in the first place. Once everybody starts airing their dirty laundry and copping to the fact that none of their lives has turned out the way they had planned, the women waste little time in bitchily sniping at each other. A condition only exacerbated by frayed nerves and zero survival skills once the presence (not the identity) of the killer becomes known and the women have to learn to rely upon one another.

"Special Guest Star" Robert Conrad as Michael Wylie

Bradford Dillman as Jim Meeker

The men are not much better. Short, stocky, Eveready Battery spokesman/Battle of the Network Stars beefcake, Robert Conrad, can't stop playing "Knock it off...I dare you!" with tall and lanky Bradford Dillman long enough to be of much help to anyone, let alone a house full of defenseless women burdened with an overabundance of hair care products and a shortage of locks on the doors.
Viewed today, Five Desperate Women incites so many giggles at its own expense that it challenges you to imagine how it was ever conceived as a serious thriller, but I must say, as an adolescent I found this movie to be REALLY gripping and terribly suspenseful. So much for the discerning tastes of youth.

The unintentional laughs start early with a scene in which put-upon rich girl, Mary Grace, is emotionally battered by the passive-aggressive ventriloquist act engaged in by her silent mother and loudmouthed nurse. Hot on the heels of this comes the dockside reunion of the giggly sorority sisters wherein they sing a school song and southern-fried sot, Lucy, drops hints about affirmative-action charity case, Joy, not really being “one of us…”

The Wild, Wild West's Robert Conrad, who previously appeared with co-star Stefanie Powers in the unforgettable Palm Springs Weekend (1963), gets chummy with sweet-natured Julie Sommars. Most people recall Sommars from the TV show, Matlock, but she first caught my attention in the terrific comedy, The Pad and How to Use It (1966)

Once the women are ensconced on the island and the outbreaks of temperament erupt as regularly and abruptly as the outbreaks of violence, Five Desperate Women - clocking in at a brisk 75 minutes - moves along so quickly one scarcely minds the minimal drama and by-the-numbers thriller plotting. What does catch the attention is the risible dialog (“I buried the dog.” “[cheerily] Thank you!”); not-so-surprising personal revelations; and a screenplay (written by three men) that can’t think of a way to build tension without having five fully grown, college-educated women carry on like sheltered pre-teens at a summer camp.

Perpetually helpless, scared, and often absurdly overdressed (for her "escape" Denise Nicholas' character chooses an ensemble that features a cloche hat, midi vest jacket, hoop earrings big enough to throw a grapefruit through, and knee-high boots), these women quiver and quake while waiting to be victimized. They do traditional horror movie "girly" things like trip over brambles while running for their lives, throwing objects at the murderer with really bad aim, and wandering off to dark places alone. They all but run around in circles, shrieking and flapping their arms. Being terrified is one thing, but these women - surrounded by fireplace pokers and butcher knives – never once resort to grabbing some common household item for self-defense (OK, at one point one of them grabs a shoe...but you see what I mean).

Posing for a fashion shoot? No, in this shot Denise Nicholas and Stefanie Powers are reacting to a grisly murder

Five Desperate Women moves at breakneck speed toward its not-wholly-unforeseen conclusion and the reveal of the killer's identity… a finale that finds one of the women being strangled while her friends have hysterics from the sidelines screaming at the manic to “Stop!” (that always works) a good 30 seconds before it occurs to any of them that it might be a good idea to come to her aid.

If what I've written thus far has given the impression that Five Desperate Women is a film to be avoided, let me correct that error now. With apologies to TCM, Five Desperate Women is one of The Essentials: one of those rare, miraculous little films that exists simultaneously within the realm of good and bad. A film that pays countless entertainment dividends whether taken seriously (for all it's faults, it's actually better than most of what is being released in the horror/suspense genre these days) or viewed as camp.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As stated before, Five Desperate Women is basically your average woman-in-peril suspense thriller - only taken to the fifth power. There’s literally nothing here you haven’t seen a dozen times before in movies about a mad killer on the loose in an isolated setting, the only difference: instead of one hysterical would-be victim, you have five. One might imagine this would lead to five times the suspense, but mostly it just translates to five times the screaming hysterics. Which is fine by me.

I'm not exactly feelin' it from Ms. Powers in this shot

PERFORMANCES
The late Joan Hackett as the forlorn Dorian is my absolute favorite in the film, but if, like me, you're a fan, you'll note unfortunate echoes of similar roles in The Last of Shelia, The Group, Reflections of Murder, and another college reunion TV movie, Class of '63. It's not that Hackett isn't excellent, no, she always is; it's just that she was horribly typecast throughout most of her career and directors rarely could see her as anything but the mousy, retiring type. She was Oscar-nominated and won a Golden Globe for one of my least favorite of her performances, the vainglorious socialite friend of Marsha Mason in Only When I Laugh (1981), but at least she was cast against type. Her rarely exploited gift for physical comedy can be seen in 1969's Support Your Local Sheriff , for which i really think she deserved a nomination.

Five Desperate Women is saved from complete TV movie mediocrity by the masterstroke casting of two of the most splendidly idiosyncratic actresses of the 70s together in the same film. Joan Hackett is sensational, but Anjanette Comer (so great in The Loved One and The Appaloosa) almost steals the film as the skittish southern belle, Lucy.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Five Desperate Women is a video catalog of all things 70s. You won't care a whit who the mad killer is because your eyes will be popping out of your head from the mod MOD MOD fashions and positively enormous hairdos. You'll see minis, midis, maxis, hot pants, knickers, boots, huge studded belts, chokers, fringe, and halter tops. And lest we forget the boys, we have Robert Conrad traipsing about in his by-now-trademark ridiculously tight, bun-hugging pants and overstretched, pec-tacular T-shirts.

Smokin' & Drinkin' and Everything but Thinkin'
One of the pleasures of this film is to see how much carefree smoking and drinking the characters engage in.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Two favorite films from my youth that are infinitely better than Five Desperate Women but nevertheless always remind me of this TV movie are: Five Gates to Hell (1959), a war film about of a group of army nurses having to fend off a hoard of Indochinese guerrillas; and John Ford's last film, Seven Women (1966), about the female residents of a Chinese mission facing off Mongol bandits (featuring a kick-ass performance by Anne Bancroft). Although these "women banding together" movies never developed into an actual sub-genre of film that I'm aware of, I do harbor a definite fondness for them.

Male-centric war movies and westerns always bore me because of all the macho posturing and one-note, stiff-jawed heroics. The need to perpetuate society's narrow definition of masculinity has resulted in some woefully monotonous action films and thrillers. On the other hand, female characters are allowed (sometimes to a fault, as this film demonstrates) the dimensionality of being able to display the gamut of human emotions, from weakness to heroism, in the carrying out of heroic acts...something I always find more engrossing than stoic bravery in the face of all.
Five Desperate Women goes overboard in having the women characters evince too much in the way of unfettered emotionalism, but at least it's a film in which the women eventually have to fend for themselves and are responsible for their own rescue. It looks awfully silly now, but back in 1971, the same year Helen Reddy's I Am Woman first came on the scene, Five Desperate Women (to a 13-year-old who hadn't yet discovered the self-sufficient tough cookies of 40s film noir) looked very much like a women's lib twist on the traditional suspense thriller.

Five Desperate Women is available on YouTube

Though we don't smoke and we don't drink

And though our hearts are pure

There's something about a rich man

That's better than a poor

Rich fathers send your only sons

Rich mothers send us your pearls

Though he may be your joy

Still he's only a boy

'Til he's been with a Brindley girl

A movie that qualifies as both a horror film and an overstuffed Thanksgiving turkey is the perfect way to see out October and welcome in November. Said turkey being Allan Carr’s notorious, Can’t Stop the Music, a longtime guilty-pleasure favorite that, unlike most camp films in my “favorites” cannon, grows increasingly less fun to watch as time goes by.

A highly fictionalized account (and I stress fictionalized) of the creation of the gay-themed disco singing group, the Village People, Can’t Stop the Music, released in the summer of 1980, hit theaters at the worst possible time and under the worst possible circumstances. If Xanadu, that other 1980 summer musical release that tanked at the boxoffice, suffered from too much 80s faddism (roller skates, spandex, and leg warmers), Can’t Stop the Music looked and sounded like a disco relic that had been gathering dust on the shelf since 1978. So significantly had the music and cultural landscape shifted from the time of its August 1979 start date to its June 1980 release, that Can’t Stop the Music opened at theaters a literal, antiquated period-piece. Thankfully, someone saw the writing on the wall early enough to jettison the film’s original title mid-production (Discoland: Where the Music Never Ends), but not early enough to tone down its already anachronistic glitter and amyl nitrate “shake your booty!” overzealousness.

Valerie Perrine as Samantha Simpson

Steve Guttenberg as Jack Morell

Village People

Bad timing also reared its head in that the release of Can’t Stop the Music—a self-professed family musical with a closeted, “don’t ask, don’t tell” gay sensibility —coincided both with the early day of the AIDS epidemic (with its attendant groundswell of public anxiety associating it with the sexual revolution of the 70s, and the drugs and sex lifestyle that disco culture glamorized), and the release, just months prior, of William Freidkin’s controversial film, Cruising: a film met with protests and anti-gay allegations citing its largely negative depiction of gay culture. Had Can’t Stop the Music been made with even a shred of the strength of its flimsy convictions, I’m sure its leering, “cocaine and Crisco,” homogenized ode to homosexual hedonism would have come under attack as well, but producer Allan Carr knew that much more money could be made from within the closet than outside of it.

Good, Clean, Wholesome Fun

With scenes like the above in a PG-rated "family" musical, Alan Carr sought to attract "knowing" gay audiences while simultaneously banking on mainstream viewers remaining clueless to the film's so-obvious-even-a-blind-man-can-see-it gay subtext. And why not? It certainly worked for the Village People, who, even as recently as 2012 in the documentary, The Secret Disco Revolution, made such eye-rolling statements as: "Our songs were never gay, we were just a party band!" and the absolutely mental, "There was not one double-entendre in our music. 'In the Navy' was just about enlisting." Right...and Dinah Washington's "Long John Blues" is just about good dental hygiene.

At a time when it would have made a powerful statement to have a really out, “We’re here, we’re queer” mainstream movie in the theaters (along the lines of The Ritz or The Rocky Horror Picture Show) to counter the wave of homophobia that arose in the wake of the “gay cancer” scare of AIDS in the early 80s, Allan Carr, one of the most high-profile and powerful gay men in Hollywood (especially after Grease), instead gave the world a movie so self-negating, so deeply in the closet and in denial about itself, Liberace could have been its technical adviser.

We know, James...we know

Although it didn't hit me as strongly in 1980 as it does now, Can’t Stop the Music, to an almost contemptible degree, suffers from a distasteful undercurrent of homophobic self-loathing and ideological selling-out running through it. In an effort to keep its many corporate sponsors happy (Dr. Pepper, Baskin-Robbins, Famous Amos Cookies, American Dairy Association) and to court the mainstream boxoffice that made Grease into such a mega-hit, Can’t Stop the Music systematically and schizophrenically undercuts every bit of the film’s laid-on-with-a-trowel gay subtext with an unpersuasive overlay of bland heterosexuality. Honestly, in spite of Can’t Stop the Music being about a gay-themed singing group formed in New York’s Greenwich Village; the numerous coy allusions; the acres of male flesh on display; and the multitude of homoerotic double and triple entendres, I don’t think the word “gay” is uttered even once in the whole film.

Olympic Gold Medalist Bruce Jenner, making his film debut, here achieves the impossible
by actually managing to look more ridiculous than the Village People

To paraphrase one of my favorite Judge Judy-isms, Can’t Stop the Music is a movie that doesn't know whether it’s afoot or horseback. It courts gay dollars with its setting, its music, its "Auntie Mame syndrome" supporting cast of flamboyant eldery actresses, and its virtual non-stop parade of beefcake. Yet it doesn't want the polarizing effect (at the boxoffice) of actually being what it is...a big budget gay musical. Instead, it operates in a sex neutral (Guttenberg’s character swears off sex until he becomes a success…how convenient), heterosexual insistent (just WHO are those non-descript, lost-looking women clinging to the Village People in “Magic Night”?) limbo that makes no sense. At one point in the film, the Village People sing a song titled, “Liberation”, but in the "Ain't nobody here but us straights!" context of the movie, what the hell kind of liberation are these guys even singing about?

Male starlet Victor Davis showing Steve Guttenberg and Bruce Jenner
just how "not gay" Can't Stop the Music is.

In trying to be the all-things-to-all-people crowd-pleaser its sizable budget demanded, Can’t Stop the Music turned out to be not much of anything to anybody.

70s gay porn "star" George Payne jogs by (twice!) in the excruciating
Guttenberg on roller skates credits sequence

A must-read for behind the scenes details on the making of this rainbow-colored fiasco is Robert Hofler's 2010 Allan Carr biography, Party Animals. Wherein we learn that Carr's desire to bring back the glamour of old Hollywood extended to reviving the casting couch. In an attempt to put a male spin on the old MGM "Goldwyn Girls" tradition of featuring beautiful girls as extras and bit players throughout the film, Allan Carr made ample use of a coterie of male dancers, models, hustlers, starlets, and party boys ("Cash or career?" was Carr's standard come on when meeting a handsome young man). We also learn that director Nancy Walker and Valerie Perrine hated one another, that sizable chunks of the film were actually directed by cinematographer Bill Butler (Grease, Jaws) and choreographer Arlene Phillips, and that Allan Carr harbored a near-Hitchcockian obsession with his heterosexual protegee, Steve Guttenberg.

I took this picture in 1980 not long after this billboard for Can't Stop the Music was unveiled on Hollywood's Sunset Blvd. in a red carpet ceremony on what the city's mayor declared was "Can't Stop the Music Day" and the Village People were given the key to the city.

Because all else for me was eclipsed by the end-of-summer release of Xanadu, I tend to forget that the summer of 1980 saw the debut of several musicals that have become lasting favorites. First and foremost was the splendiferous Xanadu, but I also enjoyed Alan Parker’s Fame,and loved the use of iconic R & B artists in The Blues Brothers. The heavily-hyped Can’t Stop the Music wasn’t very high on my list of must-see summer films mostly due to my general antipathy towards Grease(I know it’s considered a classic and all, but I just find it clunky) and my lack of fondness for the Village People (their anthem-like songs always sounded like Romper Room marching music to me, and, having grown up in San Francisco, their costumes suggested nothing more to me than a your average ride on the Market St. F streetcar). However, being the devoted disco maven I was (and remain), just the idea of a multi-million dollar disco musical was too tantalizing a prospect to dismiss. Which brings me to the reason I was most excited to see Can’t Stop the Music: choreographer Arlene Phillips.

Choreographer Arlene Phillips (Annie, The Fan) first came to my attention through her work in a series of fantastic TV commercials for Dr. Pepper. The top photos are from the 1975 Sugar Free Dr. Pepper commercial, "Penthouse" (see storyboard here), which bears a strong resemblance to Can't Stop the Music's "Milkshake" number. Even down to sharing the same set designer, Stephen Hendrickson

He's a Pepper
Can't Stop the Music came under fire for its crass and blatant product placement

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

While my enjoyment of Can’t Stop the Music’s non-musical sequences has diminished significantly over the years, my affection for Arlene Phillip’s deliciously awful/wonderful musical numbers has increased, tenfold. I absolutely love them. Her cheesy “Las Vegas showroom by way of aerobics class” choreography fairly oozes with late-70s sleaze, and her “What WAS she thinking?” staging has the staggering, jaw-dropping lunacy of Busby Berkeley at his most demented. That these musical numbers are also monumentally tacky, done with a great deal of wit, and, like the film itself, possess an almost surreal lack of self-awareness, only adds to their appeal. Each time I have a chance to revisit the industrial glitter factory of “I Love You to Death,” or that wholesomely raunchy paean to homoerotic health & fitness, “YMCA,” my heart soars and a smile comes to my face. Well, maybe it’s more like a giggle and a smile. OK, let’s say it’s a kind of a chuckle and a grin. Oh, let’s face it, I’m usually laughing my ass off.

Given how so many of Arlene Phillips' dance tableaus resemble photo shoots from Eyes of Laura Mars, it comes as little surprise that the late Theoni V. Aldredge, the designer of all those slit-skirt ensembles for Faye Dunaway, also contributed the costumes to the musical numbers in Can't Stop the Music

PERFORMANCES

Where to begin? What can be said about performances in a film where the amateurism of the neophytes and professionals is evenly matched? I like Valerie Perrine a great deal, and she seems like an awfully sweet woman, but her (and there’s no other word for it) fag-hag role requires a personality, not an actress. Ms. Perrine splits the difference here by being neither.

No, that's not Tim Curry's Dr. Frank-N-Furter making a cameo appearance.
That's actress Marilyn Sokol attempting to channel Bette Midler's bawdy,
"Bathhouse Betty" persona, but mostly just succeeding in embarrassing herself

And then there's Steve Guttenberg. Prior to this I'd always considered Todd Susman's underground newspaper journalist in 1971s The Star Spangled Girl to be the most annoying performance ever committed to film. Guttenberg wins by a landslide. Trying for boyish exuberance, he gives a performance of such overarching hyperactivity that a mere lack of talent can't be the only answer (its like he's on crack). Never speaking when he can shout, always moving, eyes popping like Eddie Cantor, cords in his neck bulging, forming his words and using facial muscles as if to make himself understood by lip-readers on Mars...Guttenberg appears perpetually on the brink of popping a blood vessel.

Personal fave Jack Weston shows up briefly as disco proprietor, Benny Murray

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

These days, when I watch Can't Stop the Music, it's with my remote close at hand, finger poised over the FFWD button, moving swiftly from one delightfully garish musical number to the next. They are totally awful, but I swear, I love them to pieces.

YMCA
Taking four days to shoot and featuring 250 dancers, athletes, and sundry bleached-blonde himbos, the YMCA number - a tribute to the gym sequence in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - was Allan Carr's most hands-on sequence (if you get my cruder meaning). Allegedly there exists an x-rated cut of the nude shower sequence which Carr commissioned for his private collection.

I Love You to Death
The number that perhaps most resembles Arlene Phillips' work with her dance troupe, Hot Gossip. A staple of the 70s UK TV program, The Kenny Everett Video Show, you can see a slew of Hot Gossip videos on YouTube. Not surprisingly, they all look like outtakes from Can't Stop the Music.

Milkshake
Talk about bringing all the boys to the yard! The Busby Berkeley-inspired "Milkshake" number really does a body good. Choreographed for the camera in a kinetic series of barely-moving cutaways, close ups, and inserts, it has to be seen to be believed. It's totally insane, completely over the top, full-tilt queer, and my absolute favorite 3 1/2 minutes of the film.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Can’t Stop the Musicis kind of a strange film to include in this blog because, in many ways, I find the film to be rather cowardly and reprehensible. I want to just enjoy the movie on a Showgirls level…just escapist, mindless, campy fun…but as a gay man, I find myself unable to get past the fact that Can’t Stop the Music is such a colossal sellout. A bunch of rich gay men make a movie full of gay people, gay references and gay music, and yet it spends all its time trying to avoid the issue. Or worse, covering it up. This movie is like a microcosm of every closet-case individual in show business.

Paul Sand (the David Schwimmer of the 70s) plays record executive Steve Waits

They covet your money so badly they’re willing to sell themselves down the river to get it. I watch this movie sometimes and all I can see is gay self-hatred. And as an ostensibly “family-oriented” entertainment that thinks it’s being racy by slipping in coy and winking gay references at every opportunity, Can’t Stop the Music is a homophobe’s dream (nightmare) of the subversive cult of a “gay agenda” being secretly foisted upon unsuspecting straights. (Look, a red bandana! Look, men playing innocent grab-ass in the shower! And subtle dialog like, “Anybody who can swallow two Sno-Balls and a Ding Dong shouldn't have any trouble with pride!”)

Joining Jenner and Perrine in this shot are Broadway star Tammy Grimes (who sang a song in 45-Minutes from Broadway whose title, "So long, Mary," could serve as this film's credo), and Altovise Davis, last seen shooting a spider off of her hand with a revolver in Kingdom of the Spiders.

The only reason I still rank Can’t Stop the Music among my enduring favorites is because, as I review my career as a dancer, I have to admit that my biggest influences have been choreographers Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, David Winters (growing up, I was a big fan of Hullabalo), and Arlene Phillips. Which should give you a pretty good idea of how scary (and fun) my dance career was.

Can't Stop the Music is so bad that it's unimaginable that it would have been a hit even at the height of the disco craze. But there's a possibility that it could have grown into an affectionately-remembered, cult hit among gays, had it at least acknowledged the community that both created the Village People and gave the group its initial success.
In the terrific Christopher Guest Hollywood satire, For Your Consideration..., there is a scene in which the makers of a film centered around a Jewish holiday - "Home for Purim," are told to "Tone down the Jewishness" in order to appeal to a broader market. This scene satirically pokes fun at Hollywood's legendary lack of backbone, but putting a gay spin on it, it's a scene one can easily imagine played out in reality while bringing Can't Stop the Music to the screen.
This attitude severely undercuts the film's sense of fun for me, and as it stands now, Can't Stop the Music is a little like an off-color joke you initially laugh at, only to regret it later.

Can't Stop the Music Addendum:
11/11/13 Yay! After I first posted this essay critiquing Can't Stop the Music on its closeted gay, mainstream agenda and total lack of single (acknowledged) gay person in the film, my eagle-eyed sweetheart spotted what may be the film's sole gay couple!

Although used as a kind of "We're not in Kansas anymore" sight gag for Bruce Jenner's character as he walks the streets of Greenwich Village, there is nevertheless a prominently featured gay couple shown with their arms across each other's shoulders. I love it! And I'm thoroughly amazed that I hadn't seen them before. But perhaps I was too distracted by Bruce Jenner's "nice box" to notice.

Back before the days of celebrity tweets, round-the-clock entertainment networks, and broadcast news programs that deem it essential we know what stage of rehab Lindsay Lohan is in before enlightening us on the state of the economy; film fans had to get their Hollywood fix from movie magazines. And of the many periodicals available in 1968: Modern Screen, Photoplay, Movie Mirror, and Silver Screen, to name a few – it was difficult to find one that didn't feature either Elizabeth Taylor or Mia Farrow on its cover. The personal and professional lives of both actresses were hot topics that year, reflecting, conversely, a career on the ascendance (Rosemary’s Baby made Hollywood flower-child, Mia Farrow, into a star at the exact moment her controversial marriage to Frank Sinatra imploded), and a career in decline (after eight films together, the Taylor-Burton magic had begun to pall in the wake of a string of boxoffice flops).

In March of 1968 (the starting date of production on Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony), Elizabeth Taylor was the main draw and attraction in a film that co-starred movie neophyte Mia Farrow, and would reunite Taylor with the director of her last film, the as-yet-to-be-released Taylor/Burton opus, Boom!; a big-budget adaptation of the little-known Tennessee Williams play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. However, by October of the same year, Boom! had (appropriately enough, given its title) already bombed spectacularly at the boxoffice, while the blockbuster success of Roman Polanski’s debut American film, Rosemary’s Baby, had launched Mia Farrow as a star of tomorrow.

Advance publicity for Secret Ceremony made extensive use of suggestive (and, in director Losey's opinion, misleading) images of Taylor & Farrow, prompting superficial, but boxoffice-baiting, comparison to the forthcoming release of the lesbian-themed, The Killing of Sister George

Overnight, the two queens of the Hollywood tabloid press had become two above-the-title movie stars appearing in the same film. Suddenly, Secret Ceremony, the difficult-to-market Elizabeth Taylor arthouse vehicle adapted from an obscure short story by Argentinian author, Marco Denevi, had a very hot property in its cast. Posters for the film subsequently beefed up Mia Farrow’s participation, unsubtly alluding to her new-found success wherever it could (“More haunted than in Rosemary’s Baby!”the ad copy read).
I was just 11-years-old when I first saw Secret Ceremony, still flush with excitement from being caught up in the early throes of a lifetime fascination with Rosemary's Baby - a film I’d seen just a few months prior. Naturally, I was fairly chomping at the bit at the prospect of seeing Mia Farrow in what looked to be another descent into horror, so, being secure in the belief that the film’s “Intended for Mature Audiences” rating accommodated know-it-all 11½-year-olds, I saw Secret Ceremony the week it opened.

Death & Rebirth
A graveside encounter where the sorrow and guilt of a childless mother (Taylor) conjoin with the forlorn loneliness of a motherless child (Farrow).

As it turns out, the combined marquee value of Taylor and Farrow proved no match for how taken aback 60s audiences were at seeing these two movie magazine divas in a sordid tale involving, as one critic cataloged, "...psychosis, incest, lesbianism, murder, suicide, obscenities...." Secret Ceremony was lambasted by critics and flopped at the boxoffice.

I can't say that I was quite prepared for how "out there" Secret Ceremony was either, but (as should come as no surprise to anyone with a preteen in the house) there are few things more precocious (read: pretentious) than an 11-year-old film buff. I saw Secret Ceremony several times in the fall of 1968, and, enjoying it a great deal, convinced myself (if, perhaps, no one else) that I both understood it and had a solid grasp what I was watching. Ah, youth.

"What do you know about drowning?"
"Ducks don't drown."

When, in later years I revisited the film as an adult, I was surprised to find myself confronted with a movie significantly altered with age. My own, not the film’s. Somehow in the intervening years, Secret Ceremony, a movie I had once thought I'd only liked, had turned into a film I loved!

An offbeat oddity of a movie that’s as likely to impress some viewers as absurdist camp as readily as others are apt to view it as a deeply disturbing psychological exercise in magic realism; Secret Ceremony is full of motifs and themes that strike me as unimaginably obscure and inaccessible without benefit of a few years’ worth of life experience. In other words, there is no way in hell that my 11-year-old self understood this movie.

Elizabeth Taylor as Leonora Grabowski (I kid you not)

Mia Farrow as Cenci (pronounced Chen-Chee) Englehard

Robert Mitchum as Alfred

While visiting the grave of her ten-year-old daughter who drowned five years prior due to some real or imagined “neglect” on her part, Leonora (Taylor), a London prostitute, finds herself being followed by a strange, child/woman (Farrow) who insists that Leonora is her mother. That the mostly silent girl, named Cenci, recalls to Leonora her own dark-haired, hungry-eyed daughter, she allows herself to be taken to the girl's home - a huge, opulent mansion where Cenci resides in solitude - and learns that she herself bears an uncanny resemblance to Cenci’s mother, a woman whose illness and recent death the obviously unbalanced Cenci has failed to accept.

Family
Cenci and her late mother, Margaret

Out of delusion, shared loss, mutual need and subtle self-interest, an unspoken agreement is seized upon; each allows the other to use them as an instrument of atonement for unforgiven past familial transgressions. Leonora blames herself for her daughter's death, Cenci feels guilt for attempting to gain sexual superiority over her mother with Alfred, her stepfather. These feelings are agonizing demons of guilt and regret that can only be exorcised by engaging in cryptic, ritualized ceremonies of reenactment and transference.

What makes Secret Ceremony a film that feels richer and more textured with each viewing is the fact that, in this tenuous psychological merging of damaged souls (which, for all its artifice and deceit, comes from a deeply sincere desire for intimacy), it is not made readily apparent which parties are consciously engaging in delusional role-playing and which are merely incapable of determining reality from fantasy. That “reality” here is presented as a flexible, circular extension of perception (What roles do we all play? Is there a difference between identity and self-perception? What responsibility does one person owe another?), is what makes Secret Ceremony– a not very well-regarded film by critics and audiences alike – one of my absolute favorites.

Observing the portrait of Cenci and her mother, Leonora reacts to the dual likeness to herself and her deceased daughter.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Secret Ceremony is a rarity amongst my list of favorite films. Inasmuch as it’s a movie I enjoy and admire a great deal, yet I don’t know of a single soul to whom I could recommend it in good conscience. The film is just thatweird.

For me, it has Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow giving fascinating, sharper-than-appearances-belie performances to recommend it (they stay true to their dysfunctional characters even at the risk of losing the audience), and the always-intriguing Joseph Losey, whose marvelous films, The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between reveal the artist’s deft hand at dramatizing offbeat psychological complexities.

But chiefly, Secret Ceremony appeals to me because it addresses themes I find myself drawn to in film after film. Themes for which I so obviously harbor some kind of aesthetic predisposition, their mere inclusion in a movie’s narrative are perhaps enough to blind me to that film’s flaws.

Secret Ceremonies
As a prelude to their ritualized games of incestuous role-playing, Albert, Cenci's lecherous stepfather, in a mock ceremonial gesture, places a wedding ring on her finger. All of the characters in Secret Ceremony engage in formalized patterns of behavior designed to avoid self-confrontation and purge guilt.

From even a cursory glance at the list of films I've written about on this blog, it’s obvious that I harbor a particular fondness for movies about psychological dysfunction and personality displacement (I don’t even want to think what that means). 3 Women, Images, Dead Ringers, The Maids, That Cold Day in the Park, Vertigo, and Black Swan, are all favorites having something to do with the shifting nature of identity and personality. Each is a melodrama or psychological thriller in which an individual or individuals (usually women) are at the center of a story that uses metaphor and allegory to explore themes of duality, role-playing, identity-theft, loss, longing, insanity, guilt, redemption, and, most significantly for me, the basic human need to connect.

When I saw Secret Ceremony as a preteen, its title struck me as nonsensical. Viewing it now, I discover that one of my absolute favorite things Losey does with the movie is to establish from the outset a recurring motif of ceremony and religious ritual (frequently in solitude or secret, like a confession) that serves to both underscore and emphasize the film’s primary theme: the pain of loss and the passing of evil.

Leonora’s act of immediately removing her identity-concealing blond wig and washing her face after a john leaves her apartment is like a baptism ceremony designed to cleanse and wash away the “sin” of her actions.

As if enacting a passion play, Cenci engages in elaborate, incestuous, rape fantasies that cast her as a victim and absolve her of having to face her own sexual precocity or her repressed feelings of hostility and competitiveness toward her late mother.

Religious imagery and iconography abound. Prayers recited to protect the fearful from harm; lullabies sung to quiet restless souls; and throughout, scenes take place in and around churches and cemeteries, heightened by the death/rebirth symbolism of funerals and baptisms.

PERFORMANCES

Indicative of Secret Ceremony’s all-encompassing strangeness is the fact that, even as I write (in all seriousness) about what a provocative and arresting film I consider it to be, I’m also fully aware and understand why it has become a camp classic of bad cinema (the scene where she wolfs down a huge English breakfast and shows her appreciation with a huge, unladylike belch is a camp highlight).

For me, Secret Ceremony’s is an example of the kind of risky, baroque style of filmmaking that died out in the 70s (Ken Russell was a master). A kind that takes so many chances that it can court giggles while still managing to unsettle.

In this scene, Elizabeth Taylor's excellent performance is undermined by unflattering costuming that is arguably character-based (Leonora is coarse and unsophisticated) or just plain ugly 60s mod.

Elizabeth Taylor long ago proved to be a natural for the brand of purple, overstated acting a film like this calls for, and Mia Farrow once again shows that there’s not an actress alive better suited to hitting all the right notes in a role requiring woman-child / sane-unstable ambiguity.

Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown are outstanding as the light-fingered, meddlesome aunts

As Alfred, personal fave Robert Mitchum rallies around his patented brand of complaisant sexual menace (if not a very sure accent. What is it supposed to be British? Scottish?) to ratchet up the psychodramatic stakes by going head to head (and psychosis to psychosis) with Taylor is a combustible test of wills.

Leonora, really getting into the whole playacting thing

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Even as a kid I was blown away by the gorgeous mansion occupied in solitary madness by Mia Farrow's character. With its ornate furnishings; eclectic, Moroccan and art nouveau design; and those mesmerizing blue and green ceramic tiles that line the walls and hallways like some Dali-eque mental institution of the mind...this house is as much a participant in Secret Ceremony's drama as The Dakota was in Rosemary's Baby.

The mansion used in the film is Debenham House, located in the Holland Park district of London. Built around 1896, architect Halsey Ricardo is one of perhaps several who worked on its design. Secret Ceremony production designer Richard MacDonald is credited with refurbishing the house and designing studio sets (the main bedroom, for instance) to blend with the original style.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

There’s no getting past the fact that Secret Ceremony is a strange film not suited to everyone’s taste. But another word for strange is interesting, and on that score I cast my vote for directors who take chances over those who play it safe.

On the commentary track for the 1970 British cult film, Goodbye Gemini(a remarkably bizarre film that could go toe-to-toe with Secret Ceremony for weirdness), producer Peter Snell speaks of a time when movies were made because someone found a story to be interesting, paying only marginal heed to things like what market the film should target and how well it would play outside of big cities. While this was probably a terrible way to run the “business” side of the movie business, quite a lot of worthwhile films were made. Not necessarily good ones, but at least they were films that sparked debate, discussion, and thought.

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

Secret Ceremony has Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum giving two of their better late-career performances (Taylor, in particular, is quite moving), and early-career Mia Farrow giving what amounts to her last cogent performance before her Woody Allen years (although I’m partial to 1977’s The Haunting of Julia), so therefore I think it's worth at least a look if you’re unfamiliar with it.

But remember, I’m not exactly recommending it. I’m just sort of dropping a hint.

Dear God, by whose mercy
I am shielded for a few hours
Let no one snatch me from this heaven

As of this writing, Secret Ceremony isn’t available on DVD in the US.
*Thanks to Allen Knutson for finding Secret Ceremony (in installments) on YouTube

Given how so many of my all-time favorite films are movies I was first exposed to as an usher at San Francisco’s Alhambra Theater on Polk Street (it still stands, but is currently a Crunch gym), I should consider the couple of years employed there during high-school to be my primer film school education.

When Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore opened in San Francisco, it screened exclusively for the first month at the Alhambra Theater. And although Ellen Burstyn was very popular after The Exorcist(1973), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore wasn't really given the big publicity push, as Martin Scorsese was still mostly an indie director, and Kris Kristofferson’s marquee value was questionable, at best.

In fact, to illustrate what a weird kid I was, when the theater manager told me that Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was to be the next attraction, I was totally unaware of what film he was referencing, yet I was thoroughly familiar with the 1933 Guy Lombardo song, Annie Doesn't Live Here Anymore, that gives the film its name. Go figure. (And if you don’t know this song about a woman fed up with waiting for her man, it’s a worth a listen HERE. It charmingly adds to the film's lasting legacy of female empowerment.)

Ellen Burstyn as Alice Hyatt

Kris Kristofferson as David

Diane Ladd as Flo

Alfred Lutter as Tommy Hyatt

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore - the story of a newly widowed housewife (Burstyn) who sets off on the road with her 12-year-old son to become a singer in Monterey, California – from a marketing angle, didn't have much to use as bait (no hookers, no gunplay, no nudity, no car chases) yet I recall it as being the biggest film to play the Alhambra during my time there.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore was one of those movies that opened slowly and then boomed practically overnight. The theater had lines that stretched around the corner every day and sold out shows were the norm. People came back two and three times, always with someone they had recommended the film to. I had never seen anything like it. A true word-of-mouth hit. And what amazed me even more was the volume of elderly people this film attracted. For some reason, old folks absolutely LOVED this movie! Sunday matinees looked like an AARP convention.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow...with a really foul mouth
Mia Bendixson portrays 8-year-old Alice in the Wizard of Oz-inspired opening sequence

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

There are several books, online articles, and even a DVD commentary detailing the significant role Ellen Burstyn played in getting Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore made. Aside from the almost mythological appeal of the story (a feminist collaborates with a famously male-centric director to make a film considered by many to be the quintessential cinematic articulation of the 70s women’s movement), what comes through strongest is the passion and commitment of everyone involved.

The family that prays together is still pretty screwed up
In an effort to move the plot forward and get Alice on the road as quickly as possible, several scenes that would have fleshed out the character of Alice's husband, Donald (Billy Green Bush) had to be cut.

Martin Scorsese speaks of having the foreknowledge that the studio expected him to turn out a genre film – a romantic comedy with a happy ending – yet he and Burstyn turn in a film I still find myself dazzled by. Its characters, settings, dialog, and character-based humor feel so fresh, so original, and so surprising. Scorsese succeeds in creating a 70s revisionist take on the 40s woman's picture. He endeavored (with considerably less success) to do something similar with the 40s musical genre when he made New York, New York in 1977. Now there's a film that could have benefited from Ellen Burstyn's level-headed feminine perspective.

I'd never seen an onscreen mother/son relationship like the one Alice and Tommy share

Scorsese’s fluid visual style gives the film a gritty kind of grace, while his laser-sharp editing has a way of turning simple cuts into clever visual punchlines. The performances are uniformly first rate (I have a particular fondness for the sweetly oddball waitress, Vera. I always wanted to know more about her character's life), and the very funny screenplay never scarifies character or theme for an easy laugh. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is one of my enduring favorites from the 70s.

As Alice's best friend, Bea, actress Lelia Goldoni (so memorable in John Cassavetes' 1959 film, Shadows) doesn't have a lot of screen time, but I always remember how touchingly real her character's relationship with Alice felt. Only in later years did I learn of Burstyn's and Goldoni's lengthy real-life friendship.

PERFORMANCES

True to the axiom that comedy never gets any respect, whenever I think about my favorite film performances by an actress in the 70s, my mind goes straight to Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses,Don’t They? and Klute, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, Karen Black in The Day of the Locust, or Glenda Jackson in anything. I always overlook the absolutely astonishing job Ellen Burstyn does in bringing the character of Alice Hyatt to life. I thought so in 1974 and looking at the film again after so many years, it still stands out as such a thoroughly realized performance. And by that I mean that Burstyn makes Alice Hyatt so authentic an individual, you honestly feel as though you have been observing a real person, not a fictional character. She is no male fantasy construct. She's not even a Women's Lib figurehead (she only seemed so when compared to the type of degrading roles being offered women during the 70s).

Smart Women / Foolish Choices
As Ben Eberhart, Scorsese stalwart Harvey Keitel as gives a chilling portrait of the kind of courtly gentility that often masks an dominating nature. One of the many things I like about Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is how, in presenting a woman's point of view, it doesn't take the easy route of vilifying men. Instead, it explores why some women are drawn to a kind of archaic definition of masculinity that can lead to abusive relationships. I love the scene where Alice tells David how she was drawn to her husband's bossiness ("Yes, master!" she says, mocking her own passivity) and that she initially liked that he forbade her to have a career, stating that his oppressiveness was, "My idea of a man...strong and dominating."

The depth of Burstyn's performance has the effect of fulfilling what the premise of the film promises: an ordinary woman is revealed to be remarkable by sheer force of her humanity. Alice goes from being a someone's wife and mother to being the standout heroine of her own life. And it's the talent of Ellen Burstyn, giving an Academy Award-winning performance, that makes it happen.

The Academy got it right in awarding Burstyn the Best Actress Oscar, but seriously dropped the ball with the terrific Diane Ladd. Her folksy waitress, Flo, is one of the screen's great character performances. By the way, back when I was a movie usher, Flo's frustrated outburst: "She went to shit and the hogs ate her!" got the longest, loudest laugh I'd ever heard in a movie theater, yet it was also the single moment in the film I was most questioned about by departing patrons. It seemed like every third person came up to me after a screening asking, "What did that waitress say?" Apparently, folks were only able to make out the word "shit" and that (along with Ladd's explosive tone and body language) was sufficient for the scene to work. When I told them what she actually said, their faces almost always registered puzzlement. I think their imaginations wrote dialog that was far funnier.

11-year-old Jodie Foster, two years before her explosive Oscar-nominated performance in Scorsese's Taxi Driver

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

In spite of it being a somewhat troublesome film genre with a built-in anecdotal construct that frequently leads to directors being unable to arrive at or maintain a consistent tone; I like road movies a great deal (a personal unsung favorite being the quirky Rafferty & the Gold Dust Twins– 1974). Like most road movies, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore has a literal road trip serve as a “journey of life / path of growth” metaphor, but in this instance, the cliché feels fresh because Alice’s story – a woman approaching middle age forced to confront life as a single mother – isn't the kind Hollywood has been falling over itself in an effort to tell.

Uncharted Territory
Stars Wars wouldn't premiere until some three years later, but to 1974 audiences, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore - a movie about a 35-year-old woman, told from her perspective - was a visit to a world as remote as any galaxy far, far away.

Scorsese, Burstyn, and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Robert Getchell (one of the many writers involved in wresting Mommie Dearest to the screen) fashion an engagingly contemporary Alice in Wonderland liberation allegory out of Alice Hyatt’s auto pilgrimage to, as one writer astutely put it, the Monterey of her mind. Whereas most road films tend to run out of steam somewhere around the midpoint, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore grows increasingly funnier and more emotionally substantial as it goes along. I love the opening scenes in Socorro, New Mexico; the hilarious moments on the road that delineate Alice's unique relationship with her son; and the scenes highlighting Alice's early employment efforts or show her navigating the choppy waters of dating. But my favorite section -where the film fully hits its comedic stride - are the latter scenes of the film that take place in Tucson, Arizona. Specifically those within Mel & Ruby's Diner.

Being at turns funny, gritty, touching, dramatic, and very sweet, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymoreis a movie that covers a great deal of ground, but throughout, the film somehow sustains that amazingly delicate balance of being true to its genre conventions while still being a solid character drama about people we come to really know and care a great deal for. Best of all, it gives us a story of an individual's journey of self-discovery that is also one of the most well-rounded, dimensional portraits of a woman ever committed to film.

The depiction of the friendship that develops between the superficially dissimilar Alice and Flo is one of the best things in the film

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

A lot has been written about Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’s somewhat problematic ending. An ending (two, actually, if you count the brief coda after the diner scene) suggesting Alice, after finding the love of a good man (a ranch-owning, dreamboat of an eligible bachelor who also happens to be the only guy for miles around who doesn't look like an extra from Hee Haw) is going to table her dream of going to Monterey. This Warner Bros-mandated ending proved a real crowd-pleaser with 70s audiences growing weary of all that New Hollywood nihilism, thus making Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore one of the top grossing films of 1974. And while many welcomed the change of pace that an old-fashioned Hollywood happy ending presented, others were dismayed by the extent to which the chosen ending conflicted with - if not outright contradicted - much of what came before it.

Had Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore been just one of many films made during the 70s that told a story from a woman’s point of view, audiences would likely have accepted the ending as being merely a choice suitable for this particular character (after all, as the honey-tones of the opening sequence imply, Alice’s memories of her life in Monterey are likely as idealized as the scope of her early singing career). But being that the vast majority of roles available to women in 70s could be typified by Karen Black’s catalog of supportively deferential, frequently-abandoned trollops; a disproportionate amount of feminist significance was therefore placed on Alice Hyatt and her personal journey of self-discovery.

That's 6-year-old Laura Dern (daughter of Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern) listening in on Alice and David's conversation

As is my wont, I’m of several minds about the ending.

a) From a movie buff’s perspective, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore’s ending feels like a perfect full circle for a film that begins with a title sequence (cursive lettering on satin) that references the tropes and clichés of the women’s film genre of the 40s.

b)From a character-based perspective, I think it’s possible to look upon Alice’s dream of returning to Monterey as a romanticized fantasy…a retreat to childhood, if you will…that she clings to in the midst of an unhappy marriage. In this light, her ultimate decision to be with Donald and remain in Tucson (“If I’m gonna be a singer I can be a singer anywhere, right?”) indicates a newfound maturity and personal growth on her part. She’s gained the ability to find happiness in her life as it is lived in the present, not from trying to return to an idealized happier time in her past.

c) It’s only when I look at the film from an ideological or political perspective that I have a problem with the ending. And that’s largely the film’s fault for establishing such a compelling narrative trajectory. One that takes us from the words of Alice’s friend, Bea at the start of the film: “Well, I sure couldn’t live without some kind of man around the house, and neither could you.” ; to Alice’s declaration near the end:“It’s my life! It’s not some man’s life I’m here to help him out with!”

So many 70s films ended with the male protagonist leaving behind a girlfriend or wife in order to find themselves (think Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces), that it virtually became a cliché. In each instance, the ending is presented as a happy and necessary step toward independence and self-growth. Given how Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore sets itself up as a challenge to the long-held belief that a woman’s life has little to no value without a man, who can be blamed for wishing this brilliant film had ended with a repudiation of that persistent myth?

In an early draft of the screenplay, the diner sequence was to be followed by (and the film end with) a close-up of Alice's hands playing the piano. The tight framing of the shot providing an ambiguous coda, as it is not apparent whether she is playing piano in a bar in Monterey, or in the living room of David's house - we just know that Alice didn't stop singing. Since this footage is used in the sidebar of the film's closing credits, I'd like to think that Alice did indeed become a professional singer...perhaps somewhere in Tucson where she made a happy life for herself with Tommy and David. (And of course, this allows Flo to remain her new best friend. Now, that's a happy ending.)

Although I like to think of my taste in movies as being somewhat broad and varied, the truth is that I’m an oddly finicky film fan who only rarely steps outside of his comfort zone of favored tropes, themes, and genres. Case in point: as a rule, I don’t like war movies, westerns, sports films, or sci-fi. Thus, there are a great many classic and perhaps marvelous films in these genres that I have never seen, nor is it likely I ever will. That’s a hell of a lot of movies to cut out of one’s life. Of course, some of this boils down to plain old discernment (at age fifty-plus, I've seen enough western, war, sci-fi, and sports films to know that, by and large, they’re just not my cup of tea), but some of it is just kneejerk prejudice and inflexibility.

Back in my film school days, before my opinions and tastes had begun to fully take shape (read: calcify), I was one of those guys who considered it time well-spent to sit and watch ANY kind of movie, for I was then of the mind that one can learn as much from bad films as good. Not anymore. When one reaches 50, the once-illusory concept of time becomes a concrete reality. Passing time suddenly morphs into wasting time, and the odds are not in your favor. I've reached the stage where I don’t welcome spending my dwindling hours on this earth slogging through movies my cinephile Spidey-Senses signal to me I’m not going to enjoy. These days, it’s my partner who takes the broadminded, democratic approach to movies, while I largely content myself with watching films I’ve already seen, or taking my chances on new films only after I have thoroughly dusted them for signs of Tarantino, auto racing, handguns held sideways, Katherine Heigl, or anyone with a neck as thick as his head wearing a cape.

Knuckle Sandwich
Anthony Quinn & Lana Turner engage in a little oral sex

The only time my resolve weakens as to what films I positively, absolutely, will not watch, are on the occasions of my body weakening. Which is to say, when I’m confined to my bed and so sick with a cold or the flu that I’ll literally watch anything to keep my mind off of how miserable I’m feeling.
Occasionally this leads to my being subjected to unfortunate “entertainments” like Gene Kelly’s old coot comedy-western, The Cheyenne Social Club (1970); a film that, 15 minutes in, had me praying for a high-grade fever. But what I like best is when my incapacitated state brings about my exposure to (and enjoyment of) a film I might not otherwise be inclined to sit through. Such is the case with Ross Hunter’s overdressed opus of melodramatic camp, Portrait in Black; a film I consciously avoided (rather surprisingly, given its reputation) until it screened on TCM a few years back – during the flu season – and has thereafter remained a lasting favorite. For all the wrong reasons.

as Sheila Cabot

as Dr. David Rivera

as Cathy Cabot

as Blake Richards

Portrait in Black is an old-fashioned reminder that people once went to the movies to see the kind of overwrought hand-wringers and melodramas that later became standard fodder for TV movies, miniseries, primetime soaps, and the Lifetime Network. All plot, no character, Portrait in Black exists solely as a parade of lacquered hairstyles, overelaborate sets (or San Francisco locations so overlit that they LOOK like sets), and - most importantly - smart fashions for the well-dressed middle-age socialite. 60s variety.

Propping up all this material display is a workaday murder/suspense plot involving a cantankerous shipping magnate (Lloyd Nolan); his sexually frustrated wife, Lana Turner (“Too bad they can’t find a shot for your condition…a vitamin shot for ‘Love’ deficiency!”), and his morally conflicted physician, Anthony Quinn. Also thrown into the mix as sundry red herrings and narrative speed bumps of varying annoyance are Sandra Dee as the snippy stepdaughter; her scrappy, poor-but-honest suitor, John Saxon; and the dull-to-the-point-of-genius Richard Basehart as Nolan’s legal advisor.

Yes, Portrait in Black is one of those movies where even the phones are color coordinated to the leading lady's wardrobe.

There’s nothing going on here that you haven’t seen about a million times before (and better), no plot point or suspense twist that isn't telegraphed ages before it occurs. But thanks to dated acting styles that result in theatrically stilted performances worthy of a Carol Burnett Show spoof; the uniquely kitschy look of early 60s high style (gold vein mirrors, Chinese Modern knickknacks, quilted headboards, gilt filigree); and producer Ross Hunter’s unparalleled gift for making every one of his films look as if it were made at least ten years earlier; Portrait in Black fails as legitimate drama in direct proportion to the heights it hits (and believe me, this movie soars!) as derisible, highly-entertaining camp.

Chinese-American silent screen icon Anna May Wong was coaxed out of an 11-year retirement for this, her last film role, to appear (along with everybody's favorite Martian, Ray Walston) as an appropriately mysterious member of the Cabot mansion "help."

Anyone who knows me (or has even a passing familiarity with this blog) would think Lana Turner and Sandra Dee co-starring in a film produced by the man who gave us Lost Horizon, Tammy Tell Me True, AND the Doris Day camptastic classic, Midnight Lace, would be a no-brainer of a must-see for a man of my particular “tastes.” But the truth is, I’m no great fan of Lana Turner (although I’ve always got a kick out of her very “movie star” name, for me she peaked, both in beauty and talent, in The Postman Always Rings Twice); and in spite of Ross Hunter’s reputation for being one of Hollywood’s foremost purveyors of inadvertent camp, I tend to find his static, studio-bound melodramas to be a little hard going.

Trouble in Paradise
The mortality rate of Lana Turner's movie husbands is never all that great to begin with, start man-handling her and you're pretty much looking at a cameo. Curious side note: it's been said that Truman Capote harbored a lifelong crush on actor Lloyd Nolan, often speaking of him as the "ideal man."(!)

Having previously endured his backpedaling remake of Imitation of Life and the arid romance of Magnificent Obsession, I wasn't exactly inclined to give Ross Hunter benefit of a “three strikes” vote when Portrait in Black was recommended to me: hours of my life irretrievably lost to two Ross Hunter productions was more than enough, thank you. Of course, now I see the only thing wasted were all the years of laughs I deprived myself of by waiting so long to see this howler. Thank god for that miserable, debilitating, 6-day bout of influenza, huh?

Try not to look suspicious!

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Where to start? There’s something sublimely liberating about watching a potboiler so superficial and devoid of subtext that after it’s over, you needn’t waste a second mulling over what it all signifies. It’s a pleasurable time-killer, pure and simple. And beyond being a tale of illicit lovers implicated in the suspicious death of a despised industrialist and the thin mystery surrounding the identity of a blackmailer, Portrait in Black is true to Hunter’s oft-stated objective to, “…(give) the public what they wanted. A chance to dream, to live vicariously, to see beautiful women, jewels, gorgeous clothes, melodrama.” Note that at no point does he mention credible storylines, good acting, or simple character development.

Dr. Rivera: "Look at this. It's more deadly than a gun...a thousand times less detectable!"
A puncture from a hypodermic needle is less detectable than a big ol' gunshot wound? Imagine that.

You gotta love the creaky screenplay by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts (based on their 1945 play) wherein all the characters find it necessary to say each other’s names even when speaking face to face. It’s never “You mustn't!” when it can be, “David, you mustn’t!” Never,“Would you like fries with that?” when you can say, “Sheila, would you like fries with that?” This practice lends an air of comically mannered artificiality to all human interaction, which fortunately is right in step with the old-fashioned, histrionic performances director Michael Gordon (Pillow Talk, Move Over Darling) elicits from his cast. Even the reliably naturalistic (and, for my taste, tiresomely lusty) Anthony Quinn seems peculiarly hamstrung and stiff.

A real comic highlight is the hilarious rain-slicked drive along curvy coastal roads that has Turner more or less recreating her scream scene from The Postman Always Rings Twice

And because the film's simple “Who’s blackmailing us and why?” plotline must strain to build suspense and pad out its running time, the script has our star-crossed lovers making one boneheaded misstep after another, compounding the many sizable obstacles they already face in trying to navigate (and failing spectacularly) the choppy sea of red herrings provided by the rogues gallery of malcontents and secret-keepers that comprise their circle of friends, employees, and family members. In no time, what's intended to be dramatic conflict quickly plays out like a farcical comedy of errors.

PERFORMANCES

As members of Ross Hunter’s unofficial film repertory company, Lana Turner, Sandra Dee, John Saxon, and the ever-regal Virginia Grey had, by the time they made Portrait in Black, developed a firm grasp on the overly-sincere, purple dramatizing required of this kind of melodrama. And while I wouldn't go so far as to say any of them actually make fools of themselves, in certain scenes (the tormented curtain-pulling episode in particular), Lana Turner comes awfully close.

Indeed, Lana Turner takes all the prizes for making Portrait in Black so watchable for me, because hers is one of those truly awful performances that only the committed can give. She's marvelous to look at, oozes star quality out of every pore, but I honestly haven't a clue as to what she's trying for in her scenes. Whatever it is, natural human behavior doesn't factor into it. She gives one of those Master Thespian "Movie Star" performances that torpedoes realism but makes for a hell of an entertaining evening at the movies.

Although he seems a tad out of his element, I have to say it's nice to see Anthony Quinn all gussied up for a change. Usually covered in stubble, sweat stains, and acting all earthy and robust, I welcomed this buttoned-down, Brooks Bros. Zorba.
Meanwhile, Lana here doesn't seem to be too pleased with her "Minnie Mouse in Mink" look.

I've always found the troubled Sandra Dee to be a very appealing presence in movies, but here her innate charm is undermined a bit by the scornful, worrywart character she's saddled with, and by the efforts of Hunter and Universal Studios to glamorize and update the 17-year-old's teenybopper screen image. Personally, I kept hoping for Sandra Dee to break into her Tammy Tyree Mississippi twang and start lecturing these corrupt city folk on how much simpler life was down on the river with her grandpappy. Peppering her homey, colloquial diatribe with cute phrases like, "It's a puzzlement!"

It would be a few more years before Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon, and the youth movement at large encouraged young women to actually look like young women. Judging by Sandra Dee's glam makeover in Portrait in Black, the goal of sophisticated 17-year-olds in 1960 was to look like their mothers. Dee looks fabulous here, but honestly, she could pass for a woman in her 30s.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

There are many categories of camp: there’s pretentious (Showgirls), clueless (Can’t Stop the Music), and my favorite, inadvertent; of which Portrait in Black stands as a shining example. Pretentious camp is rooted in a kind of mean-spirited schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the misfortune of others) that can make you feel guilty if you think too long about it, while clueless camp can have you feeling sorry for the subject at the self-same time you’re laughing at it. Inadvertent camp, however, is the most enjoyable because the laughs come less at the expense of the individuals involved and more at the fickle finger of fate.

Time can turn one generation's obsessions into another's punch lines. The passing of time brings with it changing tastes and attitudes about all manner of things from acting styles to fashion. So if a once-serious film falls victim to outmoded pop cultural tastes and finds itself joining the ranks of camp (The Bad Seed), it’s really nobody’s fault and the laughs feel, well…just a little bit kinder.

A few of my favorite things:

Richard Basehart as Howard Mason making a play for "grieving" widow Sheila Cabot a day after the funeral (love the cigarette!)

Turner's mink-clad stroll through San Francisco's I. Magnin department store (complete with doorman!)

Anthony Quinn going mano-a-mano with the Hippocratic Oath

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As fun as a movie like Portrait in Black can be for the occasional mindless diversion, recalling that there was once a time when movies like this represented a sizable percentage of Hollywood's output, always makes me grateful for the revolution in film that brought about the New Hollywood of the late 60s and 70s. As Hollywood began to respond to the realist influence of European New Wave cinema and the naturalism of East Coast "Method" acting, old-school producers like Ross Hunter prided themselves on their efforts to bring "glamour" and old-fashioned family entertainment back to Hollywood movies. Hunter in particular made films that seemed to exist within a bubble of willful irrelevance so out of touch with the real world that they bordered on the bizarre.

Portrait in Black marked the third and final screen pairing of John Saxon and Sandra Dee

Although he was gay, Hunter made films promoting staunchly status-quo heterosexual values that featured men and women occupying traditional gender roles, and people of color depicted, if perhaps more plentifully than many of his peers, always as occupying positions of a non-threatening, subordinate status. And, as befitting the times and Hunter's own always-appear-in-public-with-a-beard-on-your-arm inclinations, gays were invisible or non-existent except as humorous reference points in his sex comedies.

Ross Hunter's films understandably struck a chord with those of an older demographic. Those moviegoers left bewildered by cinema's new permissiveness (or the term cinema, for that matter) and still enamored of the perhaps apocryphal Samuel Goldwyn quote, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union!" So while college kids in 1960 were lining up to see Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Ross Hunter was getting rich (and very little in the way of respect) releasing Portrait in Black, a movie so timely it was once considered as a vehicle for Joan Crawford.

Ross Hunter good luck charm, Virginia Grey, as Miss Lee: the proverbial secretary in love with her boss.
Fans of George Cuckor's The Women will remember Grey as Joan Crawford's wisecracking shopgirl friend, Pat

I think I'm too much the devotee of 70s movies to perhaps fully appreciate Ross Hunter's contribution to film. But as a connoisseur of camp, I think the outmoded, overdressed, overemotional charm of Portrait in Black is close to being as good as it gets.

BONUS MATERIAL
If you're a fan of Ross Hunter or late-career Lana Turner, check out these sites:
A terrific review of Imitation of Life can be found at Angelman's Place
Read all about Lana in Madame X at Poseidon's Underworld

A favorite little-known Patty Duke film (perhaps, deservedly so) sandwiched innocuously between her Oscar-winning turn in The Miracle Worker (1962) and the near career-killing ignominy of Valley of the Dolls (1967) – which has become, most assuredly, THE film she’ll be most remembered for – is Billie: a sprightly, featherweight, teen musical about a tomboyish track and field dynamo suffering with gender-identity issues.

Patty Duke as Billie Carol

Jim Backus as Howard G. Carol

Jane Greer as Agnes Carol

Warren Berlinger as Mike Benson

I won't kid you, the above description, as brief as it is, makes Billie sound considerably more substantial than it is. Point in fact: clocking in at brisk 87 minutes, Billie is so lightweight it’s barely there...which, in my book, makes it the perfect vehicle for when you want to see a movie, but aren't looking for much in the way of substance. Kind of like the cinematic equivalent of a schnecken. This bit of pop-culture fluff was churned out in just 15 days (!) in order to capitalize on the popularity of teen sensation, Patty Duke, her weekly TV series, The Patty Duke Show (Billie was filmed before the start of the show’s third and final season), and her recently launched recording career. It's not a motion picture so much as a bigscreen TV sitcom padded out to feature length with a few lively musical numbers and what easily has to be 15-minutes worth of reaction shot cutaways to the family sheepdog.

Such a Face!
The degree to which Billie relies on reaction shots of this adorable Old English Sheepdog (Clown) to provide the visual equivalent of a television laugh track, borders on animal cruelty.
The Patty Duke Show featured a sheepdog named Tiger who mysteriously disappeared after the first season

As is the case with so many 60s sitcoms, the plot of Billie hinges on a single, silly gimmick. In this instance, in lieu of talking horses, identical twin cousins, or mothers reincarnated as automobiles; we have an average teenager who, thanks to a bit of a mind flip called “the beat” – the ability to hear a rhythm in her head and transfer that percussive beat into athletic prowess – is able to outrun, out jump, and outperform every male member of her high-school track team.

Billie's got the Beat!
(more accurately, Patty Duke's got a running platform attached to the back of a camera truck)

If you're scratching your head wondering how, unless the story is set in Downton Abbey, a feature film’s worth of comic/dramatic conflict can be wrung from a non-issue like a female athlete in 1965; it helps to know that Billie is adapted from a wheezy 1952 stage play by Ronald Alexander titled, Time Out for Ginger, and, save for the substituting of track & field for the play’s intergender football premise, makes it to the screen with its outmoded sexual politics intact. (Although, when compared to the princess-fixated, Pepto-Bismol pink vision of femininity marketed to young girls today, Billie’s fairly toothless challenge to the male/female status quo of 1965 is practically a feminist manifesto.) In addition, research for this post revealed to me that until federal sex discrimination laws were passed in 1972, athletic programs for girls were a very low priority in many high schools. So perhaps some aspects of Billie's plot aren't as far-fetched as I once thought.

Mayoral candidate Howard Carol (Backus) resides in a house full of women, yet runs his campaign on a “return to gentility,” anti-women’s rights platform. Agnes (Greer), his long-suffering wife, is one of those wisely sardonic housewives typical of 60s sitcoms: she's genuinely smarter than her husband, but regularly defers to his oafishness out of love and an understanding of the fragility of the male ego. Eldest daughter, Jean (Susan Seaforth), is the ultra-femme apple of Howard’s eye and the veritable poster girl for non-threatening, 60s womanhood. Not only does she look like a younger model of her mother, but at age 20 she wants nothing more from life than to quit college, marry, and get down to the business of making babies. Goals her character has already achieved by the time she’s first introduced.

That Girl's Ted Bessell and Days of Our Lives' Susan Seaforth-Hayes contribute to Billie's cast of recognizable TV faces

This leaves 15-year-old Billie (Duke), a self-professed “lonely little in-between” wrestling with puberty and grappling with anxiety over her gender-identification. And small wonder. She has a father who clearly favors her pretty and feminine older sister, and in this painful exchange, accidentally lets slip how he really feels about his youngest offspring:

Father- “From now on, try to remember that you’re a girl!”

Billie-“I wish I was a boy…”

Father- “So do I, but you’re not!”

Ouch! I understand the title for the sequel is: Time Out for Therapy.

When Billie is later recruited by the high school track coach (“…to shame the boys into trying harder”), her newfound notoriety as the team’s most valuable player not only threatens to alienate potential suitor, Mike Benson (the doughy Warren Berlinger), but derail her reluctantly supportive father’s run for mayor. What's a girl/boy to do?

"I should have been a boy, but here I am a girl!"
Singing the song, "Lonely Little In-Between," Billie decides to throw herself a Pity Party

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Unless, like me, you're a nostalgia-prone boomer who grew up on white-bread, middle-class, suburban family comedies of the 60s, and nursed a prepubescent crush on cute-as-a-button Patty Duke; Billie is a movie so dated and obviously aimed at kids, you're apt to find it more trying than entertaining. (Although, I ask you, who can resist that infectious soundtrack?)

Given what must have been a pretty tight shooting schedule, Billie is pretty straightforward stuff as far as filmmaking goes. There's no art to the cinematography beyond making sure everyone remains within the frame and everything is in focus. The editing is of the ping-pong variety: alternating medium shots of whomever is talking in a particular scene. There's not even much to say about the performances, as everyone does a professional, workmanlike job with their sketchily written parts. So what, beyond the overall competence of the endeavor, do I enjoy about Billie?

The fact that each time I revisit it, its surface simplicity begins to look more complex.

Like a great many family-oriented films that haven’t aged particularly well, Billie has evolved over the years into one of those cult-worthy, meta-movies that, when viewed through the prism of contemporary mores, can't help but operate on several different levels simultaneously. Most of them inadvertent. All of them more interesting than the film as originally conceived.

The gender politics of Billie are either/or. You're either a track star or a girl...you can't be both

There’s Billie the high-school musical and puberty allegory about a confused tomboy teetering on the brink of womanhood; Billie the insincere social-conflict farce that pays lip service women's equality, yet in its heart really believes that men and women are just happier occupying traditional gender roles; Billie the "very special episode" of the ABC Afterschool Special about a transgender teen struggling with being a boy trapped in a girl's body (the most persuasive layer, if you ask me); and, finally, Billie the "be yourself" Glee episode about the growing pains of a latent lesbian high-school track star (Duke's resemblance to Ellen Degeneres adding yet another layer).

An uncomfortable layer, but one the good-natured actress is more than willing to attest to these days, is the curious fact that, given her real-life battle with bipolarism, she was so often cast in roles that required her to play dueling sides of her own personality.

Even after a feminizing makeover, Billie proves she still has plenty of butch to spare!

PERFORMANCES

Thanks to reruns of The Patty Duke Show airing currently on Antenna TV, I've had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with what a charming and natural comedienne Patty Duke can be. Her Patty Lane may not have been as glamorous as the teens Elinor Donahue and Shelley Fabares played on Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show, respectively, but she was far more likable, relatable, and a real dynamo of energy (Patty Lane was quite the scrappy little toughie. Episodes highlighting her character’s selfish, bossy side show signs of a budding Neely O’Hara).

With his man-boobs, Michelin Man ripples, and thorough lack of muscle tone, boyish Warren Berlinger (27-years-old to Duke's 18) makes for an unlikely athletic candidate. The athletic field featured in Billie is John Marshall High School in Los Feliz, Ca. Recognizable to fans of Grease as Rydell High.

The talented Patty Duke is undeniably the glue holding Billie together (the film is credited to Chrislaw / Patty Duke Productions. Chrislaw being the Peter Lawford-headed production company responsible for The Patty Duke Show), but her trademark vitality feels strangely subdued, and the film doesn't really make the most of her talents. Saddled with a character that spends the majority of the film feeling wounded, confused or bewildered, Duke is left shouldering all of the film’s dramatic weight (which she handles capably), a lot of its singing (Duke's real voice gets a healthy assist from Lesley Gore-style overdubbing, but she's no Neely O'Hara), some of its dancing (as with her track scenes, doubles are occasionally used), but very little of its comedy.

Regrettably, that's left to the supporting cast of stock characters populated by familiar TV faces. Each relying on the same schticky, sure-fire comedy takes and delivery we've all seen from them a million times before.

Clockwise from top left: Richard Deacon, Dick Sargent, Charles Lane, and Billy De Wolfe
If you've ever seen any of these actors before, you already know what you're getting in Billie

I must admit that the pleasure of having the great Jane Greer appear in Billie (she's one of my all-time favorite noir femme fatales. Out of the Past and The Big Steal are absolute must-sees) is mitigated significantly by seeing her lethal brand of smoldering insouciance reduced to playing sweetly supportive back-up to a blowhard character like Jim Backus. Just the kind of male chauvinist sap one of her earlier film noir personas would have tossed into the trunk of an automobile and sent hurtling off a cliff without batting an eyelash.

Strong female characters of the sort Jane Greer built her career on in the 40s were almost nowhere to be found by the 60s, when Hollywood (showing the same open-mindedness of the male characters in Billie) had a hard time envisioning women outside of the role of housewife or girlfriend.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Should Billie's retro riffs on gender roles grow tiresome, I can always console myself with its dancing. Choreographed by Elvis/ Beach Party movie stalwart David Winters (Shindig, Hullabaloo) in that curiously self-mocking, frenetic style that looks like a hybrid of 60s go-go and traditional musical comedy jazz (popularized in Broadway shows like Promises, Promises and Applause), these numbers are lively, silly, and a great deal of fun.

Making her film debut (and serving as the film's co-choreographer) is A Chorus Line's Donna McKechnie showing impeccable form in the red-and-white rugby stripes. She, along with director/mentor Michael Bennett, were dancers on the teen variety show, Hullabaloo. Several of the dancers in Billie are recognizable from 60s-era films like,West Side Story and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. A triple-bill of Bye Bye Birdie, Billie, and The Cool Ones would serve as a terrific primer on the effect of pop music on movie musical choreography.

The over-emphatic, "The Girl is a Girl is a Girl" is a musical number that really stuck with me when I was a kid. I wonder why? Witty staged in a high-school locker room, the amusing and rousing number features lots of chorus boys dancing with each other while trying to act all macho (clenching their hands into fists while singing out of the sides of their mouths) in skimpy 60s gym shorts.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

While it's hard to imagine that Billie did Patty Duke's reputation as an Oscar-winning actress any good, I think it's fair to say it didn't do it much harm, either. In fact, I was surprised to learn that Billie was a hit when it came out. A fact no doubt helped by Duke's popularity on the record charts (her two debut singles, "Don't Just Stand There" and "Say Something Funny" were each Top 40 hits), and propelled by the cross-promotion provided by Duke singing the film's single, "Funny Little Butterflies," on the variety program, Shindig, as well as on an episode of her own TV show.

The dress...

Patty Duke's managers (about whom much has been written) obviously had a vested interest in milking Duke's teenage appeal for as long as they could, and putting her in a disposable pop confection like this must have appeared, if perhaps a bit short-sighted (Duke was fast approaching adulthood), from a professional standpoint, both expedient and profitable. Personally, I would love to have seen her take on Inside Daisy Clover (coincidentally, released the same year as Billie), a film not only better suited to her talents, but one that might have eased her into adult roles a little more gracefully than Valley of the Dolls. (For the record, what with Natalie Wood being a friend of the author and a much bigger star, it's doubtful that Duke would ever have been in the running for Inside Daisy Clover.)

Billie was directed by Don Weis, who had an extensive career in television, but directed one of my favorite old MGM musicals, I Love Melvin.

BONUS MATERIAL

As much as I enjoy this movie, the enduring popularity of Ronald Alexander's play, Time Out for Ginger, truly baffles me. At various times in its revival history, the play attracted the talents of Liza Minnelli and Steve McQueen. Go figure. As far as I'm concerned, it's Patty Duke, the 60s music, the dancing, and the time-acquired abstract levels of camp and multiple interpretation that make Billie's thoroughly run-of-the-mill plot even remotely bearable.
By the way, for the benefit of any Rosemary's Baby fans out there, playwright Ronald Alexander is also the author of Nobody Loves an Albatross.

Watch Jack Benny in a 60-minute TV adaptation of Time Out for Ginger from 1955 HERE

Watch the unsold pilot for a 1960 TV series based on Time Out for Ginger HERE

If you're unfamiliar with actress Jane Greer, you owe it to yourself to check out this brief TCM clip on Out of the Past (1947) HERE

I have had a love/hate relationship with the films of Woody Allen since my teens. The love affair originating in the early-70s, when Allen’s films were largely comic and he was at the height of his popularity as the mainstream darling of the campus arthouse set. Things tilting more towards the hate end of the spectrum come the latter part of the decade, when the pretentiousness that began to seep into his work had me quoting Alvy Singer’s line (Annie Hall), “What I wouldn't give for a large sock with horse manure in it!”

As a director whose work varies most significantly in quality, not content (it’s not without reason that one can say “I’m going to see a Woody Allen movie” and have no one ask, "What's it about?"), Allen is perhaps one of the most safely reliable directors around. I’ve seen virtually every film Woody Allen has ever made, struggling through his sometimes grueling attempts at significance (Interiors - 1978), but mostly reveling in his deliriously inspired comedies (Love and Death - 1975). Although my admiration for Allen palled considerably after his very public, more-than-I-wanted-to-know, full-tilt-disclosure breakup with Mia Farrow (try as I might, I can’t enjoy the icky May-December “romance” of Manhattan anymore); I find I still can’t help but be impressed by how he has managed, lo these many decades, to remain the last of the true auteur filmmakers of the 70s. An independent director/writer/actor, whose amazingly prolific output has kept me, if not always entertained, most certainly intrigued for over 40 years.

Murder, She Read

Of course, the problem inherent in absorbing so much of a single director’s work (especially one as fond of covering the same territory, film after film, as Woody Allen) is the gradual over-familiarity one develops with said director’s favored themes and tropes. In Woody Allen’s case, this invariably means: Manhattan as a participating character in the narrative; flimsy philosophical theorizing; rampant psychoanalysis; labored homages to personal idols, Ingmar Bergman and Charlie Chaplin; and stories centered around affluent, neurotic, Jewish/Anglo pseudo-intellectuals occupying a New York curiously underpopulated with people of color, but with an overabundance of “brilliant” men, and “beautiful” women insecure about not being “smart enough” for elfin, elderly, neurotics.

When Allen uses these recurring leitmotifs as fodder for satire, no one can touch him. But when he dons his “Woody Allen: Deep Thinker” cap and tries for wisdom and tortured insight into the human condition (and BOY does the effort show), he can come off as woefully out of his depth (his insights can be shallow) and the results are frequently insufferable.

House Party
Elderly couple, Paul and Lillian House (Jerry Adler, Lynn Cohen,l.) get chummy with their neighbors, the Liptons (Allen & Keaton)

Happily, in what was initially intended as another Allen/Farrow onscreen pairing, Woody Allen followed up the squirmingly autobiographical Husbands and Wives - 1992 (which plays out much better now, thanks to the healing distance of time) with the hilarious Manhattan Murder Mystery; a splendid return to the Woody Allen of the 70s: the funny Woody Allen. But as happy as audiences were for the return of Woody-lite, Farrow’s departure and the ugly reasons behind it might have proved an insurmountable PR roadblock were not for the very engaging Diane Keaton stepping in to take Farrow’s place. Keaton and Allen, last paired in 1987s Manhattan (she had a lovely cameo in Radio Days - 1987), co-starred in just four films (Farrow and Allen appeared in seven films together, but not always as a couple), but to many, they were the beloved Bogart and Bacall of contemporary comedy. The unofficial reuniting of Annie Hall and Alvy Singer engendered so much nostalgic goodwill that the recent damage to Woody Allen’s image was temporarily eclipsed (and softened) by the welcome return of Diane Keaton, the actress with whom Woody Allen arguably shares the best onscreen chemistry.

Woody Allen as Larry Lipton

Diane Keaton as Carol Lipton

The plot of Manhattan Murder Mystery is playfully simple. When the wife of an elderly neighbor dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances, a middle-aged couple worried that their marriage has settled into a comfortable routine (Allen & Keaton) soon find themselves caught in circumstances where life imitates art. That is, if the art in question is Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, and Hitchcock’s Rear Windowand Vertigo. Reluctantly donning the cloak of amateur sleuth, our neurotic Nick & Nora of the 90s embark on a comic investigation into a possible murder that winds up unearthing more than a clue or two about their own marriage.

Like the best of those old Bob Hope or Abbott and Costello comedies that successfully combined mystery with outlandish slapstick, Manhattan Murder Mystery is a consistently funny comedy– laugh out loud funny, at some points – that still manages to sustain a satisfyingly puzzling and suspenseful (if implausible) murder mystery at its core.

Mystery Incorporated
Looking like the cast from a thinking man's version of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, Carol and Larry enlist the help of friends/rivals Ted and Marcia (Alan Alda and Anjelica Huston) in unraveling a mystery.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I saw Manhattan Murder Mystery when it premiered in Los Angeles in 1993. And although the film opened with a rendition of Cole Porter’s “I Happen to Like New York” by society supper-club crooner, Bobby Short, that nearly had me running for the nearest exit before the film had even begun; my fortitude was rewarded by being treated to one of the funniest, most entertaining Woody Allen films I'd seen in a long while. This was the kind of silly comedy, following the uneven Alice (1990) and largely terrible Shadows and Fog (1991); I had begun to doubt Allen was still capable of making.

Manhattan Murder Mystery is a genuine throwback to the Woody Allen of old, and is, at least as far as I’m concerned, his last really funny film to date. What works for me is that it’s one of those comedies wherein a significant part of the humor is derived from seeing characters associated with one kind of film (a Woody Allen neurotic comedy) forced to contend with the plot-driven constraints of a specific genre (the stylized film noir or suspense thriller). Peter Bogdanovich achieved something like this with What’s Up, Doc?, when he dropped laid-back 70s actors into the center of the controlled anarchy of a 30s screwball comedy, but its perhaps Love and Death (my absolute favorite Woody Allen film) that is perhaps the best example of this kind of anachronism-derived humor.

Manhattan Murder Mystery takes two of cinema’s most famously jittery individuals and posits them within the cool-as-a-cucumber universe of the suspense thriller. Instead of hard-boiled heroes unphased by danger, or fearless femme fatales impervious to menace; we’re given a talky, excitable, slightly dowdy middle-aged couple unable to stop analyzing their lives and emotional insecurities even in the face of possible death. No one does high-strung hysteria like Keaton and Allen, and Manhattan Murder Mystery gets funnier in direct proportion to the degree of jeopardy they face. Comic high points: the malfunctioning elevator scene and the sequence with the synchronized tape recorders.

Woody Allen pays tribute to the classic "hall of mirrors" scene from Orson Welles'The Lady from Shanghai

PERFORMANCES

I really adore Mia Farrow, and under Woody Allen’s direction, she gave some of the best screen performances of her career. That being said, outside of the total character transformation she affected in Broadway Danny Rose which unearthed a heretofore-unexplored brassiness in the preternaturally waifish actress that contrasted nicely with Allen’s sweet-natured talent agent; I can’t say I’ve ever much cared for Mia Farrow and Woody Allen’s onscreen chemistry.

In that transference that seems to happen with any actor appearing in an Allen film more than once, Mia Farrow began to adapt Woody Allen’s patterns and rhythms of speech so thoroughly that (compounded by their shared pale and thin countenances) she became more like his female doppelganger than costar. In their scenes together, there was no contrast for either to play off of…it was just Woody Allen whining in stereo.

Diane Keaton, on the other hand, is perfection. While she still strikes me as being too pretty for him (although not in that stomach-turning, Julia Roberts way in 1996s Everyone Say I Love You), Keaton is so innately likeable that she sufficiently softens Allen’s sometimes-annoying persona enough to make him and his overarching self-involvement bearable. They blend together seamlessly and have an easy rapport that radiates from the screen. As good an actress as she is, I have to say that, outside of the unsurpassed work she did in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), I've rarely enjoyed Keaton in any of her films to the degree I've liked her in the ones she has made with Allen. Keaton seems to bring out the best in Allen as no other co-star has before or since.

The ceaselessly stylish Anjelica Huston is always a pleasure to watch. Disregarding the scenes where she's called upon to make blunt overtures to the grandfatherly Allen (they play out like a science fiction movie), I get a real kick out of the way Huston's self-assured cool is contrasted with Keaton's diffidence. Far left, that's 18-yr-old Zach Braff making his film debut.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Murder mysteries aren't easy to pull off under the best of circumstances, a murder mystery-cum-homage to The Greats, that’s also a comedy…even less likely. But in Manhattan Murder Mystery. Allen’s comic detour into Agatha Christie territory manages to be a first-rate mystery of considerable twists and surprises. And, mercifully, none of it is the least bit Scandinavian or Bergmanesque. In fitting with the tone of the genre, Allen keeps the dialog witty and the plotting brisk, most of it serving to support a sweet subplot about growing older and the fear of losing one’s taste for adventure.

In this, the second of three films he made with Woody Allen (Crimes & Misdemeanors, Everyone Says I Love You), Alan Alda plays a divorced playwright harboring an infatuation for Diane Keaton

No matter what names they go by, the characters Keaton and Allen play in Manhattan Murder Mystery are Annie Hall and Alvy Singer. And that's fine by me. As someone who fell in love with Diane Keaton in his teens and laughed through the "nervous romance" of Annie Hall more times than I can count; seeing these characters 16 years later (albeit in the guise of Larry Lipton, publishing editor, and Carol Lipton, wannabe restaurateur), looking all rumpled and lived-in, yet still relating to one another with the same spark of undeniable affection and magnetism...well, it just takes me down a nostalgic road I can't help but feel is entirely the point.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Of the Woody Allen films I number among my favorites: Annie Hall, Love and Death, Radio Days, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Bullets Over Broadway, Cassandra’s Dream, Broadway Danny Rose, Everyone Says I Love You September ( I haven't seen Blue Jasmine yet)-- Manhattan Murder Mystery ranks somewhere near the top. I know many of his films are tighter, smarter, and funnier, but this is the closest Allen has come to making a comfort food kind of movie for me. In deference to the plot-driven machinations of the suspense genre, Allen's darker obsessions take a back seat to his lighter anxieties (avoidance of physical pain, losing sleep, etc.), and the entire enterprise just leaves me smiling and satisfied when it's over. It's Woody Allen at his most accessible (meaning tolerable), with Diane Keaton the perfect, sardonic foil. They create a kind of movie magic together, the kind that keeps me returning to rewatch Manhattan Murder Mystery long after the mystery of the murder has been solved.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

I got Diane Keaton's autograph back in 1981 when I working at Crown Books on Sunset Blvd. Given how much I adore her, it puzzles me how little I remember of this encounter. All I recall is that I was standing behind the cash register and there was Annie Hall standing in front of me with a pile of books. I have no memory of asking for her autograph or even gushing "Gee, Miss Keaton, I just love all your movies..." or some such nonsense. I must have passed out and woke up with this pinned to my shirt.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

WAIT UNTIL DARK 1967

SCROOGE 1970

STAR 80 (1983) / LOVELACE (2013): PORN, COMPLICITY, AND RAPE-CULTURE IN MOVIES

THE EXORCIST 1973

THE FACE OF THE 70S: A TRIBUTE TO KAREN BLACK

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION 2006

GOSFORD PARK 2001

MACBETH 1971

MAHOGANY 1975

IMAGES 1972

A PLACE IN THE SUN 1951

A TOUCH OF CLASS 1973

"GATSBY? WHAT GATSBY?" : Notes on an Adaptation

FIVE DESPERATE WOMEN 1971

CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC 1980

SECRET CEREMONY 1968

ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE 1974

PORTRAIT IN BLACK 1960

BILLIE 1965

MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY 1993