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GOSFORD PARK 2001

August 31, 2013, 3:43 pm
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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.
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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).
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Maggie Smith as Lady Constance Trentham
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Clive Owen as Robert Parks
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Kristen Scott Thomas as Lady Sylvia McCordle
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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.
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Helen Mirren as Mrs. Wilson
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Alan Bates as Jennings
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Emily Watson as Elsie
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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).
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Michael Gambon as William McCordle
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Eileen Atkins as Mrs. Croft
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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.
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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.
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Gosford Park is a great film for repeat viewings. It's staggering the amount of subtle details one misses when first just 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.
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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).
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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 one 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Copyright © Ken Anderson
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HOT RODS TO HELL 1967

January 9, 2014, 11:09 am
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Well, if you’re going to hell, I guess a hot rod is as good a means of transportation as any.

1967 was a banner year at the movies for me. I was just ten-years-old, but in that single year I saw Casino Royale;Valley of the Dolls; Bonnie& Clyde;Wait Until Dark;Far From the Madding Crowd;To Sir, With Love;Up the Down Staircase;Barefoot in the Park;Thoroughly Modern Millie; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?; and The Happening. Barely a kiddie movie in the bunch! Each was a film I was dying to see, and each, save for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, has become a lifelong favorite (Good intentions notwithstanding, this movie really hasn’t aged well for me. 108 minutes of watching human paragon, practically-perfect-in-every-way, Sidney Poitier having his feet put to the fire for the privilege of marrying, as one critic put it, “vapid virgin” Katharine Houghton, begs a tolerance of a sort different from that which was intended). 
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On the Road
Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac...or an unreasonable facsimile thereof
These days, I’d consider it a small miracle if I saw even TWO memorable films in the same year, much less the bumper crop of greats 1967 yielded; but thanks to the lax admission policies of movie theaters in those pre-ratings code days I was able, in spite of my tender years, to see practically any film I had a mind to…and usually did. But no matter how mature I imagined myself to be at the time, I was still only a kid, so upon occasion, my budding aesthetics didn't always steer me toward the quality stuff. For example: in spite of my weakness for movies with mature themes that were way over my head, The Graduate, Two for the Road, and Reflections in a Golden Eye– films I now consider to be among the best that 1967 had to offer – held absolutely no interest for me during their initial theatrical runs. Instead, my imagination and attentions were seized by two Drive-In caliber B-movies that were being given the big push on TV back then: Born Losers and Hot Rods to Hell. 
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Get Your Kicks on Route 66
Why, you ask? Well, for starters, the commercials for Born Losers (Tom Laughlin’s biker flick that marked the debut of his Billy Jack character) prominently featured a girl on a motorcycle in a bikini and go-go boots (Elizabeth James) who looked a lot like Liza Minnelli (oddly enough, a crush of mine even at that early age), while Hot Rods to Hell had, in addition to that simply irresistible title, commercials showcasing a screaming teenager (Laurie Mock) who bore a strong resemblance to another one of my preteen, gay-in-training crushes, Cher. Unfortunately, both films came and went from the local moviehouse so quickly that I never got to see them until many years later. 
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Psycho-Chick
While my interest in Born Losers dissipated as Billy Jackgrew into a pretentious vigilante franchise during the 70s (I finally got around to seeing Born Losers on TCM a year or so ago, and while it’s a lot of lurid fun - especially full-figured gal, Jane Russell, in a small role – once is definitely enough), Hot Rods to Hell, which I was lucky enough to see at a revival theater in Los Angeles sometime in the 80s, was well worth the wait. An example of Grade-A, Drive-In kitsch at its finest, Hot Rods to Hell-ariousis a camp hybrid of those 1950s drag race exploitation films and those reactionary, youth-gone-wild, juvenile delinquency social problem flicks with a suburban “reclaim your manhood” midlife-crisis domestic melodrama thrown in for good measure. It’s a gas!
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Dana Andrews as Tom Phillips
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Jeanne Crain as Peg Phillips
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Laurie Mock as Tina Phillips
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Mimsy Farmer as Gloria
After suffering a spinal injury in a nasty Christmas season auto accident, solid Boston traveling salesman, Tom Phillips (Andrews), emerges a broken and shaken man (“It all came back to me. The horns blowing, the lights, the brakes… ‘Jingle Bells’…”). On the mend from his external injuries, Tom nevertheless carries within him an ugly, shameful disease. A pitiable disease bordering on the abhorrent when discovered, even in miniscule traces, within the stoic, bread-winning, man-of-the-house, post-50s suburban macho American male. That disease is insecurity. Yes, folks, Tom’s self-image and the entire foundation of his 60s-mandated, nuclear family teeter on the verge of collapse under the strain of Daddy actually having an emotional reaction to almost losing his life in an auto accident. How dare he? Passages of the screenplay to Hot Rods to Hell read like a Ward Cleaver lecture on the perils of middle class men having their masculinity usurped due to the enfeebling act of having feelings. (Peg not only makes the initial decision to move to California, but en route, *gasp* she does all the driving!) 
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Boss Finley Can't Cut the Mustard
...Or so wrote Miss Lucy in lipstick on the ladies room mirror at the Royal Palms Hotel in "Sweet Bird of Youth." The topic was sexual impotence, and Tennessee Williams couldn't address it any more frankly in 1963 than this 1966 TV-movie could (Hot Rods to Hell was originally interned as a television release). There's a lot of talk about Tom's bad back, but its pretty clear there's also something else nagging away at ol' Dad. Here Dana Andrews uses his trembling hand as a metaphor for his underperforming man parts. Jeanne Crain's look sums it up.

Under advisement of his physician to take things easier (“What does the doctor think he is, a MENTAL case?” bellows Tom’s compassionate brother), Tom agrees to leave Boston and assume management duties at a thriving motel in the small desert community of Mayville, California. On board with the whole relocation thing are supportive wife, Peg (Crain), and freckle-faced,“all-boy” towhead son, Jamie (Jeffrey Byron). The sole holdout is daughter Tina; an early prototype of the sullen Goth teen ("All the kids drag, Dad!" she spews with adolescent bile), and walking Petrie dish of festering hormonal agitation.
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Little Jamie's dominant character trait is taking frequent passive-aggressive swipes at his father's masculinity
Loaded into their pre-mandatory-seatbelts station wagon, The Family Phillips motors cross-country to Mayville, the presumably uneventful first leg of their roadtrip taking an instant turn for the melodramatic once they hit California. Depicted as a vast landscape of open roads devoted to car culture and thrill-seeking teens, 1960s California takes on the feel of the Old West once the Phillips’ gas-powered covered wagon catches the attention of a trio of exceptionally clean-cut juvenile delinquents (they all come from "good" wealthy families).
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The Mild Bunch
Gene Kirkwood as Ernie / Paul Bertoya as Duke
What follows is a comically escalating game of cat-and-mouse, when what starts out as run 'em off the road kicks (“Everybody’s out for kicks. What else is there?”) turns deadly once the road-hogging hot-rodders make it their business to see that Tom Phillips and family never reach their destination (square Mr. Phillips plans to crack down on the "fun" once he takes over that motel) or get the chance to squeal to the police (or “Poh-lice” as Dana Andrews peculiarly intones). Passions flare, dust flies, tires screech, rock music blares, and everybody either overacts shamelessly or unconvincingly. And, in addition, many questions arise: Will Peg ever accept stop treating Tina like a child? Will good-girl Tina succumb to the lure of bad boys? Will Jamie’s respect for his father ever be restored? Does Tom still have the ol’ poop, or has he lost it forever? The answers to these, and questions you didn't even know you had, are answered in Hot Rods to Hell.
The hospital Dana Andrews convalesces in  (top) previously served as a High School in the "Ring-A-Ding Girl" episode of The Twilight Zone -1963 (below)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE
Hot Rods to Hellis based on a 1956 Saturday Evening Post short story (The Red Car / Fifty-Two Miles to Terror by Alex Gaby) and every frame feels like it. Adapted from a story written at the height of the mid-50s juvenile delinquency panic that spawned Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, Hot Rods to Hell is largely a hoot because it feels so out of step with the times. It really should have been one of those American International cheapies shot back in the 50s in black and white and starring Mamie Van Doren.
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George Ives (giving the only decent performance in the film) as motel proprietor, Lank Dailey 
There once was a time when feature films and TV sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver promoted suburban life and middle-class values as the American ideal. But come the 60s and the New Hollywood youthquake, counterculture rebellion was in (The Graduate, You’re a Big Boy Now), and uptight, staunchly judgmental, middle-class suburbanite “squares” like Hot Rods to Hell’s Tom and Peg Phillips, were out. In just a year's time, offbeat movies like Angel, Angel, Down We Go and Wild in the Streets would normalize the onscreen depiction of outlaw teens as heroes, and the casting of members of the over-30 set as villains.
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Judging You
The dramatic stakes of Hot Rods to Hell are seriously undermined by the pleasure to be had in watching this smug suburban family being taken down a notch. 

PERFORMANCES
If you've never seen veteran actors Dana Andrews or Jeanne Crain in a film before, I beg you, don't start with this one. Hot Rods to Hell will leave you wondering how they ever had careers in the first place. This is their fourth film together (State Fair - 1945 / Duel in the Jungle -1954/ Madison Avenue -1962), and to say the photogenic duo went out with a whimper would be a gross understatement. Andrews, hampered by a makeup artist trained during the days of the silents, is so unrelentingly stiff and gruff, he's a figure of derision long before his character has a chance to be made sympathetic. Hammily scowling and grimacing in his Sansabelt slacks, this is far from Andrews' finest hour, but he's awfully entertaining.
The Saga of an Emasculated Male
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In this artfully composed shot worthy of Kubrick, Tom nurses his bad back while being silently mocked by his wife's handbag
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Tom threatening to scratch out the eyes of his tormentors?
Personal faves are B-Movie starlets, Mimsy Farmer and Laurie Mock, each playing yin and yang ends of the exploitation movie female spectrum (they would reunite with co-star Gene Kirkwood in 1967s Riot on Sunset Strip). As actresses, both are severely limited, but what they lack in talent, they more than make up for in their grasp of knowing exactly what kind of overheated histrionics a movie like this requires. Farmer in particular gives her discontented small-town teen the kind of edgy Ann-Margret overkill that makes for bad movie cult heroines.
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Showing respect and giving props to her homegirl
But a special Oscar should have been awarded to Jeanne Crain, who not only looks lovely in her matronly Sydney Guilaroff coiffure, but overacts so strenuously she takes the entire film to a level of hilarity unimaginable without her devoted contribution. Let's take a moment to pay tribute:
It's A Grand Night For Screaming
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THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Aside from the source material, what likely further contributes to Hot Rods to Hell feeling like a movie made at least ten years earlier, is the fact that its 55-year-old screenwriter, Robert E. Kent  (co-writer of Dana Andrews vastly superior Where the Sidewalk Ends) was probably drawing his knowledge of teenage behavior from the screenplays he wrote for for his sound-alike opuses: Twist Around the Clock (1961), Don't Knock the Twist (1962), Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Don't Knock The Rock (1956). Similarly, the possibility for a youthful perspective certainly wasn't helped by having a director who was in his 70s (John Brahm, surprisingly, the man behind the marvelous 1944 version of The Lodger).
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Burlesque star, cult figure (John Waters'Desperate Living) and mobster sweetheart, Liz Renay appears all-too-briefly as a bar patron. 
The decades of moviemaking experience behind the screen lends Hot Rods to Hell a professional gloss that's frequently at odds with its small-budget incompetence (the poorly executed day-for-night plays havoc with the time frame of the action in the film's third act: is it dawn? Is it dusk? Is it midnight?)
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A sexual assault is pretty much regulation for 60s exploitation movies 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
A prime ingredient for my the enjoyment of any bad film is the earnestness on the part of those involved. Like Joan Crawford in Trog, I don’t believe anyone in Hot Rods to Hell had any illusions about the caliber of film they were making, yet that doesn't prevent them from pulling out all the stops and carrying on as if they are appearing in The Grapes of Wrath. Professional ineptitude without artistic pretension is simply boring, so what qualifies Hot Rods to Hell as one of those top-notch bad movies I can watch over and over again, is the sense that everyone is giving it all they've got, and THIS is the best that they were able to come up with.
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Mickey Rooney Jr (right) & His Combo contribute several (un)memorable rock tunes to the soundtrack, most notably, "Do the Chicken Walk"
As stated, Hot Rods to Hell has long been a favorite of mine, but an extra layer of enjoyment has emerged now that I've nearly reached the age of Dana Andrews when he made the film. It cracks me up when I catch traces of my own reaction to today's youth (don't get me started on teenagers and their smartphones) in the humorless outbursts of our stuffed-shirt hero.  Happily, my private fussing and fuming is as far as the similarity goes. Traffic in Los Angeles these days is far too congested for any of that other stuff.
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BONUS MATERIAL
Read a great review of Born Losers can be found HERE
Mickey Rooney Jr. guests on the pop music variety show SHINDIG HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson
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SHAMPOO 1975

January 16, 2014, 6:16 am
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Watch. Rinse. Repeat.
I don’t know of any other film in my collection of heavy-rotation favorites that has undergone as many transformations of perception for me as Shampoo. It seems as though every time I see it, I’m at a different stage in my life; each new set of life circumstances yielding an entirely different way of looking at this marvelously smart comedy.

Shampoo has been described as everything from a socio-political sex farce to a satirical indictment of American moral decay as embodied by the disaffected Beautiful People of Los Angeles, circa 1968. Taking place over the course of 24 hectic hours in the life of a womanizing Beverly Hills hairdresser (Terrence McNally’s The Ritz mined laughs from the improbability of a gay garbage man; Towne & Beatty do the same with its not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is heterosexual hairdresser running gag), Shampoo chronicles the petty crises, joyless bed-hopping, and self-centered betrayals (if, indeed betrayal is possible between individuals incapable of committing to anyone or anything) amongst a particularly shallow sampling of the denizens of The City of Angels.
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Nixon's the One
Four people, each with their own agenda. Five if you count the smiling portrait in the background

The film takes place in and around Election Day 1968, and, fueled by our foreknowledge of what Nixon’s Presidency portended for America with its attendant undermining of the nation’s moral fiber and erosion of political faith; Shampoo attempts - not wholly successfully- to draw parallels to the decline of the country’s political awareness and optimism of the 60s by training its lens on a group of characters who can’t stop looking into mirrors or get their collective heads out of their own asses long enough to take notice of anything around them that doesn't impact their lives personally. No one in the film even votes!
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Warren Beatty as George Roundy
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Julie Christie as Jackie Shawn
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Goldie Hawn as Jill Haynes
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Lee Grant as Felicia Karpf
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Jack Warden as Lester Karpf
Aging lothario and preternatural adolescent, George (Beatty), is the most popular hairdresser at the Beverly Hills salon where he plies his trade, but sensing time passing, feels the pang of wishing he had done more with his life. George’s ambition is to open a place of his own, but the not-very-bright beautician routinely undermines his long-term success by allowing himself to become distracted by the short-term gratification offered by the easy sex that got him into the hairdressing business in the first place. Juggling a girlfriend (Hawn), a former girlfriend (Christie), a client (Grant), that client’s teenage daughter (Carrie Fisher, making her film debut), all while trying to negotiate financing of the salon from said client’s cuckolded husband (Jack Weston); George find himself in way over his pouffy, Jim Morrison-tressed head. 
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Directed by Hal Ashby (Harold & Maude), Shampoo is really the brainchild and creative collaboration of two of Hollywood’s most legendary tinkerers: Warren Beatty and screenwriter Robert Towne (although a Julie Christie biography credits her with bringing to Warren's attention the 1675 restoration comedy, The Country Wife and it serving as the real genesis of Shampoo). Depending on the source from which one gets one’s information, Shampoo - which underwent nearly 8-years of rewrites and countless hours of on-set nitpicking - was inspired as much by Beatty's own exploits as Hollywood’s leading man-slut, as that of the life of late hairdresser-to-the-stars, Jay Sebring (a victim of the Manson family that fateful night in 1969. Beatty was Sebring’s client for a time), and celebrity hairstylist Gene Shacove (who is given a technical consultant credit for Shampoo, but who I mainly know from a 1956 lawsuit filed against him by TV personally/cult figure, Vampira, claiming he burned her hair off with one of his dryers). Even hairdresser-to-producer Jon Peters (Eyes of Laura Mars) weighed in, claiming the film was inspired by his life.
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Blow Job
(It strikes me as the height of irony and the biggest testament to the absolutely stupefying superficiality of the Hollywood/Beverly Hills set satirized in Shampoo, that so many men clamored to be credited with being the inspiration for George. A character depicted - if one is actually watching the film and not just getting off on the number of ladies bedded -  as a selfish, shallow, narcissistic, slow-witted, self-disgusted loser.)
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I saw Shampoo nearly a year after its release (I fell in love with the movie poster and bought it long before I even saw the film), but remember distinctly what a huge, huge hit it was. I mean, lines around the block, rave reviews, lots of word of mouth, and endless articles hailing/criticizing it for its frank language and (by 70s standards) outrageous humor. It's popularity even spawned an exploitation film titled, Black Shampoo, which I've yet to see, but I hear features a chainsaw showdown with the mob. Anyhow, Shampoo is a marvelous film, to be sure, but in hindsight, I think a sizable amount of the hoopla surrounding it can be attributed to two things:

1) The The Sandpiper Factor.  In 1965 audiences made a hit out of that sub-par Taylor/Burton vehicle chiefly because it offered the voyeuristic thrill of seeing the world’s most famous illicit lovers playing illicit lovers. The same held true for Shampoo. In 1975, audiences were willing to pay money to speculate about the similarities between Shampoo’s skirt-chasing antihero and Warren Beatty’s reputation as a Hollywood ladies’ man. That the film featured on-and-off girlfriend Julie Christie; former affair, Goldie Hawn (so alleges ex-husband, Bill Hudson); and future girlfriend, Michelle Phillips, only further helped to fuel gossip and sell tickets. 

2) Pre-Bicentennial jitters. Shampoo was released at the beginning of 1975.Three years after the Watergate Scandal broke, one year after Nixon’s impeachment, and just three months before the official end of the Vietnam War. As the flood of “Crisis of Confidence in America” movies of 1976 proved (Nashville, Taxi Driver, Network, All the President’s Men, etc.) movie audiences were more than primed for anything reaffirming their suspicion that America’s values were in serious need of reexamination. 
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Carrie Fisher (making her film debut)as Lorna Karpf
In 1975 this line got a HUGE laugh. Her other famous line got a HUGE gasp
I found Shampoo to be a funny, well-written and superbly-acted look at the spiritual cost of the "free love" movement of the 60s. It is a witty, intelligent, and keenly observed comedy of manners. What it never was to me was a particularly profound political satire. The election night stuff, the TVs and radios blaring ignored campaign speeches and election returns...none of it gelled for me as an ironic statement deeper than America's apathy helped put a man like Nixon into office. I'm not saying that others haven't found the subtext to be appropriately weighty, I just find it significant that over the years I've encountered many people who love Shampoo, but only dimly recall any of the political references (or even the death of an unseen character).
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In Shampoo's most talked-about scene, Rosemary's Babyproducer, William Castle, chats up Julie Christie, while to Beatty's left sits character actress, Rose Michtom. Fans of Get Smart will recognize Rose from her 44 appearances on that TV show (one of the executive producers was her nephew). A curious tid-bit: she's the daughter of the inventor of the Teddy Bear (!), and even has a website devoted to her Get Smart appearances.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Movies about unsympathetic people are not always my thing, but I do admit to being a sucker for a film that taps into a reality I’ve found to be true: that a great many distasteful people don’t like themselves much more than I do. What I love about Shampoois that it is one of those rare films that can show the lives of the rich and privileged and still convey to us the hollow disappointment that lies within the souls of each of the characters. And in a comedy yet! It’s a small, yet extremely difficult thing to do (talk to Martin Scorsese about The Wolf of Wall Street) but it is the thing that makes these people human, and therefore individuals I can both identify and understand…if not necessarily like. I think the award-winning screenplay by Towne / Beatty is absolutely brilliant. An early draft of which I read, even more so, as it fleshed out the friendship between Jackie and Jill even more.
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Producer/director Tony Bill  plays TV commercial director, Johnny Pope
PERFORMANCES
OK, I’ll get this out of the way from the top: Julie Christie is an absolutely amazing in this movie (surprise!).  Not only does she look absolutely stunning throughout (even with that odd hairdo, which I’ve never been quite sure was supposed to be funny or not) but she brings a sad, resigned pragmatism to her rather hard character. A character not unlike Darling’s selfish Diana Scott.  Whatever one thinks about her performance, I think everyone can agree that stupendous face of hers is near-impossible not to get lost in.
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You Had One Eye in the Mirror as You Watched Yourself Gavotte
One of my favorite things in Shampoo is the way the characters are perpetually captured checking themselves out in mirrors; even in the middle of serious discussions or arguments. 
Lee Grant's voracious-out-of-boredom Beverly Hills housewife won Shampoo's only acting Oscar, and nominated Jack Weston really deserved to win (his is perhaps the film's strongest performance) but I think Goldie Hawn is especially good. Comedic Hawn is great, but serious Hawn has always been my favorite. The scenes of her character's dawning awareness of what kind of man she's allowed herself to fall in love with are genuinely touching, and among the best work she's ever done. Not to overuse a word bandied about in Shampoo with vacant casualness, but Hawn is great.
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As Shampoo's most sympathetic character, from her early scenes as a ditsy blond to the latter ones revealing a clear-eyed defiant strength, Hawn shows considerable range.
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Shampoo is peppered with celebrity cameos and walk-ons. All adding to the feeling, that this isn't a period film taking place in 1968 (in many ways the period detail in Shampoo leaves a lot to be desired) so much as a 1975 Warren Beatty roman à clef.
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Michelle Phillips
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Susan Blakely
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Andrew Stevens
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Howard Hesseman
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Jaye P. Morgan

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Shampoo over the years
1975- First time I was a sex-obsessed teenager (and virgin). Beatty seemed old to me at the time, so I didn’t fully understand how a fully-grown man could allow his life to unravel around him due to an inability to keep it in his pants. What did I know?

1983- OK, let’s put it this way; at this stage of my life I “got” the whole sex thing in Shampoo. Also, I was I was living in Los Angeles by this point, so not only had the film’s satirical jibes at Los Angeles “culture” grown funnier, they became perceptive.
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1990- Throughout the 80s and 90s, I worked as a dancer, an aerobics instructor, and a personal trainer in Los Angeles. If you have even a tangential familiarity with any of these professions, you’ll understand why, at this stage, Shampoo started to take on the look of a documentary for me. In fact, I came to know several George Roundys over the years. Straight men drawn to these largely female-centric professions, aimiable, screw-happy, and more than willing to reap the benefits of working all day around women and being in the sexual-orientation minority where males were concerned. All of them exhibited behavior so identical to that attributed to the George character in Shampoo, I gained renewed respect for the accuracy of Towne and Beatty’s screenplay.
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Today- I’m happily in my late 50s (I happy about it, not ecstatic); nearly 20 years into a committed; loving relationship; thankful and gratified by the journey of growth my life has been and continues to be. When I look at Shampoo now, I watch it with an empathy toward its characters I don’t believe I had when I was younger. Who knew then that so in the film referenced growing up? (Jill's harangue at Goerge, Jackie being surprised that an old hippie friend is still throwing parties). 
I think what I now know that I couldn’t have known in my 20s or 30s, is the profound emptiness of these people’s lives. Never having been in love before, I didn’t know what I was missing. Now I understand how wonderful a thing it is and how terrifying life can feel without it.
Especially when one faces the possibility - at middle age - that the very life choices one has made in one’s youth (the lack of introspection, the inattention to character, kindness, or concern for others) can render one incapable of ever attaining it.
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It's too late...
Jackie checks to makes sure her future is still secure with Lester as George confesses his vulnerability
Shampoo is still amusing to me, but its comedy is more wistful and full of regret these days. I see a film that mourns the loss of 60s optimism (the use of The Beach Boy song, Wouldn’t it be Nice? Is truly inspired) and stares out at a future that, at east in 1975, must have looked pretty hopeless.
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Copyright © Ken Anderson
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MIDNIGHT COWBOY 1969

January 24, 2014, 9:31 pm
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I’m sometimes asked if I only like movies about women, or if a film has to have a female protagonist in order for me to enjoy it. Granted, even a cursory look at the films discussed on this blog would seem to bear that out, but the truth is, I’m not drawn specifically to movies about women so much as I have a strong aversion to what passes for male characterization in a great many motion pictures. Preoccupied as they are with perpetuating a narrow (not to mention, outmoded) vision of manhood comprised of oversimplified macho/hero stereotypes; I find that movies too often give us outsized masculine totems instead of fleshed-out, human-scale men.

Never being one to find plot-driven action and adventure to be a preferable alternative to the intensity of simple emotional conflict, I gravitate instead to movies about flawed characters grappling with the human condition. That these have largely been movies about women says more about our culture’s rigidity in its onscreen depiction of masculinity than it does any gender preferences I may hold in the way of  narrative central characters. 
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Joe Buck sees the cowboy as the epitome of hetero-masculinity
Hollywoodhas never lost a dime trafficking in gender stereotypes. In the standard Hollywood film, men “do” while women “feel”; men propel the action, women do all the emotional heavy-lifting. The prototypical American male movie hero is a stoic, unemotional, lantern-jawed man of action, rarely given to moments of self-doubt, feeling, or introspection. He’s the strong, silent type, indigenous to westerns, war movies, crime dramas, espionage thrillers, sports films, sci-fi, or any testosterone-leaden genre requiring things being “blowed up real good,” or cars raced fast and furiously.
Happily, a great deal of this changed (albeit briefly) in the late-60s with the emergence of the movie anti-hero. The New Hollywood, in its youthful repudiation of America's cinematic status-quo, challenged the old-fashioned concept of masculinity and reimagined the traditional Hollywood leading man as an individual of unprepossessing countenance (Elliot Gould, Richard Benjamin, Malcolm McDowell, et. al.) capable of uncertainty, and more apt to be at war with some aspect of his character than to be found pointing a .44 Magnum at some punk and asking, “Do you feel lucky?”
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Urban Cowboy
Archaic notions of masculinity collide with the modern world 
A perfect example of the American male redefined can be found in one of the films I consider to be a true, genuine-article, movie classic: John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. A buddy film for a new generation, which in every way embodies the kind of perceptive, complex, characterizations I love to see in movies. When a film is this textured in exploring emotional isolation, vulnerability, loneliness, and (a favored theme of mine) the human need to connect, from, speaking topically, the relatively rare perspective of the male; it only emphasizes how much time is wasted and how many rich stories we all miss out on when movies persist in depicting men in terms of masculine archetypes rather than genuine, humanly-flawed people.
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Jon Voight as Joe Buck
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Dustin Hoffman as Enrico Salvatore Rizzo
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Sylvia Miles as Cass Trehune
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Brenda Vaccaro as Shirley
Midnight Cowboy is the story of Joe Buck (Voight), a naïve Texas dishwasher with a sad, abandoned past, who, possessed of little beyond an elemental self-awareness – “The one thing I ever been good for is lovin’”– seizes upon the tin-pot ambition of going to New York and making it as a sought-after gigolo, servicing the sexual needs of neglected, Park Avenue socialites. Unfortunately, a string of bad breaks (not the least of them being Joe’s ignorance of the largely homosexual implications drawn from his beloved cowboy attire in a Metropolitan setting) results in a drastic reversal of fortunes for Joe, leading to his forging an unlikely friendship/bond with a tubercular, disabled grifter and pickpocket: one Enrico Salvatore Rizzo (Hoffman), or, as he's loath to be called, Ratso.
In detailing the tentative alliance between these two wounded misfits, director John Schlesinger (Darling, The Day of the Locust) and screenwriter Waldo Salt (from the James Leo Herlihy novel), have not only fashioned one of the screen’s great (platonic) love stories, but in the bargain create a terribly moving and heartrending essay on isolation and the need to be needed.
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"Joe sees how profusely Ratso is sweating and untucks his shirt to pat down his friend's hair. Ratso, not used to such tenderness, holds onto him, his eyes closed in a stolen moment of bliss."
                        - Dustin Hoffman speaking about one of the film's most poignant scenes in the John Schlesinger
                        biography, Edge of Midnight, by William J. Mann

The kind of mature-themed major motion picture unimaginable in today’s teen-driven multiplex marketplace, the then X-rated Midnight Cowboyfairly knocked me for a loop when I saw it in 1969 (I was fairly shaken by it; finding some parts absolutely harrowing, later feeling heartbroken and bawling my eyes out at the end...then staying to watch it all again). I was just 12-years-old at the time, and in my film fan fervor, Midnight Cowboy looked to me like the future of American movies. Strange to think of it now in the age of Iron Man and The Avengers, but try to imagine: only an adolescent movie enthusiast but already exposed to the brilliance that was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Rosemary’s Baby, Secret Ceremony, and Bonnie and Clyde…and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was just around the corner.

Like an unspoken promise, the quality of these movies led me to the optimistic (naive?) belief that American films were headed in an entirely new direction. And, freed from the constraints of censorship by the newly-imposed rating system, mainstream motion pictures movies could at last take their place as the emergent pop-cultural art form of the 20th century. Alas, conservatism and consumerism ultimately won out, but for a brief time there, Hollywood was turning out the most AMAZINGLY offbeat and thought-provoking movies.  
No wonder the 60s and 70s still linger in my heart as my absolute favorite era in American film. I see now that its because we were both growing up at the same time.
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X-Rated
Bernard Hughes appears as Townsend "Towny" P. Locke in one of Midnight Cowboy's most  controversial scenes

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Putting aside for a moment Waldo Salt’s absolutely incredible screenplay (and if you've read Herlihy's novel you know what a splendid adaptation it is), as far as I’m concerned, cinematographer Adam Holender (Puzzle of a Downfall Child) and composer John Barry (and all sundry music contributors) are as much the stars of Midnight Cowboy as Voight and Hoffman. Displaying the kind of seamless collaboration that served to both feed and mislead auteur theorists critics back in the day,  Holender and Barry create a look and sound for Midnight Cowboy so cinematically swell-suited to its themes of fractured dreams and abandoned hopes (the use of disorienting flashbacks and subjective audio were considered innovative for its time), that the mode of storytelling becomes as important as the story itself. And, of course, who can listen to Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin'(sung by Henry Nilsson) without visualizing Joe Buck strutting down the crowded Manhattan streets, the diminutive Ratso Rizzo at his side, struggling to keep up.
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Repeat viewings reveals the incredible amount of backstory and character exposition relayed through the economic and use of flashbacks and dream sequences. Everything you need to know about Joe Buck's troubled past is revealed, but the richness of this device is found in how little is actually explained. Imagine that, a movie that gives you credit for being smart enough to connect the dots without everything being spelled out!
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Shown in flashback, Joe is sexually assaulted by town rowdies jealous of the attention paid to him by the town goodtime-girl, Anastasia Pratt, aka Crazy Annie (Jennifer Salt, daughter of screenwriter Waldo Salt). 

PERFORMANCES
Midnight Cowboy is so chock full of amazing performances that it becomes an exercise in futility to extol the virtues of any one particular actor. Still, each time I watch it, I find I'm left with lingering impressions of newly-discovered bits of brilliance in performances I thought I was long-familiar with.
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Making his film debut, long-time favorite, Bob Balaban, is appealingly vulnerable as the young student who, even in his naif outing as a sexual outlaw, has it over Joe Buck in the street-smarts department
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"I got a strange feelin' somebody's bein' hustled!" -Doris Day in Calamity Jane
Oscar-nominee Sylvia Miles makes more out of 6 minutes-worth of screen time than any actress I've ever seen. As the Park Avenue "socialite" with the braying voice and whiplash temper, Miles creates a vividly dimensional character out of little more than a sketch. I could go on about what I adore about her performance, but I couldn't put it any better (or more hilariously) than a fellow blogger does HERE
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Sylvia Miles had the showier part, but I have a soft spot for Brenda Vaccaro and what she does with her thoroughly unique role as the emancipated woman who gets a kinky kick out of paying for sex with, as she puts it, a "cowboy-whore" she meets at a party. Like almost every supporting role in Midnight Cowboy, hers is a character one can easily imagine having a life beyond the frame of the screen (judging by her apartment, possibly a pretty fascinating one).   
Midnight Cowboy was my first exposure to both Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, both of whom give the kinds of performances that make stars. Some of the actors considered for the role of Joe Buck include: James Caan, Don Stroud, Alan Alda (!), Michael Sarrazin, Lee Majors, Alex Cord, Gary Lockwood, Robert Forester, and Michael Parks.

Hoffman is, of course, a revelation, especially in light of the extreme departure Ratso Rizzo is from his work in The Graduate; but it's the sad-eyed Jon Voight who ratchets up the film's pathos by way of achieving, in his portrayal of the hapless hustler, Joe Buck, what I've always admired in the work of Julie Christie: the ability to instill in shallow, not-very-bright characters, a considerable amount of inarticulate depth.
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Haunted
If it's disappointment and sadness that leads Joe to willingly accept sexual objectification as a viable means of existence, then Midnight Cowboy qualifies as the male perspective of a tragic real-life circumstance we tend to see played out in public most often by women. Consider the doomed fates of sexualized small-town girls, Dorothy Stratten and Anna Nicole Smith.
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Fantasy isn't perhaps the best word to describe what I mean, but I adore the seedy, grimy look of late 60's New York captured in Midnight Cowboy. It's a Through the Looking Glass view of Manhattan inspired, one can't help but assume, by Brit director John Schlesinger's unfamiliarity with the city, and his fascination with its sordid contrast to the cheery image of America presented in advertising and TV commercials. As would be the case in later years in films like Klute (1971) and Taxi Driver (1976), Midnight Cowboy uses New York as if it were another character in the story.
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THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As it is rare for a director to even turn out ONE classic film in the entirety of their careers, I find it sometimes a little baffling how easily John Schlesinger's name - the man who gave us Midnight Cowboy, Darling, and The Day of The Locust...three genuine classics, in my book -  is so often bypassed in discussions of great directors. Even the gay community rarely gives it up for this director (to my knowledge, the only "out" director working in mainstream film at the time) whose body of work is decidedly uneven, but nonetheless yields several impressive efforts. Happily, Schlesinger won the best directing Oscar for Midnight Cowboy, and the film won Best Picture that year (Salt also won for his screenplay).
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There’s no telling what, if any, impact Schlesinger’s sexuality had on the way Midnight Cowboyturned out (after all, the original novel was written by a gay man, but adapted by a straight). But even by today’s standards, what still impresses me about Midnight Cowboy is how strongly it stands as one of mainstream cinema’s most persuasive examples of the purposeful deconstruction of the masculine myth.
Joe Buck embraces a traditional concept of masculinity no longer considered relevant or even valid in an urban (modern) environment. In fact, Joe is rather stunned to learn that everything he one thought represented masculinity and manhood (macho posturing, sexual pursuit, and dressing like a cowboy) has, somehow, become perversely feminized ("You're gonna tell me John Wayne's a fag?!"). Manliness of the sort he admired as a boy in the movies, or copied from the rodeo cowboys that populated his grandmother’s bed, transmogrified into the macho “drag” adopted by homosexual prostitutes plying their trade on New York's Forty-Second Street.
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Like a great many men who haven't a clue as to how to view themselves without clinging to an antiquated hunter-gatherer/alpha-male paradigm; Joe, without a defined code of “masculinity” to follow, is at a loss. (Ironic, because, as revealed in the novel and an early draft of the screenply, what inspires Joe to come to New York in the first place is his learning that the urban phenomenon of the overworked businessman has resulted in a surplus of sexually frustrated city women. In short, Joe believes there is a shortage of "real men" in New York, and his goal is to step in and fill the void, so to speak.)

Even within the sex trade where he hoped to make his fortune, Joe finds himself unwittingly cast in the feminine role of being the one pursued by males rather than in the (equally passive) part of easygoing stud sought after by women. Yet, in his inarticulated longing to love and be loved (his only familiarity with it is as a purely physical act) he finds the closest thing he has ever known of it in the deep friendship he develops with another male. One every bit the misfit as he is. 
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Scenes of Domesticity
Over the course of the film, as Joe and Ratso come to need and depend on one another, Joe’s deep-rooted masculinity anxiety shows signs of being replaced by a fragile sense of self-worth, and a broader concept of what it means for him to be a man. Joe even tables his dreams and awakens to the reality that he's not cut out for hustling. He places the needs of someone else before his own, and though he acts out of desperation, it's born of a genuine concern for the only person that has come to mean anything to him (the only person he has, in fact). Rico drops his tough-guy front and reveals his vulnerability (who could call a man in a Hawaiian shirt Ratso?) forcing Joe to abandon his own false macho attitudinizing, resulting in two individuals at last becoming defined (in our eyes and their own) by their humanity; not the empty labels of masculinity.
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And for a rather bleak and somber film, I think that's a really lovely, bittersweet  message to end with.
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Copyright © Ken Anderson
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CALAMITY JANE 1953

February 6, 2014, 2:00 pm
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A look at Doris Day’s filmography doesn't exactly yield (at least on the surface) a kaleidoscopic portrait of versatility when it comes to the kind of roles the extremely underrated actress has undertaken throughout her career. From her debut in 1948’s Romance on the High Seas, the studios made it their business to place Day in movies in which audiences were encouraged to partner the sunshiny implications of her alliterative stage name with the homespun effervescence suggested by her strapping good health; freckled, apple cheeks; and pleasantly toothsome smile. This, coupled with Day’s well-scrubbed sex-appeal, and soothing, honey-coated voice – which in spite of its clear-as-a-bell virtuosity, rarely strayed convincingly into the sultry or sensual – helped her to become one of the reigning boxoffice stars of the day (pun not only intended, but shoehorned). It also saddled her with an image of such strenuous and unrelenting wholesomeness that for years, the words “Doris Day movie” were a pop-culture punchline signifying a certain brand of clean-cut cinema artificiality.
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Famously, director Roman Polanski used the term, “Like a Doris Day movie,” in describing the disconcertingly sunny look he wanted for the early scenes of Rosemary’s Baby; and only recently I've come to learn of the existence of the slang phrase, “Doris Day parking,” which apparently is the name given to a miraculously open parking space found exactly in front of the point of one’s destination. (An allusion to a familiar movie trope by no mean restricted to Doris Day films, in which characters always seem to find available, convenient parking near, or right in front of, the place they need to be…even in crowded cities.)

The rather tragic particulars of Doris Day’s real life, pooled with her personal values and a loyalty to her sometimes rabidly image-sensitive fanbase, has led Day, throughout her career, to shun some of the darker, more against-type  material offered her (Mike Nichol’s The Graduate, for example) that might have better showcased her range. (Fans reacted strongly to Doris smoking and drinking in Love Me or Leave Me, and as late as 1968, when the actress was well into her 40s, some fans bristled when, in her last film, With Six You Get Eggroll, her character – a widow, not the constant virgin she usually played –  goes to bed with Brian Keith before marrying.)
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But Doris Day never set out to be a character actress. She was a star. And if the limitations of her squeaky-clean image and light-as-a-feather roles conspired to create in the public’s mind the impression that she was more a personality than an actress (especially during the “kitchen sink realism” era of the late 50s when her style of films began to fall out of favor), it’s nice to know that the passing of time has ultimately brought about a much-deserved reevaluation of her body of work. A reevaluation which rightfully places Doris Day amongst the most talented of Hollywood’s Golden Age stars.
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Doris Day as Calamity Jane (nee Martha Jane Canary)
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Howard Keel as Wild Bill Hickok (James Butler Hickok)
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Allyn McLerie as Katie Brown
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Philip Carey as Lt. Daniel Gilmartin
Calamity Jane, a tuneful, quadrilateral romance fashioned around the highly-fictionalized lives of real-life Old West figures, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, fools no one in its actually being a blatant, bald-faced, carbon copy of  Irving Berlin’s Broadway hit, Annie Get Your Gun, which Warner Bros. lost the screen rights to in a bidding war with MGM. The 1946 Ethel Merman musical was made into a film in 1950 starring Betty Hutton and Howard Keel; he playing essentially the same role he plays in Calamity Jane, albeit under a different name.
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Dick Wesson as Francis Fryer
Calamity Jane was released to great success in 1953, and were not for the merit it earns on the strength of its own unique gifts, I’m certain its “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” similarities to Annie Get Your Gun would have branded it an embarrassing copycat. I've never read anything about what the creators of Annie Get Your Gun thought of Calamity Jane, but I’m surprised that two such similar products didn't lead to some kind of courtroom shootout at one time or another. That being said, as much as I like Betty Hutton (an acquired taste, to be sure) and think she acquits herself very nicely in a role she had to step into when an ailing Judy Garland was sacked, I much prefer the more modestly-budgeted Calamity Jane to Annie get Your Gun.
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Deja Vu All Over Again
Howard Keel's face-off with Doris Day in the number, "I Can Do Without You," is a dead-ringer for Annie get Your Gun's "Anything You Can Do"
A staple of Saturday afternoon TV programming when I was a kid, Calamity Jane is the very first Doris Day movie I ever saw. And, discounting Love Me or Leave Me (1955) which features Day giving a standalone, powerhouse dramatic performance, Calamity Jane is my favorite of all of her films. Absolutely nothing else I've ever seen her in has matched Calamity Jane for flat-out, lift my spirits, always-puts-a-smile-on-my-face, double-barreled (to use the vernacular of the trailer) enjoyment.
Made at a time when original movie musicals were fast being replaced by adaptations of Broadway shows, Calamity Jane is, at 101 minutes, a brisk and snappy far cry from the butt-busting  roadshow behemoths that musicals would become in later years, and is an example of the Hollywood musical at its entertaining and  unpretentious, best. (Historical and artistic merit notwithstanding, I've never been too enthusiastic about the arty self-seriousness that overtook the movie musical in the post-Agnes de Mille/An American in Paris years).
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Gale Robbins appears briefly as sagebrush songbird, Adelaid Adams
As befitting the time, the genre, and the film’s featherlight approach, Doris Day gives a performance that is oversized but never overdone. Liberated from having to be all sweetness and light, Day is allowed to give full vent to the tomboyish, outdoorsy quality (read: butch) that has always lurked beneath even her most glamorous screen appearances. Calamity Jane gives us a Doris Day at her most rambunctiously appealing, and, in being given lively support by a score of catchy songs by the Oscar-winning team of Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster (Love is a Many Splendored Thing), Calamity Jane ranks among a short roster of films I think provide near-ideal showcases for a particular star’s talents and strengths. A list that includes: Meet Me in St Louis for Judy Garland, Singin’ in the Rain for Gene Kelly, Funny Girlfor Barbra Streisand, The Unsinkable Molly Brown for Debbie Reynolds, Mary Poppins for Julie Andrews, and Cabaret for Liza Minnelli. 
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Doris Day croons the Oscar-winning song, "Secret Love"
Thanks to its gleefully butch heroine and subversively playful preoccupation with gender-normative behavior, Calamity Jane has grown into something of a Queer Cinema cult-favorite over the years. All that repressed, 50s-era skirting the issues of sex and gender allows for the contemporary attribution of gay-coding subtext  to the mismatched romances at the center of the plot. For years, "Secret Love" has been regarded as something of a gay anthem, with pop singer k.d. lang recording a rendition to play over the closing credits of the 1995 documentary, The Celluloid Closet.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE
I’m not sure when it happened, but it has become a subtly dismissive form of insult to label anything as fun or purely entertaining. Pop stars Madonna and Lady Gaga became crashing bores after they stopped making infectious dance music and took up the mantle of serious artiste; likewise, Jerry Lewis ceased being even remotely funny (and he wasn't all that funny to begin with) once he and the French came to a meeting of the minds regarding his status as genius.
Pretentiousness and self-seriousness has killed a lot of what is lively about the lively arts, so when a film like Calamity Jane comes along, devoted as it is to providing its audience with a rollicking good time and plenty of toe-tapping music, it is by no means a minor statement to assert my fondness for this film chiefly because it succeeds in being such a cheerful and thoroughly captivating entertainment.
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The Deadwood Stage (Whip-Crack-Away)
You'll have to look hard to find a sprightlier opening sequence for a movie musical than this bouncy, marvelously economical little ditty that gets across a staggering amount of expositional information while showing off Doris Day as a consummate musical performer. Her energy and charm is totally winning. And just check out how effortlessly she glides through Jack Donahue's athletic choreography and manages the timing of all those props!
The list of what works in Calamity Jane extends to the music (joyous, not a clunker in the bunch), performances (sharp as a tack), and pacing (glides along at a clip). But Calamity Jane starts out way ahead of the game by merely avoiding a few Musical 101 pitfalls that trip up filmmakers to this day:
Hire actors who can sing and dance
Seems a no-brainer, but after the mid-60s, Hollywood adhered to a perverse prerequisite of ONLY making musicals with individuals devoid of musical skill of any kind (see: Camelot, Man of LaMancha, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Paint Your Wagon, Lost Horizon).
Give songs a melody
I’m not calling for nursery rhymes or jungles, but hummable tunes of the sort that made the songs from The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins ones children remembered and wanted to sing along with. Too many musicals today are hamstrung by over-sophisticated songs designed toward getting the composer a place on the Billboard charts ("Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas), or obvious Oscar-bait so lacking in distinction that the songs could be inserted into any number of films with no loss of relevance (pretty much everything written by Randy Newman).
Entertain
I don't mean keep it light or frothy; I simply mean keep in mind that things like pacing, good humor, and energy go a long way with audiences. When Vincente Minnelli excised each and every uptempo song from his film adaptation of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, one has to wonder, was it his express purpose for audiences not to have a good time?
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Above: Character actor Dick Wesson's reluctant drag number, "Hive Full of Honey," is a comic highlight in Calamity Jane. Below: Wesson in drag again, fifteen years later in an episode of That Girl with Marlo Thomas.

PERFORMANCES
The price of being a Doris Day fan is having to resign oneself to the fact that only occasionally do her films measure up to her talent. Calamity Jane is such an occasion. Always a fine singer and actress, what’s impressive about Day in Calamity Jane is the sheer athleticism of her performance. Leaping about in form-fitting buckskin (which makes her resemble William Katt in Butch & Sundance: The Early Days) she displays a boisterous physicality that perfectly matches her full-throated brand of singing. A particular jaw-dropper is she's singing while sitting crossing-legged on the bar, then raises herself to he feet by pushing off of her ankles. Amazing!
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My partner and I take particular pleasure in poking fun at Calamity Jane's over-emphatic, inconsistent western dialect; which consists of terms like "cigar-reets" and "sarsparilly," yet accommodates words like "malign." And don't get me started on her adjective/verb/noun formula for insults: "You mangy pack of dirt-scratchin' beetles!"
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Growing up, strikingly handsome Philip Carey was more familiar to me as Granny Goose- the cowboy spokesman in a series of popular TV commercials for the potato chip company. But it was several years before I came to associate Calamity Jane's Katie Brown, engaging comedienne/singer/dancer Allyn McLerie, with Red Button's sardonic marathon dance partner in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, or as Tony Randall's comically stern secretary, Miss Ruebner, on his eponymous 1976 sitcom.
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On the topic of the natural beauty of the Dakota Black Hills, Calamity Jane inadvertently proves that a lack of education  (ignorance) has always played a big part in Manifest Destiny and the legacy of entitlement. I saw Calamity Jane at a revival  theater once where I'm happy to say this exchange was met with a deafening chorus of "boos"
Howard Keel (who always seems to be on the losing end of a battle in trying to navigate his lips over his gorgeous but sizable teeth) makes for a very appealing co-star. As was the case with Annie Get Your Gun, he has the curious ability of making chauvinism look charming.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
It’s easy to see how Calamity Jane gained a reputation as a paean to gender independence and a coded, gay-identity musical viewed through the prism of 50s repression. The amount of time the film invests in comedy centered on identity, drag, and gender role reversal is certainly intentional, as are the gender-normative romantic complications that don’t quite gel: tomboyish Calamity is in love with hyper-masculine Lt. Gilmartin, who has eyes for ultra-femme Katie Brown. Calamity’s best buddy, Bill Hickok, relentlessly teases Calamity about her lack of womanly virtues, and he too is smitten with the girlish Katie. But the overall impression it leaves of being a film about the oppressiveness of traditional gender is wholly unintentional.
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Hickok has to appear in public in female Native-American "drag" as a form of shaming
Calamity Jane doesn’t know it, but it sets up a “Born This Way” dynamic with Calamity’s character. She is happiest and most at ease when she is just being herself (the only person she knows how to be) and the fact that her natural way of living her life is labeled “masculine” comes as news to her…she’s just being Calamity. In fact, it’s not until she visits “Chicagee” and gets a dose of the crossed messages her demeanor and mode of dress elicit (women flirt with her, men regard her as either an unsophisticated male or female curiosity), that it evens dawns on her that there is a different way for a woman to be.
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Wannabe showgirl/maid Katie returns to Deadwood with Calamity, and if the cohabitating pair are revealed to share a livelier and more palpable chemistry than what has been thus far been exhibited by either of the women with their rather stiffish male love interests, it has nothing to do with what the film is trying to convey, but everything to do with the natural, unforced butch/femme magnetism of Doris Day and Allyn McLerie.
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Female duets are rare in musicals, and McLerie and Day shine in the marvelous, "A Woman's Touch"
Sure, Doris Day arguably looks “better” to our glamour-trained eyes after she gets her feminine makeover, but Calamity never again appears as carefree or seems to have as much fun as she did in the earlier part of the film. The otherwise playful film suddenly gets all misty-eyed and slow, as if both Calamity and the movie itself are reined in by her corset.

In the end, heterosexual love wins out and the gender roles realign, but I don’t think it takes a Queer Eye to see that the two lantern-jawed males make a more appropriate-looking pair, just as the duo of Katie and Calamity look made for each other.
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Seriously, who wouldn't have wanted to see these two hook-up?
Calamity Jane predates Some Like it Hot by five years, but both films, in poking fun at sex, cross-dressing, and gender roles, unintentionally - through their adherence to the standardized cultural norms of the day - make subtle and telling statements about the liberating effect of not always having to conform to accepted gender roles.
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Bonus Material
In 1963, Carol Burnett starred in a TV adaptation of Calamity Jane. See a clip HERE.

Philip Carey in a Granny Goose Potato Chips commercial  HERE 

Copyright © Ken Anderson
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BLUEBEARD 1972

February 20, 2014, 1:58 am
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When it comes to the preserved documentation of talent squandered and the irrefutable evidence of an artist in decline, few actors have as nagging a filmography as Richard Burton. And boy did he know it.

Indeed, it’s on the occasion of my having just finished reading (more like devouring) The Richard Burton Diaries– where he frequently rebukes the tiresome (to him) “myth” that his career is one of unrealized potential incarnate – that I was inspired to revisit this cult film curio from the “anything goes” 70s. Cult film, in this instance, being the term applied to any movie of dubious merit for which one harbors an affection that defies logical explanation.

In 1971, just before starting work on Bluebeard, Richard Burton wrote: “My lack of interest in my own career - past, present, or future - is almost total. All my life I think I have been secretly ashamed of being an actor. And the older I get, the more ashamed I get.” 
Well, that explains a lot. 
In fact, combined with the obvious allure of travel (the film was shot in Budapest, Hungary, a place the globe-trotting Burton's had never been) and a hefty paycheck, only apathy, self-loathing, and a subconscious need to publicly humiliate oneself can be the possible explanation for Burton’s head-scratching participation in Bluebeard: A big-budget, yet awfully cheap-looking, black comedy/horror movie that by rights should have been a throwaway exploitationer from Hammer Films starring Christopher Lee or Vincent Price (whom Burton wrote of purposely hoping to emulate in the role: “It has to be done with immense tongue in cheek. I will try to remember how the master –whasssisname – Vincent Price plays it.”).

Compared to the depths of degradation he was yet to fall into with The Klansman (1974), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1976), and The Medusa Touch (1977), Bluebeard actually represents something of  late-career high-point for Burton, signifying as it does a movie that, at least partially, intends to be laughed at.
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Richard Burton as Baron Kurt Von Sepper
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Joey Heatherton as Anne
Basically a Playboy magazine pictorial disguised as a film, Bluebeard is a tongue-in-cheek, post-WWI retelling of the 17th-century French folktale about a nobleman with a history of murdering his wives. Richard Burton plays Austrian (I think) war hero and famed fighter pilot Kurt Von Sepper, who hastily falls for and marries Anne, a spunky American cabaret performer assayed (emphasis on the first syllable, if you get my cruder meaning) by 70s variety show stalwart, Serta mattress pitchwoman, and erstwhile Bob Hope USO Tour frug-er, Joey Heatherton. True to the very grim original fairy tale, the Baron’s bride soon comes to learn of the gruesome deaths of her six predecessors (and a prostitute, for good measure) at the hands of her literally blue-bearded husband, and over the course of one very tense evening, is forced to rely on her wits(!) and assorted Scheherazadian ploys to avoid meeting a similar fate.
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As movie set-ups go, this one isn't half bad. It's only in the execution (if you'll pardon the pun) where things start to go awry. The theme of the young wife suspecting her hubby of harboring a deep dark secret has been used effectively in movies for ages: in The Stranger (1946) a slow-on-the-pickup Loretta Young discovers she's wed a Nazi (you'd think a little thing like that would have come up during courtship); teen bride Elizabeth Taylor learns much-too-old-for-her Robert Taylor is a Soviet spy in Conspirator (1949); the thriller Julie (1956) finds Doris Day wed to man who may or may not have killed her first husband (how inconvenient!); and Hitchcock requires Joan Fontaine to sleep with one eye open in both Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941).

In this French/Italian/German production designed to showcase and undress its cast of international beauties, Miss Heatherton's unequivocal American-ness works rather well. Both as contrast (she has a delectably dissolute quality that makes her look like a debauched Sandra Dee) and in rendering her character believable as the one wife meddlesome enough to go snooping where she doesn't belong.
Richard Burton summed it up nicely: "Heatherton seems unbelievably ordinary, which might be good for the part. She has one of those one-on-every-corner, blonde, rather common, and at the drop of an insult I'm sure, rather bitchy faces."
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Raquel Welch as Magdalena, the nymphomaniacal nun. Wife #4
Of course, top-billed Raquel Welch is also an American (total screen time: 8 minutes), but as Myra Breckinridge established, when Welch tries to be funny, she becomes so mannered and stilted that she barely even registers as human.

The device of having Heatherton forestall her execution by getting her homicidal husband to recount to her the whys and wherefores of each of his wives' deaths is a good one; for its fairy-tale framework is perfectly in keeping with Bluebeard's archly gothic tone, while the extensive use of lengthy flashbacks gives Bluebeard the feel of one of those tongue-in-cheek horror anthology movies popularized by Britain's Amicus Productions in the 70s (The House That Dripped Blood, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, et al.).
Thus, with a solid horror film structure firmly in place and a script that asserts its dark/self-mocking humor at regular intervals, one would think that Bluebeard, in laying its "exploitation film" cards on the table, could effortlessly meet the  low bar requirements it set for itself. Not so.
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Karin Schubert as Greta, the patient virgin. Wife #1
The impression one is left with from the film's wandering pacing and unfocused tone is that the filmmakers just don't have their hearts in the horror side of things. Blacklisted veteran director Edward Dmytryk, who clearly has seen better days (Murder My Sweet, Raintree County, The Caine Mutiny), has produced impressive work in many genres over the years, but demonstrates little of that flair here.
He has trouble arriving at and sustaining a consistent rhythm, the overlong Bluebeard frequently showing the strain of having to keep its featherweight premise aloft for its hefty two-plus-hours running time; he tends to undercut suspense (since we usually know right away what fault Bluebeard will find in his wives, the drawn out scenes of his slowly reaching the end of his rope feel like overlong setups for jokes we already know the punchline to); and he out and out flubs even the most cliche tropes of the genre (a shock reveal of a character thought to be out of the vicinity is botched entirely by having the camera placed practically across the room from the action). Equally problematic: it's hard to be induced to laugh at the exaggerated, purple performances Dmytryk elicits from his cast when one is not entirely sure: 1) They're in on the joke, 2) Capable of better.
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Nathalie Delon (l.) as Erika, the latent lesbian babytalker. Wife #3
With her, Sybil Danning (r.) as a helpful prostitute
No, if Bluebeard can be accused of anything, it is of appearing to so aggressively court the lucrative softcore euro-sleaze exploitation market, that it treats every scene that doesn't actively involve the gratuitous disrobing, display, or objectification of a pulchritudinous actress as necessary, but unwanted, filler.
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Virna Lisi as Elga, the atonal songbird. Wife #2
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
It’s a strange thing indeed to find oneself drawn to a film specifically because of the disaster potential inherent in the collective interaction of its assembled particulars. I submit for your approval: A once-respected, bomb-prone, alcoholic Shakespearean actor not known for either his dramatic restraint or light touch with comedy; a legendarily "difficult," not excessively talented, reigning global sex goddess trying hard to hold onto the title after a string of notable flops; a pouty American perpetual motion machine and heir to the sex-kitten throne after Ann-Margret abdicated with Carnal Knowledge; a bevy of international actresses of varying degrees of stateside recognizability (translated: the more obscure the actress, the more extensive the nudity); a director in his 60s taking a whack (pun again?) at trendy 70s permissiveness; all converging in a genre of film – a tongue in cheek black comedy gothic horror movie – alien to everyone involved.
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Marilu Tolo as Brigitt, the masochistic feminist. Wife #5
Marveling at the myriad ways in which these discordant ingredients interact in Bluebeard is like watching one of those chemical reaction science demonstrations from when I was a kid. And it's just as much fun. There's the full-tilt sensory bombardment of having Richard Burton and Joey Heatherton "acting" together in the same scenes (so ill-matched they are actually MARVELOUS together). The visual clash of garish 70s art direction (one set looks like a furnished blood clot). And let's not forget the aural assault of the hollow, dubbed voices for many of the actresses, brushing up against Burton's free-flowing Austrian or Welsh or English accent, all buttressed unsteadily by Heatherton's flat, matter-of-fact,Yankee delivery on one side, and Welch's mechanical, mid-Atlantic elocution lesson whisper on the other. 
Agostina Belli as Caroline, the dispassionate free spirit. Wife # 6
The product of three screenwriters and no telling how many other “collaborators” (time and place is so inconsistent and poorly evoked in the costumes and makeup, each of Bluebeard’s wives appear to be a time traveler visiting from a different era...past and future), so many disparate ingredients are thrown into this Euro-sleaze potboiler that its working title could rightfully have been: Hungarian Goulash.
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Audiences were puzzled by the insignia and flag used in Bluebeard. Although many thought it was a made-up substitute for a swastika, it is in fact a real-life crutch-cross (cross potent) symbol representing the Fatherland Front. An Austrian, anti-Nazi conservative group headed by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in 1933

PERFORMANCES
Although the lovely Nathalie Delon gives what I think is Bluebeard's best performance (she was the only wife I was sorry to see go), and the stunning Virna Lisi the most beautiful (that she allows her beauty to be camouflaged by costuming and makeup designed to emphasize the ridiculousness of her character, perhaps speaks well of the actress' lack of ego and sense of humor); I have to say that I am thoroughly charmed by Joey Heatherton in this and she is my absolute favorite performer in the film.
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Dream Project Never to Be:
A film of Chekhov's Three Sisters starring Joey Heatherton, Tuesday Weld, and Connie Stevens
With that perpetually open mouthed, sex-haze look she falls back on whenever she finds herself at a loss for character motivation, Heatherton can be downright dreadful at times. But she also possesses that intangible, alchemic "something" that transforms bad acting, mediocre dancing, and a narcissistic self-absorption, into a special kind of camp, star quality.
Looking amazing and photographed the most flatteringly she's ever been in a film (she first worked with Bluebeard director Edward Dmytryk in 1964s Where Love Has Gone) and dressed in a collection of anachronistic frocks better suited to one of her Hullabaloo TV appearances, Heatherton nevertheless reveals a comic talent for the sarcastic throwaway line, imbues the sometimes sluggish film with a considerable amount of misdirected, giggle-inducing energy, and ultimately emerges the real star of Bluebeard. Oh, and did I mention she goes topless?
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As Bluebeard, the man who invented your-fault divorce, Richard Burton is certainly game, and sometimes even appears to be enjoying hamming it up, but it's hard to laugh at an actor of his stature actually trying to emulate Vincent Price (who is the master of this sort of thing, but it IS this sort of thing). His Bluebeard doesn't really have any madness at his core. In fact, in too many scenes Burton appears to be either drunk, distracted, or bored...take your pick.
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Edward Meeks as Sergio, Anne's unlikely partner in her cabaret act 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Contemporary horror fans discovering Bluebeard are likely to find both the nudity and gore of this R-rated film to be well below even PG standards. But as for me, not having been weaned on Saw or whatever brand of torture porn passes for horror these days, I don't mind a bit that, outside of a pretty unwatchable hunting scene, the violence in Bluebeard is pretty bloodless.
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Mathieu Carriere as the mysterious character known only as The Violinist
Where Bluebeard works best for me is in creating a suitably bizarre gothic atmosphere (silly and fun, but creepy) and in building suspense around how long it's going to take Heatherton to catch on to Bluebeard's "secret," and how she's is going to escape that castle before dawn (certainly not for lack of velocity. When Heatherton runs, flowing gown or not, the woman seriously floors it).
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 "Oh, I love the castle! I love the park. The woods. These curtains. These walls. The furniture. I even like these strange photographs!"  Joey Heatherton, folks

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
When Bluebeard was first released, both Burton and Dmytryk went out of their way informing/warning everyone that the film was intended solely as a lark and a laugh (as if anyone seeing a movie titled Bluebeard [starring an actor wearing a literal blue beard] could mistake it for anything else). When critics and audiences failed to find much comedy, black or otherwise, in the sadism of the violence directed toward women; little humor in the grim choice of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi fascism as a backstory plot point; and sat stone-faced at images of real-life animal slaughter in the hunting scene, their complaints were summarily dismissed as being born of taking it all too seriously, missing the point, and failing to understand that the movie was…here we go again…a  black comedy designed as escapist entertainment.
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Von Sepper gets it in die nüsse 
A great many cult films, especially those poking fun at taboo/serious topics like murder and death, can come off as offensive. Of course, if it's a film by John Waters, Paul Morrissey, or David Lynch, causing offense is likely the whole point. But sometimes a film can cross a line for a viewer, and, so long as that individual doesn't try to censor a film or stop others from enjoying it, I think differing opinion should be respected without that person being told they are taking things too seriously or missing a film's point.
Researching Bluebeard online, I read many reviews citing the above reasons for not enjoying the film. And, this being the internet, those observations were met with caustic rejoinders citing said reviewer's inability to grasp that it was a horror comedy and therefore not to be taken seriously.
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Anne attempts to distract Von Sepper with a delicious dessert
I have a tendency to roll my eyes - with a vengeance - any time I hear a filmmaker or fan launch into that overworked stock phrase, “It’s pure escapism, it’s meant to be entertaining,” when deflecting criticism directed at a film, or defending (I assume) our inalienable right to willful mindlessness.
That’s all very well, and to each his own. 

But if being a student of film has taught me anything, it’s that, historically speaking, pop culture’s so-called “mindless entertainments” – in the unguarded license they afford themselves – generally reveal far more about who we really are as people, than serious, contemplative films which tend to flatter us with images of how we like to think of ourselves.
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Many considered a violent scene depicting Burton's character spearheading a fascist pogrom against Austrian Jews to be out of place (or at least poor taste) in a film Dymytrk described a being "Made purely for entertainment"
As comedian Ricky Gervais said (Oh God, I'm quoting Ricky Gervais...and using the word God in the bargain): "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." And on the topic of reacting to potentially incendiary films, maybe I should add to that: Just because you take no offense doesn't mean you have a more profound understanding. No movie worth its salt doesn't divide audiences.

I think that Bluebeard is a great deal of gaudy, campy fun. A real "only in the 70s" oddity that is definitely worth a look. But that doesn't mean I'm unaware of its very real potential to offend. It's a dated relic of a time when male-centric Hollywood sought to counter the the cultural one-two punch of Women's Lib and the sexual revolution with movies that many perceived to be troublingly anti-woman (Roger Vadim's Pretty Maids All in a Row [1971] being the worst offender).

So, if you're inspired by this post to give Bluebeard a look, please proceed with caution. 
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And be very, very afraid...


BONUS MATERIAL:
See Joey Do Her Thing!
A mouth-watering collection of fantabulous Joey Heatherton variety show clips from the 60s and 70s await you at The Redundant Variety Hour. Get ready to be transported to The Land of 1000 Dances! You can thank me later.

Joey's Best Performance Ever!
In 1986 Heatherton was acquitted on charges of having assaulted a passport office official.  Heatherton should consider the verdict her unofficial Oscar for the absolutely incredible impersonation she does of her accuser. Had she given her film roles this much gusto, she'd have been a major movie star! Watch the YouTube clip HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson
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LENA HORNE: THE LADY WHO LUNCHED

March 13, 2014, 4:30 am
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In one of the few instances I can recall from my youth where everyone in my family was in agreement over what movie to see (and as there were five of us, this was a rare occurrence, indeed), one Friday evening my dad fired up the trusty Oldsmobile and took us all to San Francisco’s Northpoint Theater to see That’s Entertainment in 70mm and Six-Track Stereo.

It was 1974, and I was a 16-year-old, self-styled cineaste in the first blush of a full-tilt, head-over-heels love affair with The Movies. And if my adolescent over-earnestness was made obvious by a myopic preference for the films of the 60s and 70s above all others; I have Ken Russell’s charming 1930s musical pastiche, The Boy Friend(1971) to thank for opening my eyes to the joys of second-hand nostalgia and for awakening the latent classic film fan within.
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That’s Entertainment, a compilation film highlighting 50 years of MGM musicals through clips and misty-eyed reminiscences by Golden-Age stars, was one of the few examples of the real thing to emerge out of the largely revamped/revisionist nods to the past that typified the 70s pop culture nostalgia craze (The Great Gatsby, The Way We Were, Happy Days, The Divine Miss M, et al.)
Released at a time when the public’s appetite in films ran chiefly to disaster movies, black-themed dramas, irreverent comedies, and kung-fu actioners; That’s Entertainment– part Old Hollywood eulogy, part tribute to the very sort of escapist, purely-for-entertainment, studio-system fare the New Hollywood aimed to discredit – tapped into something in the cultural zeitgeist that sought relief from the tensions of Watergate, Vietnam, inflation, and the oil crisis. Its intentions made explicit by the poster tagline: “Boy. Do we need it now,” That’s Entertainment was originally conceived as G-rated counter-programming for the largely-ignored elder demographic; but the film’s reverent, gently self-mocking tone and invitation to “Forget your troubles, c’mon, get happy!” proved irresistible to young and old alike. The relatively low-budget That’s Entertainment became one of the top-grossing films of 1974.
For an youthful disciple of the auteur theory like me, That’s Entertainment represented an unexpectedly welcome change from all the sturm und drang of post-classical cinema, reminding me what a joy it was just to have FUN at the movies for a change.

I saw That’s Entertainment several more times that summer, standing foremost in my mind being the memory of the unrecognizably young Joan Crawford always drawing the film’s biggest laughs with her “spirited” Charleston; the way the lively “Varsity Drag” number from Good News always put a smile on my face; and how surreal and marvelously loony those Esther Williams water extravaganzas seemed to me.
But in the end it was one of the non-musical moments of That’s Entertainment that ultimately made the strongest and most lasting impression on me. It's only a few seconds long, but it stood out like a beacon, and the image haunted me for many years after.
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Greenbriar Picture Shows
In newsreel footage documenting a massive luncheon thrown by MGM in 1949 to commemorate its 25thAnniversary, a slew of the studio’s biggest contract stars are lined up and seated … not unlike ducks in a shooting gallery  … at a bank of tiered dining tables. As the camera dollies along the aisles capturing the stars in various states of conviviality (Ava Gardner & Clark Gable), mortification (Errol Flynn), clowning (Buster Keaton), or chowing down heartily (Angela Lansbury); we’re given a fleeting glimpse of Lena Horne, seated between Katherine Hepburn and an actor I believe to be Michael Redgrave.

What burned a hole in my retina and seared a tattoo on my 16-year-old mind was the look on Lena Horne’s face: She’s not having any. Seriously. In stark contrast to That’s Entertainment’s sparse parade of subordinate black performers (and regrettably, but inevitably, white performers in blackface) wearing beatific smiles, eager to entertain, grateful merely to be allowed to “sit at the table” (in Ms. Horne’s case, a term both literal and figurative); there sat this (very) solitary black woman, poised, dressed to the nines, and displaying a self-possession and look of utter disdain that, in context with the place and time, looked to me like nothing short of an act of militancy.

It was more than the fact that she wasn’t smiling. It’s that she held herself with this kind of removed, regal aplomb while assuming a wilfully casual posture that communicated to any and all that she wasn't on exhibit and wasn't going to be putting on a show for anybody’s benefit. Her expression: a raised-eyebrows/lowered eyelids combo familiar to anyone who’s ever been sized-up; her jaw: set; her gaze: cool. Lena Horne had flipped the script, folks. The one on display was doing the judging. Miss Lena Horne, to use the vernacular, was a diva throwing shade.
(Horne, whose ongoing battles with MGM have been well-documented in several biographies as well as her as-told-to 1965 autobiography, Lena, was at the end of her seven-year contract with the studio when this footage was shot, so by this point she was fairly fed up with the studio and obviously didn't care who knew it.)
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And that’s precisely what struck me most about this sequence. Lena Horne at that table – subtly rebellious in the simple act of daring the camera to capture who she was at that moment, not what the studio wanted her to be – was the first glimpse of a contemporarily recognizable black reality I had ever seen in the context of classic film.

As a teen, I’d watched many old movies on TV, but I'd never seen a single image of a black person in any of those films whom I even recognized, let alone could relate to. The shuffling, smiling, obsequious blacks that appeared on The Late, Late Show bore no resemblance to me or anyone I’d ever met or known. They seemed strange and alien to me, the blatant disrespect and caricature inherent in their depiction and representation in no way nullified by their frequently being imbued with near-superhuman levels of kindness and compassion. These images were lies, and my resistance to them inhibited my exposure to classic film (pre-1950s films) for many years.

So while I wasn't sure then, I now understand why Lena Horne in that brief bit of black & white newsreel footage from That’s Entertainment stayed with me over the years. I was responding to the "truth” she presented. In place of the fetishized ebony goddess segregated to stand-alone cabaret sequences in all-white musicals (all the better to be excised from prints screened in the South) or the ornamental siren in well-intentioned but patronizing all-black epics, I saw a glimpse of a real black woman reacting authentically and appropriately to her circumstances and surroundings: 

“I disconnected myself to shield myself from people who would sway to my songs in the club and call me ‘nigger’ in the street. They were too busy seeing their own preconceived image of a Negro woman. The image that I chose to give them was of a woman who they could not reach and therefore can’t hurt.” - Lena Horne

I would come to learn that such candor was a hallmark of Lena Horne, a pioneering actress/singer of astounding fearlessness whose battles with racism, sexism, and institutionalized ignorance have earned her the labels "embittered" and "hard" in many a biography, but which qualify her as a warrior and hero in my book. (Similar behavior attributed to an actress like Bette Davis is called being a "fighter" and a "survivor.")

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"The only time I ever said a word (onscreen) to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of 'Show Boat' included in the film, 'Till the Clouds Roll By'"

This production still is proof that such a scene was shot, but in my copy of the film it appears to have been excised. Horne sings "Can't Help Lovin' That Man" (Lena was not about to use the offensive black dialect, "dat" ) and is seen in an ensemble shot, but has no lines at all. Those familiar with Horne's biography know that "Show Boat"s Julie LaVerne, an archetypical "tragic mulatto" character, was a role Horne coveted. Although she was offered the part in a 1946 Broadway revival that MGM refused to release her from her contract for, but given the racial prejudices at the time and the essential "reveal" aspect of the role itself, it's unlikely Horne was ever seriously considered for the 1951 film version.

It’s not exactly the easiest thing being both an aware African-American man and a huge fan of classic film. Often it means finding ways to make peace with wonderful movies that nevertheless include disrespectful, ofttimes painfully degrading racial clichés and promote heinous stereotypes. It means having your comments on the topic downplayed by missing-the-entire-point comparisons (“The marketing of stereotypes is Hollywood's stock in trade!"), or minimized by over-broad generalizations (“That’s how they thought back then. You gotta overlook it!”).

It means you sometimes have to be “that guy” who brings up the alternative point of view at a Gone With the Wind screening or Busby Berkeley film festival (Berkeley had a distinct fondness for blackface numbers), or you’re Mr. Buzzkill who’s accused of politicizing the arts when you contradict the suggestion that the largely all-white world depicted in classic films reflect a “simpler, gentler time.”  You're the wet blanket out to subvert people’s cherished memories of sweet-natured mammies, childlike slaves, and benevolent servants; and you’re the PC guy who insists on applying contemporary attitudes to works that are essentially historical records of cultural attitudes of the time in which they were created.
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Lena with Eddie Anderson in Cabin in the Sky (1943), the film that made her into a star
But films are not frozen in time, they live. And to me it's an important part of the cinema experience to continue to see the old through new eyes.

What I saw in Lena Horne's very contemporary rebellious spirit paved a way for me to see the humanity behind black stereotypes in movies I'd previously felt so offended by, I simply shunned them. I have since developed a profound respect for the black actors who had to play these roles, knowing that it couldn't have been easy, and in many instances, must have been soul-killing work. Lena Horne may not have been the first black actor to refuse to play maids or servants, but she certainly must have been one of the few to still have her job after doing so.

Today, when I look at that clip from That’s Entertainment, I am impressed as hell with Lena Horne's attitude. She's a hero to me because at a time when nothing was expected of her but to be a sepia-toned fantasy object, she owned her anger, expressed her resentment, and voiced her outrage.  And that she did so a time when so many others couldn't ... well, for me, that just made her the biggest star MGM had on the lot that day, and certainly the most memorable and inspiring woman I saw on the screen that Friday evening back in  1974.

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Photograph © Carol Friedman

The complete 10-minute newsreel covering the MGM 25th Anniversary luncheon is available for viewing on YouTube  HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson
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WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? 1971

March 25, 2014, 8:54 pm
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Debbie Reynolds is always quick to cite her performance in 1964s The Unsinkable Molly Brown as her personal favorite. Which is easy enough to understand given it's a title role which afforded the versatile actress the opportunity to play both comedy and drama, showcase her considerable singing and dancing ability, and won her an Oscar nomination (her only to date). While I find parts of The Unsinkable Molly Brown to be a little tough going (I hate to say it, but Reynolds’ acting in the early scenes make Irene Ryan in The Beverly Hillbillies look like a model of nuance and subtlety), I nevertheless enjoy the movie a great deal. But even given that, I still would only rank it as my favorite Debbie Reynolds film somewhere below Singin’ in the Rain (1952), I Love Melvin (1953), and Mother (1996). Surprising even myself, I have to rate 1971s What’s the Matter with Helen? – Reynolds’ late-career, against-type, low-budget, semi-musical venture into the world of hagsploitation horror – as my absolute favorite Debbie Reynolds movie.
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Debbie Reynolds as Adelle Bruckner (Stewart)
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Shelley Winters as Helen Hill (Martin)
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Dennis Weaver as Lincoln Palmer
In What’s the Matter with Helen?, Reynolds and Winters play Adelle Bruckner and Helen Hill, two dowdy, Depression-era moms in Braddock, Iowa who forge an unlikely friendship (Winters’ Helen is a slightly dotty religious fanatic, Reynolds’ Adelle is a self-deluding dance instructor) born of a shared burden of guilt and fear of retribution arising out of the conviction of their adult sons in the brutal mutilation murder of a local woman. Hoping to flee both the scrutiny of the press, and, most significantly, mysterious phone calls from a stranger threatening murderous revenge, the women flee to Los Angles to start a new life as partners in a dance studio catering to aspiring Shirley Temples.
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Adelle and Helen are confronted by an angry mob outside the courthouse where their murderous sons have been spared execution and sentenced to life. In the cab, Helen becomes aware that someone in the crowd has sliced her hand. 

With new names: Adelle Stewart/Helen Martin; and altered appearances – Jean Harlow-fixated Adelle goes platinum blonde ("We could be sisters!”), mousy Helen has her Lillian Gish tresses cut into a bob ("You’re the Marion Davies type!”); the two women, at least for a time, appear to have successfully left their pasts behind them. This is especially true of the dreamy, ambitious Adelle, who, in trading the bland Midwest for the seedy glamour of Hollywood, clearly feels she is in her element. Unfortunately, the change of locale has rather a more detrimental effect on the mentally fragile Helen, whose religious fundamentalism plagues her with guilt over her son’s crimes and whose latent, repressed lesbianism fuels an irrational possessiveness once Adelle begins showing interest in the wealthy divorced father of one of her tap school charges (Dennis Weaver).
Is it mere coincidence when mysterious letters, death threats, phone calls, and shadowy figures in the distance start to resurface just as Adelle moves closer to securing a new life for herself …  a life free of  memories of her neglectful past and thoughts of her estranged son and his crimes? Is it coincidence? Bad luck? God’s will?  Or is something the matter with Helen?
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Adelle and Helen are joined by a mutual inability to see themselves as they really are
Released into theaters (well…dumped, actually) on the heels of the single-season cancellation of Reynolds’ rather grim NBC sitcom The Debbie Reynolds Show, What’s the Matter with Helen? is a first generation cousin to the unofficial trilogy of Robert Aldrich-produced horror thrillers centered around elderly female twosomes of questionable sanity (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - 1962/ Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte - 1964/ What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?– 1969).

Directed with a rather uneven hand by Curtis Harrington (Games - 1967), and lacking Aldrich’s gleeful willingness to go for the full Grande Dame Guignol; What’s the Matter with Helen? is nevertheless an intriguingly quirky and off-beat melodrama with an irresistible premise (I love how ill-matched the two women are. It's so absolutely clear that nothing good can come of it. Plus, the setting of a tap school for creepy  little Shirley Temple wannabes lorded over by a bunch of pushy stage mothers more terrifying than anything else in the film, is truly inspired); and considerably more on its mind than its quick-buck, exploitation film title would indicate. (The film's working title was the infinitely more subtle: The Best of Friends.)
Themes of transferred guilt, repression, delusion, redemption, role-playing and revenge play out against the backdrop of a darkly cynical, funhouse-mirror vision of tarnished Hollywood glamour populated with a gallery of grotesques that rival The Day of the Locust.
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Above: a crime scene photo of the murder victim, Ellie Banner (Peggy Patten) showing a bloody palm. Below: several time sin the film, Helen suffers wounds to her hand. A motif of bloody palms runs throughout What's the Matter with Helen?, fueling the religious and moral themes of transferred guilt and (quite literally) having blood on one's hands. 
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Agnes Moorehead as Sister Alma 
No film about Hollywood's creepy blend of artifice and showmanship would be complete without referencing the oddball phenomenon of celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. A similar character known as "Big Sister" is portrayed by Geraldine Page in The Day of the Locust. (It has been alleged - refuted by producer Ed Feldman - that Page was an in-the-wings replacement option for Shelly Winters who was very difficult on the set. Drinking, temperament, and according to Reynolds, suffering something a a bit of a mental breakdown during the making of What's the Matter with Helen?). In both films, religion is depicted as just another myths-for-a-price opiate of the masses in the souls-for-sale landscape that is Hollywood.

What’s the Matter with Helen? was directed by written by Henry Farrell (author and screenwriter of both What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte) from his short story, "The Box Step", and produced by Debbie Reynolds as part of her contract with NBC for a TV series, two specials, and a film. The television angle certainly goes to explain the participation of NBC star Dennis Weaver, who was riding high as TVs McCloud at the time.
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Michael Mac Liammoir as acting coach, Hamilton Starr ("Two 'R's, but prophetic nonetheless!")
When What’s the Matter with Helen? came out, I was familiar with the likable Debbie Reynolds from her TV appearances, from having seen The Unsinkable Molly Brown four times at the local theater, and from surviving How Sweet It Is - a smutty, 1968 “family” comedy with James Garner that by any rational standard should qualify as Debbie Reynolds’ first real horror movie. As a fan of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, I was fairly eager to see a What’s the Matter with Helen?, but it came and went so quickly from theaters that I didn't get to it until many years later as an adult.

Still, not seeing the movie didn't prevent me (at age 13) from being fairly traumatized by its legendarily boneheaded ad campaign; one which prominently featured as its central image, a still from the film that effectively gave away the grisly surprise ending. Obviously stumped as to how to convey to an unwitting public that a PG-rated pairing of America’s perennial girl-next-door with the reigning queen of outrageous talk show appearances wasn’t going to be a comedy or a musical, a desperate and monumentally lazy publicity department resorted to using the single most striking and violently grotesque image in the film it. Never mind that it not only seriously undercut the suspense in a film that could use every bit of help it could get in that department, but in its ham-fisted obviousness, cheapened and sabotaged the very real potential What’s the Matter with Helen? had for building word-of-mouth interest based solely on the shocking payoff of its climax.
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Watching the usually cheerful Debbie Reynolds playing a somber and self-interested character that stands in stark contrast to her well-established girl-next-door image, contributes immeasurably to making the psychological horror of What's the Matter with Helen? all the more unsettling.
Imagine Psycho promoted in its original release with a tip-off to Janet Leigh’s fate, or a Planet of the Apes poster comprised of the film’s "big reveal" ending (which now serves, ironically enough, as the cover art for the DVD).

Did the poster for What’s the Matter with Helen? (which also included an inset pic of Shelley Winters looking more demented than usual) create interest in my wanting to see the movie? Yes. In fact, the image was so harrowing and disturbing; it made me want to see the movie more …so in that way you could say the advertising was successful. But did it ultimately spoil the moviegoing experience for me? Hell yes! When I finally got around to seeing it, the tension leading up to that dreaded denouement is so deftly handled that I was more than a little pissed-off that I already knew EXACTLY how things were going to pan out. The colossal spoiler of that poster (still used on DVD overs to this day and seen in the film’s trailer) cheated viewers out of a well-earned shocker climax, leaving us with only the HOW to wonder about.
(Such careless disregard is something of a stock in trade for Martin Ransohoff, the meddlesome and artless head of Filmways [The Beverly Hillbillies], hair-raising stories about whom can be read in the memoirs of Roman Polanski and Joe Eszterhas.)
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WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Although a troubling number of my favorite films fall under the classification of "camp," I sometimes think that overworked little noun is a frustratingly limiting classification. Especially when, as in the case of the rather marvelous What’s the Matter with Helen?, it reduces the entirety of a flawed but arresting thriller to its most superficial and easily-accessed characteristics. What’s the Matter with Helen?, as does the entire "psycho-biddy" horror sub-genre, traffics in the sexist conceit that there is something inherently grotesque and terrifying in women (most particularly, unmarried women) growing older. In the cultural currency of Hollywood, old men are adorable (The Sunshine Boys, Grumpy Old Men), old women are gargoyles (Sunset Boulevard, Strait-Jacket).
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Structured as standard gothic melodramas, these films replace the traditional movie monster with actresses "of a certain age" and exploit our attraction/aversion to seeing once-youthful and glamorous stars in various states of mental and physical decline. Camp rears its head in the spectacle of excess: too much makeup on wrinkled, sagging flesh; opera-scale performances;  overdramatic dialog; and the occasional outburst of female-on-female violence (which, regardless of the intensity, is depicted in the scope of the irrational "catfight").

Psychological horror is the context, but running below the surface like an undercurrent is the unmistakable air of gynophobia. The fear that women, when divested of their cultural "value" as wives, mothers, and youthfully ornamental symbols of beauty and desirability, turn into monsters. They become, as the line in Clare Booth Luce's The Women goes, "What nature abhors. ... an old maid. A frozen asset."  Which may go to explain why a significant camp element of the genre is how strongly these women come across as female impersonators or drag queens. It's as if on some level they cease being women at all.

All the above are present in abundance in What’s the Matter with Helen? (and with Shelley Winters playing insane, how could it be otherwise?), but the enjoyable weirdness of this infectiously watchable, wholly bizarre movie shouldn't completely blind one to the fact that behind the camp there lurks a hell of a nifty thriller containing a great many good (if not wholly realized) ideas.

The Feminine Defiled
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Sammee Lee Jones adopts the exaggerated, hyper-feminine "living doll" persona of Shirley Temple 
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Body of a child, face of an older woman. Mature, heavily made up Little Person, Sadie Delfino (who looks like a doll-come-to-life to the children at the tap school) is  presented as jarring contrast to the armies of little girls tarted up by their stage mothers to look like grown women 
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Robbi Morgan vamps a la Mae West in a vulgar burlesque (that proves nonetheless to be a real showstopper) to the highly inappropriate song, "Oh, You Nasty Man!"
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The Best of Friends
Adelle's porcelain dolls passively reflect both her external perception of her friendship with Helen (she's glamorous to Helen's dowdy) and her inner sense of their inherently unequal status (Adelle the sophisticate outclasses Helen the farm girl). 
From the first time I saw it, I've always felt What’s the Matter with Helen? had more in common with Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust than What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The horror is in these character's pathetic quest for salvation and beauty in a world depicted as squalid and tawdry. I particularly like how the sub-theme of guilt as something shared,transferred, and possibly redemptive, infuses the film with a quasi-religious tone of doomed fate and predetermination.

A nice touch is how the film juxtaposes the neglectful mothers of two thrill-kill murderers (Adelle & Helen) with the exploitative moms vulgarly prostituting their daughters for a chance of becoming another Shirley Temple (whose precocious adult appeal always seemed to border the perverse and freakish). What’s the Matter with Helen? envisions Hollywood as a place of grotesque misfits lured by vague promises of happiness and  hope for renewal and regeneration. Stage mothers seek to reclaim their youth vicariously through their daughters, Helen seeks to redeem her damned soul through religion (as presented, just another arm of show business), and Helen strives to reclaim her lost youth and live the idealized life she's learned from movies and movie magazines.
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It was true in the 1930s and it's true now: no one comes to Hollywood to face reality

PERFORMANCES
Although it has been said that Debbie Reynolds was insecure about her ability as a dramatic actress during the making of What’s the Matter with Helen?, its actually Oscar-winner and Actors Studio alum Shelley Winters who seems to be going through the motions here. She's really very good playing a latent lesbian whose bible-thumping morality causes her to deny and suppress her nature to a psychopathic degree; but it's a performance I've seen her give so many times before, anything unique she brings to the character is lost in a haze of half-remembered stutters, whimpers, nervous flutters, and expressions of slack-faced befuddlement from other films. If there's any complaint I have with her performance, it's that she pitches Helen's instability so high so soon that she leaves her character nowhere to go. This leaves Helen's feelings of attraction for Adelle, her mounting jealousy, and not-unfounded desire to persuade her "sane" friend to face a potentially dangerous reality as the only compelling arcs of her character.
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Sexually repressed Helen caresses (and sniffs!) Adelle's satin teddy.
The film's lesbian subplot is enhanced by claims in the rather nutty memoirs of Reynolds' ex-husband Eddie Fisher that Debbie Reynolds and Agnes Moorehead carried on a years-long affair
As the selfish and pretentious Adelle (her rinky-dink Iowa dance studio is christened, Adelle's New York School of Dance) Debbie Reynolds is surprisingly effective in a role originally offered to Joanne Woodward, Shirley MacLaine, and Rita Hayworth. With her girlish cuteness matured to a slightly brittle hardness, Reynolds creates a character that plays both to and against our sympathies. Her Adelle may harbor illusions of Hollywood stardom more appropriate and realistic to a woman half her age, but as she is revealed to indeed be a talented dancer and desirable beauty (enough to land the to land a Texas millionaire), one can easily imagine her circumstances as being a woman feeling trapped in a small Midwest town, perhaps married and saddled with a child at too young an age. Her pragmatism looks like sanity, but it may be nothing more than a determination born of bitterness at feeling cheated in life, and a resolve to have her reality match up with what she's seen (and feels entitled to) on the big screen.
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In a rare, intoxicating moment when her real life lives up to her fantasies, Adelle becomes the center of attention when she dances the tango at a speakeasy with a suave stranger. In keeping with the film's themes of  peeling away at Hollywood artifice, unknown to her, the handsome stranger is actually a gigolo surreptitiously paid for by her date.
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The only Academy Award attention What’s the Matter with Helen? garnered was a well-deserved nomination for the splendid period costume designs of Morton Haack (nominated for Reynolds' The Unsinkable Molly Brown and The Planet of the Apes). In fact, for a low budget feature, What’s the Matter with Helen? is an atmospherically gritty looking film (suffering a bit from an over-obvious backlot set) with a fine eye for period detail.
Reynolds engages the services of William Tuttle, her makeup man from Singin' in the Rain, legendary hairdresser to the stars Sydney Guilaroff for the those stiff-looking, but period-appropriate wigs, and Lucien Ballard (True Grit, The Wild Bunch) as cinematographer.
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For those interested in such things, Debbie Reynolds looks striking and gets to model a slew of gorgeous 30s  getups and frocks. Ms. Winters, not so much.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Openly gay director Curtis Harrington in his posthumously published book, Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood (Harrington passed away in 2007, the book published in 2013) wrote: “Of all my films, 'Helen' is the one I personally like the best.” And its not difficult to understand why. Its a darkly amusing, surprisingly gratifying film that works, perhaps only intermittently, as a thriller (those musical numbers, enjoyable as they are, go on far too long ,and succeed in destroying tension and suspense) but consistently as a macabre and off-beat melodrama with a terrific setting and premise.
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What’s the Matter with Helen? is a true favorite of mine, hindered chiefly by slack pacing and perhaps, in angling for a GP-rating over a boxoffice-prohibitive R, too much postproduction tinkering. Nevertheless, it is a movie I consider to be a good deal smarter than usually given credit for, and it boasts a memorable dramatic performance from living-legend Debbie Reynolds. (The supporting cast is also particularly good. Look for The Killing's Timothy Carey and Yvette Vickers of Attack of the Giant Leeches - a personal fave.)
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So if you don't mind knowing the ending beforehand and are willing to risk having the Johnny Mercer song, "Goody Goody" stuck in your head for days afterward. I'd recommend paying Helen and Adelle an extended visit.
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BONUS MATERIAL

That all-purpose backlot building
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The Iowa courthouse in What's the Matter with Helen? (above) served as a Hospital in 1967s Hot Rods to Hell (below) and as a high school in a 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone (bottom)
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Do It Debbie's Way
Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters reunited in 1983 for the laugh-a-minute home exercise video, Do It Debbie's Way (YouTube clip HERE). You haven't lived until you've seen an aerobics class in which a continually disruptive Shelley Winters (in a "I'm Only Doing This For Debbie" sweatshirt) cries out, "How many girls here have slept with Howard Hughes?"(a surprising number of hands go up), or hear Reynolds say aloud to no one in particular, "If I only had a hit record I wouldn't have to do this!" 

What's The Matter With Helen? Radio spot HERE

What's The Matter With Helen?: The entire movie is available on YouTube HERE (Thanks, Peter Lappin!)

Copyright © Ken Anderson
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WALK ON THE WILD SIDE 1962

March 31, 2014, 4:57 pm
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If prostitution didn’t exist, Hollywood most certainly would have had to invent it. How else to surmount the troubling obstacle presented to screenwriters hired to develop female characters not defined by the title of wife, mother, or girlfriend? How else to include as much sex, salaciousness, and female objectification as possible while still being able to tent-pole the dual obligations of providing just enough have-your-cake-and-eat-too moralizing necessary to keep one step ahead of the censors, and the proper amount of after the fact, self-righteous finger-wagging to placate guilty audiences?
America loves its sex, violence, and debauchery, but never really lets itself enjoy the fun it has rolling around in the gutter unless also afforded the opportunity to give itself a good slap on the wrist after it’s all over. This need to have one’s "sensitive adult material" served up with a healthy dose of dogma goes a long way toward explaining why a moralizing piece of Hollywood sleaze like Walk on the Wild Side is such an enduringly entertaining hoot. 
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Laurence Harvey as Doug Linkhorn
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Jane Fonda as Kitty Twist (nee Twistram)
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Capucine as Hallie Gerard
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Barbara Stanwyck as Jo Courtney
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Anne Baxter as Teresina Vidaverri
Published in 1956, Algren’s anecdotal, relentlessly downbeat, essentially unfilmable (at least in 1962) Depression-era novel A Walk on the Wild Side, bears little resemblance to the sanitized movie made from it beyond a few character names and a title minus the “A.”  The film version, rumored (rather remarkably) to be the result of no less than six writers, among them playwright Clifford Odets (The Country Girl) and screenwriter Ben Hecht (Spellbound), strives to be a tale of lost souls searching for redemption through love on the sordid side of the streets of New Orleans, but for the filmmakers, balancing sexual candor and social uplift proves a burden far too unwieldy. In the end, the movie promoted with the self-serving warning “This is an ADULT PICTURE - Parents should exercise discretion in permitting the immature to see it,” was no more than another Hollywood soap opera.
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The composition of this shot pretty much sums up Walk on the Wild Side's major conflict 
The time is the 1930s (you’ll just have to take the filmmaker’s word for that). After the death of his ailing father: an alcoholic, unordained preacher - Arroyo, Texas farm boy, Dove Linkhorn  (Lithuanian-born Laurence Harvey) travels to Louisiana on a quest to find his long lost love, Hallie (French-born Capucine), an amateur painter and sculptress. En route, he crosses paths with savvy runaway orphan Kitty Twist (Fonda) who teaches him the tricks of riding the rails and thumbing rides. Although Kitty has a few other tricks she’d like to teach him, Dove says no to hobo hanky-panky because his heart remains true for Hallie (he calls her his religion). 
After a brief stopover at the rundown café of Mexican head-turner Teresina (Baxter) brings out Kitty’s claws (jealous of the attentions accorded Dove, she steals from the proprietress) the morally offended dirt farmer sends her on her way and stays on at Teresina’s place as a hired-hand.
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The composition of this shot pretty much sums up Walk on the Wild Side's secondary conflict
Cut to New Orleans’ French Quarter and the popular bordello known as The Doll House run by no-nonsense lesbian, Jo Courtney (Stanwyck) and her devoted but ineffectual husband, former carny strongman, Achilles Schmidt (Karl Swenson) who lost his legs in a train accident. The big shocker (to the screenwriters perhaps, but certainly to no one with even a passing familiarity with soap opera plotting) is that Dove’s virginal and virtuous Hallie is The Doll House’s most desirable and sought-after prostitute … Jo categorically taking top honors as Hallie’s most persistent and ardent pursuer.
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As Hallie, statuesque ex-model Capucine embodies the kind of regal, exotic glamour suitable to a high-priced escort ("Upscale and sophisticated enough to take anywhere!") but  beauty aside, the woman comes off as the least fun hooker you're likely to meet.

Of course, when Dove finally reunites with his wild Texas love with whom he shared his first kiss and more: “Afterwards, in the moonlight...we danced like we was celebrating a miracle. A crazy kind of dance. And then we sang and shouted...like it wasn't real.” (a ridiculous reminiscence rendered laughably inconceivable once we set eyes on the high-cheekboned grandness of Capucine) the romantically idealistic hayseed is a tad slow in catching on as to how Hallie manages to afford all those expensive Pierre Cardin-designed frocks from 30 years in the future; but when he does, heartbroken disillusionment gives way to the usual macho proprietary protectiveness.
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The intense dislike Capucine and Harvey had for one another is the stuff of legend
You see, since the film regards Hallie’s lost virtue as something that has been taken from Dove and that he's the principally wronged party, it’s then up to him to take the necessary steps to secure and safeguard its future. Resorting to his father's bible-thumping ways, Dove proselytizes ... I mean, explains ... to an understandably exasperated Teresina (busy meanwhile dousing her torch):
 “In the Bible, Hosea fell in love with Gomer. She was a harlot. They got married but she couldn't stay away from men. Hosea got mad and threw her out. Sold her into slavery. But he couldn't get her out of his mind, so he went looking for her. When he found her, he brought her back home. But it was no good. Before long, she was up to her old tricks again. But he loved her anyway and he couldn't give her up. So he took her into the wilderness...away from temptation. Away from other men. And that's what I have to do with Hallie.”
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I'm sorry, but we're supposed to buy that these two stunning, continental-looking creatures spent even one minute in dustbowl Texas?
The bulk of Walk on the Wild Side occupies itself with being a romantic triangle-cum-spiritual tug-of-war between Dove (representing honest values and true love) and Jo (representing well-dressed depravity and perversion) with the magnificent but I’m-not-all-that-convinced-she’s-worth-all-this-trouble Hallie at the center.
Happily, by way of distraction we have the welcome reappearance of Kitty, the former boxcar good-time-girl transformed into a garter-snapping sexpot as the newest employee of The Doll House; chipper Southern belle, Miss Precious (the always terrific Joanna Moore – Tatum O’Neal’s mom), a Doll House resident who sleeps on a confederate flag pillow and punctuates even the shortest sentences with “The Colonel always said…” ; and sexy, short-tempered strong-arm-man, Oliver (Richard Rust of Homicidal) who has an eye for the ladies and suede gloves to keep his hands nice when he roughs them up. 
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Inquiring Minds Want to Know
Menacing roughneck, Oliver (Richard Rust), needs some answers from Kitty 
Posters for Walk on the Wild Side exclaimed, “A side of life you never expected to see on the screen!”, which is not altogether false given you've got a 4-time Oscar-nominee playing one of the screen’s first lesbians (who lives, yet!) and the daring-for-its-time setting of a New Orleans brothel. The rest, alas, is what Hollywood has always done: a) Offer up endless reworkings of the Madonna-whore dichotomy as soap opera and love story, b) attempt to shock and scandalize while only revealing an conservatism and prudery.
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Joanna Moore as Miss Precious
A personal favorite and incapable of giving a bad performance, this incandescent actress with the very sad life story is one of the bright spots in Walk on the Wild Side

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I'm not sure if the genre has been afforded a name beyond "southern gothic", but I am a major fan of the overheated sex and psychosis dramas of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Carson McCullers. When these southern-fried potboilers are crossed with a touch of the soap-opera overstatement associated with Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann, and Sidney Sheldon ...well, I'm in 7th Heaven. Walk on the Wild Side has all the luridness of Williams, the pretentiousness of Inge, plus all the unintentional humor of anything bearing the stamp of Susann.
There's dialog that sounds as if it were written by a robot; overearnest performances that are nevertheless as limp as clothesline; the ever-present topic of sex that is hinted at and alluded to but never spoken of in even remotely direct terms; and clashing accents left and right -  Texas drawl, Southern twang, Georgia singsong, French, British,  Mexican (sort of).
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Riding the Rails
Jane Fonda recalls her father Henry in The Grapes of Wrath in this shot of Dove and Kitty catching a ride in a freight car
Fans of the by-now-anticipated unwillingness and inability of 60s films to remain faithful to the era they're depicting will have a field day with Walk on the Wild Side's interpretation of the Depression era South. Outside of a few automobiles and some distant dress extras, the look is 1961, through and through. A long time ago a friend of mine who once designed costumes for film told me that this is not an unintentional or careless phenomenon. It's an industry's appeal to the contemporary aesthetic tastes of their audience.
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We're asked to believe that Hallie, a woman who quotes Eliot and asks johns for Brancusi sculptures as gifts, ever had anything to do with a man as "basic" (read: boring) as Dove 
When a studio is forking over big bucks for a glamour actress, they want the audience to see her as glamorous. The concern is that the baggy fashions and severe makeup styles of the 30s (thin eyebrows, bow lips, thick stockings, figure-concealing frocks, etc) will look odd or comical to 60s audiences.
A point well taken, I concede. but it doesn't address the jarring incongruity of seeing 60s bouffants and bullet bras stepping out of DeSotos.
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Juanita Moore as Mama

PERFORMANCES
Where to start? To say that I enjoy all the performances in Walk on the Wild Side is not at all saying that many of them are any good. If anyone emerges from the chaos with their dignity intact, it's Barbara Stanwyck. Not really called upon to deliver more than a professional, standard-issue Stanwyck tough-broad performance, she's nevertheless the most believably passionate person in the film for me. She wants Hallie and I don't doubt it for a minute. I'm actually rather crazy about Barbara Stanwyck as an actress, anyway. She's one of my favorite classic-era actresses.
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The strikingly beautiful Capucine may not be much of an actress, but she's not helped much by a script that asks her to be a non-stop pill from the minute we see her. Male screenwriters are sometimes guilty of writing "beauty" as a character trait in women, and in the case of Hallie Gerard, so little of her passion, restlessness, or joy is captured that we're left to think that she's so desired simply because she's so outrageously pretty. If the Hallie we now see is supposed to represent a broken woman whose life-force has been drained out of her by her having "fallen down the well," all the backstory we're left to imagine requires an actress substantially more skilled than what we're given. You get about as much emotionally out of Capucine here as you would from one of her model photo shoots from the 50s.
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Jane Fonda gives the film's liveliest performance. Liberated from the lacquered, overly-mature look adopted for The Chapman Report and Period of Adjustment (both 1962), Fonda is sexier and looser. Perhaps a little too loose in her early scenes. There's something about "earthy" that brings forth the inner ham in actors. Fonda in her early scenes can't seem to keep her finishing school refinement from creeping into her overly-mannered interpretation of Kitty Twist, railway ragamuffin. Parts of her performance have the feel of an over-coached acting school scene. But she's never a dull presence (unlike some of her co-stars) and really comes into her own in the sequences in The Doll house. She looks amazing as well. The cameraman obviously thought so too, for Fonda's shapely backside has arguably as many closeups as her face.
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Anne Baxter's terrible Mexican accent ("Wha hoppen?") never fails to reduce me to fits of laughter
Laurence Harvey has always been a favorite of mine (owing at least in part to my tendency to develop matinee crushes on birdlike, Tony Perkins types), but he really seems out of his element here. The thoroughly engaging (and sexy) energy he brought to 1959s Expresso Bongo is nowhere to be seen in the tediously virtuous Dove Linkhorn.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Is there some axiom that says the cooler the opening credits sequence, the more likely one is apt to be let down with the film? Outside of the brilliant and stylish art-deco title sequence for Mame which got me all hyped-up only to then lead me down a path of soft-focus croaking, Saul Bass' snazzy, jazz-tinged title sequence for Walk on the Wild Side (assisted immeasurably by the Oscar-nominated Elmer Bernstein, Mack David theme music) sets one up for a film that never materializes.
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Edward Dmytryk would go on to direct Richard Burton and Joey Heatherton in Bluebeard.

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The beginning and end title sequences are the very best things about Walk on the Wild Side. 
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If you've seen the movie, the question that immediately comes to mind is, who took that photo on the left? 
You can take a look at the Saul Bass title sequence on YouTube

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Walk on the Wild Side is, like the 1976 US/USSR collaboration that resulted in the dreadful musical mistake that was The Bluebird, a film whose backstory is infinitely infinitely more interesting than the motion picture released. Conflict-of-interest deals were behind much of the grab-bag casting (Laurence Harvey was being pushed by the wife of the head of Columbia Studios, while Capucine was being promoted by producer Charles K. Feldman). The film was plagued by constant rewrites, deleted scenes (the internet if full of rumors regarding a curiously missing in action hairbrush spanking scene between Stanwyck and Capucine ... be still my heart), constant rewrites, a cast that was often openly antagonistic to one another as well as to the director...the list goes on.
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Nine years later, Jane Fonda would win a Best Actress Oscar for playing a prostitute in Klute(1971)
The end result is a film that is a disappointment as both drama and love story, but a bonanza of unintentional humor and delicious badness. Woefully tame and coy by today's standards, Walk on the Wild Side maintains its historical notoriety as one of the earliest major motion pictures to feature a lesbian character. As the years have gone by, the film has gone on to reveal itself as one with a pretty high behind-the-scenes LGBT pedigree as well. Laurence Harvey, Capucine, and Barbara Stanwyck have all been mentioned in various celebrity memoirs as being gay or bisexual, while Jane Fonda has written in her own book of participating in bisexual three-ways with her husband Roger Vadim.

You'd think a little bit of all that sexual democracy might have wound up on the screen, but no. Walk on the Wild Side remains a tame timepiece and cultural curio for those interested in seeing what kind of film Hollywood thought it was ready to tackle during the early days of the abandonment of the Motion Picture Production Code.
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Copyright © Ken Anderson
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SECRET CEREMONY 1968

November 14, 2013, 3:44 pm
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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Elizabeth Taylor as Leonora Grabowski (I kid you not)
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Mia Farrow as Cenci (pronounced Chen-Chee) Englehard
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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.
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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.
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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. 
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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

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Copyright © Ken Anderson
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OLIVER! 1968

April 12, 2014, 9:52 pm
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Lest frequent readers of this blog (and bless you all, every one!) assume the entirety of my childhood was spent watching only age-inappropriate movies that bore the tag “Suggested for Mature Audiences,” I present as Exhibit A: Oliver!; a G-rated favorite that not only stands as testament to my occasionally allowing the odd kid-friendly film to crack my self-styled precocity, but as proof that, at heart, I'm really a big, gooey, sloppy sentimentalist of the highest order.
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Mark Lester as Oliver Twist
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Ron Moody as Fagin
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Jack Wild as Jack Dawkins, aka The Artful Dodger 
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Shani Wallis as Nancy 
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Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes
Oliver! (oh, how I loathe exclamation points in musical titles) is the big-scale movie adaptation of Lionel Bart’s Tony Award-winning 1963 Broadway musical version of Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel, Oliver Twist. A show that, having premiered to great success in London’s West End in 1960, is credited with being the first modern British musical to be transferred successfully to Broadway. 
Taking place in the by turns poverty-stricken/opulent-wealth areas of a London in the early 1830s, Oliver!relates the parable of workhouse orphan, Oliver Twist (Lester), who, after running away from an abusive apprenticeship, is taken under the wing of streetwise pickpocket, the Artful Dodger (Wild) and finds a home of sorts with paternal thief, Fagin (Moody) and his motley crew of larcenous street urchins.
As befitting any Dickens story, we have a plenitude of scruffy, colorful, supporting characters. A maternal strumpet (prostitute Nancy played with winning charm by Shani Wallace), a brutish villain (the positively terrifying Oliver Reed), and the usual fateful quirks of coincidence and heredity (this time in the form of victim-turned-benefactor/ possible blood-relation, Mr. Brownlow [Joseph O’Conor]) offering the only glimmers of hope in lives ruled by class and position.
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Joseph O'Conor as Mr. Brownlow
That I fell in love with a big, splashy, arguably over-produced musical is no surprise; that said musical featured swarms of singing and dancing children marked Oliver! as something of a departure for me. For in spite of being a mere kid myself – I was 11-years-old when I saw Oliver!– I was inclined to find child actors a distinctly insufferable breed (a point of view that hasn’t altered much over the years). They’re either trying too hard to be cute, tugging too aggressively at our heartstrings, or so grotesquely artificial and self-consciously “on” that they come across as pocket-size adults. That I never got around to seeing either The Sound of Music or Mary Poppinsuntil I was well into my 30s is due largely to the fact that for many years I went out of my way to avoid movies that even hinted at the presence of adorable tykes. Generally, I prefer onscreen depictions of children to hew more closely to how they seem to me in real life: i.e., Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed or Jane Withers in Bright Eyes.

I suppose Oliver! conforms to my flinty worldview by being faithful to Dickens’ customary juxtaposing of unapologetic sentimentality with harsh social realism. An alliance which, happily, leaves little room for cute. In fact, the angel-faced Oliver may be the story’s catalyst, but everyone knows the real stars are Fagin, The Artful Dodger, and the ragtag gang of East End reprobates that hang out at The Three Cripples Tavern. Making his musical film debut, director Carol Reed (Odd Man Out, The Third Man) is to be credited for his deft balancing of the brutal with the bathetic, granting the somewhat softened events and characters of Dickens' novel with just the right amount of edge to keep the still-and-all jaunty musical from slipping into mawkishness.
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Oliver!’s scruffy band of street urchins are well-cast and well-directed, convincing in their overall grubbiness and commitment to staying in character. Contrast this with John Huston’s 1982 film adaptation of Oliver!’s sex-change musical doppelgänger, Annie: a film where the affected, stagy performances of the orphans hint at a premature vocational enrollment that nevertheless fails to prevent them from staring directly into the camera lens at regular intervals.
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Peggy Mount and Harry Secombe as Mrs. & Mr. Bumble
The harshness of Dickens' characters is leavened considerably by these roles assayed by comic actors  
Oliver! is one of my favorite period musicals. And by period, I mean the mid to late 1960s; that brief but prolific moment in time when movie theaters across the nation were full of the sound of music (as opposed to today, where all you hear coming from cineplexes is the whoosh of superhero capes). A time when movie studios, in hopes of unearthing another durable cash cow on the order of Julie Andrews’ nuns and Nazis romp, were falling over themselves buying up the film rights to any and all Broadway musicals. Sometimes before the shows had even opened (for example: the 1968 Burt Bacharach musical, Promises, Promises, which, in spite of several stabs at treatments over the years – one to which John Travolta was briefly attached - never did make it to the big screen).

In 1968 alone, Oliver!duked it out at the boxoffice against Funny Girl, Finian’s Rainbow, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Julie Andrews’ Star! (those exclamation points again…). All elephantine musicals of disparate merit, but each conceived as a roadshow attraction and each boasting studio-bankrupting budgets. Of that roster, only the twin Columbia Pictures releases, Funny Girl and Oliver!, emerged bonafide hits; Funny Girl besting Oliver! At the boxoffice, but Oliver!trumping Funny Girl’s 8 Oscar nominations with a whopping 11, culminating in a 6-award sweep for that film, including Best Director and Best Picture. The latter bit sticking most in the craw of classic film fans.
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The Artful Dodger welcomes Oliver into the fold in the rousing show-stopper "Consider Yourself"
The influence of Oliver! on musicals of the era can be seen in the films: Bedknobs & Broomsticks, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Scrooge, Mr. Quilp, and of course, the aforementioned Annie
Although the recipient of near-unanimous praise on its release (even Pauline Kael gave it a rave), virtually no one happening upon Oliver! today seems able to fathom how a pleasant, inarguably professional, but decidedly old-school and unremarkable musical entertainment like Oliver! managed to walk off with Best Picture and Best Director awards in a year that featured both Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby(a truly galling bit of trivia, as it wasn't even nominated).
Personally, I’d still rate Oliver! as Best Picture amongst those that were nominated: The Lion in Winter– Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn yelling for two hours;  Funny Girl– aka, the Streisand Show;  Rachel, Rachel– Paul Newman gives wife Joanne Woodward a 10thAnniversary present; Romeo & Juliet– hippified Shakespeare mitigated by codpieces.

The problem seems to be that although beloved by many, the passing of time hasn’t been particularly kind to Oliver!. So in failing to be embraced by the same cloak of nostalgic revisionism that came to redeem onetime kiddie-flops like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; Oliver! tends to show up on “Least-deserved Best Picture Oscar winners” lists, unfairly lumped together with genuine head-scratchers like Shakespeare in Love and The Greatest Show on Earth.
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Trouble in Mind
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Notwithstanding the fact that I’m probably the only person ever to get all blubbery and teary-eyed upon just hearing the first notes of “I’d Do Anything” (hands-down favorite song in the entire score, everything about this number just floors me), Oliver! is mostly just a film I enjoy a great deal, not one whose themes resonate with me on some broader, deeper level (like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol). 
Apart from it being my absolute favorite screen adaptation of Oliver Twist ever, capturing the look and feel of Dickens in an appealingly light/dark storybook fashion, I just think Oliver! is one of those solid, wholly enjoyable, escapist movies that so successfully accomplishes what it sets out to do, and does so in a manner that makes it all look so effortless, I’m afraid it has become a victim of its virtues. It’s become too easy to take the skill, talent, and craft behind Oliver! for granted. Which is rather surprising given how comfortable we seem to have grown with mediocrity: i.e., the film adaptations of Nine and Dreamgirls, and Mamma Mia ! (there’s that punctuation again…).
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Oliver! turns orphan Oliver Twist into something of a co-star in his own story, so my emotional  involvement in the film has always been limited to Nancy's maternal concern for the boy and the lengths she goes to to protect him. On that score, Shani Wallis' performance is a real standout.
Oliver! is far from a perfect film, and in a way, I fully get how people can admire it and respect it, yet still not find it to be their cup of tea (insert British joke here). I relate this to my own feelings about the film version of My Fair Lady, a perfectly wonderful musical of its kind, but one I can barely tolerate. If you're not already fond of musicals, Oliver! is one so traditional in form, content and execution that its unlikely to produce many converts. The opening scenes at the workhouse, stylized and theatrical, take some getting used to, and by the time they launch into the sing-songy title tune, non-fans are likely to be heading for the exits. The only part that drags for me is the ballad, "As Long as He Needs Me," a song well-performed by Wallis, but so sung to death on variety shows during the 60s that all it inspires in me is a Pavlovian need to take a restroom break.
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Hugh Griffith as The Magistrate

PERFORMANCES
As is often the case with films, the best roles in Oliver! belong to the villains. Thus it’s hardly a surprise that Ron Moody’s Fagin and Jack Wild’s Artful Dodger were the performances singled out for Oscar nods. Personal favorite, 15-year-old Jack Wild, the real breakout star of Oliver!, is like a Cockney Cagney, commanding his scenes with an assurance and star-quality that easily justified his short-lived tenure as a 70s preteen heartthrob and star of the preternaturally weird TV show, HR Pufnstuf.
As Yul Brenner so embodied the King of Siam in The King and I that I thereafter could never picture anyone else in the role, such is true of Ron Moody's Fagin. His may not be the sinister character of the book (Alec Guinness' grotesque performance and makeup in David Lean's 1948 version of Oliver Twist may be closer to what Dickens had in mind, but I seriously can't even watch it) but Moody's hammy take on Fagin as a harmless, self-interested charlatan is more to my liking.
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Beating out possible contenders Peter Sellers, Peter O'Toole, and (God help us) Dick Van Dyke, relative unknown Ron Moody had the opportunity to recreate the role he originated on the London stage
Oliver Reed (nephew of Oliver!'s director, Carol Reed) is unsurpassed at playing brooding heavies, and his Bill Sikes is no exemption. Indeed, to hear surviving cast members tell it, Oliver Reed was every bit the holy terror his reputation made him out to be during filming, “He got one of my dancers pregnant!” blurted out choreographer Onna White during a 1998 Oliver! screening Q & A when asked about whether or not Reed was "difficult.” 
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Something that could never happen in today's all-access, Internet environment, for years Columbia Pictures was able to keep secret the fact that the angelic singing voice coming out of  9-year-old Mark Lester was actually that of 22-year-old Kathe Green, daughter of  Johnny Green Oliver!'s Oscar-winning music arranger.
It's as easy to see why sweet-faced Mark Lester (who readily concedes to being tone-deaf and uncoordinated) was cast as it is to overlook his understated contribution to the film. His is a reactive and sympathetic role, and on both fronts the appealingly natural actor triumphs.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
You'd have to had lived as long as I and bore witness to the gradual decline in all things musical and terpsichorean (don't get me started ... Rob Marshall/Glee/animated musicals) to understand the feelings of relief and gratitude that converge within me when I watch a film like Oliver!. What a miracle just to see a live-action musical that actually holds together! To have a cohesive plot that doesn't insult intelligence; tuneful songs staged and choreographed with variance (some intimate, some large-scale, some comedic) and innovation; actors who (by and large) can sing, dance AND act; British roles assayed by actual British actors; and, most importantly a director with a cinematic eye who knows how to use film to tell a story.
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I love Oliver!'s whimsical art direction and set design
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Second-Act opener "Who Will Buy?": Probably one of the best large-scale choreographers of her day, Onna White (Bye Bye Birdie) pulls out the stops in Oliver!'s massive musical set pieces
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Example of the amazing work by cinematographer Oswald Morris (The Wiz) 
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 Jack Wild, Shani Wallis, Mark Lester, and Shelia White as Bet (Nancy's younger sister)
"I'd Do Anything" (above): a perfect example of a musical number that could have ground the film to a halt, but director Reed and choreographer Onna White keep it light and amusing while using it as a device to reveal character and relationships. The song is performed as an unwitting parody of the kind of life Oliver is actually born to, but beneath the lyrics of exaggerated romantic fealty and behind the spoofing formal airs and graces, the characters are revealing their genuine familial attachment to one another: Nancy and Bet the surrogate mothers, Fagin the stern (but ultimately playful) father. We see the origin of Nancy's protectiveness toward Oliver (she sees right away that he's not like the others), and get to contrast this more humane communal environment for wayward boys with that of the government-run workhouses. The entire number is a marvelously conceived and shot (check out how many camera angles they squeeze out of that small set), the song is adorable, and I can say it's honestly my favorite sequence in the entire movie.
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A favorite unsung character in Oliver! is Bill Sikes' faithful dog, Bulls Eye 
Oliver Reed in Life magazine 1968: “Every actor knows better than to appear with animals or children, so here I am with a bloody dog and all these kids!” 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
While I think I've made a pretty good case for Oliver!, cataloging its merits apropos my fondness for it, I’d be less than honest if I didn't also reveal that no small part of the soft spot I harbor for this film are tied to the nostalgia and sentiment I attach to the time, place, and circumstances by which I first came to know of it.
Oliver! premiered as part of a Christmas season roadshow/reserved ticket engagement at San Francisco’s Alexandria Theater in 1968, but as there were five of us in our household and therefore too pricey, we had to wait a few months later when it opened wide (“At popular prices!”), sans overture, intermission, and exit music. It played for weeks at my beloved Embassy Theater on Market Street – site of so many of my fondest early moviegoing memories – and I returned every weekend. I think I saw Oliver! about six times. But the best thing about seeing Oliver! for the first time was that my mom went with us.
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My mom and dad were divorced at the time and my mom was several years from meeting my stepfather-to-be, so as a single, working mother of four, she counted on me and my three sisters going to the movies on Saturdays as a way to get a little peace and quiet around the house. However, on this occasion we managed to talk her into going with us, and I'll never forget how much fun it was seeing her lose herself in the movie. She was smiling, laughing, and in general acting just like one of us. My mother loved musicals (one of my sisters is named after June Allyson) and if you could have seen her that day you'd have sworn she'd transformed into a teenager right before your eyes. At one point during the "Consider Yourself" number I thought someone had kicked my seat, only to soon realize that the entire row was moving due to my mom bouncing in her seat and tapping along with the rhythm! One of my happiest memories of that day is the picture I have of my hardworking mother – seen out of the corner of my eye – softly singing along with the music, looking like the happiest little girl in the world. 

Sadly, my mom passed away just last year this month, and in knowing that Oliver! was one of her favorite movies, I guess I can't help but associate it with very happy memories. 

BONUS MATERIAL
Childhood ain't what it used to be.

You can read about the sad circumstances of the late Jack Wild's adult life online. Take a look at this interview from 2002 (he passed away in 2006) in which he talks about his career and Oliver! YouTube

Mark Lester kept a pretty low-profile in his post-Oliver! days (he's an osteopath now) emerging from obscurity in 2013 alleging to be the sperm-donor father of Michael Jackson's kids (!!!) HERE

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Copyright © Ken Anderson
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STRAIT-JACKET 1964

April 24, 2014, 8:03 pm
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“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small!”– Norma Desmond Sunset Blvd.

Perhaps that oft-quoted Gloria Swanson line is so memorable because it conveys so much Hollywood truth. I know I’m certainly of that opinion when it comes to Joan Crawford: the Oscar-winning actress (with a capital A) dubbed - with equal parts admiration and castigation - “The Ultimate Movie Star,” who saw her decades-long status as the last of the grande dames of the silver screen flounder as the bigger-than-life scale of motion pictures shrunk to television-size. Joan Crawford getting the shit kicked out of her by Bette Davis in the anteroom of their decaying Hollywood mansion in 1962s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was Crawford’s last onscreen pairing with anyone even remotely able to keep in pace with her particular brand of old-school (fading) star-wattage. Following that, every film role and episodic TV appearance only seemed to emphasize the brobdingnagian degree to which the 5'5" actress towered over her second-rate material and dwarfed the lilliputian talents of her co-stars and directors.
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Joan Crawford as Lucy Harbin (close-ups like this don't just happen, folks)
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Diane Baker as Carol Harbin
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George Kennedy as Leo Krause
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John Anthony Hayes as Michael Fields
There's no denying that Joan Crawford was an actress given to theatrically histrionic excesses; a to-the-manner-born camera hog, prone to mannered, over-stylized gestures and gimmicks that morphed over time into camp self-parody. And sure, the harsh, mannish extremes of her late-career physical appearance lamentably coincided with an accelerating artificiality and lack of concern for subtlety in her acting (which wasn't all that subtle to begin with) that caused her to come across more like a haughty female impersonator than one of the great beauties of Hollywood's Golden Age. But however one may feel about Crawford, it’s difficult to imagine anyone thinking the star of Mildred Pierce and A Woman's Face deserved the likes of William Castle; a charming, obviously sweet-natured guy, but arguably one of the most pedestrian movie directors ever to hoist a megaphone.
Rochelle Hudson and Leif Erickson as Emily and Bill Cutler
You'd think, what with my being such a devotee of entertainingly bad movies, I'd be among those who regard "King of the Bs" William Castle as some kind of patron saint of schlock. I certainly can attest to having my favorites (those being: Strait-Jacket, Homicidal, and I Saw What You Did), and even concede that the worst of them are so inoffensively lightweight that they're somehow always watchable, if not exactly enjoyable. But beyond having a nose for truly bizarre and offbeat material, Castle has always struck me as lacking the requisite vulgarity necessary for creating truly epic bad films. Something about him always seemed too bland and suburban, perhaps too decent or too sane, to ever really go to the dark places the topics of his films suggested.
William Castle was a showman, a producer, and an inveterate huckster, but as a director he appeared to have no demons to exorcise, no overarching ambitions, and was without that spark of neurotic lunacy that made the films of directors like Ed Wood (Plan 9 From Outer Space), Bert I. Gordon (Attack of the Puppet People), and his idol, Alfred Hitchcock, so compelling (and weird). In fact, one of my chief frustrations when watching a William Castle film is the nagging certainty I have that all of his films would have been vastly improved had Castle been prohibited from directing them. (See: Rosemary's Baby).
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When I was growing up, Joan Crawford's name was synonymous with B-horror movies. It was years before I knew her from anything other than Berserk, Trog, Strait-Jacket, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 
But while I'm of the opinion that an actress of Joan Crawford's reputation didn't deserve a director as mediocre as William Castle, there's also little question in my mind that at this particular stage in her career, Joan Crawford (and her ego) desperately needed a director as respectful as William Castle. From everything I've read, Castle was so beside himself at having actually landed a bonafide movie star for one of his typically bargain-basement horror opuses (blowsy Joan Blondell had initially been cast), that he treated Crawford in a manner more befitting her days as MGM's boxoffice darling than as the fading star of secondary roles in The Best of Everything (1959) and The Caretakers (1963).

Obsequiously conceding to her every whim (approval over script, cast, and cameraman; 15% participation in profits; hefty Pepsi-Cola product placement), Castle gave Joan her first sole leading lady role since 1957s The Story of Esther Costello. So what if it was in another derivative, cut-rate homage/ripoff in Castle's tireless (tiresome) quest to duplicate Alfred Hitchcock's career? At least Joan and her falsies didn't have to compete with Bette Davis for camera time.
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For Those Who Think Young
Crawford, "Star of the First Magnitude" and Pepsi-Cola Board of  Directors member, was not above a bit of old-fashioned hucksterism
An original screenplay penned by Psycho's Robert Bloch, Strait-Jacket casts Crawford as rural hotbox, Lucy Harbin (“Very much a woman, and very much aware of the fact”). First glimpsed in a 1944 flashback through a Vaseline haze we’ll come to grow progressively more familiar with over the course of the film, 57-year-old Crawford (unconvincingly) plays 25-year-old Lucy as a superannuated Sadie Thompson driven to murder when she catches her faithless 2nd husband (Rock Hudson protégée Lee Majors making his film debut) in bed with another woman (Patricia Crest). Seizing upon a nearby axe as her weapon of choice, luckless Lucy is nevertheless favored with a rare crime of passion twofer: the raven-haired honky-tonk homewrecker lying next to her husband obligingly keeps quiet and stays stock-still, patiently awaiting her turn until after Lucy has completed vigorously bisecting her hubby's head from his bare-chested torso.
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From the repeated, wild-eyed hacks taken at the now literally separated lovers, it's clear Lucy has been driven crackers by the night's events and is soon carted off to the funny farm wearing the film's titular item of clothing. But winning by a landslide in the "worst evening ever" sweepstakes is Lucy's 6-year-old daughter, Carol, whose world-class kindertrauma encompasses being left alone in a desolate farmhouse while her father barhops; being awakened by said father and local floozy, who then proceed to make out in front of her without benefit of a closed door; finally to have it all capped off  with witnessing her axe-wielding mother going postal on the lovers while dressed in a garish, floral-print dress, cacophonous Auntie Mame charm bracelets, and tacky, ankle-strap shoes. The horror!
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Vicki Cos as young Carol Harbin
Diane Baker wasn't required to play Carol as a child, but it's up for debate as to whether 25-year-old Baker would have made a more convincing 6-year-old than Crawford does a 25-year-old
Jump ahead twenty years: Carol is a lovely, well-adjusted (?), budding sculptress living on a farm with her uncle and his wife (Leif Erickson and Rochelle Hudson), about to embark on a new life with her rich fiance-to-be (John Anthony Hayes). The monkey wrench in the works is that her mother, who has been institutionalized all these years, is scheduled for release. Will she be welcomed or reviled? Has she been rehabilitated or is she still a raving maniac with questionable fashion sense? Any way you cut it (heh-heh), the stage has been set for a doozy of a family reunion.
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Ethel Mertz: "Are you insinuating that I'm daft, loony, off my rocker, out of my head?"
Fred Mertz: "Well, that covers it pretty well... ."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Two words: Joan Crawford. For fans of over-the-top Joan (that would be: everybody) who heretofore have had to content themselves with brief-but-welcome snippets of unchecked ham seeping through otherwise reined-in performances held in precarious check by watchful directors; Strait-Jacket(to use the hyperbole of old-movie publicity) gives you Joan Crawford as you long to see her…the Joan Crawford you love…the Joan Crawford whose take-no-prisoners approach to acting and total disregard for the performance rhythms of her co-stars sets the screen ablaze with the fiery passions of a woman’s dangerous desires!
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Smokin'
You’ll never convince me that a director as uninspired as William Castle had anything to do with Joan Crawford’s performance in Strait-Jacket. Hers is a performance culled from hours of self-directed rehearsals and meticulous attention paid to doing “something” every single moment the camera is pointed at her. In fact, to hear co-star Diane Baker tell it, Crawford was, for all intents and purposes, the director of Strait-Jacket; everything she wanted, she got. And for that you won’t hear me complaining. Without Crawford, Strait-Jacket would be as sluggish as most of Castle’s other films. All the scenes without Crawford are inert, exposition-heavy sequences of inexpressive talking heads. 
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Pepsi-Cola Vice-President, Mitchell Cox as Dr. Anderson
Maybe it was the contractually-mandated ice-cold sets she insisted upon (biographers have stated this was as much for makeup and skin concerns as keeping energy up) or the vodka she laced her Pepsis with, but Crawford’s scenes are substantially more “spirited” than anything else in the film. No wonder that, outside of promotional cardboard axes handed out to patrons, Strait-Jacketis one of the few William Castle productions released without one of his trademark gimmicks. Who needs gimmicks when you have Joan Crawford?
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Now, how did that get there?
PERFORMANCES
Evoking Charles Dickens' antithetical quote: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Strait-Jacket is one of Joan Crawford's worst films, yet strangely, also one of her best. Joan Crawford is one of my favorite actresses, and with each new film I discover, my appreciation and admiration for her grows. There's not another actor I can think of who is so good when they are being so bad. The joys to be had in watching Strait-Jacket is seeing Joan the terrific actress going mano-a-mano against Joan the free-range ham.
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Crawford is rather remarkable in being able to wrest genuine sympathy and pathos out of the sketchily-drawn character of Lucy Harbin. She does some of the finest acting of her career in the sequence in which she gazes at the youthful image of herself sculpted by her daughter (actually sculpted by artist Yucca Salamunich on the set of A Woman's Face in 1941). She's so good and rather touching in making you feel the character's melancholy over the years lost and beauty faded. She totally outclasses the film in the sequence. As many have pointed out over the years, had Strait-Jacket not been such an obvious Z-grade exploitationer, the more quiet aspects of Crawford's performance (the early, post-asylum scenes are wonderful) would surely have been looked upon more favorably by critics.
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On the polar-opposite end of the subtlety spectrum is the sequence that fans of over-the-top camp have made into Strait-Jacket's setpiece. In it, Joan's character undergoes a transformation akin to demonic possession when dressed in clothes similar to those she wore 20-years earlier. Shy and hesitant before, Lucy reverts (presumably) to her old ways and turns a polite meet-and-greet with her daughter's handsome fiance into the 1964 equivalent of a lap dance. 
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The sight of a grotesquely-made-up Joan Crawford turning her man-trap wiles on a man young enough to be her son is more terrifying than anything Castle was able to accomplish with his fake-looking axe murders. In the 2002 book, Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography, the authors write that Joan was quite taken with the good looks of actor John Anthony Hayes, and in response to an admiring comment made by someone alluding that Hayes did his acting with his lips, Crawford is quoted as replying, "Yes, and such sexy lips, too!"All of which goes to set up, if not exactly explain, why Crawford's unique method of (wholly improvised) seduction during this sequence involves feeling about the actor's mouth like a Braille student and practically shoving her entire hand down his throat. Sexy.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
"Spot the Real-Life Parallels" is a game that gives zest to the viewing of any Joan Crawford film.
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The Neatness Thing
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"Is that the way you're going to do it?"
Judgmental Joan: No matter how hard you try, you know you'll never quite measure up
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Daughter Issues
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Joan always knew where to find the boys AND the booze
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"Tina!! Bring me the axe!!"
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I've never fully understood why it is so many "bad" movies outdistance more accomplished films when it comes to sheer entertainment value, so perhaps that why I treasure them so much. With boring and banal the most frequent by-product of professional ineptitude, there's something serendipitous about discovering...what can you call it...the perfect "hot mess" that is an enjoyably bad movie.
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Meeting the In-Laws
Edith Atwater and Howard St. John as Alison &Raymond Fields
Strait-Jacket is a veritable laundry list of filmmaking flaws: a terrible, ill-used music score; bland performances (although I really like Diane Baker and George Kennedy); unsure pacing; flat cinematography and editing that appears calculated to enhance the artificiality of the violence; a cliche-filled script; and no distinct visual style beyond- make sure you can see it, make sure it's in focus. Yet it's a movie I can watch over and over and still find new things to enjoy. The breeziest 93 minutes of film you're likely to see. Of course, the one-of-a-kind, force of nature known as Joan Crawford accounts for 90% of this.
But whether you watch for the talent or the travesty, Strait-Jacket doesn't disappoint and is one of the few of my favorites I'd label a must-see! Certainly one of the last opportunities to see this particular big star before the pictures got smaller.
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Watch Your Step, indeed!

BONUS MATERIAL
The absolutely delightful "How to Plan a Movie Murder" featurette for Strait-Jacket with Joan Crawford, William Castle, and screenwriter Robert Bloch: HERE

Diane Baker enjoyed a good relationship with Joan Crawford and appeared with the actress in The Best of Everything and Strait-Jacket, but according to Baker, that relationship soured during the making of Della (originally titled Fatal Confinement)an unsold 1964 pilot for a Paul Burke TV series called Royal Bay. See the episode in its entirety on YouTube  HERE

Joan Crawford's wardrobe & makeup tests for Strait-Jacket HERE

1964 audio only interview with Joan Crawford in which she speaks of Strait-JacketHERE

1970 David Frost  Interview with Joan Crawford HERE

1982 Interview with Steven Spielberg on working with Joan on Night GalleryHERE
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Pure William Castle
The Columbia Lady loses her head
Copyright © Ken Anderson
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AIRPORT 1970

May 1, 2014, 6:34 pm
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When I watch a movie like Airport –producer Ross “I gave the public what they wanted”Hunter’s arthritically old-fashioned, $10 million, all-star, big screen adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s ubiquitous 1968 bestseller– I’m reminded once again why the late 60s and 70s represent my absolute favorite era in American filmmaking.

The diversity of what was hitting the theaters was astounding!  There were arty films like Puzzle of a Downfall Childand Nicolas Roeg’s Performance; the underground films of Andy Warhol (Trash); big-budget acts of desperation like Myra Breckinridge; mainstream documentaries (Woodstock); the maturation of the blaxploitation genre in Cotton Comes to Harlem; overblown musicals (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever); films with ground-breaking topics like The Boys in the Band; the sexually subversive comedies, Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Something for Everyone; amazing foreign entries like Le Boucheand The Garden of the Finzi-Continis; forgotten oddities of the Dinah Eaststripe; Disney’s stick-in-a-time-warp family things (The Boatniks); and breakout independents like John Avildsen’s Joe. And in the middle of all this, a big, glossy, old-Hollywood gasbag melodrama in the tradition of Grand Hotel meets The V.I.Ps…all in the same year!
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"What a dramatic airport!"- Mel Brooks "High Anxiety" (1977)
Looking over this list (which is merely the tip of the iceberg of what 1970 produced), I can scarcely get over what a broad array of films were released. As Hollywood blindly stumbled about in a struggle to conduct business-as-usual while trying to keep in step with changing public tastes, we movie-lovers reaped the benefit of their creative identity crisis. As I was just a kid at the time, I had no awareness of the severe economic toll Hollywood’s growing pains were taking on the industry; all I knew is that you could look at the entertainment section of a newspaper (back when they could advertise X-rated and G-rated films side by side) and be greeted by what then appeared to be the entire spectrum of human experience. This is why I fell in love with movies.
And I had no reason to believe that this wasn’t how it was always going to be.

Of course, what I'm hoping to achieve in detailing this brief and shining, Camelot-esque moment for film lovers known as the New Hollywood, is the granting of a kind of artistic clemency for myself. A nostalgic leniency, if you will, that begs one to take into account how, by growing up in an atmosphere of democratic tolerance for films of all kinds, I was able to reconcile the glaring inconsistency–not to mention lapse in taste–behind being 12-years-old and having as my absolute top, top, favorite movies: Rosemary’s Baby, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,Midnight Cowboy, …and Airport.
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Burt Lancaster as Mel Bakersfeld
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Jean Seberg as Tanya Livingston
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Dean Martin as Vernon Demerest
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Jacqueline Bisset as Gwen Meighen
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Miss Helen Hays as Ada Quonsett
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George Kennedy as Joe Patroni
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Maureen Stapleton as Inez Guerrero
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Van Heflin as D.O Guerrero
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Dana Wynter as Cindy Bakersfeld
Yes, Airport. The movie that piles up clichés higher than the snow drifts disabling a Boeing 707 in the middle of a busy runway, and whose production values, dialog, characters, and soap opera complications are all so cobwebby and old-fashioned, movie critic Judith Crist was inspired to dub it, “The best film of 1944.”
Nevertheless, Airport was THE film to see in 1970, and when I did, I went positively dotty over it. I thought it was one of those most exciting, action-packed, tension-filled movies I'd ever seen. I saw it more times than I can count; read my mom's Reader's Digest "condensed book" version of the novel (convinced the abridged version was depriving me of some much-sought-after smut, I checked out the complete novel from the library and re-read it); and I even went out and purchased the soundtrack album...my first!...and wore it out. (And don't even get me started on how off the geek Richter scale it is for a 12-year-old's first LP purchase to be Alfred Newman's by-turns spectacularly overcaffeinated/easy listening score for Airport.) More frightening still, friends and I played Airport with my toy model of a 747 Delta Airlines passenger jet. And how does one go about playing Airport? You try (unsuccessfully, thank goodness) to cram a lit firecracker into one of the rear windows!
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Tanya has a heart-to-heart  talk with her father
A weird hallmark of old movies was the often huge age discrepancy between leading men and their onscreen love interests. The beautiful Jean Seberg was just 31 (although made to look like a well-preserved matron thanks to Ross Hunter's maiden aunt ideas of female beauty) to Lancaster's daddyish 56. Angie Dickinson was Ross Hunter's preferred choice for Tanya Livingston, Airport's head of customer relations and mooning love interest of married airport general manger, Mel Bakersfeld, but Seberg was the one already under contract to Universal. Lancaster (who was a second choice after Gregory Peck) hated working on the film and there was no love lost between him and Seberg. Their lack of chemistry is palpable. 

I'm not going to say Airport isn't still one of my favorite films, for I watch it often. But my enjoyment of it these days is strictly on par with why I repeatedly watch Valley of the Dolls, or The Oscar; which is to say I can never get my fill when it comes to overripe Hollywood cheese. Airport was a huge boxoffice hit and even garnered a whopping 10 Academy Award nominations, but honestly, watching it today, I don't think there are seven five consecutive minutes in Airport that don't reduce me to paroxysms of laughter. And try as I might to access the me who once watched this movie unironically, I swear, it feels as if I'm hijacking someone else's memories
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Gwen has a heart-to-heart with her father
Well, technically speaking, chief stewardess Gwen Meighan is merely dropping the bomb (heh-heh) to her much-married lover, pilot captain Vernon Demerest, that she is pregnant. However, what with the 27-year age spread between Bisset and Martin (she was 25 to his 52) the above caption is maybe just psychologically true. Incidentally, for all the coy verbiage, I can't imagine a G-rated film today containing such a level-headed discussion about abortion without an outcry from the "How do I explain this to my kids?" set.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As the first and least cartoonish of the four airport-themed films in Universal’s franchise, and the film that more or less kicked off the 70s “disaster film” craze; Airportlooks, by way of comparison to the atrocities that followed, much better than it actually is. It’s plot: seven, count ‘em, seven romantic and dramatic entanglements duke it out over a seven-hour period at a busy Midwestern airport plagued by blizzards, airport noise bellyachers, and bombers.

At this particular airport, dramatic tension and impending disaster is love’s co-pilot (infidelity – both real and the “lusting in my heart” variety – is practically a job requirement), while domestic discord and personal tragedy have to ride coach to the first-class priority given to customer satisfaction and comfort. The latter being the chief element of Airport’s plot to really date it.
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Is This Any Way To Run An Airline?
That tower of shrimp and heaping bowl of iced caviar passed without notice in 1970. When I saw Airport at a revival theater in the 80s, this shot got one of the film's biggest laughs. And for you youngsters, the caption is a reference to a series of National Airline commercials from the 60s in which a flight-attendant (Andrea Dromm from 1966s The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming) asked and answered  her own rhetorical question: "Is this any way to run an airline? You bet it is!"
I’ve seen Airport far too many times to be able to ascertain whether or not it still holds up as a viable suspense melodrama, but I can attest to it being a near non-stop parade of ugly, stiff-looking fashions culled from acres of drab polyblend synthetics; static, rigidly blocked scenes (the camera must have been nailed to the floor) with actors giving TV movie-level performances; truly terrible dialog (old-school he-man, Joe Patroni still refers to women as “broads” and “dames.” And while preferable to today’s infatuation with the word, “bitch,” I kinda thought that in the 70s atmosphere of  Diary of a Mad Housewife, terms like broad and dame –the Rat Pack notwithstanding – had gone out with Guys and Dolls); and, in stark contrast to today’s films, Airport displays a rather quaint interest in the lives of the middle-aged.
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 Actress Virginia Grey (Ross Hunter's "lucky charm") appears as the mother of wisenheimer teen, Lou Wagner. Her skeptical-looking husband is played by Dick Weston 
But thanks to the assembly-line professionalism of Airport's trained-in-the-studio-system production team (there's scarcely a soul involved in the making of this film younger than 50) things move along at an engagingly peppy clip. Director/screenwriter George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street, Teacher's Pet) genuinely fashions a pretty solid (and silly) entertainment from this faithful adaptation of Hailey's exhaustively researched novel, the laughs arising mostly out of the drop-dead serious manner in which all this nonsense is delivered.
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Lloyd Nolan as Head of US Customs, Harry Standish
"First I look in their eyes, then the luggage."  Kill me now.
PERFORMANCES
Not counting her dubbed walk-on as Miss Goodthighs in Casino Royale (1967), Airport was my first Jacqueline Bisset movie. And along with being bowled over by her beauty and "Pip pip, cheerio!" British accent, I remember being quite taken with the strength of her character. Gwen Meighen is no Ellen Ripley (Alien), but she was as close as one got to a liberated heroine in those days. Not only does she decide for herself what to do about her unplanned pregnancy, but she's so fearless and take-charge under pressure. This movie may have been made by a bunch of old men, but they are light years ahead of the curve in giving us a female character who "acts" in the face of danger, rather than shriek and collapse into hysterics. Universal contract player Katherine Ross was the original choice for the role and was subsequently put on suspension for turning it down (this she turns down, and says yes to The Swarm?). Bisset, having earlier stepped into the Mia Farrow role in Frank Sinatra's The Detective at the last minute, was used to being second-string.
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I think my favorite scenes are those in which Bisset behaves more like the kind of flight-attendants we've grown accustomed to in modern air travel. She is terrifically authoritative and stern, and I love the reactions of the other passengers...as if rudeness hadn't been invented yet.  Here, Whit Bissell (I Was a Teenage Werewolf) tries to intercede in Bisset's elder-abuse of stowaway Helen Hayes. Meanwhile, hopeful bomb-toter Van Heflin tries to act as if nothing is happening. No matter what you might think of the movie as a whole, this latter segment of Airport is pretty bravura stuff. (The blond pictured between Bisset and Hayes is Pat Priest, the 2nd Marilyn on the hit TV show The Munsters) 

While Bisset continues to dominate the film for me (she's practically the baby in the cast), over the years I've come to grow ever fonder of the laid-back performance of Dean Martin. His popular variety show was still on the air when Airport came out, but I honestly didn't care for him much as a kid. These days I rank him as my all-time favorite male vocalist (my iPod is overflowing with his mellow crooning) and his screen appearances which I once dismissed as being too casual, have actually aged rather well, coming across as appealingly natural and underplayed compared to the stiff formality of actors like Burt Lancaster.
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Irish-descended Maureen Stapleton and Van Heflin perhaps looked like no one's idea of Hailey's Inez and Dominic Guerrero, but they give two of the more compelling performances in the film. Compelling or not, when I was a kid, all I remember about this scene was being preoccupied with Stapleton filling those sugar dispensers.
In a film of questionable performances, it's odd that Helen Hayes' (sorry, Miss Helen Hayes') Oscar-winning turn as Ada Quonsett (described in the movie's trailer as "The mind-boggling, huggable perpetual stowaway!") is the one character I can barely abide (Kennedy's Joe Patroni runs a close second). Afflicted with a terminal case of the cutes and employing every little old lady cliche devised since the beginning of time, Hayes' is a hammy, vaudeville turn more in tune with a knee-slapping episode of The Andy Griffith Show than a major motion picture. But it's the kind of performance that wins Oscars (see: Margaret Rutherford in 1963s The V.I.Ps). While I like her very much in her scenes with Bisset (she gets slapped, afterall), I really wouldn't have minded too much had her character been one of the airline's casualties. Oh, and in addition, I have to race for the mute button every time she appears onscreen accompanied by her "adorable" cartoon-appropriate theme music. Both Shirley Booth and Claudette Colbert were originally considered for the role but spared themselves the schtick.
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OK, the look she's giving this self-medicating nun (character actress Mary Jackson) is pretty hilarious.
Perhaps this reveals me to be the terrible person I probably am, but next to Bisset's stewardess (I know, I know...flight-attendant) my favorite character in Airport is actually Dana Wynter as Mel's fed-up, socialite wife, Cindy. Even if it's only for the reason that she is so unrelentingly one-note and perpetually pissed-off , I find her character to be an absolute hoot! Not only does she begin every conversation at full-throttle harpy, but here's a woman who braves the city's worst blizzard in 30 years (in mink, yet) just to rip her husband a new asshole. She really should have been running that airport.
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Wives don't fare too well in Airport. Perry Mason's Barbara Hale plays Sarah Demerest, the good-natured but long-suffering wife of philandering pilot, Dean Martin, and sister to Burt Lancaster.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The passing of time and post-9/11 changes in airline travel have contributed to Airport acquiring a layer of historical entertainment value it didn't have in 1970. Given that Airport has about the same fantasy-to-reality ratio of any glamorous Ross Hunter production, it's doubtful that the commercial airline experience was ever as stylish as presented here. But seeing as the screenplay follows Arthur Hailey's dedication to airline operation accuracy to an almost Dragnet-level of tedious recitation of just the facts, ma'am; I think it gives a fairly close approximation of flying in the days when one could effortlessly sneak in and off of planes carrying homemade bombs and boarding passes in lieu of tickets.
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Airport features many familiar TV faces among its cast of passengers, all of whom (according to the Ross Hunter hype machine) were given full character names and backstories for "realism."
1. Happy Day's Marion Ross, 2. Bewitched's Sandra Gould (Gladys Kravitz), 3. Everybody's favorite obnoxious passenger ("Nuts to the man in 21-D") Michael Stearns, 4. Face-slapping priest Jim Nolan, 5. Familiar face from practically every TV commercial ever made, Fred Holliday

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
In all likelihood, my fascination with Airport was at least in part due to my taking my very first plane trip just a year before, in 1969. It was a flight from San Francisco to Maryland to visit my grandmother. I don't recall much about the flight itself other than the inflight movie was Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, the whole experience was heady and thrilling, and that the stewardess gave me a tiny pair of wings to pin to my sweater a booklet of color-and-tear postcards which I've somehow managed to hold onto after all these years.
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In trying to figure out what it was about Airport that so captured my imagination back in 1970, I think that maybe among the many scaled-down, low-budget, character-based films rooted in realism that came out in the late 60s and 70s; Airport, in all it's old-fashioned glory, represented something different to me. Too young to be familiar with all the cliches and overworked plot devices, Airport was my first real all-star Hollywood blockbuster, and perhaps, like Ross Hunter himself, I was just hungry for a little taste of old-fashioned, escapist glamour. And while I wouldn't want a steady diet of it, when in the right mood and proper frame of mind, a bit of harmless fluff like Airport can be very, very satisfying.


THE AUTOGRAPH FILES
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You Ever Been in a Cockpit Before?
Gary Collins (c.) and Barry Nelson (r.) play second and first officers Cy Jordan and Anson Harris, respectively

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I got Barry Nelson's autograph when I went to see him at San Francisco's Orpheum Theater in 1977 where he was appearing with Liza Minnelli in the pre-Broadway tour of the musical, The Act (then titled, Shine It On).

BONUS MATERIAL
An in-depth, lavishly-illustrated article about Edith Head and the costume designs (and hairstyles, aka wigs) in Airport can be found at one my favorite movie blogs, Poseidon's Underworld

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"Remind me to send a thank you note to Mr. Boeing"

Copyright © Ken Anderson
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PLAY MISTY FOR ME 1971

May 9, 2014, 12:05 pm
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I have a comprehensive familiarity with the movies of Clint Eastwood that is grossly disproportionate to my relative indifference to him as an actor. Neither actively seeking him out nor going out of my way to avoid him, I’ve somehow managed to see roughly 19 films starring the empty chair monologist of the 2012 GOP convention. That’s neck to neck with the number of Joan Crawford films I’ve seen…and she’s a favorite!   

Part of this I lay at the feet of my older sister. In my youth, she harbored such a take-no-prisoners crush on the former Rawhide star, that whenever one of his movies played at the local theater, seeing it was a fait accompli in our house. No discussion. No argument. No resistance. I saw Paint Your Wagon, Coogan’s Bluff, and all those indistinguishable “rob, rape, ‘n’ shoot” spaghetti westerns of his, more times than I can possibly count. 
The other, more persuasive, part of this I attribute to Eastwood’s rather savvy handling of his career. Clint Eastwood has always had an eye for choosing movies that don’t press too heavily against his self-professed limited range, yet are intriguing and thought-provoking enough to stand alone as films I’m interested in seeing, independent of any consideration of his participation.Indeed, the one thing The Beguiled, Tightrope, The Bridges of Madison County, Unforgiven, A Perfect World, Million Dollar Baby, and Sudden Impact all have in common is that, based on storyline alone, each is a movie I’d be clamoring to see no matter the star. 
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Clint Eastwood as David Garver
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Jessica Walter as Evelyn Draper
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Donna Mills as Tobie Williams
Can we all pause for a moment to appreciate these awesome/awful 70s hairdos? 
Clint rocks an intricately-sculptured, casual mass of blow-dried masculinity, while Walters and Mills both sport saucy variations on the ubiquitous Jane Fonda/Susannah York/Carol Brady layered shag .

The plot of Play Misty for Me is as simple as it is familiar: David Garver (Eastwood) is the honey-voiced (and by the look of his bachelor pad, very successful) deejay of a light jazz radio program in picturesque Carmel, California. Although “hung up” on local artist Tobie Williams (Mills) - aka “One of the foxiest chicks on the peninsula” - freewheeling David is also known to play the field a bit; a swinging 70s, love-the-one-you’re-with propensity that lands the smooth-talker in the bed of dark-eyed Evelyn Draper (Walters), a one-night-stand bar pickup who also just happens to be the provocative “Play ‘Misty’ for me” serial caller to his radio show.
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While it would be two more years before Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck” entered into the sexual revolution lexicon; almost immediately David’s no-strings hookup with the pleasant-appearing easy-listening groupie begins showing signs of growing increasingly less zipless and markedly more fucked. Faster than you can say, “boiled bunnies” (see: Fatal Attraction, Play Misty for Me’s unofficial 1987 remake), Evelyn goes from fan to raving fanatic as she launches on an ever-escalating campaign of stalking and harassment, desperate to have David for herself alone, or pledged to ruining his life in retaliation for the perceived rejection.

Always a fan of thrillers, I was keen on seeing Play Misty for Me the moment I saw its Psycho-esque poster in the “Coming Soon to This Theater!” display case in a movie theater lobby. And best of all, not a single gun, horse, or poncho in sight!  But wouldn’t you know it?... by 1971 my sister was old enough to move into a place of her own, and so subsequently, the opening of the latest Clint Eastwood film no longer engendered the same degree of mandatory household allegiance it once had. In fact, everybody was so relived to be freed of my sister’s despotic, Eastwood-stranglehold that I was unable to persuade a single soul to go with me to see Play Misty for Me. (Which was probably for the best, as nobody wants to see a 13-year-old boy watching a movie through the fingers thrust over his eyes.)
"...an invitation to terror!" (Early advertising tagline)
In his first outing as director, Clint Eastwood definitely shows his inexperience (the trite romantic montage and interminable Monterey Jazz Festival footage play havoc with the film’s already shaky pacing), but he also shows a great deal of talent. Play Misty for Me is a thrill-ride suspense thriller that actually works, which is something not every entry in the genre can lay claim to. The original screenplay by Jo Heims and Dean Riesner has an irresistibly relatable premise that Eastwood does justice to by filming in a professional, straightforward manner refreshingly devoid of the usual self-consciously arty affectations that tend to mar so many actor’s debut directorial efforts (that same year Jack Nicholson directed his first film: the plodding and oh-so-dated campus drama, Drive, He Said).
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Don Siegel as Murphy 
As a favor to Eastwood, director Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) consented to appear in the cameo role as the bartender assisting David in his gambit to meet Evelyn. Siegel directed a total of five films with Eastwood and is said to have been instrumental in guiding Eastwood's hand in Play Misty for Me

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I get a huge kick out of movies where the leading men (especially if they are known for their macho and sex appeal) consciously take on roles which seek to poke holes in the Male Mystique. Action fans tend to look on this as emasculating the hero, but if you’re longing to see men portrayed on the screen as something more authentic than wish fulfillment templates of an idealized masculinity, these self-aware implosions of archaic gender roles make for arresting character drama. Warren Beatty did it beautifully in Shampoo, and in the provocative and underrated Civil War drama, The Beguiled (released eight months apart, both The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me were co-written by women) Eastwood and director Don Siegel messed with a lot of men’s heads by showing America’s #1 action hero at the mercy of a housefull of women.
Much like the aloof sex symbol humanized by showing she isn’t afraid to make a joke at her own expense (Candice Bergen in Starting Over, Raquel Welch in The Three Musketeers), I find the macho action star is only palatable to me when accompanied by a healthy dose of vulnerability.

I love how, in an almost Hitchcockian use of screen composition to heighten tension and emphasize character dynamics, Evelyn is so often photographed in poses of superiority over David. She is forever pinning him down, looming over him, and basically reinforcing her dominance. David's diminished importance in the shots seem to reflect his loss of control and power over his life. 
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The vast majority of the characters Clint Eastwood built his career and reputation upon have struck me as being fairly insufferable. No matter how well-chiseled, a monosyllabic hunk of granite is still a rock. That's why I've always preferred him in average-Joe parts like Play Misty for Me's laid-back deejay, David Garver. Playing a man used to things going his way, suddenly forced to deal with circumstances and situations he's not at all sure how to handle, Eastwood's squinty impenetrability takes on human dimensions and it gives me a person I can relate to, if not necessarily care about. The humanizing effect is one big reason why, after all these years, Play Misty for Me has remained my favorite of all of his films. The other reason is the chilling and unforgettable performance of Jessica Walter.
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Jessica Walter was nominated for a Best Actress Golden Globe for Play Misty for Me, but lost out to Jane Fonda in Klute. A case of dueling shag haircuts.
One of the more terrifying things I learned while researching Play Misty for Me for this post is that in 1970, The Hollywood Reporter noted that producer Ross Hunter (Portrait in Black) had purchased the rights to the property and planned to develop it as a vehicle for actress, Dana Wynter (which may go a long way toward explaining the motivation behind Wynter’s witch-on-wheels performance in Hunter’s Airport…it was an audition!) 

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Clarice Taylor as Birdie
Fans of The Cosby Show will recognize Taylor as Anna Huxtable, Bill Cosby's mother

PERFORMANCES
"The only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson,, and that's ME, baby, remember?" - Valley of the Dolls

Say what you will about Clint Eastwood, but he’s not one to surround himself with mediocrity in order to make himself look better. Many of his best films have been the result of his collaborating with talents which (in my opinion) far outclass his own : Meryl Streep, Geneviève Bujold, Geraldine Page, Gene Hackman -  and the results have been all the better for it. Maybe when you’re a megawatt personality like Barbra Streisand, it’s tough to find a male co-star with enough onscreen charisma to keep up (although I can’t say it ever looked like she wore herself out searching); but if you run as cool as Eastwood, in a film like this you’re smart to cast an actress who’ll bump up your game a notch. And it's to Eastwood's credit that he so graciously hands over the entirety of Play Misty for Me to Jessica Walter, whose portrayal seriously puts this film over. She's not just good, she's GOOD in this, and she not only makes Eastwood appear more engaged and present than usual, but gives her underwritten role just the right amount of sane and just the right amount of batshit crazy, to make for a compelling, chilling, and oh-so-convincing screen heavy.
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Armed with precious little in the way of backstory (we don't even know what she lives on. The sole bit of information she discloses about herself is that she lived in Albany when she was 19, but even that could have been a lie), Walter creates a character whose mounting instability always feels as if it's coming from a place very real. Even if it's a reality that only takes place in her head. I first became aware of Jessica Walter in Sidney Lumet's ensemble drama,The Group (1966), in which her bitchy, motormouth character made a strong impression (as it also did, I understand, with Eastwood, who cast Walters after seeing her in the film in spite of the studio pressing for Lee Remick). Of course, I'm a huge fan of her priceless comedic work in TVs Arrested Development, but the knife-wielding Evelyn Draper is a bone chiller that will always make it one of my top favorite Jessica Walter performance.
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Donna Mills (Knots Landing) is saddled with the largely thankless, ornamental role of Dave's true blue girlfriend, Tobie. Serving chiefly as a plot construct, Tobie is designed to make Eastwood's character more sympathetic, provide gender role contrast (she's sweet, soft-spoken, and passive to Evelyn's in-your-face directness), and potentially bump up the body count.
To add to the film's "hip" and "with it" quotient, Tobie has a swishy, gay best friend (my first exposure to the movie archetype that even now shows no signs of abatement) while Dave has the obligatory jive-talkin' soul brother buddy, plus a sassy, African-American housekeeper for good measure.
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Design Technology for Tighty-Whities Had Not Yet Been Perfected
In later years my sister would tell me that this scene was the catalyst for her eventual disenchantment with Clint Eastwood (the uniform, Gumby-like taper of his physique), but I suspect it was really when he started making those redneck "Every Which Way..."comedies. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
My aforementioned affinity for films that tweak the hypermasculine ideal finds its complement in films depicting women turning the tables on men and acting out in assertive ways atypical to the conventions of the horror/suspense-thriller genres. 
I’m crazy about movies like Leave Her to Heaven(1945), Pretty Poison (1968 ), That Cold Day in the Park (1969), Kitten With a Whip (1964), Andy Warhlol’s BAD (1977), Eye of the Cat (1969), Remember My Name (1978), and of course, Fatal Attraction. Not just because I've grown weary of violence against women depicted as entertainment in 90% of what comes out of Hollywood, but because it intrigues me how the mere refocusing of the aggression from female to male in a narrative results in such a huge paradigm shift that even the old feels new.
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My Not So Funny Valentine
Apropos of nothing perhaps, save our culture's weird courting rituals, but in watching Play Misty for Me recently, it struck me as odd how often the plot device of an ardent lover not being able to take no for an answer has been used in thrillers and horror movies, but also in quite a few romantic comedies. It's weird to think that you could take the basic "psycho-chick" plotline of Play Misty for Me, cast Clint Eastwood's pursued "victim" part with a rom-com darling like Sarah Jessica Parker or Drew Barrymore; recast Jessica Walter's obsessive stalker with Adam Sandler or Seth Rogen, and, taking away the knives and death threats...you have the same "chase her until you wear down her defenses" premise that's at the center of I don't know how many bad romantic comedies.
Perhaps that's what makes a thriller like Play Misty for Me click with audiences; we can all relate on some level. At one time or another we've all known what it's like to pursue or be pursued, yet unsure as to whether we're coming on too strong, misreading the signals, or inadvertently leading a person on. Romantic movies keep telling us that we should never stop trying to win the person we love, but then we have thrillers like Play Misty for Me that say, "Enough already!" 
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After an argument, Evelyn shows up at David's door wearing nothing under her overcoat. In 1989 John Cusack would pull a similar stunt (with a blasting boombox substituting for standing there starkers) in Say Anything. Although depicted as a romantic gesture, it always seemed kind of stakler-ish as well. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Coming as it does at the tail end of the 60s “free love” movement and the start of the promiscuous, singles bar era that would dovetail into the joyless, Looking for Mr. Goodbar end of the sexual revolution; it’s difficult not to project onto Play Misty for Me’s rather straightforward thriller plot, a whole heap of sexual cautionary-tale subtext. (I say project because I have a hard time believing Eastwood had time to worry about much more than telling a story well.) 
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Considerable footage (perhaps a tad too much) is devoted to capturing the beauty of the Carmel, California locations
When I look at the film today, I’m reminded not only of how very much Play Misty for Me is a product of its time in terms of clothing (oh, brother!), hairstyles (see above), slang (“Everythang is gonna be everythanng!”), and music (Misty, Erroll Garner’s 1954 classic is a hauntingly ideal piece to build a movie around); but how, as an adult I can appreciate the film as a still very effective thriller, yet allow myself to lapse into enjoying the elements that have taken on an air of camp for me. And by those I mean, how Evelyn, when she really flips out, tends to make me think I'm looking at the young Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development; or how, in these post-Mommie Dearest years, it's difficult (especially if you see this with an audience) not to find Evelyn's hair-trigger mood swings to be reminiscent of you-know-who (after all, scissors are involved in both). 
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In early drafts of the screenplay, David did not have a steady girlfriend. It was decided that Evelyn would appear more dangerous  (and David more sympathetic) if she represented a threat to the couple's "domestic" happiness
What does seem to traverse all generations is the film’s reinforcement of the old-fashioned belief that behind all the desire for sexual freedom, emancipation, and lack of commitment, rue happiness can only be achieved through monogamy, domesticity, and adherence to traditional gender roles.

One of the reasons I think Play Misty for Me was so popular with the public is because long before Evelyn begins exhibiting signs of serious mental illness, she is depicted as a threat and disruption to the natural order of things. David is a skit-chaser, but a reformed one, dedicated to changing his ways and starting anew with torch carrying Tobie. But From the start Evelyn fails to adhere to normative standards of male/female interaction. She’s sexually the aggressor (David would prefer it if she’d wait until HE calls her); she has a temper (maybe women didn’t swear much in 1971, but every time Evelyn blurts out an obscenity, the camera cuts to a reaction shot worthy of The Bride of Frankenstein); and worst of all, she seeks to dominate.
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Thrillers and horror movies are rooted in the introduction of chaos into order. In the 70s, what was more chaotic to the introduction of Women's Lib and the sexual revolution into the order male/ female relations? Play Misty for Me may not have been the first psycho-sexual thriller, but for me, sit still stands as one of the best. 

BONUS MATERIAL
An early ad mock-up reveals that, at least for a time, Universal was going to jettison the gracefulness of the title, Play Misty for Me, and go for the "hard sell" title: The Slasher! (A reaction, no doubt, to the boxoffice failure of Eastwood's prior film, The Beguiled, which suffered from a title which gave no indication of its subject matter, and an ad campaign that intentionally tried to make a character drama look like an action film.) As the term, "slasher film" eventually came to signify an entire subgenre of horror film that rose to popularity in the 70s, an argument could be made that the popularity of Play Misty for Me, it being one of the first (if not the first) entries of the decade, spearheaded a genuine trend.
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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the 70s TV show Starsky & Hutch flattered the hell out of Play Misty for Me in this copycat 1977 episode that finds Hutch (the blond one) the target of a fatal attraction by none other than pert and perky Karen Valentine. Watch the episode titled: "Fatal Charm" on YouTube

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"Annabel Lee" - Edgar Allan Poe 1849
Copyright © Ken Anderson
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HARLOW 1965

May 16, 2014, 6:11 am
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There, there…just put it out of your mind. Just put it out of your mind Joseph E. Levine’s Harlow actually has anything whatsoever to do with the life and career of Jean Harlow, MGM star and Hollywood’s first “blonde bombshell.” Don’t worry your little head over anything even tangentially redolent of the 1930s seeping in to corrode the assertively mid-60s vibe and aesthetics of this lacquered, $2.5 million soap opera. Dispense with all hope of accuracy (from made-up names to fabricated events, Harlow is an absolute work of fiction); logic (Harlow looks exactly the same AFTER her Hollywood glamour makeover as she did when we first meet her as a struggling dress extra); physics (Harlow and her mother look to be roughly about the same age); or credibility (Red Buttons plays a near-mythical character: a “Hollywood agent from Mars” of such ludicrous selflessness and high morals, he makes the denizens of Hogwarts look plausible by comparison).

No, Harlowis a market-driven exercise in expediency and exploitation; a movie as artless and willfully artificial as a Dacron® polyester housecoat. Its purpose is neither to pay homage to its titular subject, nor say anything meaningful about fame, the film industry, or even recognizable human psychology. It is, pure and simple, an act of commerce. A product designed to capitalize on the popularity of Irving Shulman's sleazy 1964 bestseller, Harlow: an Intimate Biography, and a project divined as yet another bid in the campaign waged by producer Joseph E. Levine to sell protégé, Carroll Baker, to the public as successor to the Marilyn Monroe sex symbol throne (Monroe died in 1962).
I've found that by accepting Harlow for what it is – a slick, schlock titillation package with no bearing on Hollywood, history, or even reality as we know it – I am then free to get down to the important business at hand: joyfully reveling in Harlowas a campy, satin-covered, marvelously misguided, miscast, multi-million dollar mistake.
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Carroll Baker as Jean Harlow
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Red Buttons as Arthur Landau
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Angels Lansbury as Mama Jean Bello
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Peter Lawford as Paul Bern
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Mike Connors as Jack Harrison
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Martin Balsam as Everett Redman, head of Majestic Pictures
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Leslie Nielsen as Richard Manley
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Raf Vallone as Marino Bello
For those genuinely interested in the fascinating and brief life of Jean Harlow (she died at age 26 of uremic poisoning), there are several books available which provide a more fact-based overview of the actress’ career than Shulman’s largely discredited work of biographical fiction. The internet offers a wealth of information in the form of written profiles and video documentaries available on YouTube, but better yet, just check out any one of Jean Harlow's feature films (my favorite, Dinner at Eight) if you want to get a sense of Harlow’s unique brand of star quality, and to appreciate how more persuasive she was as a gifted light comedienne than sex goddess.
Look anywhere but to Joseph E. Levine’s expensive but cheap-looking rush job, filmed at a careless, breakneck speed in an (unsuccessful) attempt to beat a low-budget rival Harlow film to the boxoffice in 1965. (The 2011 book, Dueling Harlows by Tom Lisanti, details how Levine chopped months off of his own film’s pre-production schedule when made aware of an independent studio's plans to release a Harlow movie starring sound-alike actress Carol Lynley, and utilizing an inexpensive television-based technology [saddled with the William Castle-esque name of “Electronovision” ] requiring no more than an eight-day shooting schedule.)
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According to Carroll Baker, filming on Harlow began without a completed script 
During filming, a feud erupted between Baker and Levine resulting in the termination of her six-picture deal with his Embassy Pictures,  culminating in her suing (and winning) for breach of contract. Levine's revenge was to have a shrill, witch of an character named Cheryl Barker- modeled to look just like Baker- appear in his film, The Oscar
Truth be told, when it comes to Joseph E. Levine’s Harlow, those unfamiliar with the actual life and personage of Jean Harlow will find themselves at a distinct advantage, for the film is such a wholesale work of inaccuracy, gossip, and time-tripping anachronisms, the less one knows (especially pertaining to the way people dressed and looked in the 20s and 30s) the better. But while Harlow is valueless as historical biography, it's fairly priceless as a laugh-out-loud comedy of the absurd. A shining, overlit example of that uniquely 60s brand of glossy, overwrought melodrama mixed with tentative sleaze; Harlow promised to salaciously blow the lid off the many myths surrounding the life of the silver screen goddess, yet little did audiences suspect that the film's taunting tagline: "What was Harlow really like?" was really a literal, non-rhetorical imploration posed by the screenwriter and producer to anyone within earshot. 
The best way to enjoy Harlow is to ignore its allusions to reality and perhaps see it as a show business parable, the second entry, if you will, in Joseph E. Levine’s unofficial “Hollywood as Cesspool” trilogy: The Carpetbaggers (1964), Harlow (1965), and The Oscar (1966).
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In The Carpetbaggers, Carroll Baker played the Jean Harlow-inspired movie star, Rina Marlowe. In that film, Rina engages in a wild bedroom tussle with Jonas Cord (George Peppard), a character based on Howard Hughes. Harlow affords Baker a second, undisguised go at Jean Harlow in addition to a copycat bedroom scene in which she gets to wrestle around on a bed with another Howard Hughes-based character. This time in the form of Leslie Nielsen as movie mogul, Richard Manley (why some porn star hasn't taken the name of Dick Manley now, I'll never know). As evidence of Harlow's hurried production schedule, note the crewmember captured in the marbled glass in the second screencap above.  In her 1983 memoir, Baby Doll, Carroll Baker recounts tales of filming being so rushed on Harlow that there was no time for rehearsals, the script was being written as they went along, and, barring any major technical gaffes, the printing of first takes was the norm.
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Body Talk
Baker seductively shimmies to composer Neal Hefti's song: Girl Talk a marvelous (ragingly chauvinist) bit of 60s light-jazz that incongruously crops up in this scene taking place in the early 1930s. Although the song went on to become a pop standard of the day (but failed to garner Oscar attention), I've never been able to figure out just what this very modern song is doing in this period movie. But why look for logic? Later in this same montage sequence, Baker actually breaks into a spirited 1960s twist!

Screenwriter John Michael Hayes (The Carpetbaggers) deciding on the film’s point of view: “I can either write the story about a girl who slept with everybody to get to the top, or an innocent girl who fought off the wolves, kept her integrity intact, and made it to the top on her own merits. Which do you think?”           Baby Doll: An Autobiography- Carroll Baker -1983

Seriously?  Those were the only two options?

Hayes, opting for the latter, reduces the entire scope of Harlow’s screen legacy to the banal issue of “Will she?” or “Won’t she,” thereby making this already trite movie even more insipid than it need be. Presented as something akin to a human pressure cooker unable to keep the lid on her overflowing sex appeal; Harlow is introduced rebuffing the advances of a lecherous actor, and the film tirelessly keeps offering up variations on this theme well-nigh for the next two hours.
Made up to look more like 60s-era Marilyn Monroe than Jean Harlow, and carrying on throughout as if she were Ross Hunter-era Doris Day caught in a loop of The Constant Virgin; Baker sports a breathtaking number of flattering, form-fitting outfits, and some of the stiffest, ugliest wigs I've ever seen in a major motion picture. 
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Jean Harlow and her agent, Arthur Landau, take in the rear-projection scenery
The real moral behind Harlow is that talent agents are the most trustworthy people in show business
The plot, such as it is, is summed up by the man who discovers Harlow, the only man who saw her as a talent and not a piece of tail - the saintly talent agent, Arthur Landau (whose portrayal as a paragon of virtue can be attributed to his being the main information source for Shulman’s book): “You’re the sweet beautiful girl next door, but on fire inside.”
And so the die is cast. Through a passive mother (Lansbury), a parasitic stepfather (Vallone), skirt-chasing moguls (Nielsen), matinee idols (Connors), and impotent husbands (Lawford), Harlowis made up of vignettes that keep hammering us over the head with the same message: The world’s most famous sex symbol had a lot of trouble with sex in real life. Zzzzzzzzzz.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Anyone familiar with my twisted taste in movies knows that every complaint fired at a film like Harlow is also a valentine. Bad movies are made all the time, but it's a certain kind of art to make a fascinatingly watchable bad movie, and for me, Harlow is a bad movie classic. It's so gonzo in its half-baked, "1930s as filtered through a 1960s prism" sensibilities, that it reminds me that they just don't make 'em like this anymore. I love every hair on Carroll Baker's ghastly Dynel wig.
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The ever-dull Mike Connors (he'll always be "Touch" Connors to me) plays a Gable-like matinee idol
I love the vulgarity at the core of movies like this. I love the garish sets, the superficial overemphasis on glamour, the tin-eared dialog, broad-strokes acting, and thoroughly loopy disregard for period detail. Perhaps it's cruel and reveals a small spirit on my part, but I have a special place in my heart for grandiose flops like this (that's flop in the artistic sense. Harlow, while no blockbuster, did make money). Joseph E. Levine produced a number of my very favorite "good" films (The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, The Lion in Winter), but as the saying goes, when he was bad, he was better. Harlow, along with  The Oscar, Where Love Has Gone (1964), and The Adventurers (1970) are the best of Levine's worst. Just brilliantly gauche, sex-obsessed behemoths that look like the kinds of films Ed Wood, Roger Corman, John Waters, or Paul Morrissey would come up with if they'd been given the budget.
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In this scene, we're asked to believe that the rather mature-looking Carroll Baker is too young to sign a movie contract without her mother's signature.

PERFORMANCES
While I lost my respect a long time ago for what it meant to be a "Method" actor when I learned that Edy Williams was once a student of Lee Strasberg (yes, THAT Edy Williams of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), I've seen Oscar-nominee (Baby Doll) Carroll Baker in enough roles to know she can be pretty good under the right circumstances (Giant, Andy Warhol's Bad, Star 80). Harlow isn't one of those circumstances. By all accounts Baker was rushed into this film, exhausted, unwilling, and unprepared, and I'm afraid it shows. Her flat line readings are matched only by her unconvincing display of even the simplest emotions. Of course, given the lines she has to speak, I can't blame her for phoning it in.
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Angela Lansbury is a standout in her all-too-brief scenes as Harlow's mother
As is so often the case with female-centric camp-fests like this, the male cast is a dull and sexless bunch. Peter Lawford looks like the walking embodiment of the word, "debauched," Raf Vallone has spark, Red Buttons might as well be wearing a sign saying "Nominate me for Best Supporting Actor, please," and Leslie Nielsen proves once again that when it comes to drama, he's a hell of a comic actor.Angela Lansbury, on the other hand, is so good it's as if she'd wandered in from a different movie.
As a fan of Hazel Aiken, the crass, New Jersey hit-woman Carroll Baker played in Andy Warhol's BAD (1977),  I have to say, Baker seems at her best delivering a sarcastic line of dialog. She only comes alive in Harlow in scenes requiring her to show her contempt for her stepfather, Marino Bello.

Harlow: Cheap, shoddy greaser!
Bello: Nobility runs in my veins.
Harlow: King liar, Prince loafer, Count ne’er do well, Baron loudmouth!

Bello: I’ll turn you over my lap and spank some respect into you!
Harlow: I’m too smart to get that close to your lap.

Bello: Perhaps your agent would find a part suitable for me…
Harlow: He only handles people.

Bello: Hey, sweetheart, your paycheck...?
Harlow: There isn't any.
Bello: But I have a horse running at 3:00!
Harlow: Better tell him to walk.

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Harlow plays fast and loose with history. Paul Bern (Lawford) is portrayed as Harlow's her first and only husband. In truth, he was the second of three.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
They’re called clichés for a reason. Harlow traffics in so many over-familiar melodrama/soap opera tropes, even on first viewing you'll swear you've seen you've seen this film before.

The tortured, waking up in a strange bed in a sleazy room with a sleazy stranger, scene 
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1. A downsliding (albeit, artfully posed), Harlow reacts in silent horror to the depths to which she's fallen
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2. In Valley of the Dolls, a less artfully-posed Neely O'Hara's doesn't fare much better
 The self-disgusted, "I can't stand the sight of you!" cold cream on the mirror scene
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1. Glass in hand, a boozy, bed-hopping Harlow has had her fill of herself
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2. In Queen Bee, Joan Crawford finds even she can only tolerate just so much Joan Crawford

The firm and testy, "This is for your own good!" paternal intervention scene

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1. Harlow's agent tells her she looks bloated, puffy, and older than her years
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2. Neely's agent tells her she looks bloated, puffy, and older than her years
 The hitting rock bottom, "Been down so long it looks like up to me!" beach scene
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1. A drunk and depressed Harlow throws herself a beach pity-party
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2. In Valley of the Dolls, Anne Welles has her dolls with a little water (plus lots of seaweed and sand)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I was eight years old when Harlow was released, but remember absolutely nothing about the whole Jean Harlow mania that that erupted as a result of Schulman's sordid biography. A huge bestseller, I remember my mother had a copy of the book around the house, but knowing absolutely nothing about the actress myself, I paid it no mind. Had I known of the book's scandalous reputation, I'd have been all over it. According to the New York Times, in 1964, all four of the major studios had Harlow films in the works. When the smoke cleared, only Joseph E Levine's "authorized" version and producer William Sargent's black and white, Electronovision version were left standing.
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Carol Lynley's Harlow opened just three months before Levine's version and flopped at the boxoffice (and at the cost of a mere $500,000, that isn't easy to do); Levine's heavily-promoted film opened to good boxoffice but scathing reviews.
Carroll Baker refused to see Harlow, only managing to catch it by mistake three years later when it was shown as the in-flight movie on a plane she was taking to Buenos Aires ("I was trapped! Actually, as I watched it, I was pleasantly surprised,"Baker later wrote). Now who can ask for a better recommendation than that?
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Suffering in Mink; my favorite subgenre of film
That's Hanna Landy (Rosemary's Baby) as Arthur Landau's wife, Beatrice.

BONUS MATERIAL
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The complete, rarely-seen 1965 Carol Lynley "Electronovision" version of  Harlow is available on YouTube ! 
These things have a tendency to be removed without notice, so I urge the curious to check it out, pronto! A very different, less flattering take on Jean Harlow (she's pretty self possessed), Mama Jean (Ginger Rogers in her last film role is very good!), and it has a terrific Paul Bern (the husband who killed himself) in Hurd Hatfield (The Picture of Dorian Gray - 1945). No production values to speak of, but in several ways, an improvement over Joseph E. Levine's version.  See it HERE.

Hollywood Backstage: Footage from Paramount's Champagne Luncheon press party kicking of the first day of filming on Harlow. A chance to see just how miserable the exhausted Carroll Baker looked before embarking on this misguided effort. HERE

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Oh, and can we take a second to talk about that other shameless pitch for a Best Song Oscar nomination, "Lonely Girl" which plays over the film's closing credits? I don't know if it's the song itself or Bobby Vinton's thin, reedy voice, but it all adds up to the musical equivalent of a cat scratching glazed pottery.


Copyright © Ken Anderson
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THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS: Adapting "Rosemary's Baby" to the Big & Small Screen

May 25, 2014, 6:38 am
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Now that the green haze of tannis root has lifted, and the public’s memory of NBC’s four-hour Miniseries Event “reimagining” of Rosemary’s Baby (May 11th and 15th, 2014) is as murky and nebulous as Rosemary’s own chocolate mousse-induced dream; the votes are all in (not very good), the results have been tallied (a ratings bomb, Rosemary en France proved to be no Maria von Trapp), and the line for the I-told-you-so’s starts to the right.

The idea of adapting Ira Levin’s 1967 novel, Rosemary’s Baby and its much-reviled 1997 sequel, Son of Rosemary into a TV-miniseries has been bouncing around Hollywood for years. In 2005, ABC Television acquired the rights and announced a Rosemary’s Baby miniseries for its Fall 2006 schedule. When that project failed to materialize, the network made a similar announcement (to similar result) in 2008. In each instance, I breathed a sigh of relief and optimistically attributed the failure of each project to an 11th-hour attack of common sense on the part of the producers, or, at the very least, a dawning awareness of the fool’s journey involved in remaking a film widely believed to be a modern classic, and regarded by many as one of Hollywood’s few faithfully-adapted, near-perfect films.
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Your Worst Fears Realized
In the "reimagined"Rosemary's Baby, Steven Marcato -seen here exuding more sleaze than menace- is a Eurotrash runway model with blue contacts who's managed somehow to keep his past a secret in spite of going around looking pretty much exactly like your garden-variety, Sunday School illustration of the Devil. 

Thus, in having already been down this road several times before, when I learned that NBC had actually made good on this lingering threat…I mean, promise…to turn Rosemary’s Baby into a four-hour telefilm, my natural curiosity trumped my innate cynicism. I knew I was going to watch the TV remake, even if only to satisfy my curiosity over what degree of hubris could possibly inspire the kind of delusional, presumptuous, thick-headed arrogance necessary for one to think they should try their hand at Levin’s modern gothic masterpiece, when, in 1968, a young, pre-felony Roman Polanski fairly batted that particular Satanic ball well out of the park.
And that was just my curiosity side.

My cynical side suggested to me that the producers, in lieu of trying to arrive at a reasonably fresh approach to justify the need to retell a story already quite expertly told (one more compelling than it simply being “newer” –a lazy pandering to those factions devoted to never watching any film older than their cellphones), merely went in search of a marketing hook. Since the FX Network’s anthology series, American Horror Story: Coven has made witches relevant again, and the success of NBC’s own blood-soaked Hannibal has shown there to be a viable market for network-suitable horror; Rosemary’s Baby: the redux had at last surmounted its most significant production obstacle: the ascertaining of a distinct ratings demographic to which to pitch its advertising.
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Rosemary's Baby - 1968
Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Stanley Blackmer
Directed by Roman Polanski
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Rosemary's Baby - 2014
Zoe Saldana, Patrick J. Adams, Carole Bouquet, Jason Isaacs
Directed by Agnieszka Holland
Well, after much ballyhoo and yo-yoing anticipation on my part, Rosemary’s Baby: The Miniseries Event finally premiered. Two evenings, four hours, and countless commercials later, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised it wasn't the unmitigated disaster it could have been (à la, the dreadful remakes of Carrie and Sparkle), but annoyed that the filmmakers hadn't been able to seize upon anything pertinent enough to the times we live in to either justify a remake, or discourage comparisons to Roman Polanski’s incontestably masterful 1968 original. (Two excellent examples of “remakes” successfully distinguishing themselves from their originals are Kate Winslet’s HBO miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce [2011], and Martin Scorsese brilliantly intense revisit to Cape Fear [1991].)

The original Rosemary’s Baby is more than just an ingeniously realized thriller; it’s a deceptively subtle commentary on the enduring nature of evil, the vulnerability of innocence, and the uncertain relevance of religion in the modern world. It's a film that concludes on a note of moral and psychological ambiguity, leaving you contemplating issues extending far beyond the parameters of Levin's story. By way of contrast, NBC’s version, with roughly 30 more minutes at its disposal, was so plot-driven and devoid of subtext, I found myself not even thinking about the broader “Is God Dead?” ramifications of what it means for the living son of Satan to be born into the world today (neither does the film), merely wondering about plot points that led nowhere (the whole Roman Castevet/Steven Marcato, eternal youth thing) and scratching my head over how a longer version of Rosemary's Baby managed to have less character development. The miniseries left me with nothing, not even a chalky undertaste.
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Minnie & Roman
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Roman & Margaux
There's a perverse wit in having the orchestrators of Satan's plan to overthrow 2000 years of Christian hegemony look like residents of Mayberry. As much as I adore Carole Bouquet in the remake, the vision of evil presented is pure Hammer Films.

Rosemary’s Baby: The feature film, is a seminal horror classic, integral in moving the horror film from the B-movie bargain basement into the mainstream. Rosemary’s Baby: The miniseries, while respectful, ultimately proved itself an innocuous work of professional competency. By any qualitative standard that makes a movie resonate with me (character development, physiological sensitivity, narrative cohesion, use of cinema vocabulary, subtlety) there really is no comparing the two.
However, what does intrigue me is how these two films–so vastly different in approach, yet adapted from the same book–illuminate the intricacies involved in adapting a novel to film. Forty-six years have transpired between these disparate book-to-screen adaptations of Ira Levin’s 1967 bestseller; and what is reflected in the artistic choices and points of view adapted  by the filmmakers says as much about how much movies have changed over the years as it does about our culture.

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NOTES ON AN ADAPTATION
First off, let me address the word, “reimagined.”  There is no such thing. Like the Devil, reimagined is a corporate invention. “Reimagined” is “remake” with its negative connotations surgically removed after first passing through the obfuscating, verbal camouflage of legalese and marketing. Rosemary’s Baby on Ice? Now we're talking reimagined. Rosemary's Baby as Kabuki theater performed by The Muppets - that's reimagined. Merely updating it, moving it to Paris, and throwing superfluous characters and elements from The Omen and 666 Park Avenue into the mix...that's a remake. A desperate, starved for ideas remake, but a remake, nonetheless. If you doubt it, imagine what would happen if every year they gave an Oscar or Emmy for Best Remake; "reimagined" would go the way of the word, "rerun" (which we all know has transmogrified into "encore presentation").
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(In the interest of brevity, Rosemary’s Baby and its remake are hereafter referred to as RB1 and RB2, respectively.)
The Setting
The Manhattan setting of RB1 is a purposeful upending of traditional horror genre conventions. In lieu of a gothic tale of ancient evil set in a dark, abandoned castle somewhere in Europe, RB1 stages its horrors in broad daylight, in the middle of a crowded city, framed against the steel and glass backdrop of New York City, circa: 1966. A Western Age of Enlightenment where reason and logic have replaced fear and superstition. A world where science rules (“I want vitamins in pills, like everybody else.”); our welfare is entrusted to authority figures (“He’s very good. He was ‘Open End.’”); and religion has grown irrelevant (“I was brought up a Catholic. Now I don’t know.”). Contemporary culture’s disavowal of all things spiritual (“There are no witches, not really.”), coupled with the credence granted surface appearances (“Honey, they’re old people, and they have a bunch of old friends….”) is precisely how it is possible for an unimaginable evil to flourish, undetected, right under everyone’s noses. RB1 plays with our notions of safety by showing us how easy it is for evil to hide in plain sight.

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Standing in for The Bramford, La Chimere: an exclusive Paris apartment building
If RB1 is a departure from gothic tradition, RB2 is more a reversion to type. It’s set in Paris; a city more than10, 000 years old, crammed with gargoyles and gothic structures, thus, exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find witches; Roman Castevet, cast as perhaps the least disarming person you've ever seen in your life, looks about as trustworthy as a Bond villain; and this Rosemary is required to ignore one blatant red flag after another while a virtual torrent of dead bodies piles up around her. Why? For no logical or character-based reason than that the story demands it. And therein lies the problem with this remake. Superficial changes to location and character description are no substitute for understanding that Rosemary's Baby has always been more than just a "scary movie." Which is why it has endured. Without making this version be "about" anything other than the mindless tracing of the footsteps of its predecessor; character identification suffers, narrative coherence is lost, and RB2 becomes just another forgettable, plot-driven horror film with nothing to say about anything except, "Boo!"

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The Time
RB1 was released when the Catholic Church was in a state of reformation. Pope Paul VI (his 1965 visit to New York referenced in the film) took strides to modernize the church’s image, while simultaneously, Christian theologian Paul van Buren’s “God is Dead” theories were making headlines. Into this atmosphere came a horror film whose premise was seen by many to be a bastardization of the allegory of the Christ child; a reversal of the New Testament Christian myth that has a divine father figure, a chosen vessel, and the birth–signifying the dawning of a new era–attended by adoring followers. In Levin's fantasy, Satan, Rosemary (a lapsed Catholic, importantly) and the birth of the anti-Christ signaled the dawning of a new Dark Age for the world. A bleak period all too imaginable given the climate of the times (gun violence, political assassinations, urban riots, the Vietnam War). In the socially-conscious world of the 60s, Rosemary's Baby quasi-religious horror parable had an eerie urgency that struck a chord with the public.
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No such urgency occurs in RB2. To an almost hermetic degree, the real life horrors of today fail to intrude upon the cliche horrors on display in RB2. Just going from my own idea of what a contemporary embodiment of Satan on earth would be like, I envision him as one of those conservative, ultra-right wing, billionaires using his vast fortune to convince middle class people that the problems of the world are the fault of the poor. He would use his money to help perpetuate fear, oppress the powerless, accelerate global warming, and subtly promote war, gun violence, and international terrorism. That sounds evil to me. A story proposing Rosemary's pregnancy unleashing this kind of evil into the world, I would find compelling, to say the least.
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How is ultimate evil embodied in RB 2? The best this movie can come up with is that Satan is like a Charlie Sheen crossed with Jack the Ripper. He’s a wealthy whoremonger who hangs around in sex clubs. That’s this movie’s idea of evil, folks.
Polanski knew the only way RB1 would work was to ground it firmly in a recognizable reality. RB2 goes ludicrously in the opposite direction and situates itself within a reality known only to television. The world inhabited by the Parisian Castevets is of the elite rich (are we supposed to be impressed, or repulsed?); racism is non-existent (the film is either unaware or purposely ignores the implications of what it means to present a solitary black woman at the center of a drama in which she is ceaselessly exploited by league of white people); and Catholicism plays no part (mustn't risk offending anyone, for ratings sake). It's a world so artificially realized that some viewers actually thought this Rosemary’s Baby had a happy ending. (!!)

Had Roman Polanski been as enamored of Levin’s spawn-of-Satan plotline as those who’ve unofficially cribbed from it over the years (The Stranger Within, The Devil Within Her, It’s Alive, The Devil’s Advocate, The Astronaut’s Wife), Rosemary’s Baby might have turned out as undistinguished a thriller as those listed. In choosing to place the emphasis on character, Polanski puts the supernatural, genre-dictated aspects of the plot in service of the motivations, interactions, and relationships of principals of the story. This approach perhaps produces a horror film too slow and bloodless for today’s ADHD mode of moviemaking, but mercifully spares us the sort of leaps in logic and character inconsistencies that plague RB2’s more action-driven adaptation. 
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I've never seen Zoe Saldana in a film before, yet without actually becoming Rosemary for me (or any human being I've ever known, the script has her behaving so erratically), I think she is very good. Not so much the epically inexpressive Patrick J. Adams, whose sole, all-purpose expression (noodly wimp) supports a Guy Woodhouse that makes absolutely no psychological sense. On the plus side, Adams is so unrelentingly awful that maybe folks will begin to look more kindly upon the subtleties of John Cassavetes' underappreciated performance.

RB2's saving grace and sole element of inspired casting and character is Carole Bouquet's Margaux Castevet. I absolutely love the changes in the character, how it's written, and how it is played. Mysterious, maternal, malevolent, VERY sexy...it's the only part of RB2 I'd give an unqualified thumbs up.
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I've been in crazy about Rosemary's Baby since I first saw it in 1968 and it scared the crap out of me. It has always seemed to me such an ideal, perfectly realized film; I never seriously thought anyone would really attempt remaking it. Well, they finally did, and after seeing it, I would be lying if I said I didn't feel a slight sense of vindication in my belief that Polanski's film is precisely Levin's novel, beautifully realized, and should be left alone. With so many remakes and continually returning to the well of past successes, so much of our culture today seems on a fast track course of mediocrity and dumbing-down. Example: Had NBC's Rosemary Baby proved a ratings hit, I'm almost positive it would have spawned a series. Something else for the literal-minded made uneasy by ambiguity and require every detail and consequence S-P-E-L-L-E-D  O-U-T.
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A bonafide, genuine, classic film is a rare thing. When it happens along, maybe we should just let it be and just enjoy it, dated material an all. It has valuable. Even if only to remind ourselves that excellence, not imitation, is something to strive for.

BONUS MATERIALS
For the time being, Rosemary's Baby: The NBC Miniseries Event, is available for viewing on HULU and the NBC website.

Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby, the ill-advised 1976 TV-movie sequel to Rosemary's Baby, is available on YouTube. Has to be seen to be believed. It stars Patty Duke, George Maharis, Ruth Gordon (shame on you), Ray Milland, and Tina Louise...as The Movie Star.

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"You're trying to get me to be his mother."
"Aren't you his mother?"

Copyright © Ken Anderson
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UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE 1967

June 12, 2014, 1:27 pm
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“Now, as then, teachers are overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated.”
 Up the Down Staircase author, Bel Kaufman. 2012
(A list to which I might also add, in this day of helicopter parents and overentitled students: unprotected and unsupported.)

Although I lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco at the time, my strongest memory of June and July of 1967 isn’t related to the human “Be-In” that was The Summer of Love (I was only 10-years old, so, in contrast to the timbre of the times, my entire existence depended on trusting people over 30), but to the fact that it was the summer vacation I spent almost entirely in school. Not actual summer school, mind you, but as an observer in the classes of Mr. Mark Thackeray and Miss Sylvia Barrett.
Vaguely evoking the "dueling Harlows" of 1965, in the summer of 1967, two films starring Academy Award-winners cast as idealistic high school teachers facing hoards of unruly teens in “problem area” inner-city high schools, were released within weeks of one another. To Sir, with Love and Up the Down Staircase came out in June and July, respectively, and I spent many hours in dark theaters that summer–an honorary high-schooler in a virtual classroom–receiving a first-rate education in life lessons and human compassion from two of the most inspiring fictional teachers ever culled from best selling, semi-autobiographical sources. 
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Sandy Dennis as Sylvia Barrett
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Patrick Bedford as Paul Barringer
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Ellen O'Mara as Alice Blake
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Jeff Howard as Joe Ferone 
In a previous post on Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), I noted a film critic's observation that it made perfect psychological sense for De Palma to limit the scope of Carrie’s destruction exclusively to that of her school (as opposed to the entire town, as it is in the novel), for the simple reason that to the average adolescent and teenager, school IS their world. 
On that point, I'd have to concur. Back in the day when school comprised the totality of my outside-the-home activity and colored whatever social perceptions a ten-year-old child can lay claim to; said narrow scope of experience led to my favoring television shows in which schools and classrooms played a regular part (Leave it to Beaver, Dennis the Menace, Father Knows Best, Our Miss Brooks, Dobie Gillis), and falling in love with those marvelously reactionary 1950s “high school juvenile delinquency” movies that used to play regularly on The Late Show. Movies with titles like: High School Confidential, High School Caesar, The Cool & the Crazy, and High School Hellcats. Each and every one, a gem.
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Ruth White as Beatrice Schacter
And even if these all-white, staunchly middle-class, sanitized exemplars of Eisenhower-era values were more social propaganda than any kind of recognizable reality to me; in their classroom archetypes (teacher’s pet, class clown, bully, tattletale) and basic school-system templates (teachers, principal, classrooms, assembly halls), just enough discernible truth was able to seep through in these movies and TV shows for me to feel as if the world I occupied - seven hours a day, five days a week - was validated through representation. Having attended mostly Catholic schools with nuns for teachers, one of my true all-time fave high-school movies is 1966s The Trouble with Angels. Alas, none of the nuns I recall were quite as even-tempered as Rosalind Russell’s Mother Superior.
Both To Sir, with Love and Up the Down Staircase were mainstream reboots of the somewhat dormant high school juvenile delinquency film (which, during the early 60s, had largely been supplanted by the motorcycle gang/beach party genre), their near-simultaneous release in the summer of '67 coinciding with Hollywood's reawakened interest in the boxoffice clout of the young. No longer a strictly Drive-In exploitation market, youth-centric movies were now served up a healthy dose of social relevancy.
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To Sir, with Love (a cross between that 1961 British rarity, Spare the Rod and 1955s Blackboard Jungle) benefited from the heavy radio airplay of its ubiquitous title song; its simplified, feel-good, Civil Rights Movement topicality; and the above-the-title participation of megastar Sidney Poitier (Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? came out later that year), taking on what was essentially the Glenn Ford role in Blackboard Jungle– the great granddaddy of all high school juvenile delinquency films in which Poitier was cast (for the first and last time) as a disagreeable tough. Up the Down Staircase, on the other hand, promoted itself largely on the strength and popularity of Bel Kaufman's terrific bestselling book - an epistolary novel consisting of notes, directives and letters (like Bob Randall's novel for the Lauren Bacall film, The Fan) - and in the casting of Sandy Dennis, the Oscar-winning breakout star of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ,in her first starring role.
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When I at last got the opportunity to see both films, I was surprised and relieved to find that each, while covering roughly the same territory (teacher idealism vs. public school reality), did so from very different perspectives: To Sir, with Love taking the more socially-conscious angle of students learning life lessons about accountability and human interdependence; Up the Down Staircase satirically pitting the personal and professional challenges of being a teacher against the obstacles of administrative boondoggling and student apathy. 
Both films get a big gold star from me and rate high on my list of all-time favorite films about teachers and teaching -The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie occupying the top spot). But over time To Sir, With Love, a film I'd initially favored, has begun to feel more quaint and sweetly naive (in spite of the warm, fuzzy feelings these movies invoke in me, I’m not one to disavow claims that neither film fully succeeds in sidestepping the clichéd racial tropes of the well-intentioned Hollywood movie: the black saint/the white savior.), while Up the Down Staircase, a film that once felt too easygoing, has grown in emotional richness for me.
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Mean Streets

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I’ve neglected going into the plot of Up the Down Staircase because, as an example of the idealistic inner-city schoolteacher genre, it’s one of those films (like the manic pixie dream girl rom-com or renegade cop drama) whose genre classification serves as a roadmap. In Up the Down Staircase, the seriocomic adventures of neophyte English teacher Syliva Barrett (Dennis) as she grapples with the undisciplined, underserved students and battle-fatigued, red-tape deluged staff of New York’s fictional Calvin Coolidge High, follows a preset, genre-standardized dramatic arc of: idealism/disillusionment/renewal - as inexorably and unwaveringly as a NY subway train speeding along the tracks.
What saves Up the Down Staircase from being just another high-minded lecture on “what’s wrong with our schools,” is its light touch and sense of realism. It’s most definitely a film with points to make, but thanks to a zippy pace, a great deal of authentic school atmosphere captured frequently with a hand-held camera, and the effective performances director Robert Mulligan (Inside Daisy Clover) elicits from his sizable cast of youthful unknowns, the film makes its points gently and with a great deal of sensitivity.
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Jose Rodriguez as Jose Rodriguez 
If there is any one character in this movie that comes closest to capturing what I was like as an adolescent, this guy is it
During the self-serious 60s, Up the Down Staircase’s cutesy score, pat characters (Dennis has one of every troubled youth “type” in her class), and then-uncommon mix of comedy and drama, had the effect of making the film appear unsubstantial and mawkish. However, what perhaps looked facile in 1967 comes across as measured and delicate today.
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Up the Down Staircase benefits from a documentarian's eye for detail (this scene brings back to me the unforgettable smell of mimeograph ink and the oily texture of the paper), and a feel for the absurdist contradictions typical to the day-to-day operation of a school (the incessant bells, garbled intercom announcements, endless forms, and mindless rules). 
Instead of a socially naïve, politically heavy-handed drama trapped eternally in the time-warp of the issues of late 1960s; Up the Down Staircase, in focusing on a dedicated teacher’s frustration at being hindered from doing her job by distractions both disciplinary and administrative, achieves a kind of timeless poignancy as a character drama. In some of the most economical filmmaking outside of an Altman movie, we come to know and care a great deal about both the kids and the teaching staff. Before you know it, you find yourself involved in what is happening with a particular student, and, come the film's conclusion, you're likely to wonder if the story arc of your particular favorite will be have a happy ending or (realistically) left unresolved. 
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The always-welcome Eileen Heckart as Henrietta Pastorfield
The problems facing these 60s teens are no different from what you'd hear kids talking (texting?) about today. The same goes for the complaints of the teaching staff and burdens placed on the school system... no difference in all this time. And, true to the era (Hollywood happy endings were out) Up the Down Staircase doesn’t neatly solve or wrap up all of its dilemmas; it ends fittingly and without much fanfare…a few heartbreaking failures, a few quiet victories.


PERFORMANCES
It's always puzzled me why critics have always singled Sandy Dennis out for her acting mannerisms. I'm not saying she doesn't have them, but next to the twitchy gimmicks and facial contortions of Marlon Brando and James Dean, Dennis is practically a Sphinx. In a film like Up the Down Staircase, one with a large cast of characters required to establish their personalities quickly, a director does well to cast actors who exude a distinctive, idiosyncratic individuality: something Ms. Dennis possesses in abundance. Portraying the least-neurotic character of her career, Dennis exudes a great deal of sympathetic charm, allowing her trademark hesitancy and fragility to give overqualified first-year teacher, Sylvia Barrett, a vulnerable “otherness” that appropriately sets her apart and makes believable her soft-hearted compassion for her students. She's one of my favorite actresses, and she gives a nicely understated performance.
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Theater legend Vinette Carroll as Mrs. Lewes
Actress, playwright, and Tony-nominated director (she was the first black woman to direct a play on Broadway) Vinette Carroll's brief scene is one of the film's highlights. A true Oscar-nomination worthy turn by a great actress with too few screen credits 
At the time of ts release, Up the Down Staircase garnered a lot of publicity for casting real New York high school students in major roles and as extras (who, by the way, in their low-income modes of dress, still look positively dapper compared to kid's styles today). And indeed, the youthful, diverse faces in Up the Down Staircase are a welcome improvement on the callow blandness of those Disney Channel teens I see nowadays, or the AARP-ready adolescents in movies like Grease. Director Mulligan makes use of the inexperience of his cast members to get raw, suitably awkward performances that are not only a boon to realistic feel of the film, but are surprisingly moving in their naturalness. Newcomer Ellen O'Mara is especially good (the scene where her lovesick character is politely excoriated by the object of her affections is more brutal than most horror films), as is the terminally shy Jose Rodriguez and the brooding, hard to reach Jeff Howard.
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Special mention must be made of Dennis' very teacher-like wardrobe for the film. 
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Films shot on location in New York usually benefit from the wealth of theater-trained actors at their disposal, and Up the Down Staircase is no exception. From Frances Sternhagen as the librarian who cares a bit too deeply about her books, to Jean Stapleton as the over-efficient office secretary who practically runs the school single-handedly; Up the Down Staircase boasts an impressive and colorful supporting cast. In addition, In addition, the film is chock-full of the early-career appearances by many actors went on to become familiar TV faces in 70s.  
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All in The Family's Jean Stapleton as Sadie Finch
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The Dukes of Hazzard's Sorrell Booke (l.) as Dr. Samuel Bester, Roy Poole as J.J. McHabe
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Florence Stanley as Ellen Friedenberg (played Abe Vigoda's wife on 70s TV series, Fish)
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Good Times' Esther Rolle appears as an unnamed teacher
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Although rarely cited in film sources, that's Liz Torres (The John Larroquette Show) making her film debut
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Harold and Maude's Bud Cort, also making his film debut
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That's Bel Kaufman, author of Up the Down Staircase, making a well-placed cameo

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
They don’t call Hollywood the dream machine for nothing. Only Hollywood could make us all believe we really value teachers. Up the Down Staircase is a veritable valentine to the teaching profession. It dramatizes the state of intellectual crisis so many kids are in and points to the ability of dedicated, caring teachers to guide and shape new lives.
It certainly must be an idea we like, because every few years or so, Hollywood hands us the same fable under a different title. Call it Dangerous Minds, Conrack, Dead Poets Society, or Stand and Deliver, the message is always the same: our young people are the answers to a better tomorrow, and our teachers hold the keys to unlocking their minds and spirits.
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Sandy Dennis plays the kind of schoolteacher we all wish we had
(and perhaps a lucky few did!)
Sounds good in theory, and it certainly makes for lovely, weepy movies that make us proud of our teachers, proud of our education system, and proud of ourselves. 
But what do we do in real life? We pay teachers next to nothing, refuse to pay taxes for school funding, and actively support the cutting of programs and services devoted to helping “our” children develop into well-rounded, functioning, individuals. And because we love our guns so much, we also contribute to helping to make our schools about as safe as a war zone. 
It’s embarrassing to contemplate and makes little sense until one stops to consider we’re also a culture that loves movies about brotherhood and racial harmony.

Lucky for us, movies like Up the Down Staircase are there to also remind and reassure us that good teachers are so dedicated, they'll continue to be devoted to educating our nation's youth...whether they get our support or not.
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Bucking the System

Copyright © Ken Anderson
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WHY MOVIE MUSICALS MATTER

June 14, 2014, 7:08 am
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BOOK GIVEAWAY!  Enter to win a hardback copy of Richard Barrios’  
DANGEROUS RHYTHM : Why Movie Musicals Matter 

As one who can happily state that a movie musical was responsible for changing the entire course of my life (briefly: I saw Xanadu [yes, Xanadu] in my third year of film school; I was inspired to drop out and study dance. The result - a nearly 30-year career as a professional dancer and choreographer), it's fair to say that I’m perhaps the ideal audience for a film book with the subtitle: Why Movie Musicals Matter.

Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter is an exhaustive (and occasionally, exhausting) look at the American movie musical from the earliest Vitaphone squeaks of Jolson’s The Jazz Singer (1927), to the count-the-hairs-in-Hugh-Jackman’s-nose close-up bombast of Les Misérables (2012). Award-winning film historian, Richard Barrios, who’d already neatly expounded on the origins of the movie musical in his 1995 book, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, broadens his scope considerably this time out – the result being an impressively well-researched crash course on the uniquely American art form known as the movie musical.

Essentially a series of chaptered essays dissecting the genre from perspectives practical (financial, technical) and aesthetic (artistic, pop cultural), Dangerous Rhythm, in covering so vast a topic from so many angles, can at times feel as if it is in danger of losing its way…but stick with it. Barrios writes with a surer hand than what might be initially presumed, and guides (as gracefully as Astaire) the reader through roughly eight decades’ worth of film history, analysis, and guilty-pleasure gossip, to the foundation of his studied and sound conclusion that movie musicals do indeed matter. The specifics of which you’ll have to discover for yourself.

Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter is academic and fact-filled enough to satisfy the most knowledgeable film scholar, yet informal and full of amusing and critical observations so as to please the armchair film buff and casual fan of the musical genre.

A few examples of Barrios' infectious running commentary:

On critics' reaction to Lucille Ball in Mame– “...the words 'toneless' and 'croak' were frequently invoked."

On a certain disco musical  – “Like [Alan] Carr himself, Can’t Stop the Music was gay without thinking anyone knew….”

On Joan Crawford’s terpsichorean skills in Dancing Lady – “The epic shoulders are curious ballast for a thrashing upper body, the elbows eternally tense linchpins for arms that flail without cease.”

DANGEROUS RHYTHM:Why Movie Musicals Matter        By Richard Barrios
Illustrated. 276 pp. Oxford University Press. $34.95.

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BOOK GIVEAWAY!  Enter our drawing to win a hardback copy of Richard Barrios’  
DANGEROUS RHYTHM : Why Movie Musicals Matter 

If you're a regular visitor to this blog, or just a fan of movies and musicals, I'm sure you'll enjoy Richard Barrios' DANGEROUS RHYTHM : Why Movie Musicals Matter.  That's why 
I'm happy to announce that Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For... is hosting a giveaway drawing for a free hardback copy of the book.

Entry is simple: just email your full name to me here at Ken@xanadu-fitness.com and list one reason why you think movie musicals matter (a prerequisite for entry in the drawing). The winner will be randomly drawn on Monday, June 23rd, 2014 and the winner notified immediately (no entries accepted after Midnight, Sunday June 22nd PST). After notification, the winner will be required to send me their full name and address, which will then be forwarded to the publisher's PR firm and the book mailed to you. The first name of the winner will be posted in an update to this blog post, along with any particularly interesting submitted reasons for why movie musicals matter.
So come on, enter to win your copy today!

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Dreamgirls  2006


TOP 10 MUSICALS THAT MATTER (TO ME)
In honor of our giveaway drawing and the subject of movie musicals, I thought I'd compile my own (by no means comprehensive) list of musicals that matter to me. As for why these films matter, there are links to past posts. As for the new entries...well, those will have to wait for some future date.

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1.   Sweet Charity   1969
Because of Bob Fosse's choreography and Paula Kelly's spine
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 2,   Cabaret  1972
Because art, dance, and music never blended so decadently
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 3.   The Boy Friend 1971
Because anything that makes me feel this happy has to matter
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4.   The Gay Divorcee  1934
Because of the magic that is Fred & Ginger  (Note* The title of Barrios' book "Dangerous Rhythm" is taken from the lyric to the song, "The Continental", my favorite dance number in this film)
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5.   Tommy 1975
Because nobody can put our dreams and nightmares on the screen like Ken Russell
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6.   Singin' in the Rain  1952
Because Gene Kelly is a sex god
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7.   Nashville  1975  
Because musicals capture a sense of time and place better than anything I know
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8.   The Wizard of Oz   1939
Because it makes me feel like a kid again
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9.   Camelot   1967
Because it looks like a fairy tale come to life
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10.   Xanadu 1980
Because it fueled my dreams and fed my imagination

 "Life is too short without dreaming, and dreams are what le cinema is for." 

                                              
Copyright © Ken Anderson
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I AM A CAMERA 1955

June 27, 2014, 11:36 pm
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“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”
Christopher Isherwood  - The Berlin Stories 1945

I've wanted to see I Am a Camera for 42 years. That’s the length of time I've been aware of - yet unable to lay eyes upon - this little-known, rarely-televised, not-available-on DVD, all-but-forgotten adaptation of the successful Broadway play that inspired the musical, Cabaret, and gave the screen its very first Sally Bowles.
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Julie Harris as Sally Bowles
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Laurence Harvey as Christopher Isherwood
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Shelley Winters as Natalia Landauer
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Anton Diffring as Fritz Wendel
Forty-two years ago: It was 1972, I was a freshman in high school, and Cabaret had just opened nationally. I was eager to see the film on the strength of my fascination with Bob Fosse’s choreography in Sweet Charity(1969) and my infatuation with Liza Minnelli in The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), but in order to persuade my family to select it for a night out at the movies, I had to rely on the scores of critical raves quoted in the newspaper ads. Which was all for the good, because I knew next to nothing about just what Cabaret was.

I had absolutely no foreknowledge of Christopher Isherwood’s 1945 novelized twin-memoir: The Berlin Stories; I was in the dark about playwright John Van Druten (I Remember Mama) adapting one of those short novels –  Goodbye to Berlin – as the 1951 play, I Am a Camera (prompting theater critic Walter Kerr’s terse, too-oft-quoted review, “Me no Leica”); and I was thoroughly unaware that said seriocomic play had served as the structural source for the 1966 musical, Cabaret…the original Broadway production serving as merely the launch pad for Fosse’s significantly reworked movie adaptation.

Well, as if to prove the adage, “ignorance is bliss,” a byproduct of my state of unenlightenment was that it afforded me the rare opportunity of enjoying Cabaret free of the usual burdens that come with seeing a beloved stage and/or literary work adapted into another medium: e.g., that feeling of never fully being “in the moment” born of anticipating the omission or mishandling of some favored line or bit of business, or that ceaseless, almost involuntary process of comparison and sizing up that goes on in your head as you watch, hoping expectation doesn't outpace execution.
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Lea Seidl as Fraulein Schneider, the landlady
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Ron Randell as Clive Mortimer, the rich American playboy

Like most everyone who saw it at the time, I was completely blown away by Cabaret. Especially its stylish, darkly atmospheric depiction of the social and moral decay of pre-Nazi Germany in the 30s…so ideally suited to Bob Fosse’s particular brand of razzle-dazzle cynicism. In an attempt to rectify my prior obliviousness, I subsequently took to reading everything I could about the film.

My first discovery was that it was the rare Cabaret review or feature article that didn't reference the film version of I am A Camera (always unfavorably). Some remarked on the film's failure to do justice to Van Druten's play, others complained that it didn't successfully bring to life Isherwood’s colorful characters, all cited it as the first on-screen incarnation of Sally Bowles. While it definitely came as a surprise to me to learn that Fräulein Bowles (who to this day is difficult to envision as anyone other than Liza Minnelli) appeared on film a whopping 17-years before Cabareteven existed, what really knocked me for a loop was that it was in the startlingly against-type personage of Julie Harris.
I couldn't imagine two actresses with less in common than Liza Minnelli and Julie Harris. Even in the most democratic of fantasies I'm hard-pressed to envision any point at which the talents of these two very gifted ladies might intersect to make feasible the notion of their being cast in the same role. One’s a jackhammer, the other a tap on the shoulder. It piqued my interest no end to discover that Harris (an actress I adored, but always associated with reserved, Plain Jane roles like in The Haunting, East of Eden, and You’re a Big Boy Now) originated the role of one of literature’s most flamboyant extroverts...and won a Tony Award for it in the bargain!
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Divine Decadence
Sally bares her emerald-green nails (and tigress snarl)
Suddenly, I am A Camera became a movie I absolutely had to see. In 1972, I hoped the popularity of Cabaret would occasion a resurfacing of it on late-night TV at or a local revival theater…but no such luck. My frustration knew no bounds. In those pre-cable/pre-DVD days, it certainly wasn’t out of the ordinary to have to wait a long time for a favored old movie to make the rounds, but I am A Camera was a unique case in that absolutely no one I knew (not my parents nor my older sister, who was a Late Show maven if ever there was one) had ever heard of it, much less seen it.
Years passed (decades, actually), and I am A Camera eventually became one of those films (like Andy Warhol’s L’Amour) I resigned myself to never seeing. Then, two weeks ago, just as I’d all but forgotten all about it, what do you know?... there it is, big as life on YouTube: I Am a Camera - 1955!!!!

So it's true, good things come to those who wait...for a VERY long time!

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WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Having read so little over the years that could be considered encouraging about I Am a Camera, I’m afraid that when the time came for me to finally see it, I did so more out of curiosity than conviction. After it was over, I wanted to give each of those early critics a solid trouncing over the head (myself included, for believing them), for to my great surprise, I found I Am a Camera to be a thorough and utter delight. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought so back in 1972 when the air of solemnity Fosse brought to Cabaret rode the then-popular wave of pessimism of so many Nixon-era films (and flattered my adolescent-self-seriousness); but today, I Am a Camera’s unremittingly old-fashioned, studio-bound, almost farcical, light-comic approach distinguishes it so significantly from every other adaptation of Isherwood’s memoirs I've seen, that it stands far and apart from comparison and represents to me, a work unique unto itself.

Presented in the form of an extended flashback told to fellow writing associates by “confirmed bachelor,” now-successful author, Christopher Isherwood (Harvey), I Am a Camera recalls the years Isherwood spent as a struggling writer in Berlin in the 1930s. In vignette-style, the film recounts his platonic, life-changing friendship with free-spirit Sally Bowles (Harris), a modestly-talented cabaret singer and self-styled bohemian whose flighty manner and impulsive behavior propel him into adventures which will ultimately serve as the basis and inspiration for his early writing successes. A subplot involving his only-slightly-worldlier friend, Fritz (Diffring), a would-be gigolo and closet Jew, wooing a department-store heiress (Winters), introduces a bit of drama and brings to the forefront Germany’s mounting Nazi threat.
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The Nazi Intrusion
Sally, Clive, and Christopher momentarily have their spirits dampened by a Jewish funeral procession  
I Am a Camera doesn't deviate significantly from the basic plot of Cabaret, its chief point of departure merely being one of approach. While Minnelli’s Sally Bowles symbolized the kind of I’m-dancing-as-fast-as-I can, willful self-deception that allowed the Nazis to take over a Depression-era Germany salving its sorrows with decadence; I Am a Camera presents Isherwood's adventures as a lighthearted coming-of-age story and depicts Bowles as something of an early incarnation of that genre staple: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (thank you, Nathan Rabin) – the quirky, childlike female character who brings chaos into the orderly life of a sensitive, button-down type, only to leave him a better, more-matured artist for it.

Katherine Hepburn played one in Bringing Up Baby (1938), so did Sandy Dennis in Sweet November (1968). Certainly Minnelli's Pookie Adams from The Sterile Cuckoo qualifies (although "nightmare" might be more to the point), and the characters of Dolly Levi and Mame Dennis from Hello, Dolly! and Auntie Mame, respectively, are nothing if not the Manic Pixie Dream Matron. Of course, the great Grande Diva of Manic Pixie Dream Girls is Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and ultimately it is this film, not Cabaret, which I Am a Camera most recalls.
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One of the setpieces of I Am a Camera is a raucous, remarkably-staged party scene that predates Blake Edwards' iconic cocktail party sequence in Breakfast at Tiffany's 

Both Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (published in 1958) and Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (published in 1939) are novelized memoirs written by gay men recalling their transformative friendships with quirky, unconventional women of liberated sexuality. Whereas Tiffany's was converted into a romantic comedy (even Cabaret imposed a false romance), Camera leaves Isherwood's homosexuality as coded as the 50s would allow (his declaration "I suppose I'm not the marrying kind," is tantamount to outing himself). 
PERFORMANCES
Whether or not one cares for I Am a Camera’s lighthearted touch and bittersweet Hollywood happy ending (which still feels more honest than making the Isherwood character bisexual [the movie musical] or straight [the stage musical]), I can’t imagine any fan of classic cinema not being enchanted by the sight of so many brilliant dramatic actors displaying such a talent for comedy.
British actor Laurence Harvey, long a favorite of mine yet so unaccountably stiff and affectless in so many of his American roles, is appealingly naïf and boyish as Isherwood. I've always harbored a big crush on him, so perhaps I'm not exactly what you'd call an objective judge, but I’d easily rank his work in I Am a Camera alongside Room at the Top and Expresso Bongo as among Harvey's best film performances.
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In a reversal of her role in 1951s A Place in the Sun, Shelley Winters plays an heiress wooed by a fortune-hunter 
As for the strikingly handsome Anton Diffring, so chilling as the villain in Fahrenheit 451 and an actor who literally made a career out of playing cold-hearted Nazis, I never would have guessed he’d be so charming a light comedy player. To be honest, I think this is the very first film in which I've ever seen him smile! Shelley Winters, several years away from the grating, undisciplined performances that would later brand her a camp film  favorite, has a surprisingly small role and displays a worrisome German accent, but she is endearing beyond belief. It's easy to forget what an accomplished comedienne she could be.

But hands-down, it is Julie Harris who walks off with my highest praise. She's nothing short of sensational. I've seen Harris in many things over the years (even on Hollywood Squares), but I've never EVER seen her this perky and playful. I had no idea she could be such a flirtatious, funny, physical, and vivacious a personality. Her versatility is on full display here, capturing the many shades of Sally's mercurial personality, from her childlike vulnerability to her flashes of self-interested callousness. Speaking in that rapid-fire manner I associate with George Cukor movies, her Sally Bowles is less a bohemian iconoclast and reminds me more of Kathryn Hepburn's Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory (1933): all self-centered chatter and ostentatious show, but ultimately touching.
I found not a single moment of Harris' performance wanting, save for the poorly-matched dubbed voice she's given during her big cabaret number - the languid vocalist fails to capture the sprightliness of Harris' physical interpretation (I'm reminded of the too-calm dubbed voice attributed to Rita Moreno in West Side Story). Harris doesn't appear to be lip-syncing, leaving me to suspect the other voice was added post-production. I remember hearing Julie Harris sing on the cast album of the 1965 Broadway musical, Skyscraper ... she mostly went the Rex Harrison talk-sing route.

In the end, what pleased and surprised me most about Harris as Sally Bowles is the manner in which she tackles the role with such ease and command, inhabiting her character so winningly and completely that she resists comparisons to Liza Minnelli, making the part her own. No easy task, that.
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"I remembered your eyes. It was if they were asking me to look at you and yet not see you!"
It's believed that Julie Harris' outstanding performance was overlooked for an Oscar nomination because I Am a Camera - a British production which failed to punish its sexually promiscuous heroine or delete mention of abortion - was denied a Production Code Seal, resulting in many theaters refusing to screen it, and some newspapers refusing to carry ads. In the UK, it was given the "Certificate X" rating.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
While devoid of anything like Cabaret's "bumsen" scene, I Am a Camera is remarkably frank on the topics of sex, abortion, prostitution, and, depending on one's susceptibility to gay coding in old films, homosexuality. Considered risqué for its time, I was amused by just how much they were able to allude to in this 1955 film (a gay couple is briefly glimpsed in the nightclub scene) and enjoyed noting how many little details of style and content would later show up in Fosse's Cabaret.
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This Sally sings at The Lady Windermere, but its clientele is pure Kit Kat Club, as are its wall caricatures
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Partaking of Sally's favorite pick-me-up: Prairie Oysters 
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The Threesome...
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...The Twosome
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Laurence Harvey + rectal thermometer = sexiest scene in the film 
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"I mean, I may not be absolutely exactly what some people call a virgin... ."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS 
For all the charismatic dominance of Sally Bowles and Julie Harris’ standout performance, I Am a Camera ultimately manages to make good on its first-person title by being a story of one man’s coming of age. The increased presence of the Nazis in Berlin challenges Isherwood's determination to just be a spectator in life, his ultimate inability to ignore its evil facilitating his growth as both as a man and as an artist.

For me, the poignancy of I Am a Camera is found in its final moments when it becomes clear (to us, if not the characters involved) that, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Christopher has possessed all along what he'd sought to find. As the only person to take pity on the abandoned Sally that first night in the club; to be the one individual who offered her shelter without want of anything in return; to have remained by her side during a crisis, even going so far as to propose marriage and lose a promising job opportunity - Christopher was involved in life from the very start. He was never for a moment the apathetic, unthinking “camera” he imagined himself to be.
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Christopher ceases to be the passive observer
Author Armistead Maupin in his 2008 introduction to Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories (and if you haven't read The Berlin Stories, I highly recommend it) makes the observation that Isherwood's narrative device of assuming the role of the “camera" in his memoirs - the impartial, uninvolved recorder of events - was the author's way of protecting himself. Intentionally keeping his homosexuality out of his autobiographical stories for fear that its mere inclusion would distract from everything else in the text. 
A necessity at the time, but one rectified by Isherwood himself in his 1976 memoir, Christopher and His Kind, in which the very same pre-war Berlin years documented in this film are recounted with a proud acceptance of his sexuality and an acknowledgment of its profound influence on his life and his art. 
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I Am a Camera; a film shrouded in period-mandated gay coding (the aforementioned “confirmed bachelor” line) and starring a closeted gay actor portraying an asexual/sexually ambiguous character; is a product of its time, yet nevertheless contains a timeless message. Especially for the LGBT community which has been so much a part of Christopher Isherwood's enduring legacy. Society, when not actively seeking to eradicate, has always encouraged gay people to “hide in plain sight.” To, in effect, protect ourselves through anonymity and the acceptance of a non-participatory role as a “camera” on the periphery of life.
I Am a Camera - (inadvertently perhaps, but I'd like to think by way of the innate humanity of Isherwood and his characters) - exposes inauthenticity as an obstruction to growth (Sally, a woman defined by artifice, never changes); promotes the necessity of being true to oneself (Fritz finds love and is compelled to reveal his true self to Natalia); and affirms the absolute necessity that we must all be active participants in life...no matter how complicated things become.
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Since I consider Bob Fosse's Cabaret to be such a perfect film and wasn't really hoping to find a movie to compare it to or replace it with, I rejoiced in I Am a Camera turning out to be so comprehensively and refreshingly different. Making up for those 42-years of longing, I've already seen it three times and marvel at what a splendid lost gem it is. To quote Sally Bowles, I think I Am a Camera is "Most strange and extraordinary!"


BONUS MATERIAL
I Am a Camera is available for viewing in its entirety on YouTube HERE

The tune Sally Bowles sings in her cabaret act is the 1951 German song, “Ich Hab Noch Einen Koffer in Berlin” (I still have a Suitcase in Berlin) written by Ralph Maria Siegel. In this film given new English lyrics by Paul Dehn (the title changing to: "I Saw Him in a Café in Berlin").
You can Hear Marlene Dietrich sing the original song HERE

The 2011 BBC-TV adaptation of Isherwood's Christopher & His Kind is available for viewing in its entirety on YouTube HERE
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Copyright © Ken Anderson
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LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR 1977

July 10, 2014, 9:13 pm
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*Spoilers Ahead
In hindsight, it seems both ominous and prophetic that Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever were released within months of one another at the tail end of 1977 (October and December, respectively), a somber conclusion to a year which began with the release of Star Wars.
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Diane Keaton as Theresa Dunn
Although one couldn’t know it at the time, both films sounded the dissonant, disco-beat death-knell tolling the end of the 70s and the sexual revolution; the looming specter of AIDS serving to make Looking for Mr. Goodbar's dispiriting linkage of sex and death feel positively prescient. Each film embodied attitudes which stood as barbed provocations to the Utopian 70s promise of the liberating potential of drugs, free love, sexual exploration, feminism, group therapy, hedonism, the new morality, and porno-chic. Meanwhile, on a somewhat minor, but no less catastrophic cultural scale, the blockbuster success of Star Wars signaled the end of  this very sort of film: the major motion picture intended for grown-ups.
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When, in 1976, I saw Martin Scorsese’s trenchant urban nightmare, Taxi Driver, I thought then that I had seen the most depressing film the 70s had to offer. Clearly, I hadn’t reasoned on what 65-year-old writer/director Richard Brooks (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, In Cold Blood) had up his sleeve in bringing Judith Rossner’s controversial 1975 bestseller, Looking for Mr. Goodbar to the screen. Without a doubt, the feel-bad movie of 1977.
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Inspired by the gruesome real-life murder of New York schoolteacher/singles bar habitué, Roseann Quinn in 1973, Brooks’ Looking for Mr. Goodbar is part opaque character study, part sociosexual thriller, chronicling (with compellingly provocative ambiguity), the confused emancipation / dissociation of Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton): gifted teacher of deaf children by day, by night...pill-popping, singles bar-hopper seeking to salve her scars – literal and psychological – through submersion in the twilight world of detached, casual-sex encounters with anonymous, increasingly unsavory partners.
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Theresa’s through-the-looking-glass (darkly) journey is largely reactive: her romantic skepticism, a result of an over-idealized fling with an emotionally-abusive college professor (Alan Feinstein); her lack of desire for children, a dual response to her sister’s multiple abortions and her own fear of passing on congenital scoliosis; her determined want of independence, most assuredly a fervent backlash against the stifling life options proffered by her bellicose father, who would have Theresa settle down with a nice Catholic boy, cranking out one baby after another like her kid sister, Brigid (Laurie Prange).
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That Theresa’s emancipation ultimately takes the form of a paradoxical dual existence ("Saint Theresa by day and swinging Terry by night.”) signals not only her unresolved inner conflicts, but underscore a point I think is germane to the appreciation of  Looking for Mr. Goodbar as something more complex and infinitely smarter than a simplistic moral cautionary tale about the dangers awaiting single women in the big, bad city.
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It calls attention to the fact that the “New Morality” of the 70s did absolutely nothing to minimize or reconfigure the sexual double-standard. In spite of the newfound freedoms of the era, women were still viewed in terms of Madonna/whore (I can't recall a single critic at the time blaming Theresa's rapist/murderer, only her own reckless behavior); their bodies and reproductive rights, open-forum landscapes for religious, politico-social debate; their very independence rendering them more vulnerable than ever as targets of male sexual aggression.

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Teaser ad from Variety - 1977
I saw Looking for Mr. Goodbar at the Regency Theater in San Francisco the first weekend of its opening. Then, I was but a sidelines observer in the sexual revolution. A 20-year-old virgin attending college in one of the most progressive cities in the world; I neither drank nor smoked, didn’t partake of drugs, and had yet to set foot in a disco. But the era was so alive and abuzz with change, excitement, and energy, even a Catholic-reared, late-bloomer like me walked around in a near-constant haze of sensual distraction. Honestly, San Francisco in the 70s was so stimulating an environment; you would have sworn amyl nitrate had been piped into every establishment.
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Richard Gere as Tony Lo Porto
That being said, what started out as a cultural movement of joy and self-discovery had, by 1977, transmogrified into a commoditized, cynically co-opted wave of sexual merchandising and lifestyle marketing exposing the dark, unspoken lie behind the revolution’s rhetoric of freedom and liberation. The lie (or perhaps the naïve hope) being that sex was not intimacy, human physical contact bears no psychological or spiritual consequence, and that we are not profoundly affected by its lack. What led me to this conclusion was that the high-profile hedonists of my generation: John Holmes, Marilyn Chambers, Hugh Hefner, Linda Lovelace, etc., looked like hell. 
Surely, something beyond drug use accounted for the glazed, dead eyes staring out from the all those glossy sex magazines like Playboy, Viva, and Hustler. Was there a reason suburban swingers always looked so vacant and debauched? Why was it, whenever I passed by the doors of singles bars, nobody in them looked particularly happy? If the new morality was as joyous and life-affirming as pop culture and youth media kept assuring me, why did its practitioners look so hollowed out? I had the feeling the enraptured lyrics (and moans) of all those disco songs weren't telling the whole story.
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The 70s: the era of sexual revolution or sexual dehumanization?
Sex was more out in the open, but attitudes were still mired in sin, shame, and debasement 
Although I hadn’t yet read the book, I knew enough about Looking for Mr. Goodbar and the incident that inspired it to be excited by the prospect of a contemporary film attempting to capture a cultural climate teeming with contrasts and contradictions. 

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Tuesday Weld snagged a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her role as Katherine Dunn, a walking microcosm of 70s self-absorption and the unfocused quest for the ideal existence

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
One of my favorite things about the 70s is that it was such a self-reflective era in motion pictures. In fact, a frequent criticism leveled at American films at the time was that they, representative of the “Me Decade” in general, were in a rut of compulsive navel-gazing; nearly always of the bleak, post-Watergate disillusionment sort. Looking for Mr. Goodbar was NOT the exception.

When the relatively hang-loose permissiveness of the late 60s evolved into the strenuous hedonism of the mid-70s, it wasn’t difficult to detect a hint of desperation behind disco music’s over-emphatic exuberance, or the coke-fueled euphoria of the swinging singles lifestyle. Had sexual liberation, once thought to be the gateway to honest and open human interaction, become just another means of escaping reality? To numb the pain of existence? To shelter our darker demons? To create a greater distance between people? 
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Looking for Mr. Goodbar could have been subtitled: The Pleasure Paradox
The philosophy that happiness, when pursued (that elusive Mr. Goodbar), remains ever beyond one's grasp 

Behind the provocative sexual politics and incendiary commingling of sex, guilt, and religion which so distracted critics at the time, Looking for Mr. Goodbar addresses the above-stated questions more artfully and honestly than any film I've ever seen. It explores the fissures that began to show in the “If it feels good, do it” façade of the new morality, tackling while it’s at it: feminism, religious hypocrisy, the sexual double-standard, and America’s intractable linking of sex and violence.

When I first saw Looking for Mr. Goodbar, I knew right away it was something special. From the first saxophone strains initiating that gloriously unsettling title sequence, I was hooked (a short film in and of itself, it’s a flowing montage of gritty black and white still shots capturing the light and dark, vaguely dangerous-looking allure of singles bars). The entire cast, but Diane Keaton especially, make something poignant and frighteningly real out of a story begging for sensationalism. Director Richard Brooks keeps to his motif of light and dark parallels, pitching scenes at the Dunn household to operatic levels, contrasting their emotional violence with Theresa's quiet, character-defining vulnerability.
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Richard Kiley as Theresa's no-patience-for-imperfections father
The jarring use of sound and William Fraker's dark, dark, dark cinematography (I initially thought it was shot by Gordon Willis) contribute to making Looking for Mr. Goodbar one of the most powerful movies of the 70s. And make no mistake about it, this movie scared the bejesus out of me. The book was so popular, even if you hadn't read it you knew how it was going to end; but knowing is not the same as being as prepared. The harrowing, near-unwatchable concluding moments of Looking for Mr. Goodbar left me feeling shell-shocked. I still believe I stayed to watch it a second time simply because I was too stunned to move out of my seat.

Not everyone’s cup of tea for any number of reasons, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (dubbed Mr. Goodbarf by many left queasy by the film's violence) is for me an example of American self-reflective cinema at its best. Not the least because it’s an adult film that takes the risk of allowing itself to be misunderstood. I like that it doesn’t spell everything out and tell you how you should feel or react. It has a point of view and even an agenda, but it doesn't invite you to agree with it so much as it induces you to just think about it. Some people find it simplistic, others find it to be moralizing, many found it misogynistic, some just felt it too depressing and sordid...few found it forgettable. 
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William Atherton as James (here washing the very knife that will play a role in the film's hellish denouement), the slightly creepy "nice guy" whose resentful response to being moved into the friendzone is to behave in an aggressive,  possessively entitled manner every bit as unstable as the woman-hating "bad boys." Sound familiar?

PERFORMANCES
Because there were so many interesting actresses around in the 70s, it’s easy for me to forget that the decade was largely a boys’ club devoted to buddy movies and misunderstood anti-heroes. (Tellingly, when the time came to adapt Rossner’s woman-centric bestseller to the screen, only male directors were considered: Bernardo Bertolucci, Bob Fosse [I shudder at the thought], Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, and Roman Polanski.)
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LeVar Burton as Cap Jackson
Looking for Mr. Goodbar marked the feature film debut of Burton, who became an overnight household name when the landmark miniseries, Roots aired earlier in the year

Closer to the truth is that on those rare occasions an actress was called upon to be something other than a girlfriend or male support-system (to get Goodbar, Keaton turned down the largely thankless Julie Christie role in Heaven Can Wait), the characters were so well-written (Katherine Ross – The Stepford Wives) and performances so superb (Jane Fonda – Klute), their prominence in my memory contradicts their paucity in actual practice. 

Looking for Mr. Goodbar is hands-down my all-time favorite Diane Keaton movie. I actually think it’s the best work of her career. But apropos of the dark/light contrasts of the Theresa Dunn character herself, I don’t think I would have fully appreciated her work here were it not for my having seen her in Annie Hall (released earlier the same year) before. Onscreen almost constantly, Keaton's performance here is astonishing, the range and depth of her characterization (a true original, I've never seen a character in a film like her before or since) appearing both natural and risk-taking. She's simply staggering and was a very inspired choice for the part. It really makes you wish Keaton had pursued more dramatic roles.
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Alan Feinstein as Professor Martin Engle
As for the character itself, I've always considered Theresa Dunn to be 70s cinema’s first anti-heroine: a female sexual outlaw and cultural nonconformist. And, like all rebels, she’s not always likable, smart, or rational – just a complex, vulnerable human being struggling to make sense of the contradictions of her nature, deciding for herself what she wants to be, and accepting the risks (which, as it turns out, are considerable in our culture of normalized female-directed aggression) of choosing to live life on her own terms.
Like her male counterparts, Theresa delves into sex and drugs in her quest for self-discovery, and for once a woman’s exploration of her sexuality is presented in a manner perceptive and honest enough to allow for the enjoyment of no-strings sex for its purely sensual appeal and enslavingly addictive anodyne effect.
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"Get this into one of your two heads, the one that can think...I am my own girl! I belong to me!"

Looking for Mr. Goodbar is such a downer of a film it never received the credit I think it deserved for the rather groundbreaking sincerity and seriousness with which it approached female sexuality. Anyone coming to Goodbar hoping for gauzy, soft-core porn cloaked in faux-feminist empowerment rhetoric (a la the popular Emmanuelle franchise) was in for a shock.
If screenwriter Brooks is guilty of anything, it's in being too honest. Taking a tack different from the book, the Theresa of the film is not the self-loathing masochist with a death-wish Judith Rossner wrote about (Rossner was said to have been displeased with the film, finding Keaton's character too "happy") and so many critics longed for to help explain away their discomfort; she is a flawed woman who makes one too many bad choices.
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Because things end badly for the character of Theresa, Looking for Mr. Goodbar was seen by many as an anti-feminist cautionary tale for single women. Things ended very badly for Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, but I don’t recall anyone calling that film a cautionary tale for hippie drug dealers.

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Robert Fields as Rafe and Carole Mallory as Marvella
Fans of The Stepford Wiveswill recognize these  two swingers. She played a robotized housewife, he played chemist, Raymond Chandler, Katherine Ross' first love

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
I only got around to reading Looking for Mr. Goodbar two years ago, an experience which left me appreciating even more what Richard Brooks' skill as a screenwriter (his first career) brought to the film version. To me, his work is a vast improvement over the source material, and when faced with the challenge of extracting drama and suspense from a story most everyone knows the ending of, Brooks builds tension through the stylized application of an almost Biblical motif emphasizing the contradictions of free-will and fate.

Brooks cannily uses innocuous events in the "light" parts of Theresa's life (as a teacher) to foreshadow the progressively violent trend of her "dark" nocturnal pursuits.
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In assisting a deaf child to feel the forming of a word, Theresa has the girl hold her throat. A choking image that will be reenacted (horrifically) later. 
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Asked to come up with words that will produce enough air to move a feather, a child repeats the word "punch." When asked to come up with a less violent word, he responds with repeated shouts of "help!"
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Having overslept due to a night of partying, Theresa is greeted by an angry class. On the board is written, "You don't care!" The phrase, an inadvertent commentary on her desire for emotional disengagement in her private life, the ominous, death-mask skull, a foreshadowing of the film's final image.

 THE STUFF OF DREAMS
"How do women still go out with guys when you consider that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat to women! Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease.”     Louis CK

“Every guy has a ‘crazy girlfriend’ story. Why don’t women have ‘crazy men’ stories? I never hear that. Because if you have a crazy boyfriend, you’re gonna die.”     Donald Glover


Looking for Mr. Goodbar was released decades before Sex and the City, so no cultural paradigms were in place through which one could process the notion of a sexually-active single woman living alone in a metropolitan city without resorting to blame-the-victim terminology. Terms like: self-loathing, nymphomaniacal, self-destructive, desperate, mentally ill, masochistic, unstable, depressive. The whole thing was quite ironic; while calling out Richard Brooks for making a morally reactionary sexual thriller, so-called liberal critics couldn't stop themselves from reaching the conclusion that promiscuity, drugs, and drinking were a certain fast-track to death for a single woman. A point which failed to acknowledge that promiscuity, drugs, and drinking were cornerstones for a great many male coming-of-age films of the era, but nobody saw anything fatalistic in such "boys will be boys" behavior.
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Tom Berenger as Gary
On a similar note, Goodbar came out long before the concept of rape culture, so at no time could one find a journalist willing to devote even a paragraph to the castigation of the brutish, violent behavior of the men in the film, or could you find articles addressing our normalized attitudes on the matter of rape and other forms of female-directed aggression in the age of sexual permissiveness. All I recall reading were a lot of human-interest articles about parents taking their daughters to see the film as a means (I suppose) of terrorizing them into celibacy. Of course, there were no stories about sons being taken to the film to teach them not to rape and abuse women.

A lot has changed over the years, but not so much that a daringly mature film like Looking for Mr. Goodbar doesn't  have something relevant to say to contemporary audiences. As stated earlier, it's a film that begs to be rediscovered and reevaluated in terms broader than the lazy label of  "cautionary tale" has afforded it. It's an unpleasant film, to be sure, but an honest one. Perhaps even a bit too honest. But it's an inarguably important entry from a decade when the objective of major motion pictures wasn't always to placate and pacify, but to get us to think. Unfortunately, I'm still looking for Looking for Mr. Goodbar...at least until the day Paramount decides to finally release it on DVD.
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(DVD copies burned from tapes are often available through iOffer where I've had amazing luck tracking down rarities.)

Copyright © Ken Anderson
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