DREAMS ARE WHAT LE CINEMA IS FOR...

Good, old-fashioned, classic movie storytelling doesn’t get much better than the first 80-minutes of Picnic. Comprehensive yet concise; economical but at the same time expansive; Picnic seamlessly blends sensitive drama, delicate humor, and dreamy romanticism – all the while sustaining an entertainingly effortless narrative flow.

Picnic’s depiction of life in a small Kansas town in the midst of prepping for Labor Day festivities– its people, their routines and rituals, both mundane and apart– is evocatively rendered in that uniquely idealized true/false reality Hollywood does so well. Full of finely-observed details of character and setting redolent of William Inge’s childhood spent in Independence, Indiana (where, like the character of Flo Owens, his mother ran a boarding house populated with spinster schoolteachers), Picnic is set in the then-contemporary 1950s, but has thenceforth become cloaked in a rosy nostalgia that looks back on a time when drifters hopped boxcars, marriage was the end all and be all for any single woman, and people wore ties, sportscoats, and full-skirted dresses to picnics.

William Holden as Hal Carter

Kim Novak as Madge Owens

Rosalind Russell as Rosemary Sydney

Betty Field as Flo Owens

Susan Strasberg as Millie Owens

Cliff Robertson as Alan Benson

The last day of summer serves as both the time-frame and primary metaphor of Picnic; William Inge’s wistfully contemplative look at the sometimes painful inevitability of growing up. Following the death of his alcoholic father, handsome but feckless Hal Carter (Holden) drifts into town in search of a job from college pal, Alan Benson (Robertson), whose father is a grain industrialist. The unnamed Kansas town (actually four Kansas towns in real life, Salina appearing on a sign early in the film) has a male-to-female-ratio appreciably lacking in testosterone, and thus is a virtual hotbed of sexual frustration and withered hopes.

Town beauty Madge Owens (Novak) is the vessel of everyone’s projected dreams in spite of the fact that, while not very bright, she’s smart enough to know (in 1955 yet) that being the object of the appreciative gaze is not the same as being appreciated.

Into this ripe-for-disruption environment comes Hal, whose rambunctious, superannuated frat-boy act – invariably played out sans shirt–understandably draws the attention of the local women folk. There’s favorable: the grandmotherly Mrs. Potts (Verna Felton); puppy-love: tomboy-in-transition, Millie Owens (Strasberg); distrustful: Flo Owens (Field), a mother alone raising two girls; conflicted: repressed schoolmarm Miss Sydney (Russell); and of course, love at first sight: Madge. Hal’s appearance in town has a different effect on each character, and as they all converge at the picnic, Labor Day becomes something of a day of reckoning, bringing out the best or worst in each individual. Truths are confronted, illusions shattered, facades dropped, and everyone is forced to grow up just a little bit.

Verna Felton as Helen Potts
TV fans will recognize Felton from her guest stint as the maid from hell on I Love Lucy, or as the voice of Wilma's mother on The Flintstones

Picnic is one of those movies I first discovered on TV as a child (loaded with commercials and only in an awful pan-and-scan version) I fell in love with it from the start, and Picnicremains to this day one of my favorite comfort movies. I can watch it (the first third, anyway) anytime, anywhere. These days, without exception, if ever I happen to be channel-surfing cable TV and Picnicpops up, I always tell myself I’m only going to watch it for a couple of minutes, but before I know it…boom! an hour has passed. That I own a DVD copy of it matters not a whit…I just take such pleasure in the film's setting, characters, conflict, and dialog, I never tire of it.

That I expressly favor the first 80-minutes of this nearly two-hour film (those comprising the introduction of the main characters, establishment of the central plot, and the picnic scene in its entirety) speaks to director Joshua Logan’s breezy and sure-footed handling of these character-driven, slice-of-life early sequences. Winner of the 1953Tony Award for his direction of the original Broadway production, Logan shines brightest when Picnic is capturing vivid tableaux of small-town culture or compassionately conveying the defeated spirit born of withered dreams and repressed hope.

As fellow schoolteachers, character actresses Reta Shaw (Irma Kronkie) and Elizabeth Wilson (Christine Shoenwalder) recreate roles they originated on Broadway

Somewhat less persuasive is his handling of the film’s final third, which becomes a little too melodramatic and plot-driven for its own good. Here, as if under outside pressure to provide some “action” in an otherwise gentle romantic drama; Inge’s sensitive play feels as if it were temporarily hijacked by Douglas Sirk. And to little effect, I'm afraid, as the swift introduction of a gratuitous car chase and unconvincingly-staged two-against-one fistfight with armed lawmen merely succeed in being distracting. Not helping matters further is the fact that, in lieu of a then-unthinkable sex scene between Holden and Novak, we have in its place, three (count ‘em, three) repetitious and very talky “tortured longing” scenes that never fail to leave me looking at my watch.

Discounting this sluggish detour, Picnic gets back on track with the final scene, where story threads are tied up and Rosalind Russell’s performance single-handedly alters my opinion of which is the film’s most satisfying love story.

Recreating the role he originated on Broadway, Arthur O'Connell as Howard Bevans received the only acting category nomination of Picnic's total of six (it won two: Art Direction and Editing). Many thought Rosalind Russell was a shoo-in for a nomination, if not a win, had she allowed herself to be submitted in the Supporting Actress category, which she refused.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Even as a kid I was hard-pressed to imagine a time when a film as tame as Picnic could ever be considered racy. But of course, at that age I had no idea that Madge and Hal’s impassioned embraces alongside that barreling freight train was Censorship Code shorthand for sex, and, to be honest, only after it was brought to my attention in a college film class did it ever cross my mind that it was Inge’s intention to intimate (a little too subtly, if you ask me) that Rosemary and Howard had also had sexual relations that night. Who knew? Anyway, from its male bodice ripper ad campaign to its convention-flouting themes of sexual frustration and libidinous urges, Picnic was pretty hot stuff in its day.

But Picnic’s reputation as a classic romantic movie doesn’t resonate with me very strongly (the sex feels born of despondency more than passion). Not as strongly as its sharp-eyed, often witty, depiction of small-town life and the incisive details William Inge (Splendor in the Grass, Come Back, Little Sheba) brings to his characters.

Failure to Live up to Expectations
Alan's resentment of Hal is rooted in feeling he is a disappointment to his father

Inability to Accept Reality
Flo copes with past failures by projecting all of her hopes for happiness on daughter, Madge

Lack of Identity
Madge longs to find something to value about herself beyond her beauty

PERFORMANCES

Picnic is a uniformly well-acted motion picture that, like a great many 50s films adapted from stage plays of the day (the works of Tennessee Williams come to mind), retains a certain staginess in dialog and acting style that locks it forever in particular time. That the overall appealing performances in Picnic seem also to be a tad old-fashioned plays favorably into the whole glimpse into the past, days-gone-by feel of the movie as a whole.

Perhaps because the central romance feels as if it's based solely on physical attraction (for all his talking, Hal never asks Madge anything about herself), my strongest memories of Picnic have to do with Rosalind Russell’s superb performance as Rosemary, the old-maid schoolteacher. In a career of many high points, I think this is one of her best performances and she practically walks off with the entire film. Here, the actress's trademark sardonic wit and vitality is channeled into a character whose thin veneer of nonchalance and dimming vestiges of pride show the wear of too many lonely Labor Days bleeding into solitary school semesters. Russell gives the role everything she's got, and she is, in every scene, a force of nature daring you to look at anyone else. She’s funny, moving, sad, and even pitiful; but you wind up rooting for her and she’s a marvelously sympathetic, dimensional character.

If Picnic falls short of being the great film it might have been, I'd attribute it to the sense I have that everybody is pushed a little too strongly against type. I agree with the common complaint that William Holden is too old for his role (not jarringly so, but his college days seem far, far behind him) and that his attempts at expressing Hal's coarse nature aren't all that convincing. And while he's every inch the likable charmer the role requires, Holden just looks forced when when trying to play dumb. The same can be said for the sad-eyed Novak, who has Madge's vulnerability down, but lacks (oddly enough) the kind of switchblade, protective vanity insecure pretty girls carry around with them like security blankets. She too, seems a bit too astute.
Susan Strasberg, while the right age for Millie, is far to angularly beautiful to be a believable as either a tomboy or anybody's definition of "goonface." She seems out of her element in the earlier scenes, but seems to relax into both herself and the role as the film progresses. Cliff Robertson, on the other hand, is a perfect fit. I'm not much of a fan, but I like him a great deal in this movie.

"I had a job as a model once...like this. They had me posing in front of a class almost raw."
Hal shares one of the high points of his checkered past with the adoring Millie. For those too young to know just what 50s male physique modeling looked like, I offer this real-life sample to illustrate that Mr. Holden was right on the money. The nude model is Tabby Anderson (!) which is the ideal name for my cat...if I ever get one.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

When I was a child, every single household had an LP of the Picnic soundtrack, or, if not the score itself, most certainly one of the myriad easy-listening versions of “Moonglow/ Theme from Picnic” available on instrumental collections from the likes of Living Strings or Ferrante & Teicher. I cannot honestly recall when I first heard this popular medley (which I considered “old people’s music” at the time), but it’s as much a part of my childhood as the theme from The Mickey Mouse Club, and to this day I can’t hear Moonglow (a 1933 song, I was later surprised to discover) without seeing William Holden and Kim Novak dancing so photogenically under those paper lanterns.

In this great shot representative of the consistency in performances throughout Picnic, each character reacts differently to the sight of Madge as she's crowned "Queen of Neewollah"

Perhaps calling their movements “dancing” is casting a rather wide net (neither star held any illusions about their dancing skills, Holden being so reluctant as to request extra pay and getting himself fairly drunk before filming), but after all these years I still get quite a kick out of that iconic sequence. Both actors radiate old-fashioned movie star luster, Novak’s steady, unbroken gaze is sexy as hell, and that elusive thing called chemistry is present in almost corporeal abundance.

Composer George Duning’s Oscar-nominated score – which, upon occasion, veers perilously close to Carol Burnett-spoof territory when significant dramatic events are histrionically emphasized by blasts of horns serving as the musical equivalent of exclamation points –is absolute perfection here. The smooth jazz arrangement of the pop standard, Moonglow, lushly underscored by the orchestral Picnictheme, creating a sense that our lovers-to-be are dancing to two songs: the tune played at the picnic, and the melody which they alone can hear.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

William Inge’s Picnic won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1953, but if your only familiarity with it is the film version – rather brilliantly adapted and opened-up for the screen by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Daniel Taradash (From Here to Eternity) – seeing it on stage can be quite the sobering experience. Everything occurs on the back porches and adjoining backyards of Mrs. Potts and Mrs. Owens, and the picnic of the title occurs offstage.

Happily for literal-minded me, the film version has a masterfully constructed, protracted picnic sequence that not only shines as a fine example of studio-era location shooting and serves as the film's narrative and thematic nucleus. The five-minute montage that kicks off the sequence is so good it could stand alone as a short film highlighting 50s Americana. James Wong Howe's CinemaScope cinematography basks everything in a honey-colored glow that contributes to making this amusing and appealing sequence one of the major reasons Picnic continues to stay one of my favorites.

Save for the obvious set for the Moonglow dancing dock used for weather reasons, the entirety of the picnic sequence was filmed in Halstead, Kansas, the swimming lake scenes in Sterling, Kansas. That's Nick Adams (Bomber) and What's My Line? stalwart, Phyllis Newman (Jaunita Badger) in the bathing suits above.

BONUS MATERIALS

For the curious, here's a YouTube link to a 1986 made-for-cable-TV production of Picnic for Broadway on Showtime starring Gregory Harrison (he produced, which should answer any "WTF?!?" questions), Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Rue McClanahan. Although set in the 50s, it has 80s written all over it.

Broadway on Showtime Presents: Picnic

I didn’t grow up in a small town, and this typically Hollywood, all-white vision of Midwestern life is nothing I clutch to my bosom with misty-eyed nostalgia (although with HD and sharp eyes you might catch a fleeting glimpse of one or two black people in the picnic scenes). But on a human level, I tend to find irresistible any story which celebrates, with compassion and dignity, the small struggles and victories of people leading simple lives. Few writers conveyed this with as much heart and humor as William Inge.

“Get more out of life. See a fucked-up movie.” John Waters

I don’t know why, but certain kinds of bad movies do have a unique charm about them. The best are happy accidents comprised of good intentions, poor decisions, lofty ambitions, and overburdened talent - all culminating in a perfect schadenfreude cocktail.
To be fair, Sphinx doesn't legitimately qualify as a fucked-up movie, but it is an implausible, convoluted, unrelentingly silly movie which, provided it hasn't put you to sleep with its sluggish pacing, is a great deal of fun. The fact that I derive so much pleasure from a film considered by many (some being members of the film's cast) to be absolutely wretched, is a riddle worthy of the Sphinx itself.

Lesley-Anne Down as Dr. Erica Baron

Frank Langella as Ahmed Khazzan

Sir John Gielgud as Abdu-Hamdi

Maurice Ronet as Yvon DeMargeau

Sphinx was released toward the tail-end of “Tut-Mania” - a superficially New Age-y 70s craze inflamed by the mass-marketing and rampant publicity surrounding the record-breaking 1976-1979 U.S. tour of the Egyptian artifact exhibit: The Treasures of Tutankhamun. Virtually overnight, America became obsessed by all things Egyptian.

Comedian Steve Martin had a Top-20 hit with his novelty song, King Tut; bookstores overflowed with tomes extolling the virtues of Pyramid Power (my college had a pyramid in its courtyard under which students could sit for energy renewal. Its acoustic-resistant design ideal for muting the sound of snickers); and everywhere you looked you saw King Tut posters, bumper stickers, T-shirts, and massive reproductions of ancient Egyptian jewelry. Rare was the home you’d visit which didn't have at least one Egyptian-themed artwork, shelf knickknack, or coffee table book on display.

In the grip of Egyptomania
Cher (who never met a fad she didn't like) plays "Hands off my Tuts" while
Steve Martin gets wild & crazy with an Egyptian mummy (w)rap song

In 1978, thanks largely to Michael Crichton’s slick direction and Geneviève Bujold’s intelligent performance, Coma - author Robin Cook’s 1977 bestselling medical-thriller - enjoyed a commercially successful book-to-screen translation. The following year, Cook topped the bestseller lists again with Sphinx, another profession-based mystery-thriller with a spunky young heroine at its center, this time set in the fast-paced, life and death struggle, never-a-dull-moment world of Egyptology. That the novel would be made into a motion picture was a foregone conclusion the moment it hit the stands.

Sphinx’sserpentine plot (aspish plot?) virtually defies description, but the base, TV-miniseries gist of it all is that Lesley-Anne Down is a young and beautiful Egyptologist (is there any other kind?) who stumbles upon a cutthroat gang of antiquities black marketeers, and in doing so, possibly unearths Egypt's last undiscovered, perfectly preserved tomb. In her efforts to claim the discovery for herself ("Do you know what the chances are of getting anywhere in Egyptology through the normal routes are for a woman?!?"she asserts at the beginning of a long-winded, ill-timed feminist jeremiad that doesn't have the cumulative effect the screenwriter hoped) while assisting an ambitious French Journalist (Ronet), and falling in love with/evading a mysterious Egyptian official (Langella); Down must first survive being thrown down a flight of stairs, imprisonment, being chased, terrorized, shot at, assaulted, entombed, bitten by an old woman(!), nearly beheaded, run off the road, and being attacked by old bats (they flying type, this time, not the aforementioned little old lady). It's action, it's adventure, it's romance...it's Sphinx.

In a 1922 flashback sequence, Victoria Tennant and James Cossins portray Lady and Lord Carnarvon, the real-life financial backers of the discovery and excavation of Pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb. Ironically, in 1986 Tennant would wed Mr. King Tut himself, Steve Martin.

If Hollywood wasn't already intrigued by the lightning-strikes-twice success potential of Robin Cook's sound-alike suspenser (it’s essentially Coma in Cairo), most certainly the timely, exploitation-friendly setting of Egypt was enough to seal the deal. The aforementioned Treasures of Tutankhamun museum tour was still going strong (it toured globally from 1972 through 1981) so Sphinx must have looked like a boxoffice slam dunk. In an out-of-the-gate bid to compete in the big leagues, recently-formed independent production company Orion Pictures snapped up the film rights to Sphinx in pre-publication for an estimated $1 million dollars. The directing chores immediately assigned to Oscar-winning director Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton, Planet of the Apes, The Boys from Brazil), who also co-produced.

After such a hefty initial cash outlay, and with a substantial portion of the film’s budget (reported to be in the vicinity of $12 million - $17 million) yet to be allocated to the securing of a cinematographer (Ernest Day - A Passage it India) and the understandably high-priority task of acquiring the rights to film in some of Egypt’s most historic locations (Valley of the Kings, the Pyramids and Sphinx of Giza, The Egyptian Museum of Antiquities); the makers of Sphinx can’t be blamed if they felt it necessary to tighten their shentis a bit when it came to the screenwriter and cast.

Sphinx boasts breathtakingly beautiful scenery

In a decision tantamount to trying to build a pyramid upside down, the job of adapting Robin Cook’s novel to the screen was handed over to Mahogany screenwriter John Byrum; an ignominious claim if ever there was one, and a screen credit one would think sufficient to prohibit Mr. Byrum from ever being allowed anywhere near a typewriter for the rest of his days. When the film opened, Byrum's talky, nonsensical screenplay was cited as a prime offender in the film's many unfavorable reviews, most famously the terse two-word put-down, "Sphinx Stinks," which is right up there with I Am a Camera's "Me No Leica."

British actress Lesley-Anne Down copped the plumb female lead in Sphinx's nearly all-male cast. An alumnus of Upstairs Downstairs (the 70s Downton Abbey), Down’s film career at this point consisted mainly of high-profile supporting roles and second-leads in a string of increasingly dismal big-budget features. Sphinx gave Down her first opportunity to carry an entire major motion picture by herself.

I won’t say the lovely actress fumbles the opportunity, but following Sphinx, the actress who at one time starred opposite Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, and Burt Reynolds, was reduced to lending support to such kiss-your-career-goodbye movie co-stars as Andrew Stevens, Eric Roberts, and Hulk Hogan. Happily, television welcomed Ms. Down back with open arms, and for years the now-retired actress enjoyed a thriving career as the Joan Collins of daytime soaps.

Shady antiquities dealer Abdu-Hamdi shows Dr. Baron a rare statue of Pharaoh Seti I

No matter how slickly packaged, bad movies have a way of tipping their hand rather early. Before Sphinxeven reaches the ten-minute mark, we're given an indication of what kind of ride we’re in for in a scene where Down engages in a forced, exposition-heavy conversation with a museum curator. In record time we learn where she’s from (Boston by way of England for Egyptology graduate studies); how long she’s lived there (five years); why she’s single (she’s sworn off men after her beau, a fellow Egyptologist, left her for a tenured position at a Chicago University); and why she’s in Egypt (she’s working on a paper on Meneptha, chief architect of the tomb of Tutankhamun).

The scene lasts but 60-seconds, but in that time we’re alerted to the fact that this is a film which regards character as something to be hastily dispensed with in order to get to the most pressing matters at hand: implausible plot twists, narrow escapes, close calls, travelogue views of Egyptian scenery, and placing the heroine in as much jeopardy as possible over the course of two hours.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

As “Women in Jeopardy” films go, by description Sphinx may sound a lot like Coma (a movie that gets it 100% right and which I absolutely adore), but in execution it most resembles Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline (1979), one of Audrey Hepburn’s last films and a movie so off-the-rails loopy that I urge to run, not walk, and secure yourself a copy if you've never seen it.

Sphinx has beautiful scenery to recommend it, lots of lovingly rendered shots of Egyptian artifacts to drool over, and even a pretty decent mystery at its core, but these serve as mere backdrops for the film’s primary amusement: Sphinx’s consistent inability to make good on even its most modest ambitions.

For example, Sphinxcan’t make up its mind if it wants to be a rollicking adventure along the lines of, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark (which opened five months later in 1981, effectively obliterating Sphinx from people’s memories), or a smart mystery thriller like Hitchcock’s Notorious. Thus, in settling unstably somewhere in between, Sphinx at times feels jarringly schizophrenic. From a narrative standpoint, this means physical comedy and broadly-played character schtick shatter interludes of funereal soberness without preparation or warning, making plot points that already stretch credibility seem farcical.

John Rhys-Davies as Stephanos Markoulis
He appeared as the less threatening Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark this same year

For poor Lesley-Anne Down, this means her character has to vacillate between being a resourceful, no-nonsense Egyptologist; a gushing tourist; and a screaming, hysterical ninny...sometimes all within the same scene. Saddled with a crayon-red hairdo that makes her look like the love child of Laurie Anderson and Annie Lennox, the movie asks us to take her character seriously while the filmmakers undermine her credibility by keeping every hair in place, clothes spiffy clean (that cream-colored jumpsuit must have been dipped in Scotch-Gard), and makeup flawless, no matter how many ruins she crawls around in.

Mullet and Shoulder Pads
A look as timeless as the Pyramids themselves

PERFORMANCES

I’ve liked Lesley-Anne down since I first laid eyes on her in A Little Night Music in 1977 and then a few months later in The Besty (another world-class stinker you should make it your business to see). She was so different in each film I scarcely knew it was the same woman. Although her subsequent output gave me pause (the deadly dull Hanover Streetwas almost the final nail), I was excited at the prospect of her being cast in Sphinx after reading the book and thinking it would at last provide the ill-used actress an opportunity to be something other than glamorous window-dressing.

The Stepford Egyptian
Talented actor Frank Langella (a lip-reader's nightmare, his mouth never moves when he speaks) must have used the saying, "Expressionless as a Sphinx" as his character motivation. Honestly, his performance is comprised of steely-eyed stares (his 1979 Dracula bit) while his voice emanates from...where, his ears?...certainly not that immobile mouth

Down is actually the best thing in the film, but on the whole that turns out not to be saying very much. At some point the makers of Sphinx must have realized that they had constructed a thriller exclusively around a bunch of grim, glowering, middle-aged-to-elderly men (mostly silent) whose main interest is to keep a secret hidden. This may play well on the page but makes for a deadly dull movie. Subsequently, it falls to the Erica Baron character to shoulder the entirety of the film’s “thrill factor.” So, as if to compensate for a whole lot of nothing coming from the male side of the cast, Down is directed to scream, shriek, jump, weep, yelp, and basically be in hysterics at annoyingly frequent intervals just to remind people they are watching a thriller. So while I can't say Lesley-Anne Down ever convinces me even for a minute that she's an Egyptologist, I have to hand it to her for giving the role everything she's got. For those who only know Down from the robotic demands of soap operas, the physicality of her performance in Sphinx should come as quite a nice surprise.

Scenery-10, Chemistry - 0

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
As a non-fan of the video game feel and look of CGI, Sphinx gets points simply by presenting such amazing, unenhanced vistas of Egypt. Accompanied by sometimes overly-majestic swells of music, there is much to swoon over in the scenery, artifacts and travelogue footage. Even if you hate the film and want to watch it on fast forward with the sound down, I'd recommend Sphinx for its outstanding visuals. And on a side note, I know this is a film and many of the people are paid extras; there still is an alarming difference in the size of the average American tourist back in 1980 when compared to today.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I don't really know if they make movies like Sphinx anymore (most likely they're on Lifetime if they do), but just watching it again recently made me all nostalgic for the days when one could count on at least one glossy, overproduced Hollywood trifle like this a year. It mattered not whether it came from the pen of Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, or Sidney Sheldon, there was just the assurance that the result would be entertainingly escapist trash or a disaster of transplendent awfulness. It was a win-win situation.
Sphinx is too serous in approach and lacking in outrageously off-kilter casting to be a great camp classic (they would have had to cast Pia Zadora for that), but while it still hits all the necessary points for me to qualify it as an enjoyably "bad" movie, Sphinx has an appealingly old-fashioned feel to it that gets me where I live, nostalgically speaking. And by that I mean I occasionally appreciate movies that stumble and fall flat on their faces simply because they take me back to a time when movies actually looked like they were trying.

BONUS MATERIAL
Sphinx is available in its entirety on YouTube HERE

When most people think of film in the 70s, they think of a time of innovation, upheaval, and experimentation. And indeed, it was. But the 70s was also the decade which introduced the first generation of film-weaned filmmakers; directors, producers, and writers who grew up watching movies.

Wholly uninterested in the experimental exploration of film’s potential as an art form or means of creative expression, this new breed nostalgia-prone, rear-view-fixated filmmakers – many of them former movie critics or film scholars – not only seemed to have spent the entirety of their formative years in front of movie screens (and therefore appeared to be devoid of any actual, real-life experience insights to impart beyond those gleaned, secondhand, from movies), but when granted the opportunity to make films of their own, strove for no ambition loftier than to remake, revisit, and re-imagine the films that meant so much to them growing up.

The legacy of such willfully arrested artistic development can certainly be seen today in Hollywood’s worrisome over-reliance on remakes and reboots, and the almost-surreal global dominance of mega-budget, adolescence-coddling comic book movies. But back in the day of the Auteur Theory, the Nouvelle Vague, and the New Hollywood; the regressive filmmaker was largely dismissed by serious cineastes, but embraced by a moviegoing public showing signs of having grown weary of avant-garde filmmaking techniques, artsy pretensions, and non-linear storytelling. Indeed, in the wake of the 70s oil crisis, inflation, Vietnam, and Watergate, many audiences found the notion of escaping into the romanticized idealization of the past to be a very appealing proposition.

Cinema Dreams
In the background of this shot, Bogdanovich pays tribute to one of his favorite directors, John Ford, by featuring a theater marquee advertising Ford's 1935 feature, Steamboat Round the Bend

Some directors, like François Truffaut, paid homage to the filmmakers they admired (Hitchcock, in his case) by reinterpreting that director's style through a modern prism. Others, like Francis Ford Coppola, found fame through the application of auteurist theories to classicist filmmaking. Only Peter Bogdanovich – actor, film scholar, and critic – drew the ire of Hollywood Renaissance movie cultists while claiming success as the Golden Boy of the nostalgia craze by making new “old” movies.

Ryan O'neal as Moses (Moze) Pray

Tatum O'Neal as Addie Loggins

Madeline Kahn as Miss Trixie Delight (alias, Mademoiselle)

P.J. Johnson as Imogene

Burton Gilliam as Floyd

John Hillerman as Deputy Hardin / Jess Hardin

Randy Quaid as Leroy

Although Peter Bogdanovich is technically credited with being its director, Paper Moon, like its predecessors The Last Picture Show(1971) and What’s Up, Doc? (1972), is a film so heavily influenced by Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Orson Welles, each gentleman, by rights, could share co-director billing. A point Bogdanovich himself would likely make no bones about, as on the DVD commentary he states, “The movie was very 1935 with 70s actors.” And to be sure, what with the film’s salty language, racy humor, and a pint-sized, cigarette-smoking heroine so cheeky she’d take the curl our of Shirley Temple’s hair; Paper Moon feels very much like some kind of pre-Code Preston Sturges movie shot through with a dose of 70s self-awareness.

Paper Moon, a Depression-era road comedy skillfully and hilariously adapted by Alvin Sargent (The Sterile Cuckoo) from John David Brown’s 1971 novel, Addie Pray, is the story of small-time con man, Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal), who meets his match in little Addie Loggins (Ryan's real-life daughter, Tatum O’Neal), an old-beyond-her-8-years, recently-orphaned waif who may or may not be he his illegitimate daughter. Entrusted with escorting the child from Kansas to Missouri to stay with relatives, Moze’s attempt to first swindle, then unburden himself of the cagey tyke, results in the tables being turned on him in a manner which ultimately binds the two as reluctant partners in cross-country flim-flams. The quarrelsome duo’s misadventures swindling widows, bilking shopkeepers, and taking up with buxom carnival dancer, Trixie Delight (Kahn) and her beleaguered maid, Imogene (Johnson), is played out against a bleak Midwestern landscape of barren skies and vast Kansas plains redolent of The Grapes of Wrath.

Paper Moon's grim depiction of the Midwest during The Great Depression not only served as dark subtext to the film's comedy, but resonated with 70s audiences contending with gas-rationing and rising inflation

Gloriously shot, cleverly conceived, superbly-acted, and consistently laugh-out-loud funny, Paper Moon is a feast of period detail and sharp comedy writing that manages to be sweetly sentimental without veering into the saccharine. And while I find the film to feel a little draggy in its third act, the first two-thirds of Paper Moon are very nearly perfect. (It makes perfect narrative sense for things to take a darker turn once Addie & Moze's overconfidence in their con leads to greed and their ultimate comeuppance, but both the bootleg swindle and hillbilly car swap have tension without wit. But to be honest, Paper Moon reaches such a giddy height of comedy incandescence with the introduction of the characters of Trixie and Imogene, their departure can't help but make the rest of the film - excluding the marvelous denouement - feel like an anticlimax.)

If it can be said of Bogdanovich that he is a director who has spent his life forever at the feet of The Masters, then at least he’s a student who learned his lessons well. For as with all of his early films, Paper Moon reveals Bogdanovich to be a deft and sensitive storyteller, versatile and fluent in the language of cinema. He understands what he’s doing, knows what he’s going for, and despite a film-geek tendency toward stylistic imitation-as-flattery, he has an inspired touch when it comes to comedy and has a talent for making the familiar feel engagingly fresh.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Paper Moon is one of my favorite comedies, one I’ve always regretted never having seen at a theater in the presence of an audience. But as I recount in an earlier post about The Last Picture Show, as a young man I was less than enthralled by the whole 70 nostalgia craze:

“As African-American teen inspired by the emerging prominence of black actors on the screen and excited about the upsurge in positive depictions of African-American life in movies of the 70s; these retro films, with their all-white casts and dreamy idealization of a time in America’s past which was, in all probability, a living nightmare for my parents and grandparents, felt like a step in the wrong direction. The antennae of my adolescent cynicism told me that all this rear-view fetishism was just Hollywood’s way of maintaining the status quo. A way of reverting back to traditional gender and racial roles, and avoiding the unwieldy game-change presented by the demand for more ethnic diversity onscreen, the evolving role of women in society, and the increased visibility of gays.”

And while I still feel this to be true and witness the same thing happening today in Hollywood’s focus on fantasy films populated with mythical creatures, elves, gnomes, wizards, and superbeings of all stripes (anything but those pesky, problematic humans); the passage of time has literally transformed Paper Moon into what it was always designed to be: an old movie. And old movies I can watch through a prism of the past I’d otherwise find unacceptable, if not reprehensible, in a contemporary film.

If there's a method to Bogdanovich's retro madness, it's that Paper Moon is often at its funniest when it uses our familiarity with 30s movie tropes as the setup for contemporary, very 70s comic reversals. Tatum O'Neal's tough-talking Addie amuses in part because she's so very unlike the kind of little girl every parent wanted their daughter be like in the 30s: Shirley Temple. Trixie's maid, Imogene, may recall the sassy black maids of 30s comedies, but it's her uproariously open and blatant hostility toward her employer which lays to rest the quaint stereotype of the devoted domestic.

I think it was Bogdanovich who once made the observation that people of a certain age visualize the 1930s in their mind's eye as a black-and-white era because that 's the only way they know it: black-and white-photos, black-and-white movies. When Paper Moon, with its meticulous recreation of the look and feel of a 1935 film (which is, importantly, not the same thing as recreating 1935), has its very period-specific characters using language unthinkable in films of the day, the visual and behavioral incongruity is riotously funny.

Ryan's Daughter

PERFORMANCES

As everyone knows, 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal made history by being the youngest person to ever win a competitive Oscar when she won Best Supporting Actress for Paper Moon in 1974. And on that score you’ll get no argument from me. I’m really not very fond of kids (either on or off screen) a predisposition compounded by precocious kids whose mature behavior I’m supposed to find adorable. But Bogdanovich works a minor miracle with Tatum O’Neal. She actually IS an adorable, precocious child…sweet of face, husky of voice, and inhabited, apparently, by the soul of a 50-year-old grifter.

Paper Moon's great, unsung asset is Ryan O'Neal. Looser and funnier than you're likely to see him any other film, he is a real charmer with an impressive range of exasperated reactions

Tatum O'Neal is nothing short of a marvel in a role in which she’s required to play a range of emotions a seasoned professional would find challenging. And even if the rumors are true that Bogdanovich shaped every gesture, nuance, and line reading (easy enough to believe given the flatness of her subsequent performances in The Bad News Bears and International Velvet), hers is still an amazingly assured and natural performance for one so young and in her first film (O’Neal was eight when filming began).

Now, with all that being said, I do have to lodge my one complaint: there is no way in hell Addie Pray is a supporting role. It’s a lead. The entire film rests on her shoulders and she appears in more scenes than anyone else in the film. It’s patently absurd that Tatum O’Neal was entered in the Best Supporting Actress category.

Of course, my rant is based in my ironclad certainty that, taking absolutely nothing from O’Neal’s great performance, it was Madeline Khan who deserved that award. As good as Paper Moon is, without Khan’s Trixie Delight, my A+ rating would drop to a B-minus. She's that good.

I'm sure someone somewhere has tallied the length of Madeline Khan's screen time in Paper Moon, but from her memorably jiggly entrance, through her umpteenth speech extolling the virtues of bone-structure, to her magnificent scene on that hilltop (one of the finest moments in Khan's entire career); every single moment is sheer brilliance.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The off-kilter charm of Paper Moon is in it essentially being a romantic comedy. An uneasy love story between a father and daughter who may or may not be biologically-related (“It’s pothible!”). That Addie doesn’t really see herself as a little girl and Moze not seeing himself as anything closely resembling a father, makes for several amusingly touching scenes wherein the querulous duo are forced to play-act as a loving father and daughter in order to perpetrate a swindle, yet at all other times reluctant to yield to even the slightest display of affection for one another .

Waitress - "How we doin' Angel Pie? We gonna have a little dessert after we finish up our hot dog?"
Addie - (never taking her eyes off Moze) "I dunno."
Waitress - "What d'ya say, Daddy? Whyn'y we get precious here a little dessert if she eats her dog?"
Moze - (slowly and through gritted teeth) "Her name ain't precious."

Two days and 36 takes (!) produced this exceptional continuous shot sequence

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Over the years, both Peter Bogdanovich's unrealized potential and the dysfunctional family circus that has become the O'Neals has lent a bittersweet air of nostalgia to Paper Moon wholly unintended and unrelated to its roots in 1930s. For years it had been hinted that Bogdanovich's success was owed in large part to his wife, production and costume designer, Polly Platt. Paper Moon marks their last collaboration (they divorced after Peter fell in love with Cybill Shepherd during the making of The Last Picture Show) and tellingly, the end of Bogdanovich's success streak. As a longtime admirer (if not idolater) of Orson Welles, it couldn't have been lost on Bogdanovich the degree to his decline in popularity mirrored Welles' own tarnished Golden Boy career decline.

By way of talks shows, memoirs, and tabloid headlines, Ryan and Tatum O'Neal have practically built a cottage industry around airing the dirty laundry of their familial discord. Watching Paper Moon these days, one can't help respond to the almost documentary aspects of Moze and Addie's push-pull relationship. This is especially true of scenes depicting Addie's possessiveness toward Moze and jealousy of any female attention directed towards him (Addie's relationship with Trixie is like being given front row seats to how the whole Tatum O'Neal/Farrah Fawcett thing played out).
In light of the unhappy reality we've come to know about the O'Neals, Moze and Addie have become for us the idealized image of Ryan and Tatum.

As with Orson Welles, I'll always associate Peter Bogdanovich with the genius work of his early career, and largely overlook his latter contributions. Tatum and Ryan O'Neal I like to envision driving off to an uncertain but happy future together, devoted father and loving daughter, down that long and winding road into the horizon. Remembering the past as we'd like it to be is what nostalgia's all about, isn't it?

And They Lived Happily Ever After

BONUS MATERIAL
YouTube clip of Tatum O'Neal winning her Oscar for Paper Moon - HERE

YouTube clip of Ryan O'Neal, Tatum O'Neal, and Peter Bogdanovich on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson - HERE

In 1974 Paper Moon was a short-lived TV series starring Jodie Foster (just two years away from her own Oscar nomination) and Christopher Connelly, an actor who played Ryan O'Neal's brother in 1964's Peyton Place, yet another TV series spun off from a motion picture. YouTube Clip of series' opening sequence.

The controversial Italia-Franco-German production, Salon Kitty, was released in the United States in 1977 under the title, Madam Kitty (because we Yanks do need to have things spelled out for us), but I honestly, have no direct memory of its release and can’t recall ever reading anything about it at the time. Which is really weird given: a) It stars dreamboat #1, Helmut Berger, going full-frontal (why hadn’t my friends told me about this?!!?); b) It’s an X-rated, European art-house flick, which, if you knew me in my film-school days, was practically catnip; c) It’s a semi-musical with Ingmar Bergman star, Ingrid Thulin, channeling Cabaret and doing her best Sally Bowles impersonation as the singing proprietress of a decadent, high-class Berlin bordello in 1939; e) It reunites the stars of Luchino Visconti’s 1969 opus, The Damned (Thulin & Berger) in an over-the-top, trash/camp vision of Nazi Germany that is worthy of Ken Russell in being a film of almost operatic poor taste and visual excess.

With so much about Salon Kitty so perfectly suited to my oddball tastes, I really am at a loss for understanding how this film failed to capture my attention back in 1977. Except to note that when I Googled the original US release poster researching this essay, what I found was a poster so tacky and cheap-looking, with "X-rated" plastered all over it, there's a pretty good chance that I mistook Madam Kitty (Salon Kitty) for a run-of-the-mill porn film back in 1977 and never even bothered to read the credits. In the end, perhaps it was all for the best because, as I understand, the US version was severely edited, and I'm happy that my first exposure to Salon Kitty (just last month!) was through the restored director's edit (Italian director Tinto Brass, of Caligula infamy) currently available on DVD.

Helmut Berger as Helmut Wallenberg

Ingrid Thulin as Madame Kitty Kellerman

Teresa Ann Savoy as Margherita

Bekim Fehmiu as Hans Reiter

John Ireland (!) as Cliff

Inspired by a true story (movie-speak for “outside of the basic premise, we essentially made everything up”) Salon Kitty is about an apolitical madam (Thulin) who runs the most popular whorehouse in Berlin during the early days of WW II. Salon Kitty is a luxurious bordello/nightclub democratically catering to an international clientele of foreign dignitaries and high-ranking members of the Nazi Party (“Himmler…Von Ribbentrop…they are all my clients!”).

Under the orders of icy SS General Biondo (John Steiner), ambitious secret security officer Helmut Wallenberg (Berger) closes down Kitty’s Berlin brothel and sets up her up in a new location in the more remote Grünewald district, only instead of keeping her multi-ethnic whores (who are deported, killed, or sent to prison camps), she is obliged to accept and train a specially-selected all-German cadre of prostitutes-in-training chosen for their devout National Socialist loyalty. Kitty thinks she is doing her part for the morale of the German army, but unbeknownst to her, each of the rooms of her new bordello has been outfitted with bugging devices intended to secure information leaked by German military officers during pillow-talk which might prove useful for blackmail purposes or the unearthing of treasonous behavior.

What happens when Kitty discovers she is being used as a pawn in Nazi espionage, or what revenge is plotted when an otherwise reprehensibly unsympathetic recruit (Teresa Ann Savoy) falls in love with a disillusioned Luftwaffe Lieutenant (Yugoslav heartthrob Bekim Fehmiu, whose US career sank without a trace after appearing in the flop Harold Robbins sudser The Adventurersin 1970), serve as mere backdrop for Salon Kitty's most pressing concerns: the wholesale depiction of sexual depravity, the display of naked male and female flesh as often as possible, and allowing for Helmut Berger to strut around like Norma Shearer in one outlandish fetish uniform after another.

Does this swastika make me look fat?

Although it all sounds positively loony in synopsis, as stated, Salon Kittyis based on actual events culled from a 1972 book by Peter Norden about a madam (Kitty Schmidt, name changed to Kellerman for the film) whose brothel was indeed used for the purpose of spying by SS agents. The chief difference being that in real-life, Kitty was aware of the wiretapping but was threatened with cooperating or being sent to a POW camp. But in a Tinto Brass film, the prurient always takes precedence over the political, so, much like one of Ken Russell’s fervently overheated biographies of famous composers (The Music Lovers, Lisztomania), Salon Kittyis less a look at civilian-coerced Nazi espionage than a full-tilt wallow in the kind of “divine decadence” that Cabaret could only hint at.

The controversial "recruitment" scene

Salon Kitty was recommended to me by Netflix on the strength of the 5-star rating I gave Visconti’s The Damned when I watched it for the first time last year. I’m not a big fan of films about Nazi Germany; in fact, I tend to go out of my way to avoid them. but Visconti’s film was like The Godfather to me: a nihilistic epic of evil couched in a cutthroat family saga. I liked its scope and visual opulence, and I particularly liked Visconti’s artful way of distilling an epoch of unspeakable inhumanity down to an emotional scale that didn’t give the watchful observer the easy-out of being able to say, “That could never happen here.”

Alas, while Salon Kittyfeels and looks on the surface like a companion-piece to Visconti’s The Damned, in truth it’s more a well-heeled example of a (mercifully) short-lived cinematic sub-genre known as Il Sadiconazista (or Nazi exploitation film). These were films that, in the wake of controversial arthouse successes, The Night Porter (1974) and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), sought to capitalize more on the sensationalistic depiction of the sexual/sadomasochistic side of Nazism with only superficial, contextual attention paid to the political.

SS Commander Biondo leads Wallenberg through a gymnasium of bottomless fencing students

Salon Kitty attempts to dramatize the rise of National Socialism in Germany by equating the decadent conduct of aristocratic culture with the gradual erosion of individual morality that was at the center of the dehumanizing, sadomasochistic recruitment practices of the SS. It shows, rather effectively, that the only way to turn people into obedient drones is through the dismantling of self. And undeniably, much of what is on display is in accord with what we’ve come to learn about the controlling, brainwashing techniques of cults, religions, and extremist groups.

But in placing so much emphasis on all things sexual and in taking events so far over the top as to appear stylized, Italian director Brass not only weakens the seriousness of these themes, but makes it all too easy to focus exclusively on the downright bizarre set-pieces and often hilariously bad dialog (“A soldier also wants to shoot hisbullets, not just those the army gives him!” or, Wallenberg: “You have to close your nightclub.” Kitty: “What a pain in the ass!”). What, for example, is the appropriate response to a scene in which a prostitute literally goes mad and starts foaming at the mouth after a German official, upon placing a loaf of bread shaped like an enormous phallus between her thighs, bites off its head?

One of Madam Kitty's girls with a client

In The Damned, a character attributed the following quote to Hitler: “Personal morals are dead. We are an elite society where everything is permissible.” I have no idea if Hitler actually said this, but if the wall-to-wall debauchery depicted in Salon Kitty could be said to exist in service of anything beyond cheap exploitation, I’d say it serves to decry the basic criminal degeneracy of the Nazi movement and the moral decay fueling their particular brand of fascism. Too bad you have to stop giggling long enough to get that point.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

People (myself included) often use the phrase, “Only in the 70s” when referring to a certain unbridled, anything-goes lunacy characteristic of movies of that decade. In most instances it’s said in a pejorative way; but when I say it it’s with an almost proprietary, boastful pride. I’m happy to have discovered film in an era when filmmakers, giddy with the new-found freedom of relaxed censorship and permissiveness, took chances and were allowed to cater to adult tastes, not required to pander to adolescent fads.

John Steiner as Commander Biondo

Far from a work of art, a film of such questionable taste as Salon Kitty gets a major thumbs-up for me simply because, in light of the corporate, committee-sanctioned analgesics passing for movies today, I can’t help but admire a film that pushes boundaries. Wholly independent of whether or not I approve of the boundaries being pushed.

Fascism as Fetish

PERFORMANCES

While I tend to be of a mind to say a bad performance is a bad performance in any language; European films with international casts pose a unique problem, what with the widespread practice of post-production dubbing. In Salon Kitty I can’t tell if the often disembodied-sounding voices are due to dubbing or poor sound recording (as I recognize several of the actor’s real voices), but let’s suffice it to say that, outside of the leads (and just what is Joan Crawford's I Saw What You Did co-star, John Ireland -fully clothed, thankfully- doing here?), I think it’s fair to say that most of the cast was selected for their willingness to appear in various states of undress first, for their acting ability second.

The beauteous Helmut Berger is certainly easy on the eyes, but I’ve always considered to be more a presence than an actor. He has a kind of brittle intensity that I like, but mostly I just regard him as a kind of male Garbo…just looking is enough. By far, the best and most entertaining performance in Salon Kitty is given by Kitty herself, Swedish actress Ingrid Thulin. (Thulin began her career as a star in several Ingmar Bergman films. The same year Salon Kitty was released in the US, Bergman's own Nazi-themed film, The Serpent's Egg was also released.)

Kitty & Wallenberg attempt to make beautiful Teutonic music together

As the resilient, pragmatic whorehouse madam, Thulin is like a character out of Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. With her expressive, wry mouth, and that magnificent face that can look both masculine and feminine at the same time, Thulin plays her role to the hilt, cannily never really letting on whether she’s playing it straight or playing to the camp, melodramatic heights of the material. The earthy zeal with which she attacks the role breathes vibrant life into Salon Kitty's austere, unerotic eroticism.

Life is a cabaret at Salon Kitty

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

While Salon Kitty at times makes a pretty persuasive case against the perils of fascism and the abuse of power, I have to say, after sitting through the entire 133-minute director’s cut, the strongest images I come away with are those depicting decorous depravity, and those highlighting the visual splendor of the sumptuous art nouveau décor and the eye-catching costumes.

Not since the excesses of Lucille Ball's Mame (1974) has the drag queen aesthetic
been given such full rein in costume design. Credit Jost Jacob & Ugo Percoli

Always dressed for the occasion, Kitty attempts to enlist the aid of a client (Stefano Satta Flores)
in a plot to turn the tables on Wallenberg

You know it's a high-class whorehouse when the girls wear gowns inspired by Hollywood designer, Adrian. In this instance, a black and white number worn by Joan Crawford in Letty Lynton (1932)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Salon Kittyfeatures scenes of orgies, whippings, sadomasochism, lesbianism, homoeroticism, voyeurism, animal slaughter, and some things I could only look at through the bars of the fingers covering my eyes. Although unpleasant at times, none of it ever feels purposeless. Indeed, when Salon Kitty is at its best as a film to be taken seriously, the explicit barbarism depicted feels calculated to prevent us from ever slipping into “enjoying” the film’s eroticism independent of its monstrous context of impending death camps and genocide.

Humanity Reclaimed
"Man belongs to mankind...not to a country, or to a race or religion."

But for all the baroque displays of violence, degeneracy, and depravity, Salon Kitty’s most chilling moment and most powerful anti-Nazi indictment comes in a quiet sequence that takes place in an aquarium. A Jewish family encounters a group of Hitler Youth girls, and as the family attempts to avoid a confrontation, their small son accidentally drops a small wind-up toy at the feet of one of the girls. A tense moment transpires as the child stares innocently into the face of one of the sternest girls (later to become one of Wallenberg’s recruits) who proceeds to methodically crush the toy under her foot without once breaking her gaze from the child’s confused eyes.

This scene, played without dialog, packs a serious wallop and should clue those who would dismiss this film out of hand for its excesses, that there is perhaps a method to Tinto Brass' madness, and the whole of Salon Kitty is likely greater than the sum of its outrageous parts.

Salon Kitty bid you Willkommen

“You don’t understand. I mean, it’s not what you think. I’d never do that. It’s just…the boys are so nice to you. When we’re together…I never knew it was gonna be so nice. Did you ever have a boy hold you close and sing to you? This one boy, Eddie…he sang to me right in my ear. And he held me so sweetly. June, don’t you know how that feels? Just to be held like that?”

Laura Dern as Connie

Treat Williams as Arnold Friend

Mary Kay Place as Katherine

It’s summer vacation and 15-year-old Connie moves about the suburban California home she shares with her easygoing dad (Levon Helm), quarrelsome mom (Place), and “perfect” 24-year-old sister, June (Elizabeth Berridge), in a sleepwalker’s haze of idle distraction and adolescence-induced self-absorption. Able only to muster up enough energy for sunbathing, toenail-painting, music-listening, and practicing her “How to talk to boys” patter and smile in mirrors, Connie’s at that age where she feels as if she’s harboring at least four different people under her skin. First there’s Daddy’s little girl; then the lazy, can’t-do-anything-right, “career criminal” her mother thinks she needs to keep her eye on 24/7; and, of course, her sister sees her as a spoiled, entitled brat. Connie herself feels awkwardly suspended between wanting to remain a little girl like her naive friend, Jill (Sarah Inglis), or becoming one of those sexy, self-assured girls at the roadside hamburger stand who attract the boys that are just out of high school; an ambition her more with-it friend, Laura (Margaret Welsh) shares.

But if at home Connie and her mother continuously lock horns due to one being concerned she’s seeing the image of her former self while the other fears she’s looking at a vision of her future self; then its only during those long afternoons at the mall (it’s the 80s, the veryheight of mall culture) where, far from the gaze of those who think of her as a child, Connie has the opportunity to exuberantly, flirtatiously and (tragically) all-too innocently, explore the romantic possibilities of being an adult.

With sensitivity and a sometimes piercing insight into the peculiar pains and anxieties of verge-of-adulthood adolescence, Smooth Talk tells a melancholy coming-of-age story that’s also part Grimm fairy tale: a sexual awakening, yes, but an awakening to darkness.

“I look at you. I look right in your eyes…and all I see are a bunch of trashy daydreams.”

There’s a reason why a kind of neutered androgyny has always been standard equipment for male teen pop stars over the years. Why the over-effusive journalism of fan mags marketed to adolescent girls (Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine) trafficked in platonic, My Personal Dairyadjectives like, “huggable,” “cute,” “smoochable,” and “dreamy.” Why the casting of boy bands demands the representation of at least one of each prototypically “safe” male personality (the quiet one, the bad boy, the funny one, etc.). And why, in 1972, David Cassidy’s talk of drug use and his discreet display of pubic hair on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1972 sent hoards of adolescent girls heading for the hills and sounded the death-knell for his teen-idol career.

For a great many girls first becoming aware of their sexuality, sex isn’t really what it’s about at all. At least not in the clinical, literal sense. When you're young, vague adult urges collide with childish illusions. A burgeoning interest in sex during adolescence is, for most girls, a confused jumble of barely-understood, tantalizingly dangerous feelings centering on dreamy fantasies. Heady fantasies, romantic in nature, of idealized boy/men, more feminine than masculine in nature, who ask them out on dates and make them feel special, beautiful, and understood. Of safe, puppydog caresses and scary/exciting kisses which can be tender or torrid, but never go too far.

Does Your Mother Know?
Connie (Dern) and Laura (Margaret Welsh) are intrigued by an "older kids" roadside hangout. Less in a rush to reach adulthood, Jill (Sarah Inglis) lingers behind

If puberty in boys inflames an often difficult-to-understand surge in sexual desire and interest, these exact same feelings converge just as confusingly in adolescent girls, only with the added complication of the deceptively ego-gratifying awareness of the dubious female “power” to attract the male gaze. Of course, the tragic misunderstanding to be found in the pursuit of desirability through the self-objectifying manipulation of one’s appearance is that it only offers the illusion of control; the possessor of the gaze is the one with all the power. (It’s a sad fact of life that in our culture, girls learn the value of their bodies to boys and men long before they learn their own value to themselves.)

Rules of Attraction
Yearning to be noticed, Connie doesn't know she's already being watched

This tragic misunderstanding leads to girls longing to be cherished settling for being wanted (or worse, never learning to tell the difference); to confusing physical development with emotional maturity; and to using sexual activity as a means of coping with emotional emptiness.

The music of James Taylor, specifically his smooth talk version of the R&B classic, "Handyman"
serves as a premonitory leitmotif for dangerous seduction, just as Dern's
perpetually bare legs suggest a vulnerable voluptuousness

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Smooth Talk is adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’1966 allegorical short story, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Set in that decade, Oates’ story — an early draft of which was originally titled Death and the Maiden— is dedicated to Bob Dylan (Oates was very into his music at the time, specifically the 1965 song, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue) and was inspired by a Life magazine article the author read about a real-life serial killer of teenage girls known as “The Pied Piper of Tucson.” That such a gracefully delicate film could emerge from such an unsettling source is a testament to Oates’ poetic ability to emphasize the humanity behind the horrific, and filmmakers sensitive enough to know that what works in realistic allegory can be softened in the very literal language of film while still achieving the same effect.

Musician Levon Helm as Harry, Connie's loving but somewhat unconnected father

Wife and husband team of director Joyce Chopra and screenwriter Tom Cole do an extraordinary job of expanding upon and fleshing-out Oates’ slender, shivery prose. As if taking its cue from the mercurial shifts in mood typical of adolescence, Smooth Talk weaves scenes of languid dreaminess and tense family conflict (Connie, who always appears to be lost in a world of her own when around her family: “I wish I could just travel somewhere.”) with moments of the kind of joyous, impulsive wing-spreading we’ve all experienced as a natural part of growing up and discovering who we are.

The dark tone of the narrative’s third act feels, soberingly enough, like the intrusion of adult consequence on the childhood luxury of poor judgement and making mistakes.

With an almost ten-year age gap between them, Connie and older sister June (Elizabeth Berridge) don't even share the same memories

PERFORMANCES

Sometimes when I watch a film with a big star in the lead, the words of Valley of the Doll’s Helen Lawson come to mind: “The only hit to come out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson, and that’s ME baby, remember?” And by this I mean that some stars, whether intentionally or not; in order to keep the spotlight on themselves, seem to make it their business never to surround themselves with talents larger than their own. Smooth Talk, like a great many of my favorite independent films, features a cast so uniformly excellent, it has the feel of ensemble piece even in the face of the powerhouse performances of Dern and Williams.

The always wonderful Mary Kay Place is one of those fine character actresses
incapable of striking a false note

On the topic of Laura Dern, I’m afraid I’m going to come off sounding like one of those 16 Magazine writers myself, for I find it difficult to rein in the hyperbole when referring to this gifted actress. I’ve always been a huge fan, but she is just off-the-chart terrific here. As the character at the center of the story and the catalyst for all the film’s events, Dern makes sympathetically real a girl whose vanity and self-absorption might otherwise come off as shallow. She gives a natural, heartbreakingly honest, close-to-the-skin performance that’s ultimately disarming and oh-so touching; chiefly because Dern, in her ability to expressively convey what a character is both thinking and feeling, clues us in that Connie is having just as hard a time making sense of her feelings as her family. I've seen Laura Dern in many things, but her performance in Smooth Talk has always remained my favorite. Beautifully written, directed, and acted, how Smooth Talk failed to get Oscar nominations in all the major categories is a mystery right up there with 1997s Eve's Bayou.

You can keep your Mike Myers, your Freddy Krueger, your Jason Vorhees...Treat Williams as A. Friend is hands-down the screen's creepiest and scariest psychopath

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Because not a great many people have seen Smooth Talk, I don't want to give too much away about the film's unforgettable last half hour. It's a powerful scene remarkably well-played by Williams and Dern. Treat Williams in particular, gives one of those performances that sneaks up on you. It seems as first as if he's doing very little, then before you know it, you notice your heart has started beating faster and a subtle tension rising within you, making your pulse race. He's that scary...and that good. I was crazy about the film before, but this sequence, with its startling shifts in tone, just blew me away.

"I seen you that night and I said, 'Oh my God, that's the one...'"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As a gay man, I’ve never been able to fully identify with most coming-of-age-films. Ones told from a male perspective tend to be designed to flatter the egos of the male audience and mythologize the memories of the male writers. No matter what the title, these films were always populated with impossibly beautiful older women, dream girls, and willing prostitutes who craved nothing more than a sexual encounter with an awkward, gangly, pimply-faced premature ejaculate who couldn't find a clitoris with a GPS device.

Of course, there was the alternative of the John Hughes-type deification of youth movie. Films where, against evidence of logic and all common sense, adults are always corrupt and teens are all pure of spirit and mind. Where characters say things like, “When you grow up your heart dies” and aren't asked to immediately vacate the premises.

No, when I was going through puberty and struggling with adolescence, I didn’t go around punching out authority figures, drag racing, sleeping with lonely local widowers, or turning my house into a brothel while my parents were away. I was just an insecure kid struggling to find out what it meant to be a grown-up.
Male-focused coming-of-age films are encouraged to perpetuate the masculine myth: making puberty all about wearisome rites of passage (invariably centered around getting laid or channeling aggression), so one had to look to female-centered coming-of-age-films if one wanted a story that dealt with feelings.

I was well into adulthood when I saw Smooth Talk, but like no other film I've seen before or since, it captures, if not the particulars of adolescence as I remember it, most certainly the confused feelings and anxieties.

I recall my mood swings, my self-consciousness…my preoccupation with appearance, and need to be on my own. Like the character of Connie (and most teenagers), I'd go places and lie to my parents about where I'd been. I'd have one mode of dress when my parents saw me, but when out with my friends, I dressed more provocatively, hoping my clothes would speak in a sexual language I hadn't yet found the words for.

I grew up in San Francisco, so there were no malls to hang out in, but there the hangouts of Polk and Castro Streets. Too young to actually get in anywhere, we haunted the poster stores, record shops and moviehouses. Just being around so many out, gay men was exciting and empowering (although nobody used that word in the 70s) and made me feel unimaginably sophisticated and mature. Naturally, when I was actually approached by someone, my shyness and social ineptitude betrayed everything my precocious mode of dress sought to convey, and nothing would come of it. But the reality was, at age 15 and 16…just having someone show interest in you was more than enough.

These days it appears as if the stridently heteronormative strain that ran through the coming-of-age films of my era is at last starting to ease up. I certainly hope so. In this day of internet anonymity and sexual restlessness among adolescents, not much about what Smooth Talk addresses has changed over the years. Certainly not the threat of predatory attention. But with new stories to tell and a broader spectrum of human experience represented, films about adolescence and awakening sexuality are bound to reveal more of what we all collectively share and make obvious the fact that none of us ‒ male, female, gay, straight ‒ escapes the pain of growing up.

On the topic of the durability of certain horror films/suspense thrillers, a defining factor for me has always been whether or not the film in question continues to “work” long after its employment of the genre’s raisons dˈêtre (suspense, shocks, twists, surprises) have become well-known and anticipated.

For all its considerable merits, I don’t really regard The Omen as a classic horror film in the vein of say, Rosemary’s Baby (1968) or Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) — it’s a tad too silly and market-calculated for that; however, I do consider it a classic “scary movie” in that it skillfully and stylishly makes good on its dominant purpose: to provide audiences with a rollicking good scare.

Gregory Peck as Ambassador Robert Thorn

Lee Remick as Katherine Thorn

David Warner as Keith Jennings

Billie Whitelaw as Mrs. Baylock

Harvey Stephens as Damien Thorn

A characteristic of a great many of my favorite horror films, certainly those I consider to be classics, is the sense that they emerge out of a larger social unease or cultural anxiety. That they are able to translate the vulnerability which lies at the core of fear into a narrative that serves as the cathartic expression of of vague, unarticulated unease. The kind of unnamed dread that can lie just below the surface normalcy of calm. Rosemary’s Baby found its scares in the cultural instability of the 60s; Invasion of the Body Snatchers– the emphasis on postwar conformity and the threat of communism; The Stepford Wives – gender role reevaluation in the wake of feminism. These films understand that merely scaring an audience is to elicit a temporary reaction: a fleeting sensation akin to making them laugh at the unexpected. For a film to inspire real fear, it has to draw upon something infinitely more complex and deep-rooted. Films which understand this basic principle manage to enthrall and engage audiences years after the “spoilers” of their scare gimmicks have become common knowledge.

Patrick Troughton as Father Brennan
A lapsed Catholic about to get the point

Like that other favorite scary movie of mine, The Exorcist, The Omen is one of those rare horror films which rely heavily on shock effects, yet still manages to play fairly well the second and third time around. The over-the-top excesses of The Exorcistbenefit significantly from the seriousness of intent and absolute conviction of its filmmakers (both director William Friedkin and author William Peter Blatty see the film as an earnest treatise on the mystery of faith). The Omen, on the other hand, in spite of publicity-friendly lip-service paid by self-serious screenwriter David Seltzer and co-creator/religious technical advisor, Robert L. Munger, never convinces that it actually believes in its own pseudo-religious hokum. Rather, it feels like a scare-the-pants-off-America project dreamt up by a sophisticated William Castle (if one can imagine such a being).

Borrowing liberally from all that came before it while inventing a few tricks of its own along the way; The Omen is a skillful cut-and-paste of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Bad Seed, designed to cash-in on the post-Exorcist interest in the occult, the trend toward increasingly graphic depictions of violence in films, and the universal suspicion that all bratty children are likely the spawn of Satan.

Fans of religious supernatural horror will note that while there are no witches, tannis roots, or yellow cat eyes in attendance, The Omen,for all intents and purposes,narratively begins where Rosemary’s Baby ends: with the birth of the human antichrist into an unsuspecting world.

Through a suspiciously serendipitous coincidence of tragedies, American Ambassador Robert Thorn (Peck) is granted an orphaned infant born at the very second his emotionally fragile wife, Katherine (Remick), has given birth to a stillborn child. At 6am on the 6^th of June, no less.

Displaying a curious lack of concern with paper trails for a politician, loving husband Robert decides to pull a Folgers Crystals switch on his wife and present the bouncing baby boy bundle as their own without telling her (she’s emotionally fragile, y’know), whom they christen Damien, a name even Minnie Castevet might find a tad Satan-y.

Katherine's escalating belief that Damien wants to kill her might be traced to this haircut

As a still-photo montage illustrates, life is rosy for the Thorn family until Damien turns five, when, it must be assumed, all hell literally breaks loose. At this time I’d say violent death begins to follow little disaffected Damien around like a puppy, but he already has one of those. A rather king-sized, vicious-looking Rottweiler capable of devouring several puppies in one gulp, in fact, courtesy of one Mrs. Baylock (Whitelaw): mysterious replacement nanny and possessor of the least-huggable name in live-in childcare.

The previous nanny, about to give notice
That's Holly Palance, daughter of actor Jack Palance

It takes time, a little persuasion, and a rising body count, but Robert Thorn eventually comes to learn and believe that his adopted son was indeed born of a jackal, bears the mark of the best (that dreaded 666 area code), and is the living antichrist. Will he be able to avert Armageddon and carry out the requisite ritual execution that will save mankind? Well, two sequels and a remake should give you a clue.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Being raised Catholic and coming from an extravagantly dysfunctional family has given me a leg-up in appreciating horror films which use specious religious scripture as the catalyst for familial turmoil. In fact, newcomers to The Omen, familiar only with its reputation, are often disappointed to discover that director Richard Donner (Superman: The Movie), following in the footsteps of Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and eventually paving the way for The Shining, has made The Omen just as much a psychological thriller about the emotional and mental disintegration of a family as it is a horror film about the unleashing of the Ultimate Evil. The questionable scenario of a father surreptitiously swapping his newborn child is made credible by the implication that Kathy is in some way emotionally and psychologically unprepared for the truth. The parental, almost caretaker attitude Thorn adapts toward his wife, plus the ease with which he's persuaded to take the orphan child, is an indicator of an underlying stress present within the marriage before the film even begins.

Kathy: "We're the 'Beautiful People, aren't we?"
A significant part of The Omen's drama concerns itself with the internal erosion of a family deemed to "have it all." Although contemporary audiences may be disappointed by the film's pace and relatively low body count, most appreciate that the film takes the time to establish an atmosphere of normalcy before the introduction of chaos

Although nowhere near as subtle as Rosemary's Baby in casting suspicious events in such a light as to leave open the possibility of their malevolence being merely a manifestation of the fragile mental state of its protagonist; The Omen does manage to wring considerable tension out of Kathy's can't-quite-put-her-finger-on-it unease around her child by effectively refraining from having Damien behave in any manner that can be deemed overtly sinister (not true of the heinous 2006 remake, which had its Damien affect a perpetual evil scowl, which, in a child, only looks like persistent tummy trouble).
For the Thorns, a wealthy political couple with their eye on the Presidency, a child represents the realization of an idealized "perfect" family. And indeed for a time, the three enjoy an idyllic, picture-perfect bonding period. But, rather provocatively, Damien's true nature doesn't manifest itself in the performance of devilish deeds, but in a devoted mother having to confront the disquieting notion that not only is she afraid of her child, but perhaps doesn't even like him. The cracks in the Thorn marriage begin to show, unspoken tensions arise, and the end of the world is harkened by a family being emotionally and mentally being torn apart at the seams

Little Devil

I've always felt that one of the main reasons The Omen doesn't play out as preposterously as it does in summary is because the supernatural horror is kept within human-scale (an early script draft had Remick’s character admitting that her burning desire to have a child was rooted in the politically-motivated desire to project an image of a perfect family). Few horror films today seem to understand that without the firm establishment of the value of something human being placed at risk - that without getting audiences to appreciate what is being put at stake for the characters - no amount of high-tech violence or CGI explicitness is going to make a film genuinely frightening. Gross, repugnant, or gory, perhaps, but not frightening.

I don't do windows

PERFORMANCES

Legitimacy has always been the elusive, snobbish scourge of horror films. Regardless of the quality, attach Joan Collins or American-International Pictures to it and you’ve got yourself the cheapo half of a drive-in double bill; bump up the budget, sign Hitchcock or some arthouse favorite as director, and you’re looking at possible Oscar bait. In the wake of The Exorcist and Jaws, the horror film was riding a crest of mainstream legitimacy, making it possible for a film whose subject might otherwise have been considered best suited to Vincent Price and Beverly Garland, to attract the likes of Gregory Peck and Lee Remick.

Having to go from no-nonsense pragmatism to possible insanity as a man who slowly comes to believe he must kill his child in order to save mankind, Oscar-winner Gregory Peck (To Kill a Mockingbird) has, arguably, the role in The Omen with the broadest character arc. But as it capitalizes on the same qualities of stolid authority and compassionate strength which typified much of his film work since the 1940s, it's really not much of a stretch for the actor. Still, Peck's innate stability contrasts effectively with the regal fragility of Lee Remick, with whom he shares a tender and believable chemistry.

The solid, rather old-fashioned performances of Peck and Remick are two of the main reasons why The Omen hasn’t been regulated to that slush pile I reserve for films I still adore but find impossible to take seriously anymore (Valley of the Dolls, The Poseidon Adventure, The Great Gatsby,Towering Inferno). Both bring maturity, intelligence, and a considerable amount of old-Hollywood gravitas to their largely reactionary, underwritten roles. A quality I'd not fully appreciated until I saw those blank slates Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles in the remake and realized how ludicrous the whole enterprise feels without actors capable of conveying an appropriate emotional maturity.

Yanks Lee Remick and Gregory Peck get solid UK support from Royal Shakespeare Academy alumni David Warner and Billie Whitelaw. Understated and natural, Warner's photojournalist gets my vote as the film's best performance, but Whitelaw (who grappled with Elizabeth Taylor in 1973s chilling Night Watch) can't help but evoke a few unintentional camp laughs in a role that posits her nefarious nanny as the anti-Mary Poppins.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
After the headline-making excesses of The Exorcist, audiences were no longer satisfied with run-of-the-mill violence and death in movies. Fanned by the 70s "disaster film" craze and the escalating depiction of violence on television (I remember 1975s The Legend of Lizzie Borden and 1972s The Night Stalker both being taken to task for their content) America ghoulishly attended certain films in the express hope of being treated to ingeniously gruesome and spectacular deaths.

The Omen became one of the Top 5 boxoffice releases of 1976 in large part due to word-of-mouth over its then-shocking violence and faint-inducing tension. While (mercifully) not on par with even the level of violence you can find in a PG film today, The Omen's talked-about setpieces still manage to pack a punch. In line with what I mentioned earlier, one fully misses the point if it's assumed public reaction was due exclusively to the technical skill and ingenuity of the action sequences themselves; the violence in The Omen (which is surprisingly bloodless) got under people's skin because, in the context of the film, the deaths had the emotional weight of real jeopardy and loss. And Jerry Goldsmith's magnificently ominous score didn't hurt either.

I saw The Omen on opening night (June 25, 1976) and while I can't vouch for anyone passing out, I can certainly attest to the many screams; the patrons who chose to sit out much of the film in the theater's lobby; and the fact that my sister (who really should have learned her lesson after The Exorcist and The Day of the Locust), at the occurrence of a particularly startling, now-iconic moment, burst into tears and had to be taken to the restroom to compose herself.

Love how the newspaper obligingly supplies a gruesome photograph of the corpse on the front page.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Time, too many parodies, too many awful sequels, my own lapsed Catholicism, and the swiftness with which its plot points became camp pop cultural clichés has softened The Omen a bit for me over the years, but I’m forever grateful that I first to know of The Omen in the most ideal manner possible: through its ad campaign.

1976 was an amazing year for film. So amazing that all of my attention was taken up with the more high-profile, hype-attendant releases of the day: Hitchcock’s Family Plot, the US/Russian collaboration on The Blue Bird, Streisand’s remake of A Star is Born, Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, the remake of King Kong, Dustin Hoffman teaming with Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, and Michael York in the sci-fi adventure, Logan’s Run. This was also the year that saw the release of The Man Who Fell to Earth, nostalgia-based films about both Clark Gable and WC Fields, Fellini’s Casanova, Liv Ullman’s return to Ingmar Bergman with Face to Face after her inauspicious shot at Hollywood stardom, All The President’s Men, and Network. Horror was coming on strong with the release of Carrie, The Sentinel, and Burnt Offerings. And I haven't even brought up the heavily-anticipated features by Altman, Bertolucci, Polanski, and Vincente Minnelli that also came out that year. As I said, 1976 was a particularly amazing year for a film fan.

My mind and imagination was so wrapped up in these films that (strange as it seems) I had absolutely no foreknowledge of The Omen. So one day I was taking the San Francisco BART train to college school and I was confronted by this massive billboard in the terminal…this completely stark, black sign with white lettering: “Good Morning. You are one day closer to the end of the world.” That was it! Nothing else. It stopped me in my tracks. I had no idea it was an ad for anything at all...it was just his creepy, eye-catching sign (T-shirts emblazoned with quotes and slogans were popular at this time). In the ensuing weeks, more and more posters began showing up all over San Francisco. Each just as cryptic, just as foreboding: “If something frightening happens to you today, think about it. It may be The Omen,”“You Have Been Warned,” and inevitably,“This is your Final Warning.”

It felt as if an entire month had passed before the signs began to include the 20^th-Century-Fox logo in the corner, then eventually, written in blood red, the words, “The Omen,” with what I then thought were bowling ball finger-holes in the ‘”O” which of course I’d later discover were three sixes.

By the time these teaser ads gave way to graphic art featuring a little boy casting the shadow of some kind of beast, ads divulging the cast (real, honest-to-god Hollywood movie stars! Not straight-to-Drive-In nobodies!), I was like a fish on the hook. The movie I had known absolutely nothing about beforehand had become the film I HAD to see.

I was too young to remember the groundbreaking "Pray for Rosemary's Baby" ad campaign that launched the film that still remains my #1 favorite horror movie of all time, but I'm grateful that the creative minds behind the marketing of The Omen gave me my own personal 70s version of the experience. Happily, once it was released, The Omen more than lived up to the hype and was quite the goosebumpy thrill-ride I thereafter sought to re-experience time and time again that summer. Indeed, a good deal of the goodwill I currently harbor for this film is due in large part to the pleasant memories I have of being young enough to allow myself to get so thoroughly caught up in the whole groundswell of excitement that accompanied the release of The Omen in 1976.

"On this night, Mr. Thorn, God has given you a son."

Do kids really like watching other kids in movies and on TV? I certainly know I didn’t. At least not what passed for kids in the TV shows and movies of my youth. My inability to relate to that hyperactive genus of freckle-faced precocity known as the child actor contributed to my childhood aversion to Disney, so-called “family entertainment,” and basically any film or TV program which trained its spotlight on adorable, towheaded moppets. Hence, I was nearly in my 30s before I got around to seeing Mary Poppins, Pollyanna, The Sound of Music, and The Parent Trap; all movies I've come to adore as adult (ultimately the demographic most invested in the sentimentalized idealization of that trauma-filled age-span known as childhood), but which held little interest for me as a kid because I simply saw no connection between myself and those miniature, adult-impersonators onscreen.

Take, for example, the TV sitcoms of my youth: Beaver Cleaver of Leave it to Beaver was a pathological liar whose wobbly moral compass and iffy common-sense could be effectively shut down by the feeble taunt of “chicken!”; those ginger twins, Buffy & Jody of Family Affair were like these too-good-to-be-true, animatronic wind-up dolls; Dennis the Menace was a well-intentioned but nevertheless misogynist, passive-aggressive sociopath; and don’t even get me started on that mayonnaise-on-white-bread-with-Velveeta-slices Brady Bunch clan.

Either absurdly goody-goody or possessed of an annoyingly thickheaded inability to ascribe consequence to action; these characters may have warmed the hearts of nostalgia-prone adults clinging to revisionist reveries of childhood as a time of mischievous scamps getting into adorable “scrapes,” or wide-eyed cherubs spreading sunshine and rainbows wherever they went; but I might as well have been watching The Twilight Zone for all their resemblance to the pint-sized Gila monsters I went to school with.

Of course, there were a few rare exceptions. Given my own dark disposition, I had no problem with the refreshingly odd Pugsly and Wednesday Addams on The Addams Family; I took considerable pleasure in Jane Withers as the hilariously bratty antithesis to the sugary Shirley Temple in 1934's Bright Eyes (“My psychoanalyst told me there ain’t any Santa Clause or fairies or giants or anything like that!”); and was perhaps most impressed by Patty McCormack’s Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed, who was essentially James Cagney in a pinafore. And of course, one of my all-time favorites was the 1968 musical, Oliver! with its ragtag cast of underage pickpockets, thieves, and swindlers.

If anything is to be gleaned from this, it’s that, as a child, I longed for an alternative to these antiseptic images of childhood just as my parents yearned for something beyond the The Donna Reed Show/Father Knows Best model of family. Sure, kids could be sugar and spice and all that, but kids are also self-centered, very sharp, and crueler than most adults would like to admit. And childhood, while certainly a (perceived) joyous and carefree time when viewed from the perspective of adult responsibility and stress, is nonetheless scary as hell and fraught with one mini-trauma after another.

Redeemed by resilience, curiosity, and a limitless capacity for hope and dreaming, I've long held that children, in essence, aren't really that different from adults. Author Roald Dahl understood this, and that is why the ofttimes frightening, marvelously witty and acerbic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (adapted from his 1964 book, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory) stands out as one of the few children’s movies from my childhood I recall with a great deal of fondness. Here was a terribly sweet children's movie that didn't need the sugar-coating.

Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka

Peter Ostrum as Charlie Bucket

Jack Albertson as Grandpa Joe

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a straightforward fairy tale - complete with moral and happy ending - that takes place in a world where the fantastic and magical exists side by side with the prosaic and practical; in other words, the world as kids see it until we adults start to stick our noses in.

One day Willy Wonka, an eccentric, reclusive, candy manufacturer around whose identity swarms mysterious Gatsby-like legends, decides to open the doors to his wondrous candy factory to five lucky winners of Golden Tickets he’s hidden in Wonka Bars shipped all over the globe. The winners and one guest receive a tour of his factory and a lifetime supply of chocolate. The winners:

Germany
The gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner) and his mother (Ursula Reit, who always reminds me of an off-diet Elke Sommer)

England
Spoiled Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole) and her salted peanut magnate father, Henry (the wonderful Roy Kinnear)

America
Ill-mannered Violet Beauregarde (Denise Nickerson) and her pushy, used-car salesman dad, Sam (Leonard Stone)

America
Rambunctious TV-addict, Mike Teevee (Paris Themmen) and his schoolteacher mom (Nora Denney)

...and most deserving, poor-as-a-church-mouse Charlie Bucket, who takes his beloved Grandpa Joe with him (and not his hardworking mom, but more about that later)

The four initial winners of the Golden Ticket are all comfortably well-off children (save for Veruca, who's loaded) whose want for the prize stems largely from a kind of entitled greed indigenous to comfortably well-off children. Only poverty-stricken Charlie (who has to attend school AND help his mother support four bed-ridden grandparents) harbors the dream of winning the ticket to improve his lot and that of his family. Thus, with sweet-natured Charlie the parable's obvious hero, and rival candy manufacturer Arthur Slugworth (Gunter Meisner) the villain, the four “naughty, nasty little children” must serve as emissaries of the film’s moral (our behavior and our hearts are the architects of our fate) and as foils for their unpredictable and mischievous host, Mr. Willy Wonka.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I love the setup and structure of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The first half of the film being rooted in reality‒well, a charming kind of storybook reality, after all, we’re asked to accept that Charlie’s four grandparents have not set foot out of the bed they all share for twenty years‒the second half, a pure flight of fantasy wherein a common childhood dream comes to life: a visit to a magical candyland that’s part Disneyland, part amusement park funhouse, and part house of horrors (adults tend to forget how much kids enjoy being frightened and gleefully grossed-out).

From the start, the film does a great job of piquing interest in Wonka by having him discussed, Citizen Kane fashion, at length before he makes an appearance. It also gives us a likeable and sympathetic hero to root for in Charlie, who’s saved from being a totally pathetic character by being blessed with a loving, oddball family. Conflict rears its head in the form of the other four Golden Ticket winners, who may be amplified versions of archetypal bratty kids, but, with the possible exception of Veruca, are not malicious or mean-spirited (even the awful Mike Teevee precurses questions to his host with a polite, “Mr. Wonka…” ).

Touring the candy factory in the S.S. Wonkatania

The two halves of the film complement one another nicely, for the first half is appropriately dingy and sentimental (bordering on cloying), setting the stage for the second half which, in mirroring the unpredictable spirit of Wonka himself, explodes into a colorful, anarchic phantasmagoria that plays havoc with the genre expectations of the children’s movie.

In fact, one of my favorite things about Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is that it is such a sublimely nasty twist on the traditional tolerant celebration of childhood precocity that fuels so many films intended for children. Wonka’s factory‒ a place where anything is possible…an environment wherein the laws of reason, logic, or physics don’t apply‒ recall those marvelously anarchic Warner Bros. cartoons. The at-odds, adversarial byplay between Wonka and the kids evoking for me the comic clashes between Bugs Bunny (unflappable, always one step ahead, just a little screwy) and Daffy Duck (unchecked id combined with brazen self-interest).

While panic reigns, Wonka watches Augustus Gloop's probable drowning in the chocolate river with detached, intellectual curiosity. Mrs. Gloop's outburst ("You terrible man!") never fails to crack me up.

PERFORMANCES

People are fond of pointing out that Roald Dahl was not very fond of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, no doubt due to the extensive rewrites his adapted screenplay was subjected to by an unbilled David Seltzer (The Omen), and the shift of the story’s focus from Charlie to Wonka. This point would be persuasive save for two things: 1) Dahl’s heirs stated he would have liked the 2005 Tim Burton version (a film I found to be irredeemably wretched, so, so much for tatse), and, 2) With rare exceptions, an author’s ability to write a book doesn't mean a hill of jellybeans when it comes to understanding what makes a film work (see: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and Stephen King). As far as I'm concerned, to place the focus on anyone but Wonka would have been sheer folly, especially if you were lucky enough to land an actor as inspired as Gene Wilder to take on the role.

Willy Wonka, as envisioned by Wilder, lives up to the alliterative suggestion of his name by being quite wonky indeed. Dressed in anachronistic high style, he sports a madman’s mane of wiry locks yet keeps his wits about him at all times; is enthusiastic and excitable as a child, yet remains unflappable and unflustered at even the most life-threatening (to the children, anyway) occurrences; and has bright, inquisitive eyes that can be warm and paternal one moment, wild and certifiably insane the next. A genial host, he’s witty, sharp, sarcastic, and not particularly child-friendly and seems singularly disinterested in being the surrogate parent and disciplinarian for the transgressions of his misbehaving guests.

"What is this, a freak out?"
The brilliance of Wilder's portrayal is that we expect the mystery surrounding Wonka to be cleared up when we meet him, but instead, it only increases. i don't care how many times or in how many ways Warner Bros. tries to wring income out of Dahl's book; Gene Wilder is the one and only Willy Wonka

Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974) would reveal to a broader audience what a comic genius Gene Wilder is, but at this early juncture in his career, he gives a timeless performance worthy of an Oscar nomination, and is the main reason the film works at all, and why it has endured beyond its initial flop release to become a generational classic. (Although Wilder was nominated for a Golden Globe, the film received but one Oscar nomination: for Best Original Score.)

Any fan of The Bad Seed should find Julie Dawn Cole's vitriolic Veruca Salt a sheer delight

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

By the way, did I mention Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a musical? No, I didn't, but that's because I was saving it for this section. At a time when movie musicals were becoming as bloated as Violet Beauregarde at maximum blueberry transformation, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory successfully bucked the trend toward entertainment elephantitis (as successfully as a film deemed a boxoffice flop upon release can be deemed a success) and came up with an appealing, bite-size musical that for once didn't overwhelm its subject and characters.
The songwriting team of Anthony Newly and Leslie Bricusse (Goodbye Mr. Chips, Scrooge!) reined in their usual tendency toward over-sophisticated melodies (although Cheer Up, Charlie, a real snoozer and always my cue to visit the snack bar, somehow snuck in) and came up with several engaging songs possessing the simple, sing-song lilt of nursery rhymes grade school. Best of all, each is staged in a clever, intimate scale that draws you deeper into film.

Director Mel Stuart wisely rejected the suggestion to expand the rousing "I've Got a Golden Ticket" into a large-scale production number that spilled out into the streets, a la 1968s Oliver!

Of course, those who were around in 1971 couldn't avoid Sammy Davis Jr.'s grooved-up version of "The Candy Man" being played 'round the clock on the radio. And though it reached No.1 on the charts and became the Davis' signature song, its omnipresence failed to garner the song an Oscar nomination (neither did the splendid "Pure Imagination") or boost public interest in the poorly-promoted film (Willy Wonka's visually unappealing poster and non-existent marketing campaign clearly show that Paramount didn't know how to sell it).

"The Candy Man" is sung by Aubrey Woods (here shown giving an inadvertent jaw realignment to a little girl who didn't know her cues) as Bill the candy shop owner. Both Anthony Newley and Sammy Davis, Jr. angled for the part. Once again, can we give it up for the wise decisions of Mel Stuart?

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in 1971 when it was released, largely at my older sister’s prodding. Then being unfamiliar with either Roald Dahl or the book (which I’ve since read it, and, as much as I love it, I find the film a vast improvement), Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory sounded far too much like Toby Tyler: or Ten Weeks with a Circus, a cornball 1960 film serialized on The Wonderful World of Disney that exemplified a great many of the things I hated about children’s movies. I was 13-years-old at the time, realism was all the rage, and the movies I most wanted to see in 1971 were Klute, Carnal Knowledge, Straw Dogs, The Devils, and Play Misty for Me; certainly not a treacly kiddie musical set in a candy factory.

Those catchy Oompa-Loompa songs are near impossible to dislodge from one's memory

Lucky for me my parents put their foot down; it was either Willy Wonka or stay home. As this post attests, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was one of the happiest surprises of my youth. It's a children's movie made by people who, like me, had perhaps grown tired of the conventions of the genre. It's funny in a lot of sharp, adult-centric ways (the Wonka-mania vignettes are real gems), its dialog is witty, and its characterizations frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious. And while there's a great deal of sweetness and sentimentality to the story, it never feels forced or phony. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory never ever made me cry when I was a kid, but now as an adult, each and every time I watch it, I get an attack of waterworks when Wonka, Charlie, and Grandpa Joe are flying over the city in the Wonkavator.

Nowadays, when children indulging in bad behavior is rewarded with Reality TV contracts or encouraged by viral YouTube videos, I guess a movie like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory really pushes a few nostalgia buttons of my own.

Wonka: But Charlie...don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted.

Charlie: What happened?

BONUS MATERIAL
Fans of Joan Crawford's 1967 circus epic, Berserk will recognize (with some effort) George Claydon as one of Wonka's Oompa Loompas.

Fans of Lost Horizon (1973) will recognize the dubbed singing of voice of Liv Ullman in that film (Diana Lee) to belong to Charlie's mother (Diana Sowle) as well.

In 2013 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was turned into a West End musical. (Athough the title suggest little or no connection with the film, the show's score of all original music does include the Newley/Bricusse composition. "Pure Imagination.") Available on iTunes.

There are tons of sites devoted to trivia, production info, and hidden-joke theories surrounding Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. My favorite is the groundswell movement devoted to proving that Charlie's beloved Grandpa Joe is basically a selfish, lazy slob without a conscience. Precipitated by his first character-revealing response when Charlie is asked by his mother where he got the loaf of bread for dinner (suitable for a banquet, I'm sad to say): "What difference does it make where he got it? The point is, he got it!" and further exacerbated by his "magical" ability to get out of bed when there's something fun to do (aka, not work), a persuasive case is made against lovable Grandpa Joe throughout the web. Check out this link: Why Grandpa Joe is a Jerk , then, if convinced; join the "I Hate Grandpa Joe" Facebook page.

I grew up in the 60s, the era of the “fun nun.” And while it’s true I attended Catholic schools almost exclusively during my youth, the real-life the nuns I encountered on a daily basis bore more a resemblance to Jessica Lange’s steely Sister Jude in American Horror Story:Asylum than all those spunky, irrepressible, exhaustingly adorable nuns that littered the pop-cultural landscape in the wake of the 60s reconfiguration of the Catholic Church and Vatican II.
Sister Luc-Gabrielle (The Singing Nun) and her ecumenical earworm of a pop-ditty, Dominique, topped the charts and actually outsold The Beatles in 1963. In 1965, Julie Andrews and those Nazi-thwarting nuns of The Sound of Music broke boxoffice records nationwide. Sister Luc’s life story was Hollywoodized in 1966’s The Singing Nun, which was little more than perky Debbie Reynolds playing perky Debbie Reynolds in a wimple. Moving on to groovier, more socially-relevant pastures, Mary Tyler Moore played a toothsome, inner-city nun wooed by Elvis Presley (of all people) in his last film, Change of Habit (1969). But perhaps the ultimate nadir and apogee of the entire 60s "nuns can be fun!" mania has to be the sitcom that launched a thousand Johnny Carson monologues: Sally Field as The Flying Nun (1967-1970): a credit it took the actress an entire career, three Emmys, and two Oscars to live down.

Rosalind Russell as Mother Superior (Madeline Rouche)

Hayley Mills as Mary Clancy

June Harding as Rachel Devery

When I was very small, nuns onscreen seemed like near-mythic figures of virtue, wisdom, and heroism on par with cowboys in white hats and combat soldiers at the front. The embodiment of Christian values in human form, they were untouchable (and, all-importantly, untouched), and representative of all the noble (aka, maternal) female virtues. But as I grew older, the long-suffering, queenly type of nuns portrayed in movies like The Bells of Saint Mary’s (1945), Come to the Stable (1949), and The Nun’s Story (1959) struck me as just another variation of the “grand lady” stereotype.

Come the 60s, when overt displays of religious piety began to be viewed as corny by the moviegoing populace, nuns became overnight comic foils. Much in the way that viewers today never cease to find amusement in little old ladies engaging in comically inappropriate behavior like smoking joints, swearing, expressing sexual rapaciousness, or rapping (kill me now); nuns became the go-to images of charmingly comic inappropriateness. Anti-establishment humor, so popular at the time, relied on clearly defined standards of decency to offend, so in the mid-60s it was nuns – those walking anachronisms of starchy morality – who played Margaret Dumont to a world of counter-culture Grouchos.

Tolerance Tested
Reverend Mother falls victim to the old bubble-bath-in-the-sugar-bowl trick

To avoid the appearance of mocking Catholicism, these films took the position that their comedy contributed to “humanizing” nuns (not a bad idea, as nuns can be pretty terrifying, and solved the outsider bullying problem by placing the antagonist “in-house.” Meaning the standard set-up always finds a high-spirited, independent-minded novice (how does one solve a problem like Maria?) butting heads with a staunch defender of the old-order; in most every instance, the imposing figure of Mother Superior: your typical imperious disciplinarian, wet-blanket authority-figure, and parental surrogate,

Thanks to over-saturation, it didn't take long for the whole wacky nuns sub-genre to fall into a series of overworked, sitcomy tropes (nuns on scooters, nuns in brawls, nuns in discothèques), but in 1966, director Ida Lupino made what I consider to be one of the absolute best movies to come out of the whole “fun nuns” genre, if not indeed one of the best, most egregiously overlooked comedies of the 60s: the delightful and surprisingly moving, The Trouble with Angels.

Fleur de Lis & Kim Novak meet The Dragon

Set in fictional St. Francis Academy, a conservative, Catholic boarding school for girls in Philadelphia, The Trouble with Angels chronicles (in seriocomic vignettes) the misadventures of rebellious, head-strong Mary Clancy (Mills) and her bumbling partner-in-crime, Rachel Devery (Harding), as their mischievous antics provoke the mounting consternation and ire of the school’s formidable Mother Superior (Russell).

Marge Redmond as Sister Ligouri, Russell as Mother Superior, and Binnie Barnes as Sister Celestine

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As I’ve expressed in previous posts, so-called “family films” held very little interest for me when I was a kid. It's not that I thought they were beneath me (I did), it just that I found most of the 1966 options inoffensive family entertainment (when I was all of 9-years-old) to be pretty offensive. On the one hand, there was the “wholesome smut” genre, typified by Bob Hope’s Boy Did I Get The Wrong Number, and Jerry Lewis in Way…Way Out; and on the other, live-action Disney films, which, when not engaged in music or magic, were so plastic and artificial (The Monkey’s Uncle, That Darn Cat!) they were like images beamed from another planet.
Given that my older sister attended an all-girls’ Catholic school and was a huge Rosalind Russell fan (she turned me into a Russell Rooter by having me watch Gypsy and Auntie Mame when they aired on TV, and by always calling my attention to how much Tony Curtis looked like her in Some Like It Hot), there was never any question about whether or not I was going to see The Trouble with Angels when it came out. No problem… like many 60s era little boys and girls, I harbored a mad (secret) crush on Hayley Mills.

Mary Clancy on the verge of a "Scathingly brilliant idea"

I’ll admit my expectations weren't very high, but from the minute I saw the pre-credits sequence which features an animated Haley Mills (complete with wings and halo) mischievously blowing out the torch of the Columbia Pictures lady, The Trouble with Angels had me in its pocket.
Part insubordinate teen comedy, part sensitive coming-of-age film; part female buddy picture, part generation-gap farce (crossed with a little Sunday School theology), The Trouble with Angels is something of a family movie miracle. Certainly divine intervention is at least one explanation for a film which doesn't exactly tread new comedy ground feeling so refreshingly original.
Of course, the most obvious miracle worker is trailblazing actress/writer/director Ida Lupino, here directing her first film since 1953s The Bigamist. She handles both the comedy and drama with real aplomb, and gets engaging performances out of her talented cast of seasoned performers and newcomers (June Harding, who gets an “introducing" credit, is especially good).

Girl Power
A true Hollywood rarity, The Trouble with Angels is a major motion picture directed by a woman and written by a woman (Blanche Hanalis from Janet Trahey's 1962 memoir, Life with Mother Superior) that is also a depiction of teen life from a strictly female perspective. That's character actress Mary Wickes as Sister Clarissa. She reprised her role for the sequel, and, 26-years-later, dusted off her nun's habit again to appear in both Whoopi Goldberg Sister Act movies.

Lupino's deft touch is in evidence in the stylish manner in which the episodic sequences are tied together with clever connecting devices (the departure and triumphant return of the school band is a wonderful bit of visual shorthand), and in the largely silent scenes conveying the maturation of the Mary Clancy character. Best of all, Lupino manages all of this without resorting to cloying sentimentality, mean-spiritedness, vulgarity, or the kind of over-the-top slapstick that bogged down the 1968 sequel, Where Angels Go…Trouble Follows.

Madame Rose & Her Daughter, Gypsy
Rosalind Russell famously portrayed the mother of stripper/author/talk-show-hostess, Gypsy Rose Lee in the eponymous 1962 musical. The Trouble with Angels brings mother and daughter together again (for the first time) as Miss Gypsy herself portrays Mrs. Mabel Dowling Phipps, interpretive dance instructor

PERFORMANCES

The Trouble with Angels' original title (changed sometime during production) was the far less whimsical-sounding, Mother Superior. Well, the name may have been changed, but there's no denying that the film’s comedic, dramatic, and emotional focus remains with the character embodied by the actress who is the film's chief asset and most valuable player: Rosalind Russell. Whether getting laughs for her pricelessly droll delivery of simple lines like "Where's the fire?"or adding unexpected layers of emotional poignancy to scenes providing us brief glimpses of the woman behind the nun's habit; Rosalind Russell gives a wonderful, subdued performance. No Sylvia Fowler (The Women), Auntie Mame, or Mama Rose flamboyance here. Russell downplays beautiful and conveys volumes with those expressive eyes and peerless vocal inflections.

After appearing to the students to be coolly unmoved by the loss of a friend, in private, Mother Superior gives vent to her full anguish. Russell's performance in this scene alone single-highhandedly raises The Trouble with Angels far above the usual family film fare

The Trouble with Angels is well-cast and well-acted throughout. Marge Redmond as Sister Ligouri, the mathematics teacher who sounds like a race track bookie, is very good in a role similar to that which she played for three years on The Flying Nun. Former Disney star, Hayley Mills (19-years-old) and co-star June Harding (25) display a winning and relaxed rapport and make for a likable contrasting duo of troublemakers. Both are real charmers from the word go, and every moment they are onscreen is a delight. Mills, soon to graduate on to adult roles (with nudity, yet!) is just excellent. Her performance gets better with each viewing. Before movies became a total boys' club in the 70s, for a brief time in the 60s, there seemed to be a small surge in movies which placed the friendship between teenage girls at their center: The World of Henry Orient (1964) and I Saw What You Did (1965) are two of my favorites.

June Harding never made another motion picture after The Trouble with Angels, and at age 25 it's not likely she could have ridden that teen train for much longer, but I always thought she would have made a wonderful Emmy Lou in a film adaptation of the Bobby Sox comic strip by Marty Links

Jim Hutton (makes an unbilled cameo as Mr. Petrie ("Sort of like Jack Lemmon, only younger."), the headmaster of the progressive New Trends High School

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
One of the more impressive things about The Trouble with Angels it how beautifully (and effortlessly) it balances scenes of broad comedy and gentle humor while still allowing for sequences that are surprisingly touching in their humanity and compassion. Here are a few of my favorite scenes...no matter how many times I see them, the comedic ones make me laugh, the dramatic ones get the ol' waterworks going:

COMEDY: Where There's Smoke, There's Fire

DRAMA: "I Found Something Better"

COMEDY: Binders Sale

DRAMA: The Christmas Visitors (dam-bursting waterworks scene)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The Trouble with Angels was a boxoffice success when released and is well-liked and remembered with great affection by many, yet it remains one of those movies which seem to have somehow fallen through the cracks over the years. It’s not exactly forgotten (while available on DVD, the only time you can see it in widescreen is when it screens on TCM) but it rarely seems to come up in movie circles. Part of this is due to the film being a somewhat innocuous, at times glaringly old-fashioned comedy (in 1966, where there really teens who idolized Burt Lancaster and Jack Lemmon?) with no agenda beyond the modest desire to entertain while passing along a few life lessons and a simple message about growing up.

And while the above may serve as a fairly apt description of the movie on its most superficial level, I think it's a mistake to dismiss a film merely because its ambitions ‒ which The Trouble with Angels surpasses with ease ‒ are humble, and chooses a light comedy touch over the bellylaugh sledgehammer. (Although I've never seen it, internet sources recommend the similar 1954 British comedy, The Belles of St. Trinian's for fans with broader tastes.)

For me, The Trouble with Angels remains one of my favorite "comfort food" movies; a thoroughly enchanting, fumy, sweet-natured movie capable of stirring up warm feelings of nostalgia. In this instance, the very distant memory I have of when I was so young that movies like this made me associate organized religion with kindness, compassion, and empathy. So sad that religion is so often used today as the banner behind which so many seek to cloak their fear, ignorance, and hatred.
Maybe it wouldn't hurt if those "fun nuns" made a comeback.

BONUS MATERIALS
Rosalind Russell reprised her role as Mother Superior in the 1968 sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, but Hayley Mills was conspicuously absent. Some say it is because Mills was back in Britain and overbooked with film projects. Others attribute it to the rumor that Russell and Mills didn't along. A rumor supported by Rosalind's Russell's 1977 autobiography, Life's a Banquet, in which Russell writes: "Haley Mills was a demon. She used to stick out her tongue whenever I passed (she couldn't stand me) and she was bursting at the seams with repressed sexuality."

Mills, for her part, has denied there was ever any bad blood between them.

A wealth of terrific behind-the-scenes info on the making of The Trouble with Angels is available HERE.

June Harding (Rachel Devery) has a website where she has posted many of the letters she wrote during the films production: June Harding Official Website

Listen to the theme song to Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows by Boyce & Hart HERE

In 1974, Hayley Mills dropped her Disney princess image for good (as well as her knickers) in the bizarre but oh-so engrossing British thriller, Deadly Strangers co-starring Simon Ward and Sterling Hayden. A real departure and available on YouTube HERE

I suppose there’s a kind of tinpot triumph in making a film about the dark underbelly of human sexuality that succeeds in being, in itself, a work of astounding sleaze and prurience. Such is Who Killed Teddy Bear?; a high-pedigreed 60s exploitationer whose interrogative title would suggest another entry in the Whatever Happed to Baby Jane?“hag horror” sweepstakes; but is, in fact, an example of what I call “cesspool cinema”: a 60s exploitation sub-genre of low-rent, reactionary, social-commentary films preoccupied with the alleged rise in sexual degeneracy and dedicated to exposing the threat drugs, pornography, and delinquency pose to a civilized society.

Tackling the kind of material David Lynch would later build an entire career upon, these movies sought to lift the sewer lid off life, offering a dark, bleakly nihilistic glimpse into the twilight world of depravity and violence seething below the surface of so-called normalcy. Posing ostensibly as tell-it-like-it-is cautionary tales warning against the dangers of unchecked morality and wanton sexual license, “cesspool cinema” films tend to tip their sincerity hand by actually being every bit as skeevy as the world their narratives purport to condemn. A good example of cesspool cinema that runs a close second to Who Killed Teddy Bear? on the sleaze-o-meter is the sensationalistic 1964 Olivia DeHavilland shocker, Lady in a Cage.

Sal Mineo as Lawrence Sherman

Juliet Prowse as Norah Dain

Elaine Stritch as Marian Freeman

Jan Murray as Lt. Dave Madden

Who Killed Teddy Bear?is first posed as a musical question crooned melodramatically (not to mention, over-eloquently, given the character whose thoughts its lyrics are meant to convey) over the film’s tantalizingly lurid title sequence. A sequence which, depending on the copy you see, features a woman in bra and half-slip and a man in incredibly tight, white underwear – something of a motif in this movie – locked together in an impassioned, touchy-feely embrace. Bearing witness to all this in the bedroom’s doorway is an understandably wide-eyed little girl clutching a teddy bear. A little girl who, upon fleeing the scene too swiftly, loses her balance and tumbles down a flight of stairs. Cue the psychosexual dysfunction and guilt.

The original, uncut version of Who Killed Teddy Bear? runs 94 minutes and can be distinguished from slightly truncated copies by the unblurred imagery shown in the title sequence

When Who Killed Teddy Bear? is posed as a question a second time, it’s by the inconsolable Edie (Margot Bennett): the hapless little girl on the stairs, now a brain-damaged19-year-old – inquiring of her older brother, Lawrence (Mineo), the fate of her beloved lost childhood toy. You see, the sordid events unfolding under the film’s opening credits turn out to be Lawrence’s guilt-ridden nightmare/flashback to the time when Edie was left in his charge (the pair are orphaned, there being a brief allusion made to their parents’ deaths, and Edie going so far as to call her brother, “mommy-daddy”) and his momentary neglect – a then-underage boy surrendering to the seduction of an unidentified “sexually-experienced older woman” – resulted in Edie suffering the accident which left her mentally and emotionally frozen at roughly age of her trauma.

Margot Bennett as Edie Sherman
Bennett (former wife of personal crushes Keir Dullea AND Malcolm McDowell) is very good in a role Taliah Shire must have used as the inspiration for the character she plays in Rocky

Jump ahead several years: Lawrence is an adult with a crippling attraction/repulsion attitude towards sex. The silent recrimination of his sister's unblaming, childlike dependency inflaming in him a neurotic prudishness that seeks to suppress her natural maturation; her lost teddy bear, a symbol of his guilt and shame, he has actually secreted away, telling her it was killed in an accident.

Obviously, Edie wasn't the only one damaged that night.

Also obvious is the fact that Who Killed Teddy Bear?, in being a film exhaustively preoccupied with presenting sex in only its most tawdry and squalid contexts, has a sizable attraction/repulsion problem of its own. Like a movie adapted from Travis Bickle fan fiction, Who Killed Teddy Bear? paints a picture of New York as a singularly seedy hotbed of latent and manifest degeneracy. There's scarcely a character in the film left unslimed by its sewer-eye-view of humanity.

CASE #1 Lawrence

A waiter at a NYC discothèque, Lawrence’s sexual molestation (that’s what it was, although they didn’t call it that back then) leaves him with a staggering catalog of sexual hang-ups – not the least being voyeurism, obscene phone calls, stalking, scopophilia, and sex attraction/repulsion. When not engaged in one of the above-stated pursuits, Lawrence spends his time dry-humping his pillow, thumbing through his extensive porn collection (French Frills, When She Was Bad), trolling Time Square, or homoerotically working out at the gym.

Where should I be looking?
Sal Mineo's toned, always-on-display body does most of his acting in Who Killed Teddy Bear? Right now I'd say it's acting like a compass needle pointing north, subtly(?) identifying the guilty party

CASE #2 Norah

Since we’re first introduced to Norah the moment she’s at the business end of a dirty phone call, there’s no way of telling how much of her frosty demeanor and almost paranoid level of apprehension is business as usual, or the result of suddenly finding herself one of New York’s premiere creep magnets. An aspiring actress and part-time DJ at the very same dance club where Lawrence lurks...I mean, works...Norah can barely get through a day without being hit on by randy patrons (“You hungry? Let me buy you a frankfurter.”) or having the status of her virginity come into question (“Every scrawny broad thinks she’s the only one entrusted with the crown jewels, and then she’ll die if she loses them!”).

"Who is this? Who IS this?"
For films like this to work, it's necessary for it never to occur to the recipient of an obscene phone call to merely hang up.

CASE #3 Marian

Tough-as-nails (aka lesbian) manager of a discothèque that seems to do a pretty decent business given they only have three records. Marian’s a brassy, calls-‘em-like-she-sees-‘em, survivor type whose weakness for fur, literal and figurative (“I dig soft things…don’t you?”), plays a significant part in her propriety-mandated, horizontal early departure from the film.

Being a simple girl from Rochester, NY, Norah can't be blamed for mistaking Marian's offer of succor to be as dirty as it sounds

CASE #4 Lt. Madden

Striving for hard-boiled but landing at Borscht Belt, police Lt. Madden is every bit the sex-obsessed porn junkie as Lawrence, but fiery moral rectitude over the loss of his wife to violent assault has allowed this self-styled expert on deviant sex to place his own behavior above the pale. Behavior which includes working clinically gruesome details of sex crimes into the most casual of conversations, and turning the apartment he shares with his 10-year-old daughter, Pam (Diane Moore, comedian Jan Murray’s real-life daughter) into a virtual vice squad reading room. Who Killed Teddy Bear?’s themes of innocence corrupted are echoed in Madden’s daughter falling asleep each night to graphic audio tapes of her father interviewing sex assault victims.

"She's very pretty...is she a hooker?"
Decades before this became a common question posed by pre-teens of their favorite pop stars, little Pam Madden's (Diane Moore) presumptive appraisal of house-guest Norah Dain betrays signs of a troubling sexual precocity

These are the players in Who Killed Teddy Bear?; less a cast of characters than a police blotter of victims and would-be assailants in service of a familiar, somewhat rote, woman-in-peril crime thriller. The plot is simple: someone has their eyes on Norah and embarks on an escalating campaign of harassment. It's a race with the clock on whether or not the police can find the caller before he makes good on his many threats.
The film takes a weak stab at trying to drum up a little suspense as to the identity of Norah's peeping tom/stalker by casting a wide net of suspicion over everyone in her skeevy circle (a lecherous maître d', a young Daniel J. Travanti as a deaf-mute mute bouncer with piercing eyes, the cop who takes a personal interest in her case), but the choice to shoot the caller from the neck down, calling attention to his impossibly taut backside and wasp waist, swiftly narrows the field of probable suspects to a comical degree.

No, what truly distinguishes Who Killed Teddy Bear? is its lewd-yet-arty exploration of aberrant sexual development; its overheated, almost documentary look at New York's seamy side (it could pass for an anti-pornography propaganda film); and a tone of suffocating bleakness that feels positively surreal when one realizes this film was made the same year as The Sound of Music.
Honestly, Who Killed Teddy Bear? is a dark film that takes a head-first dive into the sewer and doesn't come up for air. Were it a better film, it would probably be unwatchable

Corruption of Innocence
In profiling the home lives of Lawrence and Lt. Madden, Who Killed Teddy Bear? parallels the similar damage that can arise from dissimilar obsessions

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Imagine John Waters making one of those overheated erotic thrillers from the 80s and 90s (films with sound-alike titles like: Body of Evidence, Guilty as Sin, Crimes of Passion, and Fatal Attraction) and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what Who Killed Teddy Bear? is like: as twisted a work of mid-century pseudo-mainstream cinema as ever screened at a Times Square grindhouse theater.

Hollywood’s hypocritical nature is rarely shown to such brilliant advantage as when it has worked itself into a sanctimonious lather over some social-ill it wishes to expose. The makers of Who Killed Teddy Bear? (director Joeseph Cates [Phoebe’s father] and writer Arnold Drake) obviously decided that the best way to comment on the pernicious threat of degeneracy is to make a film any self-respecting degenerate would love.

Let's Go to the Movies!
Lawrence treats himself to a picture show. Who Killed Teddy Bear? is worth checking out for its scenes of 60s-era Times Square alone. Amusingly, this dive of a theater has a uniformed doorman!

As a fan of 60s go-go movies, I love all the scenes set in the discothèque (seedy dance club, really), but it blows my mind that a hunk of sleaze this oily could have been made at a time when Hullabaloo, Shindig, and The Patty Duke Show were all over the airwaves. Nostalgia fans love to think of the 60s as this kinder, gentler era, but a movie like Who Killed Teddy Bear? hints that decade was perhaps merely skillful in sweeping its social debris under the rug.

"You look like a whore!"
Incredibly, this line of dialog isn't delivered by Edie

PERFORMANCES
I haven't seen the-late Elaine Stritch in many films, and I'm not sure her range extended far beyond some variation of the tough-old-broad type; but within that range, she is untouchable. She gives the best performance in the film (arguably the only performance in the film), turning a "type" into a complex, fleshed-out character. She enlivens the proceedings and raises the film's quality bar each and every moment she appears.

A young Daniel J. Travanti (Hill St. Blues) appears as Carlo, the bouncer

And speaking of tough, personal fave Juliet Prowse is perhaps one of the least-helpless looking women I've ever seen, but her innate brassiness is a major asset in a film as focused on female victimization as this. I can't really vouch for her performance, which seems a little superficial, but I like that her character is depicted as independent-minded and often more pissed-off than scared by what's happening to her. Her's is a huge departure from the kind of cowering, passive women common to those aforementioned 80s thrillers (the whimpering Morgan Fairchild in 1982s The Seduction comes to mind).

As public tastes changed, many 50s boy-next-door types sought to extend their careers by taking on roles which challenged their squeaky clean images (James Darren - Venus in Furs, Troy Donahue - My Blood Runs Cold). Who Killed Teddy Bear? is structured as an against-type breakout role for teen heartthrob and two-time Oscar-nominee (Rebel Without a Cause, Exodus) Sal Mineo, the truth is that, while fine in the part, the actor is consistently upstaged by his physique. You'd have to watch a Raquel Welch movie to see a film where the exposure of a physique is favored so deferentially over a performance.

For a film marketed to the heteronormative exploitation market, no physique in the film comes under quite the same degree of close-up camera scrutiny as Mineo's. Not that I'm complaining.

An actor’s body is their instrument, but when that instrument is puffed out with ornamental muscles, it runs the risk of actually inhibiting expression, not assisting (think Channing Tatum’s neck). Such is the case with Mineo in Who Killed Teddy Bear?; as appealing and eye-catching as his body is, it begins a performance a good 30 seconds before he does. And worse, it seems to encase Mineo emotionally...HE seems as distracted by it as we are.

A few of the shows running on Broadway at the time

For many, a question far more pressing than Who Killed Teddy Bear? is how did the careers of Mineo (a talented actor) and Prowse (a talented dancer and singer) sink to this level of grindhouse sleaze?

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Who Killed Teddy Bear? would have a running time of 60-minutes if it excised all the scenes of discotheque dancers doing The Watusi and the The Frug. Happily, along with being a perfect time-capsule of New York at its grimiest, this film offers fans of 60s wiggling plentiful opportunities to feel less superior about how kids dance today.
The film's erotic set-piece, one precipitated by Lawrence's observation that the way people dance is "Very suggestive!" is a two-minute dance-off by the statuesque Prowse and slim-hipped Mineo that is both hilarious and terribly, terribly sexy. Suggestive, indeed!

The songs used in the film (all three of them) are composed by Bob Gaudino (of The Four Seasons) and Al Kasha (Best Song Oscar winner for The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I saw Who Killed Teddy Bear? for the first time when I was about nine or ten. Bad idea. It aired on TV in the wee small hours of the morning on something like the The Late, Late, Late Show, and I was excited at the prospect of staying up late and seeing a fun/scary B-movie like Die! Die! My Darling! or Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (the latter, playing in the theaters at the time). Of course, what I got was this weird, terribly dark movie about depravity, porn, rape, and murder. Needless to say, this heaptrip of a movie disturbed the hell out of me (Mineo with his magic pants and action torso played no small part), and for the longest time Who Killed Teddy Bear? occupied a place in my psyche reserved for kindertrauma. The ending in particular gave me nightmares.

Unable to simulate masturbation onscreen back in 1965, Mineo is shown stroking his thighs while making an obscene phone call. According to Mineo, this was the first American film to feature a man in jockey shots

It’s a curious thing, kids and scary movies; monsters and ghouls engaged in simplistic struggles of good vs. evil played out against low-budget backdrops of drafty castles and decaying mansions, have a strangely comforting, distancing artificiality. The scares they supply are fun because the worlds depicted are so reassuringly false.

Less easy to shake off is a grim treatise on the corruptibility of innocence shot in grainy, news-bulletin black and white, set in a grimy, claustrophobic New York teeming not with easy-to-identify monsters, but the flesh and blood kind that look just like everybody else. For a young person, a movie like Who Killed Teddy Bear?– a film that offers few likable characters, little in the way of hope, and no happy ending – it's all so disturbing because it’s just too real. I recall it was one of the earliest films to give me the feeling that the world wasn't a safe place.

Who Killed Teddy Bear? popped up frequently on TV when I was young, then just seemed to disappear. Sometime in the 90s it resurfaced a local revival theater here in LA, and I got to see it for the first time with an audience. By now what I once thought disturbing looked hopelessly camp, overwrought, and overemphatic, but it somehow retained all of its edge (it was banned in the UK until very recently). After all these years Who Killed Teddy Bear? holds up as one of the strangest films to come out of the so-called swinging 60s. And that’s saying something.

Teddy Bear's Picnic

BONUS MATERIAL
The version of Who Killed Teddy Bear? available on DVD overseas is a slightly edited version from the 94-minute original. Here is what can be found in the uncut version (spoilers):
1. The bodies in the title sequence are visible.
2. Scene with Stritch and Prowse in her apartment is lengthier, including Stritch relaying this information: “I never wore a bra until I was 28. And then for a fast ten minutes. Some quack convinced me it helped firm the muscles. I don’t like being fenced in. It’s a hang-up of mine.”
3. Flashback of Mineo's seduction by older woman is longer and slightly more explicit (his body, not hers).
4. Scenes of Mineo at Times Square porn shops and in front of porno theater are longer.
5. Mineo kisses and embraces Stritch after killing her in the alley.
6. There's a brief scene of Mineo humping his bed in his BVDs.
7. Final assault is slightly more explicit

The full (edited) version of Who Killed Teddy Bear? is available on YouTube.

Depending on the source the voice singing the title song over the film's opening credits has been attributed to either Rita Dyson or Claire Francis (Mikki Young). Until that mystery is cleared up, there are several cover versions floating around the net;

Hear Leslie Uggams sing the haunting theme to Who Killed Teddy Bear?

Hear 80s pop singer Josie Cotton sing the haunting theme to Who Killed Teddy Bear?

In 1965, the same year Who Killed Teddy Bear? was released, Juliet Prowse debuted in her own TV sitcom, the short-lived (and rather terrible, as I recall) Mona McCluskey. Sal Mineo appeared as a guest on an episode. See Mona McCluskey opening credits on YouTube.

Rife with spoilers. Those who wish the mystery to remain a mystery should read no further.

Of the many films made from Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mystery novels, I find 1982s Evil Under the Sunto be the most fun, but 1974s Murder on the Orient Express still heads my list as the most stylish, effective, and downright classiest adaptation of the lot.

Although I have fond memories of the publicity and glowing reviews surrounding its release; recall the weeks of long, serpentine lines queuing up outside San Francisco’s Regency Theater where it played; and I even remember going to a Market Street movie memorabilia shop to purchase the gorgeous Richard Amsel-designed poster (“The Who’s Who in the Whodunit”) which hung on my wall for many years...but for the life of me I can’t figure out why, given my interest, I never got around to seeing this in a theater during its initial release.

Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot

Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Harriet Belinda Hubbard

Anthony Perkins as Hector McQueen

Jacqueline Bisset as Countess Helena Andrenyi

My best guess is that it had to do with there just not being enough hours in the day to see all of the great films that came out that year. It was 1974, I was still in high-school, working weekends as a movie theater usher, and, as was my practice then and remains so today; when it comes to my own personal moviegoing habits, if I like a film, I invariably want to see it several times. This is great given my particular penchant for rediscovering new things with each viewing, but does tend to limit the amount of time I have left for seeing new things. At least without considerable effort applied on my part.

Distracting my attention from Murder on the Orient Express was the pomp and circumstance attending the release of The Great Gatsby, The Godfather Part II, and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. Simultaneously, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder were defining funny for the 70s with Blazing Saddlesand Young Frankenstein, while on the serious side, my cineáste pretensions (and height) got me into theaters showing the arthouse pseudo-porn of The Night Porter and Going Places. Adding to this already full schedule, That’s Entertainment, The Phantom of the Paradise, and even the lamentable, Mame were on hand to satisfy my appetite for musicals.

Sean Connery as Colonel Arbuthnot

Vanessa Redgrave as Mary Debenham

Richard Widmark as Samuel Edward Rachett / Cassetti

Ingrid Bergman as Greta Ohlsson

More significantly, Hollywood was in the midst of a HUGE "disaster movie" craze (a genre I was as unaccountably besotted with then as kids today are about those Marvel comics things), so, what with the star-studded The Towering Inferno, Airport 1975, andEarthquake all being released in the same year - not to mention that star-leaden swashbuckling sequel to another favorite, 1973s The Three Musketeers - I suspect the glow of the stellar cast assembled for Murder on the Orient Express was perhaps not as dazzling to me then as it most assuredly seems now. More's the pity and my loss entirely, for I would love to have seen this delightful movie with an audience, at the height of its popularity.

Sir John Gielgud as Edward Henry Beddoes

Dame Wendy Hiller as Princess Natalia Dragomiroff

Michael York as Count Rudolf Andrenyi

Rachel Roberts as Hildegarde Schmidt

Happily, I did eventually come to see Murder on the Orient Express many years later (on TV), and, this being the days before the internet, the vast majority of the details surrounding the film were still unknown to me. In fact, my relative ignorance of the film's particulars and wholesale unfamiliarity with Agatha Christie's 1934 mystery novel in general resulted in a viewing experience that could be summed up as a textbook case of "ignorance is bliss." I was totally swept up in the mystery, baffled by the clues, puzzled by the circumstances, and thrown by the surplus of suspects. It was bliss.
In hindsight, I can only conjecture that my naif experience of the film must have been in some ways on par with what director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paul Dehn envisioned for audiences when fashioning the project: Murder on the Orient Express felt very much like watching an actual film from the 1930s filtered through the very contemporary sensibilities of the 70s.

Jean-Pierre Cassel as Pierre-Paul Michel

Martin Balsam as Mr. Bianchi

Dennis Quilley as Antonio Foscarelli

Colin Blakely as Cyrus B. Hardman

George Coulouris as Dr. Constantine

Visually sumptuous, superbly-acted, extremely well-written, and highly entertaining; to this day I am amazed at the dexterity with which this particular adaptation is able to tightrope-walk between being a "fun" murder mystery and emotionally-engaging drama. Seeing it again after all these years, it's easy to see how Murder on the Orient Express sparked a renaissance of sorts in movies based on the works of Agatha Christie. But while many of the films that followed were very good, none were able to capture this film's unwavering panache.

Whether it be amateur crime-solver, Miss Marple, or the fastidious Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, the drill in an Agatha Christie mystery remains roughly the same (although Poirot travels in much tonier circles than Christie’s small-town spinster): a confined, preferably exotic, locale; a murder; a collection of eccentric/suspicious characters; multiple motives; multiple red herrings; a surprise twist or two; the presence of a canny sleuth to connect all the dots; and finally, the assembling of the suspects for the flashback reenactment of the and the unveiling of the guilty party.

Since the title, Murder on the Orient Express, already specifies the what and where; the fun is to be had in discerning the who, why, when, and how.

The who in this case is an individual of nefarious background and cloaked identity, mastermind of a vicious 1930 kidnap/murder of a three-year-old heiress. An act for which this criminal, in having made off with the ransom money and leaving a colleague to take the blame, has never been brought to justice. Now, five years later, in a luxury train trapped in a snowdrift in Yugoslavia, said individual is found dead of multiple stab wounds in a locked compartment.

The victim’s Mafia ties favor criminal vendetta as the most likely solution to the murder, but as is his wont; M. Poirot’s “little gray cells” alert him to the fact that there is something altogether too expedient in the unanimous airtight alibis of his traveling companions: fifteen-odd strangers of diverse background, class, and nationality; each possessing nothing in common; each unknown to either the victim or one another.

The Usual Suspects

As Poirot’s investigation leads to the unearthing of the details surrounding the kidnapping (a tragedy contributing to the deaths of at least four others) and the mysterious connection each passenger has to the event, Murder on the Orient Express establishes itself as the most engaging, suspenseful, and downright effective of the big screen adaptations of Agatha Christie I've seen.

On first viewing, I recall being very caught up in the mystery of it all and quite unable to figure out “whodunit” until the final, dramatically staged moments of the Big Reveal - a revelation of how and why which surprised me considerably more than I would have thought possible.

I really love everything about Murder on the Orient Express, but I’m especially fond of the significant role conscience, guilt, and the pain of loss play in the narrative. For even more persuasive than the film’s glossy production values and high-caliber performances (a rather amazing feat given their brevity), is its emotional poignancy. Most Agatha Christie movies end on a note of triumphant finality born of justice served and wrongs set right. But Murder on the Orient Express has an ending which always leaves me (softie that I am) with a mild case of sentimental waterworks, due to the fact that it touches – ever so lightly – on the sad reality that justice is sometimes hollow reward for the loss of loved ones no amount of rightful vengeance will ever bring back.

This melancholy ending to a truly elegant film lends Murder on the Orient Express an air of distinction that places it a mark above the other filmed Poirot mysteries.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Murder on the Orient Expressis the perfect, made-to-order film for the 70s cinema enthusiast who’s also a fan of Turner Classic Movies (uh,…that would be me). Directed by Sidney Lumet (The Wiz, The Group), in a style meant to evoke the look and feel of films made in the 1930s, and given a diffused, nostalgic sheen by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth (Oscar-nominated for this film, Unsworth won the previous year for Cabaret), Murder on the Orient Express, although a British production, is one of the best examples of Old Hollywood moviemaking to come out of the New Hollywood era.

The Orient Express
The titular star of the film gets a grand sendoff with a sweeping waltz theme that is one of the film's chief goosebump moments. Richard Rodney Bennett's glamorous, Oscar-nominated score is outstanding

On a relatively modest budget (just $1.4 million, if Wikipedia is to be believed), Murder on the Orient Expresswent on to win 6 Oscar nominations: Finney, Bergman (won), costumes, cinematography, score, screenplay - and became one of the top-grossing films of the year. With no nudity, foul language, or claims to social relevance; in the youth-obsessed 70s, Murder on the Orient Express was one of the few films capable of luring older audiences away from their TV sets. (The equally enthralled younger audiences approached it as something of a “thinking-man’s disaster movie.”)

For me, Murder on the Orient Express was a welcome respite from overlapping dialog, non-linear storytelling, gritty realism, and the sometimes-fatuous artistic pretensions of the cinema auteur. Taking a break from all that 70s navel-gazing, it was a real treat just to be entertained by a filmmaker who knew how to tell a story. Well-written (Paul Dehn’s screenplay is a witty, largely-faithful adaptation that plays fair with its clues), beautifully shot, extremely well-acted, and a great deal of fun to boot, Murder on the Orient Express was a return to escapism in an era preoccupied with confrontation.

Discovery of the Body

PERFORMANCES

Not being such a devotee of Agatha Christie as to have formed an indelible impression of Hercule Poirot in my mind one way or another, I have to say I greatly prefer Albert Finney’s take on the detective over Peter Ustinov, who always came across as so enchanted by his own performance that I found myself distracted. In my review of the 1970 musical, Scrooge, I had this to say about Finney: “(he’s) a movie star with the heart of a character actor. Makeup and prosthetics which would swallow up lesser actors only seem to liberate him.”

Only 37 years old at the time, Finney is near-unrecognizable as the 50-something Poirot, yet under all that makeup and padding is a sharp, focused performance. Seeming to inhabit the character in every minute aspect from body language to vocal inflection, it’s Finney’s darting, curious eyes which best convey the man behind the makeup. With chin forever bowed so as to appear to always be peering at people, take note of how active his eyes are in scenes where he's required to just listen. Those clear, piercing eyes are the true eyes of a master sleuth.

Finney commands the final third of the film with an amazing, eight-page monologue

The rest of the cast is flawless; Anthony Perkin’s twitchy, mother-fixated Mr. McQueen (!) being a particular favorite of mine in that it almost feels like Perkins is doing a parody of Norman Bates. The regal Lauren Bacall looks to be having a grand old time as the gum-chewing, prototypical Ugly American; Jacqueline Bisset & Michael York are both so gorgeous as to qualify as special effects; and of course, Ingrid Bergman’s scene-stealing Swedish missionary is a delightful bit of acting whether one thinks she deserved that Oscar or not.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Murder on the Orient Express is a film that boasts many stars – that luxurious locomotive and the high marquee-value cast, to be sure – but as far as I’m concerned, the film’s biggest star and MVP is production designer/costume designer tony Walton.

The Oscar-winning designer (for 1980s All That Jazz) is the jack-of-all-trades genius whose talent lent a distinctive visual pizzazz to Mary Poppins, The Boy Friend, Petulia, The Wiz, and many others. His elegant sets and larger-than-life costume designs for Murder on the Orient Express create an irresistibly stylized atmosphere of theatrical glamour.

Movie magic: In real life, the Orient Express would need to add a car just to store the hats

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Although many fans of the film consider it to be the one aspect of Murder on the Orient Express they can do without, the opening sequence – a chilling montage detailing the 1930 kidnapping/murder that sets into motion the latter events of the film – is, for me, one of the strongest, most disturbing moments in the film.

One of the reasons the opening sequence is so effective for me is because the use of newspaper images (all the more terrifying because the eyes never print clearly) brought back scary childhood memories of seeing newspapers reporting the Kennedy assassination, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr, the Manson killings, and the hunt for the Zodiac Killer.

As presented, it’s a dramatic series of events recounted in a random mix of reenactments, newsreel footage, newspaper clippings, and press photographs, which proves to be a virtuoso bit of short filmmaking whose choppy, stylized imagery evoke a kind of cinematic equivalent of a ransom note. It's a rousing good start to the movie, and I especially like how it matches, in a kind of cyclical intensity, the film’s penultimate sequence showing how the murder on the Orient Express was carried out.

As Christie’s Miss Marple mystery, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, drew upon the real-life personal tragedy of actress Gene Tierney,the instigating crime in Murder on the Orient Express bears as obvious similarities to the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping case.

A heretofore unaddressed factor contributing to why Murder on the Orient Express ranked so low on my “must see” list of films in 1974 was my then-limited, not altogether favorable, experience of British crime movies, circa the 30s and 40s. At a time when even the earliest American crime films crackled with tension, the few British films I’d seen struck me as terribly aloof affairs. I was never comfortable with all that British reserve (“Murdered you say? Bit of rotten luck, wot?”), and (wrongly) assumed Murder on the Orient Express would follow suit.

While it's by no means as stuffy as all that, by the mid-70s, as American films became bigger, noisier, and in too many instances, dumber (those disaster films) the restraint of Murder on the Orient Express seemed positively invigorating. Clever plot, great dialog, and a three-act story structure all propped up by beautiful people in fancy clothes in exotic locations…whaddaya know?...suddenly everything old felt new again.

After seeing so many billboards, bus shelters, and mega-posters around town heralding the forthcoming release of the latest screen incarnation of Annie – that pint-sized, ginger juggernaut of Broadway 1977 (and for those keeping score, this marks adaptation # 3) – I figure I’d better get around to covering John Huston’s 1982 mega-budget, mega-hyped, mega-merchandised movie version before public reaction to the remake (pro or con) influence my memories.

Motivated as they are (more often than not) by income rather than ideas, remakes are an irksome Hollywood inevitability I'm prone to dismiss on principle alone. The remaking of iconic films like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Brian De Palma’s Carrieis an obvious fool’s errand; the inevitably substandard results forgotten before they even get a DVD release. But I can't say I feel the same about remaking flawed films. In fact, affording as it does a genuine creative opportunity for a filmmaker to "get it right" the second time around; it's the only kind of remake that does make sense to me.

The 1982 movie version of Annie took a while to grow on people. Regarded as a beloved classic by many today, Annie on its release was greeted with a mixed critical reception (nominated for 5 Razzie awards, winning one for Aileen Quinn as Worst Supporting Actress); was trashed in the press by the show's lyricist, Martin Charnin ("Terrible, terrible, it distorted everything."); and though it emerged one of the top ten moneymakers of the year, its steep budget ($40 to $50 million), hefty marketing campaign ($10 million) and the record $9.5 spent on acquiring the rights, meant it wouldn't come anywhere near breaking even or showing a profit for many years.
While I wouldn't go so far as to call Annie a classic, neither would I label it the out and out flop its detractors make it out to be. Sure, at times the script is uneven to the point of feeling erratic (Hannigan's 11th hour character redemption will give you whiplash), but I still find its changes to be a marked improvement over the theatrical production. And, thanks to its bouncy score, boundless - if unharnessed - energy, and capable, hardworking cast, Annie manages to be entertaining in spite of never really gelling into the kind of touchstone movie musical event its Broadway success (and producer Ray Stark's investment) augured.

Aileen Quinn as Annie

Albert Finney as Oliver Warbucks

Carol Burnett as Miss Agatha Hannigan

Ann Reinking as Grace Farrell

As every living human must by now know, Annie is the significantly retooled movie version of the Tony Award-winning musical phenomenon based on Harold Gray’s comic strip, “Little Orphan Annie.” Set in the Depression-era New York of 1933, Annieis the story of a spunky, unflaggingly optimistic little orphan who, while dreaming of finding her parents, manages to rescue and adopt a bullied, stray mutt; win the heart of a billionaire industrialist; play cupid for his devoted secretary; thwart a bilko scheme cooked up by the villainous orphanage matron, Miss Hannigan and her partners in crime, Rooster and Lily; and by fade-out, appears poised, with the help of FDR, to take on the Great Depression itself.

Bernadette Peters as Lily St. Regis, Tim Curry as Rooster Hannigan

The estrogen answer to 1962s Oliver(what DID little girls do in dance recitals before this show?) Annie is notable – before “Tomorrow” took on a life of its own as one of the most overexposed (and in turn, annoying) songs ever written – for representing something of a 70s pop cultural turning point. In a social climate reeling from inflation, the oil crisis, post-Watergate disillusionment,Vietnam fallout, and the hedonism-as-religion retreat into sex & drugs that typified the disco era (it opened mere months before the release of the bleak Looking for Mr. Goodbar): Annie was among the first non-ironic, unapologetically hopeful entertainments to emerge from a decade noted for its cynical self-criticism. Annie’s assertively retro, “corny is cool” aesthetic rode a nostalgia zeitgeist which embraced the intentional camp of TVs Wonder Woman, Star Wars' updating of the 1930s movie serial, and fueled the comic book-mania behind 1978s Superman and Robert Altman’s musical, Popeye(1980).

While Annie’s overwhelming success guaranteed it a movie sale (then the highest price ever paid for a theatrical property), media over-saturation in the intervening years made it a prime target for parody. When producer Ray Stark (Funny Girl) made known his plans to mount a big screen version, industry naysayers wondered how 1982 audiences would respond to what many saw as the show's machine-driven sentimentality. Questions arose as to the issue of overexposure (Annie was still running on Broadway, and would until 1983) and wondering if the public was up to weathering yet another shrill rendition of “Tomorrow” sung by a red-tressed, brass-lunged moppet.

Instead of turning Annie's most well-known song into a potentially wince-inducing showstopper, director John Huston (or Ray Stark, depending on the source) wisely gets the song out of the way by having Quinn sing a traditional version over the opening credits. Later she performs a subdued, a cappella rendition when she meets FDR. As Eleanor & Franklin join in (Lois De Banzie& Edward Herrmann), Warbucks' comic, schmaltz-resistant reluctance works to effectively diffuse similar audience response.

As a West Coaster, I’m one of those guys who’d rather have a poor movie adaptation of a Broadway show than none at all (see: A Little Night Music), so I was on board for a movie version of Annie from the get-go. But what really made it a must-see film for me was the unusually high caliber of talent Stark engaged both in front of and behind the camera.

What he assembled was a dream cast for Annie; actors who not only visually fit their roles to a T, but bravely bucked then-current Hollywood musical tradition by actually being able to sing and dance. Albert Finney, while acquitting himself very nicely in the 1970 musical, Scrooge, would be the first to admit he’s neither a singer or dancer, but Carol Burnett, Ann Reinking, Bernadette Peters, Tim Curry, Geoffrey Holder (Punjab), and Roger Minami (the Asp) all had their start in musical theater.

By 1982, Andrea McArdle, Broadway’s original Annie, was roughly the right age to play Lily St. Regis, so a massive, year-long, publicity-baiting global search was launched to find the perfect little orphan. Cute 9-year-old Aileen Quinn beat out 9,000 crestfallen (if not scarred for life) Annie applicants, winning the title role in what was then the most expensive musical ever made.

She & Sandy Make a Pair, They Never Seem to Have a Care. Cute Little She...it's Little Orphan Annie
Aileen Quinn was paid the exact same salary as Bingo (one of three dogs portraying Sandy)

Now, this is where things started getting weird. Broadway veteran Joe Layton (Thoroughly Modern Millie) was on hand to create the musical numbers (which makes sense), but the choreographic chores for this 1930s period musical - an innocent, if not naive, family entertainment swarming with children - fell to Arlene Phillips (which makes no sense at all). Certainly not if you're even remotely familiar with Phillips' hypersexual choreography for the Eurosleaze dance troupe, Hot Gossip, or if you've ever seen her patented brand of disco/aerobic writhing in the films The Fan and Can’t Stop the Music. I'm personally a huge fan of Phillips' work, but even I had to scratch my head on this one. However, nothing raised eyebrows higher than the news that Annie, now known as Ray Stark’s baby (“This is the film I want on my tombstone”), was to be directed by Oscar-winner John Huston: a Hollywood veteran of forty years, making his first musical at age 75.

If "Easy Street" falls short of what one would expect for a rollicking number featuring the likes of Bernadette Peters (who looks absolutely gorgeous), Carol Burnett, and Tim Curry - and it does - it's because it was shot two months after the film was completed (and by the looks of it, in a hurry) after it was decided to scrap the full-scale, already in-the-can version which is rumored to resemble the "Consider Yourself" number from Oliver.

Theories abounded as to the soundness of such a decision (Mike Nichols, Herb Ross, and Grease's Randal Kleiser had all been attached to the project at various times), but insiders likened Stark's handing over a lavish musical to a veteran director best known for gritty dramas (Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Misfits) to a similar situation back in 1960 when uber-serious director Robert Wise (I Want to Live!, The Haunting) hit major league paydirt when he took on as his first musical projects, West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965).

Radio personality Bert Healy (Hollywood Squares host, Peter Marshall) is joined by the lovely Boylen Sisters in a rendition of "You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile"

After months of the kind of strenuous prerelease hype that turns critics against a film before it even opens, Annie premiered here in Los Angeles at Mann’s Chinese Theater in May of 1982. I was in line opening night (fewer kids at evening shows), having by now fairly whipped myself into a veritable frenzy of enthusiastic anticipation. With that cast, director, choreographer, and score; I was certain Annie was going to be every bit the “Musical of Tomorrow” its ads promised.

A photo I took of the Burbank lot which Warner Bros. and Columbia Studios shared since the mid-70s. Behind this wall is Annie's $1 million New York outdoor street set

Maybe…

I love that I get excited by movies (seriously, I gave myself a nosebleed at the SF premiere of Thank God It’s Friday), but I had double reason to be worked up over Annie. First, as one of the biggest movie musicals to be released since my Xanadu epiphany (read here), Annierepresented the first musical I’d be seeing since becoming a dancer. Second, I knew a couple of the dancers in the film who were hired for reshoots of the Radio City Musical Hall sequence and the since-jettisoned, grand-scale, “Easy Street” number, and both assured me that Annie was going to be a bigger hit than Grease.

Annie's Orphan Pals
Captured in one of the rare moments one of them isn't staring directly into the lens
or glancing distractedly at something off camera

Primed for Annie to be more of an event than a movie (it was one of the first films to charge a then-record $6 admission price), my first viewing was so ruled by my desire to like it, I can't attest to really having seen the actual film at all. As I recall, my first look at Annie was an exhausting evening of willful self-deception and near-constant internal cheerleading: I laughed too loud and hard at bits of business that barely warranted a grin, and I gasped in delight at predictable plot developments which must have seemed ancient back in the day of Baby Peggy. My only reactions that weren't artificial and inappropriately oversize were for the showy musical numbers, which were indeed pretty spiffy. Still, I’d literally worked up a sweat trying to stave off disappointment...all in an effort to convince myself that I was having a good time.

And the weird thing is, I really I did have a good time. I just didn't have a great time, which is what I expected of a $40 million film that took two years to make. Which leads me to ponder the double-edge sword of hype. When it comes to movie marketing, there’s sell and there’s oversell: the former being when you give the public information, the latter is when you give them ammunition.
Seeing the film a second time convinced me that Annie's problem wasn't that it failed to live up to expectations; it's that it failed to live up to its own potential.

Make a Wish
A victim of its own success, Annie was torn between the simple charm of its storyline
and the Hollywood dictate that it be a larger-than-life musical extravaganza

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

As I’m fond of saying on this blog, a movie doesn't have to be perfect in order to be enjoyable or somebody's favorite. Annie's a glowing example of that principle in that it's a movie I never recommend to people, yet one I revisit often when I need my occasional overproduced movie musical fix. Straight dramas and comedies require cohesion in order to work. Not so with musicals. Musicals (happily) are by-design, broken into singing and non-singing interludes which, if need be, can be appreciated table d'hôte or à la carte. Annie is arguably at its best when experienced as separate scenes and isolated dance numbers. This way, the effectiveness of certain scenes (such as when the confounded Warbucks watches Grace put Annie tenderly to bed) aren't handicapped by clumsy adjoining sequences, and the musical numbers that click ("We Got Annie") get to stand alone and apart from those that fizzle ("Easy Street," to my shock and amazement).

I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here
When Annie gets something right, it does so spectacularly. Annie's first look at the Warbucks household ("Is this a train station? Are we going on a train?") is one of my favorite sequences. The member of the staff upon whose shoulder Annie is riding is dancer Don Correia (ex Mr. Sandy Duncan) one of several A Chorus Line alumni in the cast

PERFORMANCES

One of the more fascinating things about those old Our Gang comedies of the 30s is how natural all those kids were. No matter how often they were called upon to mimic grown-up behavior, the charm was in their essential, unaffected childishness shining through.

In Annie, the little girls cast as orphans are all experienced troupers culled from Annie productions all over the world, and it shows. While the film is desperately in need of an Annie with the kind of screen magnetism of a young Patty Duke, Hayley Mills, or Jodie Foster - something to set her apart from the other orphans and justify an audience's concern for her welfare - Aileen Quinn is a perfectly swell Annie (to use the vernacular). While not over-blessed with talent, she is has an earnest, winning quality, a pleasant voice, and best of all for an old grouch like me, fails to grate on my nerves.
This is in stark contrast to the rest of the orphans who are literally children working like Trojans to act like children…and they don’t succeed! Annie was my first exposure to this kind of Disney Channel, plastic child-actor aesthetic that seems to have become the norm these days: old-before-their-years showbiz kids who can only impersonate (badly) the behavior of real children.

"You step on my cues Molly, and you'll find your close-ups on the cutting-room floor."
Had Quinn been a star, no one would fault her had she pulled a Helen Lawson
in regard to her scene-stealingly cute co-star, Toni Ann Gisondi.

I’ve no real quarrel with the performances of Annie’s grown-up cast. Finney is amusingly broad and cartoonish as Warbucks, Reinking is at her most eloquent when she lets her lithe body do the acting, and, the always-fabulous Carol Burnett is left to do all the comedy heavy-lifting as the perpetually pickled Miss Hannigan - a role she’s ideally suited for. Perhaps too much so. Burnett is a lot of over-the-top fun and never less than fascinating and spot-on. But watching her I can’t help thinking, as I often do watching Maggie Smith on Downton Abbey, she could do this kind of role in her sleep.

In 1959, Carol Burnett made her Broadway musical debut in Once Upon a Mattress in 1959. Annie marks her first movie musical appearance

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Annie’s musical numbers always put a smile on my face. Sometimes because they’re so good, sometimes because the lip-syncing is so poor or the execution is so unpolished, I have a hard time believing they made it into the completed film. Six songs from the Broadway show failed to make it into the film and I honestly can’t say I miss them. And of the four songs written expressly for the film, the only two I could have done without are “Dumb Dog/Sandy” (in which the lyricist commits the Sondheim-wouldn't-do-this crime of putting the word "residing" into the mouth of a little girl we'd previously heard say "piana" for piano), and the entire Rockettes section of “Let’s Go to the Movies.”

We Got Annie
In one of my favorite numbers, Roger Minami, Ann Reinking, and the late great Geoffrey Holder
dance together all-too briefly, but its pure magic.

"I guess I'll never know the feeling of running fingers through your hair..."
Burnett's delivery of this witty lyric from the duet, "Sign" got one of the film's biggest, most spontaneous laughs

It's The Hard Knock Life
Can we please pause a second and appreciate Annie's amazing horizontal split jump?

I Don't Need Anything But You
Annie gets it right in the charming finale, which gives Quinn the closest thing to a Shirley Temple moment

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Mimicking the fate of many beloved children's movies that were not exactly hits when first released (The Wizard of Oz and the aforementioned Willy Wonka being the most famous examples), Annie may have had to take her lumps back in 1982, but, true to her optimistic credo, she's weathered a great many more "Tomorrows" than her more critically-revered peers.
Meanwhile, my own feelings about Annie have remained roughly the same, with time adding (in equal measure) a degree of nostalgia and cheesy camp to my revisits to it, making for a win-win situation whatever mood I'm in. So, whether it's to laugh at the baffling amateurism of some scenes (what must the outtakes of the orphan's rendition of "You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile" look like if this one, with its poor lip-synching and self-conscious "fun" was chosen?); ponder the possibility that perhaps all those up-the skirt-shots and peeks at women's underwear are part of a visual motif; or merely marvel at how impossibly young everybody looks... Annie may no longer be the movie of Tomorrow, but it offers a pretty pleasant look at yesterday.

I wish the 2014 remake of Annie all the best. We have yet to have our quintessential big screen Annie.

BONUS MATERIAL
Want to watch a grown woman (Arlene Phillip) yelling at a bunch of overworked kids? Want to catch a glimpse of the deleted "Easy Street" number? Check out Lights! Camera! Annie! a 1982 PBS "making of" documentary on YouTube.

Tony Award-winner Andrea Martin portrays a grown-up Annie in this classic SCTV parody.

Life After Tomorrow, a fascinating 2006 documentary about the lives of former Annie orphans is available for viewing on Hulu.

IMDB notes in its Trivia section that the sound effects man during the Iodent radio broadcast is actor Ray Bolger in an unbilled cameo. As you can see from the photo above, the actor in question does indeed bear a resemblance to the Wizard of Oz star, but is NOT Ray Bolger. A call out to film buffs to identify this character actor.

Disco touched everything in the late 70s, and sunshiny anthems by mop-topped orphans were no exception. In 1977 disco diva Grace Jones performed what can best be described as a confrontational version of "Tomorrow"HERE.

Speaking of disco, did you know Aileen Quinn released a solo album? Me neither. Her album, Bobby's Girl, was released in 1982 to take full advantage of the Annie media blitz. Although disco was fairly dead by this time, that didn't stop Quinn from driving at least one child-sized nail into its coffin by performing an ill-advised cover of Leo Sayers' 1976 boogie anthem, "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing." "Arf!" goes Sandy.

"I love you, Daddy Warbucks"

As a hormonal pre-teen whose nether regions went all atingle at the sight of Oliver Reed’s Bill Sikes waking up in Shani Wallis' bed in the 1968 kiddie musical, Oliver!; no one wanted to see Ken Russell’s adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love more than I. More to the point: no 7^thgrader with a wholesale unfamiliarity with either D. H. Lawrence or Ken Russell wanted to see Oliver Reed appearing full-frontal naked in a movie more than I.

But it was not to be. For although my track record for persuading my mom to grant me permission to see age-inappropriate films on the basis of their “seriousness of their content” was one both impressive and fruitful in one so young (my being both a shy and humorless 12-year-old got me into Bonnie & Clyde, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), little did I know that my hopes for pulling the same stunt with Women in Lovewere dashed thanks to my parents having previously seen the controversial film adaptation of Lawrence’s lesbian-themed novella, The Fox a couple of years before. As 1967s The Fox and Women in Love (released in the US in 1970), were both promoted less with an eye toward their highbrow literary origins and more pruriently to the inherent sensationalism of their then taboo-shattering nudity and sexual frankness.

Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin

Glenda Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen

Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich

Jennie Linden as Ursula Brangwen

Eleanor Bron as Hermione Roddice

That I had been able to wheedle my way into the “Recommended for Mature Audiences” films listed above is largely attributable to the fact that they all pitched themselves as important, self-serious motion pictures commenting on contemporary issues. On the other hand, Women in Love, betraying a perhaps well-founded lack of faith in America’s interest in or familiarity with D.H. Lawrence, and hoping the lure of eroticism might offset the stuffy reputation of British imports, chose to go the exploitation route. Like The Fox before it, which used lesbianism as its prime publicity hook, Women in Love moved its homoerotic nude wrestling scene front and center as the defining image and focus of its entire marketing campaign.

And while I’m certain all of this paid off handsomely at the boxoffice, closer to home (seeing as it only solidified my mother’s perception of D.H. Lawrence as a high-flown pornographer, and strengthened her resolve to keep me far away from any film bearing his name) that particular marketing strategy ultimately proved disastrous to my private campaign to get a look at Oliver's reed. Roughly nine years passed before Women in Love's rounds at the revival theaters and my suitable chronological age coincided.

The stylish (if not eccentric) mode of dress of the Brangwen sisters not only establishes them as modern, independent-thinking women at odds with their dreary, working-class surroundings, but assert Women in Love's subthemes of internal (emotion and instinct), external (nature and environment), and man-made (industry and art) conflict.

Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen are two emotionally restless sisters whose naturally colorful natures chafe at the drab-grey existence proffered by their working-class status as schoolteachers in the coal-mining town of Beldover in postwar England, 1921. Both women are dreamy loners unable/unwilling to fit in with their surroundings. Both are also, if not exactly looking for love, reluctant to duplicate the domestic desperation of their mother, and therefore curious and receptive to exploring the experience.

Gudrun (Jackson), the youngest, is a self-styled artist and free-spirit sensually attracted to power and passion. (And, it would seem, brutality. In one scene she is shown becoming excited by the sight of Gerald mistreating a horse. In another, stimulated by a story an artist [Loerke] relates about having to beat one of his female models in order for her to sit still for a painting.)

"I would give everything...everything, all you love...for a little companionship and intelligence."
Vladek Sheybal as Herr Loerke, a homosexual artist (Richard Heffer as his lover) presents Gudrun with a possibly of platonic love

Ursula (Linden), more of a realist and more sensitive than her sister, nevertheless envisions fulfillment as something achievable only through the surrendering of oneself to an idealized vision of one-on-one domesticated bliss. Into these sisters' lives, as though summoned by mutual longing, arrive Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich; best friends of dissimilar emotional temperament who contribute to forming, in their coupling with the sisters, two contrasting yet complimentary halves of a cyclical treatise on the conundrum that is passionate love vs. romantic love. The perpetual struggle between the sexes.

Woman in Love #1- Rupert & Ursula's loving relationship is often photographed in nature

Ursula finds romantic kinship - if little in the way of stability - with Rupert (Bates), a school inspector possessed of extravagantly quixotic theories about nature, life and love, all seeming to channel from a nascent awareness of his bisexuality. Meanwhile, Gudrun, perhaps out of want of stimulation or, as Rupert surmises, a lust for passion and greed for self-importance in love, is drawn to Gerald (Reed), the brutish, aristocratic son of the town’s coal industrialist. A shared quest for power, corrosively mixed with a need for both intimacy and independence, makes theirs a passionate, albeit combative, relationship more or less doomed from the start.

Woman in Love #2 - Gudrun & Gerald's doomed relationship is often photographed in dark surroundings

Intruding upon Ursula and Rupert’s self-perpetuating emotionalism and Gudrun and Gerald’s incessant power plays, are: Hermione (Bron), Rupert’s one-time love and the walking embodiment of orchestrated eroticism with none of the heat; and Rupert himself, whose unrequited love for the mulishly impassive Gerald encumbers his relationship with Ursula.

Men in Love - Rupert advances the possibility of an implicit, perfect love shared between two men

Many films have used the entwined relationships of two couples to explore the inconsistent, conflicting complexities of spiritual and physical love (my favorites being Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge and Closer), but Ken Russell’s Women in Love gets to the heart of the matter (so to speak) in a way that is as visually poetic as it is emotionally painful. It's one of the most intelligent and genuinely provocative films about love I've ever seen.

I was in my early 20s the first time I saw Women in Love and I really thought I understood it then. But it seems with each passing year, the film reveals itself to be about so much more than I'd initially thought. Women in Love is one of those rare films that seems to grow smarter in direct proportion to the amount of life experience one chalks up. So it would seem, although you couldn't have convinced me of it at the time, my mom was right in thinking I was too young for this. Not that I wouldn't have loved to have seen Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in the buff, but Women in Love is far too mature in its themes for any of this to have made sense to me as an adolescent. Sumptuously filmed, magnificently costumed (by Shirley Russell), and so exceptionally well-acted you can watch it again and again without ever unearthing all the delightful nuances in the actors’ performances; Women in Love is a thoughtful, surprisingly restrained film, and a pleasant departure from the operatic bombast of Russell’s later works.

Gudrun's desire for power and its liberating effects is poetically dramatized in a sequence in which her lyrical dancing tames and eventually overcomes a threatening-looking herd of highland cattle. (Amusingly, a herd which, when photographed from the front, share Gudrun's coloring and haircut.)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

My favorite thing about Women in Love is how artfully it tackles the unwieldy topic of love; especially the pain and emotional upheaval born of that overused word never seeming to mean the exact same thing to any two people at any one time.
Obscured by illusion, distorted by need, thwarted by cowardice, the impulse to love may be innate and instinctual, but it’s also intensely confounding. Ken Russell contrasts images of nature with images of the encroaching industrialism of postwar England to dramatize the natural urges of the characters as being in conflict with their repressed, intellectual notions about love. Ursula, Gudrun, Rupert, and Gerald all do a great deal of thinking and talking about love, but none betray a trace of genuinely having any idea of what love really is or they want.

As suggested by Women in Love's repeated use of the popular song, "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles,"the characters all harbor romantic illusions about love: its potential for fulfillment, its ability to heal wounds, the emotional void it can fill. Conflict arises out of whether or not the grasping need of desire is capable of giving way to the vulnerability required of love.

Love & Death: In a pairing shot that many critics of the day thought too heavy-handed (which, of course, meant I absolutely loved it), the drowning death of the film's only romantically idyllic couple (Sharon Gurney & Christopher Gable) is contrasted with Ursula & Rupert's unsatisfying first tryst. A premonition of blighted love, a graphic representation of romantic ideologies at cross purposes; the women's poses can be interpreted as lovingly embracing or greedily clinging to the men, the men, unequivocally adopting gestures of disentanglement.

PERFORMANCES

While Ken Russell's operatic zest and Larry Kramer's graceful screenplay mercifully spare Women in Love from the kind of over-reverential airlessness common in most film adaptations of classic novels, I attribute the lion's share of the credit for the film's vibrancy to the talents of the amazing cast.

In an era that required so may actresses to play the compliant love interest to counterculture antiheroes, Women in Love was a refreshing change of pace in presenting two women who have a say in what they want from life and love. Personal fave Glenda Jackson (looking quite smart in her blunt, Vidal Sassoon bob) emerged in this film as something of the "New Woman" of 70s cinema.

Blessed with a mellifluous voice and an articulate beauty that radiates strength, intellect, and fleshy sensuality, Jackson is Old Hollywood star quality without the lacquered veneer. Much in the same way I attribute Woody Allen with unearthing Diane Keaton, Ken Russell and Glenda Jackson are a pair forever locked together in my mind. Her performance as Gudrun Brangwen, certainly one of the more complex, emotionally paradoxical characters in literature, is almost wily. Throughout the film she wears the look of a woman in possession of a secret she dares you to find out. The quintessential Ken Russell heroine, Jackson won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, and deservedly rose to stardom on the strength of this film.

A real scene-stealer whose presence is very much missed when her character is required to recede into the background early on, is the ever-versatile Eleanor Bron as the pretentious Hermione: a potentially ridiculous individual made real and sympathetic by Bron's prodigious talent. Only after I'd read the book did I really come to appreciate the spot-on perfection of Bron's performance.

Women in Love as a costume film/period piece, tightrope walks a space between stagy theatricality and naturalism that few but Russell - with his talent for finding natural locations that look like stage sets for an opera - could pull off. Alan Bates fits the film's romantic setting perfectly (although I find him to be so swoon-inducingly beautiful, I can’t say I've ever been able to really evaluate his performance with much objectivity), and Jennie Linden is effective in the somewhat thankless role of Ursula.

Reed and Jackson bring such smoldering dynamic intensity to their roles that their scenes together always feel slightly dangerous. I can't think of a single other actress who could appear opposite Reed in a scene and leave you concerned for his safety. I think Reed's Gerald Crich is his finest screen performance. Employing his trademark whispers to great effect, he somehow manages to be brutish, refined, and heartbreakingly vulnerable all at the same time.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Given your average ratio of anticipation to disappointment, it came as no small surprise to discover, after having waited so many years, Women in Love’s fabled nude wrestling scene more than lived up to its reputation. Satisfied with merely being sensually enraptured by the sight of two obscenely sexy actors wrestling in the altogether; I wasn't at all prepared for what a dramatically powerful and daring scene it is. Daring not in its exposure of flesh, but in its exploration of a subtextural, taboo attribute of a great many onscreen male relationships (and, I daresay, many real-life relationships as well).

I'm not sure who said it, but someone once made the keen observation that homophobia in men is not really rooted in a general distaste for male-on-male sexual contact, but rather in the fear of "What if I like it?"
Heterosexual men have established a social order in which they have left themselves few avenues allowing for the expression of male affection. In lieu of this they have contrived a network of female-excluding, male-bonding rituals so convoluted and complex (sports culture, strip clubs, ass slapping, "bros before hoes" guy codes, homophobic locker room humor, bromance comedies, misogyny masked as promiscuity [the Romeo syndrome], etc.) you sometimes wish they'd just have sex with each other and get it over with. One can't help but feel that the world would be a less aggressive, insecure place if they did.

In Women in Love, Rupert and Gerald's friendship is really the most intimate, passionate, and loving relationship in the film, but Rupert uses words and lofty theories to mask his inability to fully confront his own sexual confusion, while Gerald is too emotionally remote to allow himself to address the issue at all. On the heels of the death of Gerald's sister and following Rupert's less-than-fulfilling consummation of his affair with Ursula, the two friends find themselves at a loss for how to "appropriately" comfort to one another. So, as is the wont of repressed heterosexual males the world over, Rupert and Gerald resort to displays of physical aggression as a heterosexual means of expressing homosexual intimacy.

As the friendly combat gives way to a physical exhaustion matching their physical closeness, it's clear to Rupert that Gerald feels "something" akin to his own feelings. But before that ultimate intimacy can be broached, Gerald, in an act of willful misunderstanding, finds it necessary to break off what has been established between them before things have a chance of preceding any further. (Wrestling by firelight, the very natural state of their nudity is made vulgar and shameful by the intrusion of the modern electric light he abruptly switches on.)
As a fan of 70s movies, what makes this sequence particularly compelling for me is how it symbolically evokes the unaddressed subtext in all those post-feminism, male-centric buddy pictures of the decade. Films like Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider - films in which women are shunted off to the sidelines - are all essentially male romances. In each film, women are present, even loved, but there's no getting past the fact that the deepest, most profoundly spiritual love occurs between the male characters. Women in Love's wrestling scene dramatizes the struggle men face when affection for another man is felt and (in this instance), the societal and morality-imposed roles of "friend" are found to be inadequate.

It's an outstandingly courageous sequence whose confrontational frankness wrests Women in Love out of the past and centers it far and above what most mainstream filmmakers are willing to do today. Who knew? A sequence I only expected to be a feast for the eyes proved to be food for thought as well.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Women in Love was promoted with the tagline ‒ “The relationship between four sensual people is limited: They must find a new way.” And while this might sound more like the tagline for 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, it does at least touch upon the theme of the inadequacy of classically “romantic” notions of love in a modern world, and the need for a kind of sexual evolution.

The Proper Way to Eat a Fig
Almost as scandalous as Women in Love's nudity was the inclusion of a scene (not in the book) where Rupert compares a fig to female genitalia. The words are taken from D.H. Lawrence's 1923 erotic poem, Figs, which can be read in its entirety, HERE

None of the characters in Women in Love is able to fully align what they presuppose about love (nor what is true to their natures) with their present realities. In an earlier post about Mike Nichol’s Closer, I wrote:
“The four protagonists fumble about blindly seeking love without knowing how to return it, demanding love without earning it, and giving love without committing to it.”

The same can be said for the characters in Women in Love. And although more than 70 years separate the creation of the two works (Patrick Marber's play, Closer, was written in 1997, D.H. Lawrence's novel was published in 1920) it intrigues me that after so many years and so much human progress, the basic cosmic riddle that is love remains essentially and eternally unchanged.

Undomesticated
Rupert - "But I wanted a man friend eternal...as you are eternal."
Ursula - "You can't have it because it's impossible."
Rupert - "I don't believe that."

Given that my accepted mindset on the topic of most contemporary films (remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings, in particular) is a resounding, “Bah, humbug!” I have to say, after seeing the new version of Annie starring Quvenzhané Wallis and Jamie Foxx, I feel a little like Albert Finney in the last reel of Scrooge (1970).

Certainly, what with all those negative reviews, poor boxoffice, and my own casual antipathy toward the source material itself ‒ I love the musical score, but my very W.C. Fields-like aversion to hordes of singing children has always prevented Annie from being a huge favorite ‒ expectations couldn't have been lower. I would have been happy had this, the third screen incarnation of the 1977 Broadway musical, been made into a splashy, tolerably bad movie musical on par with Hairspray (2007) or Nine (2009); and if I’m really being honest with myself, I think I might have even secretly hoped for a so-bad-it’s-good hoot-fest, à la Lost Horizon (1973) or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978). But as it turns out, Annie: 2014 caught me completely off guard. It seems the one thing I wasn’t expecting was an utterly delightful, thoroughly enchanting musical whose thoughtful and canny updating reclaims the heart of a musical long lost to shrill children’s recitals and hollow theatrical revivals.

I’m light-years away from being the film’s preferred demographic, but as a dancer and longtime fan of movie musicals, I was wholly captivated by Annie’s old-fashioned charm and sentimentality. A sentimentality that touchingly reaffirms the musical’s simple message that everybody needs to feel loved, and family isn't only something you’re born into.

Quvenzhane Wallis as Annie Bennett

Jamie Foxx as William Stacks

Rose Byrne as Grace Farrell

Cameron Diaz as Colleen Hannigan

Bobby Cannavale as Guy

David Zayas as Lou

With two flawed Annie adaptations already committed to celluloid (the overstuffed 1982 film you can read about HERE, and the wan but more faithful-to-the-stage 1999 TV-movie), I was less than thrilled when, back in 2011, actor Will Smith announced plans to produce an Annie remake starring his daughter, Willow. Of course, now, three years later, we can all give thanks for the role growth spurts and sluggish pre-production played in averting that particular disaster, but still, who needed yet another screen incarnation of that irrepressible orphan unless in a significantly reinterpreted form?

Happily, Annie 2014 proves to be just that: a surprisingly funny, disarmingly sweet update of the Broadway musical which, through the clever repurposing of songs, characters, and situations draws amusingly apt parallels between contemporary times and the hard knock life of 1933.

Quvenzhané Wallis’ Annie has the spirit, spunk, and boundless optimism of her comic strip namesake (not to mention the same headful of curly locks), and plot-wise, the film cleaves more to the 1982 John Huston film than the original Broadway production written by Thomas Meehan (with music composed by Charles Strouse and lyricist Martin Charnin). But in spite of the many changes, it’s still the story of a hopeful waif searching for her real parents, and how she comes to warm the capitalist heart of a lonely billionaire through pluck and a cheery outlook. Annie is no longer an orphan, but (more reasonably) a foster child in the resentful care of the embittered, frequently besotted Miss Hannigan (Diaz), a failed dance-pop singer who was unceremoniously dumped from the C + C Music Factory back in the 90s (“I was too good!”) and now has to live off the subsidy income of playing foster mom to five annoying “little girls.”

Daddy Warbucks is now William Stacks (Foxx), a New York mayoral candidate whose standoffish public image is in dire need of the kind of PR rebranding and instant photo-op warmth temporarily taking in a foster kid can provide. Stacks is looked after by Grace Farrell (Byrne), the super-efficient VP of his mobile phone empire, and Guy (Cannavale), his pitbull of a political adviser. Beyond the narrative tweaks necessary to usher what is essentially a 90-year-old character into the 21st Century, Annie follows along the same fairy-tale path as its Broadway-inspired predecessors, retaining just enough of the familiar to evoke nostalgia, yet delivering plenty of (welcome) surprises to make the entire enterprise feel like something entirely fresh and new.

Granted, Annie is not a perfect film and not without its problems. Cameron Diaz’s over-caffeinated approach to the character of Miss Hannigan takes some getting used to (maybe small children will find her funny), events occasionally feel rushed (I know I'm alone in this, but I could have stood a longer running time), and like many musicals that strive to be “of the moment” (Xanadu, anyone?), Annie is in grave danger of looking dated by the time I post this. But in all, I found Annie to be a an fun, enjoyably tuneful re-imagining of Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie (“Foster kid...” as the certain-her-parents-are-still-alive Annie has to keep reminding everyone) which, thanks in large part to the engaging performance of its adorable 10-year-old star, had me feeling (to quote Scrooge in Dickens' A Christmas Carol) "...as merry as a schoolboy."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In this day of Disney animation and Muppets, live-action movie musicals are hard to come by. Rarer still is the screen adaptation of a beloved Broadway musical that avoids succumbing to the curse of having too keen a sense of its own legacy. Camelot, My Fair Lady, and Hello, Dolly!, and Mame were all perfectly fun, lighthearted Broadway shows which arrived on the big screen ponderously weighed-down by big-for-big-sake elephantitis and an overdetermined sense of their own “greatness.”

As a fan of cinematic bloat, I adore Annie’s visual sweep and glossy sumptuousness (it’s like a shiny, jewel-box vision of New York), and I like a large-scale musical number as much as the next guy (OK, probably more). But I also like self-aware humor and I am a sucker for a musical that doesn’t lose its heart amidst all the production razzle-dazzle.

This is the first AnnieI've ever seen scaled down to a size appropriate to the perspective of its heroine. And whether motivated by budgetary constraints or the dancing limitations of its cast, Annie sidesteps big production numbers at every turn (“It’s a Hard Knock Life” is almost modest) and in doing so, proves that less is consistently more.

With intimacy intensified by the New York locations, the actors all doing their own singing, and the “dancing” consisting more of spontaneous movement inspired by the nature of the characters themselves; this Annie is the first one that I ever found to be really funny, and definitely the only Anniethat has ever moved me to waterworks.

I thought by now I'd had my fill of the song, Tomorrow, until I heard Quvenzhane Wallis sing it. The staging of the number is very moving and her performance is outstanding. What a sweet voice she has!

PERFORMANCES

Impressive adaptation choices aside (I love the comically self-referential opening sequence that cleverly addresses the remake elephant in the room), Annie’s major asset is Academy Award-nominee Quvenzhané Wallis (and Golden Globe nominee for this) who is fast proving herself a child actress force to be reckoned with. There’s nothing comic book about the astonishing level of nuance she’s able to bring to a character usually summed up with a few glib adjectives built around the word, "spunky."

As realized by Wallis, Annie's belief that her parents will one day return for her is as movingly and realistically conveyed as her self-protective resilience is poignant. to bring this to a musical in which she also shines in the most engaging fashion in the comedy and musical sequences is something of a marvel. Having never Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild, the film that made her the youngest Best Actress nominee in history (she was nine), I can only say that I was fairly blown away by her display of talent here. Easily the best performance in the film, she’s an Anniefor the ages.

Wallis' performance of the original song, "Opportunity" was a real goosebump moment for me. Wonderful to hear a child sing in a voice that actually sounds like that of a child, not a pint-sized Ethel Merman

Cognizant perhaps of the indomitable juggernaut posed by the pairing of an absurdly charismatic child and a dog, Jamie Foxx wisely underplays as Stacks and comes off the all better for it (although one wonders what he thought when, rather prophetically, his big solo, "Something Was Missing" did just that in the release print). Rose Byrne is a standout and singularly appealing as Grace, the lonely-little-girl-as-grown-up spin given her character making for a nice subtextural trifecta (with Hannigan) about women/girls accepting themselves as individuals worthy of love by first learning to love themselves. Bobby Cannavale, so wonderful in last years's Blue Jasmine adds considerable comic verve to his role, David Zayas is solid as a local bodega owner harboring a love-has-20/20-eyesight crush on Hannigan, and Stephanie Kurtzuba as a wealth-struck social services worker is a scene-stealing highlight.

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Oz, Pompeii) as Nash, Stacks' driver/bodyguard

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I don't consider myself a big admirer of most of today's music (I think Miss Hannigan and I share similar musical tastes) but I was immediately taken with like the ingenious way the songs from Annie were reworked. I even like the new stuff (save for Moonquake Lake, which is a tad trying). I've read critics calling out the film for its Autotune sweetening of the vocals (a staple of every Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus song I've ever heard, and evident in 2010s Burlesque with little comment), but I'd rather have the "assisted" vocals of the real actors than the kind of rampant dubbing that occurred throughout the 60s.
And what is a musical without a favorite number? Annie has several standouts for me but my fave rave and the one number I can watch again and again is "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here."

Grace & Annie make like Mick Jagger and David Bowie in the infectiously upbeat,
"I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As much as I absolutely fell in love with this film (flaws, bad reviews, and all) and think Annie batted it out of the ballpark in a way I never would have anticipated given my general distaste for remakes; I've become an even bigger fan of the film after the daughters of a friend of mine told me what it felt like to see a little girl who looked like them starring in her own bigscreen musical adventure.
Hearing how excited they were about Quvenzhané Wallis’ singing and dancing, how much they liked her hair, her mode of dress, and how it made them cry at the end....
It just got me to thinking about what a difference a film like this would have made to my sisters when we were growing up. I have four sisters and we went to the movies nearly every weekend when we were kids, yet in all the dozens of movies we saw, they never got the chance to see themselves represented onscreen. Certainly not front and center.

In researching this post, I came across a press junket video interview for Annie in which actor Bobby Cannavale had this to say on the topic: “It’s for a new generation of kids who wouldn't necessarily see themselves in those old productions, be it the movies or the play. I recently saw the play and I still didn't see anybody of color up there. So I think it’s an important thing for kids to be able to go to the movies and see themselves.”

I've always felt that dreams are what movies are for. And as Xanadu proved in my life, a movie doesn't have to be a critic's darling to inspire a person and speak to their spirit. So my hat is off to Annie for giving a lot of kids who aren't always afforded the chance, an opportunity to dream.

Black pearl, precious little girl
Let me put you up where you belong.

Black pearl, pretty little girl
You’ve been in the background much too long.

Black Pearl-1969 (Spector, Wine, Levine)

BONUS MATERIAL

As in the 1982 film (not the show), Annie is taken to the movies. In this instance, an intentionally silly-looking Twilight parody titled MoonQuake Lake, whose fake trailer can be seen (complete with surprise cameos) HERE. Sadly, as with all good parodies, it actually looks very much like a film that would be greenlit by Hollywood today.

Clip of the "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here"number on YouTube.

I read that Annie director, Will Gluck, placed 30 tributes to past versions of Annie in this film. I haven't found a site which lists them all, but here's a start:
1. The spunky, red-haired "Annie A." who opens the film giving a class report on Herbert Hoover (the Depression era President who's the topic of a sarcastic song in the Broadway show). 2. "Annie B." follows with a oral report on FDR and his New Deal (President referenced in song in the Broadway show). 3. A mayoral candidate is given the name Harold Gray, the creator of Little Orphan Annie comic strip. 4. Will Stacks is bald. 5. A band called "The Leaping Lizards" plays in a nightclub (it's the famous catchphrase of the comic strip Annie). 6. Annie rescues Sandy from a bunch of bullies. 7. The song "N.Y.C" from the Broadway show, is played in the background of a scene. 8. The names of the actors in the fake film, MoonQuake Lake (Andrea Alvin & Simon Goodspeed) reference Annie history (original Annie, Andrea McArdle, The Alvin Theater, now the Neil Simon Theater, and The Goodspeed Theater in Connecticut where Annie premiered in 1976). 8. The red jacket, white leggings, and Mary Jane-style shoes Annie wears in the finale is a contemporary update of the classic Little Orphan Annie outfit.

Today to get the public to attend a picture show,

It’s not enough to advertise a famous star they know.

If you want to get the crowds to come around...

You’ve got to have Glorious Technicolor,

Breathtaking CinemaScope,

And Stereophonic Sound.

Cole Porter -1955 Broadway musical "Silk Stockings"

“The first big murder-mystery in CinemaScope!”, “The first crime-of-passion story in CinemaScope!" - Thus screamed the poster and newspaper ads heralding the 1954 release of 20th Century-Fox’s all-star, all-color, widescreen film noir, Black Widow. Well, seeing as I somehow never even heard of this movie until just last year (how that is even possible given the prominent role The Late, Late Show played in my movie fan developmental years is beyond me), I’m going to have to take their word for it being a "first" in the annals of CinemaScope. What I can attest to is that by combining the backstage bitchery of All About Eve(1950) with the murder-mystery-told-in-flashback structure of Laura (1944), and burnishing it all to a garish, high-gloss color palette reminiscent of How to Marry a Millionaire (1953); Black Widow succeeds in being a pleasingly campy goulash of disparate genre tropes and style conventions in search of a unifying tone.

Ginger Rogers as overbearing diva of the New York stage Carlotta Marin

Van Heflin as slow-witted theatrical producer Peter Denver

Gene Tierney as patrician stage star Iris Denver

George Raft as the Beau Brummel of the NYPD, Detective Lt. C.A. Bruce

Peggy Ann Garner as Southern-fried "purpose girl" Nancy Ordway

Reginald Gardiner as lapdog househusband Brian Mullen

Promoted by movie studios in the 1950s to compete with the escalating popularity of television, CinemaScope is, like today’s mania for 3-D (that ship has struck dry-dock by now, hasn't it?), a technological advancement devised to enhance the moviegoing experience which doesn't necessarily translate to enhancing the actual film itself. In its time, CinemaScope was a spectacle-based invention that proved ideal for epics (The Robe– 1953), musicals (How to Marry a Millionaire– 1953), and scenic adventure films (Beneath the 12-Mile Reef – 1953). Black Widow, a murder mystery based on the novel, Fatal Woman by Hugh Wheeler (A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd) was an early experiment by Fox to try out its widescreen process (with blistering color by Deluxe) on a less visual, more narrative-driven genre.

Set in the glamorous world of the New York theater (although no one in the film ever sets foot on a stage), Black Widow feels more like Americanized Agatha Christie than full-blown noir. It throws together a colorful assortment of cliché Broadway luminaries, bigwigs, hangers-on, and bohemian Greenwich Village types, then stands back as this close-knit group of professional pretenders grows progressively unraveled by the inconvenient intrusion of a murder into their sheltered enclave.

Virginia Leith as Claire Amberly
Although I always associate Leith with Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying (1956), fans of MST3K will recognize Leith as the disembodied talking head in 1962s The Brain that Wouldn't Die

While Black Widow is built around the noir staple of having an individual's life spiral out of control due to being falsely accused of a crime, missing-in-action is the hard-boiled dialog or requisite climate of fatalism necessary to make this overlit whodunit feel like a genuine sample of the real thing. Not helping matters is the fact that time better spent fleshing out character motivations or tangling them more convincingly into the central web of the mystery is given over to draggy amateur sleuthing that leans heavily on coincidence and relies too often on slow-witted police work.

Skip Homeier as John Amberly

Plot: Naive to the point of thick-headed producer, Peter Denver (Heflin), befriends guileless 20-year-old wannabe writer, Nancy Ordway (Garner), while his stage star wife is out of town (Tierney). However, the platonic nature of their friendship fails to prevent the raised manicured eyebrows and wagging, gossipy tongue of neighbor, Great Lady of the Stage, and all-around busybody, Carlotta Marin (Rogers), despite the demurred assertions of her cowed husband, Brian (Gardiner).

At the periphery of this innocent but potentially combustible situation are well-heeled sister and brother, Claire and John Amberly (Virginia Leith and Skip Homeier): she a slumming Greenwich Village artist, he a law student; Nancy’s uncle, Gordon (Otto Kruger), a low-tier stage actor; Anne (Hilda Simms), Nancy's sharp-as-a-tack co-worker; Lucia Colletti (Cathleen Nesbitt), the Denvers’ loose-lipped maid; and, once things take a nasty turn , Lt. Bruce (Raft), the steel-eyed, near-immobile detective.

Otto Kruger as Gordon Ling

The mystery at the core of Black Widow is handled fairly effectively, what with some throw-you-off-the-scent casting and a perhaps unintended lightness of approach helping to generate a few genuinely unexpected twists along the way. Also working in the film's favor is how the film uses the atmosphere of ruthlessness and duplicity common to movies set in the world of show business to create a mystery-friendly environment rife with homicidal potential. And I certainly can't find fault with the production itself, it being a veritable cavalcade of stagy sets, overdone fashions, and the apparent 50s vogue for unflatteringly short hairdos resembling gold-hued bathing caps made of tense, lambswool curls.

But in the end, neither the dark promise of its title, nor the camp excesses suggested by its gaudy visuals are ever realized in sufficient force to make Black Widow more than a handsomely mounted, slightly overdressed crime thriller.

Cathleen Nesbitt as Lucia Colletti

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It isn't common for a film’s greatest strengths to be found in its weaknesses, but Black Widow is frequently at its most persuasive when serving up a brand of moviemaking so glossily old-fashioned that its patently theatrical artificiality begins to take on the characteristic of something resembling a style.

From the outset, Black Widow embarks on a narrative course endorsing a mode of dress (the crisp, stiff clothes all look like costumes), setting (95% soundstage, 5% NYC locations), and performance (all indication, little believable emotion), all supporting the theory of a concentrated effort on the film’s part to bear as little resemblance to real life as possible.
There's an alien "otherness" to the look of the film created by the lighting and composition requirements of the CinemaScope process. A process that turns New York into a sterile and oddly spacious environment (a basement Greenwich Village coffeehouse looks to be roughly the size of an airplane hangar) that puts it at direct odds with the kind of shadowy claustrophobia one associates with film noir.

The sort of natural, laid-back blocking only CinemaScope could offer

I sound like I'm complaining, but honestly (and this may be mere perversion on my part) I found the discordant visual tone to actually work to Black Widow’s advantage. Based on its initial scenes and not knowing anything about the film before I saw it, I thought Black Widow was going to be a light romantic drama. One of those 50s “woman’s pictures” combining elements of All About Eve (Tallulah Bankhead was first approached for the Ginger Rogers role), The Moon is Blue(that film’s star, Maggie McNamara, was first choice for the Peggy Ann Garner role), or a continuation of Rogers’ own Forever Female(1953), another age-centric rivalry set in the world of theater.

That these posh surroundings, pretty people, and harmlessly waggish conversations are setting the stage for a murder mystery took me totally by surprise. And so it remained throughout: Black Widow's key lit, musical comedy sheen works at such amusing variance with what one has come to expect from noirish suspense thrillers that it inadvertently serves as a device to keep the audience off balance.

Mabel Albertson (left), known to scores of classic TV fans as the smothering mother figure on Bewitched, That Girl, and The Andy Griffith Show, gets a chance to let her hair down (and, by the looks of it, her bosom) as Sylvia, the tough-broad proprietress of a Greenwich Village hangout

PERFORMANCES

Beyond the musicals she made with Fred Astaire, I’m not enough of a fan of top-billed Ginger Rogers to know if the divinely catty character she plays in Black Widow is as much a departure from type as it seems. She always displayed a charming brassiness in films like Stage Door and Golddiggers of 1933, so perhaps this isn't that much of a stretch, but with Van Heflin’s one-note performance and the obvious fragility of Gene Tierney (the actress was in the early throes of a mental breakdown during filming), Ginger Rogers' flamboyant energy is a godsend. Plus, she gets all the best lines.

In a role that amounts to little more than a bit part, Broadway actress Hilda Simms
gives the most natural, convincing performance in the entire film

For former child star Peggy Ann Garner (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), Black Widow was a a bid for adult legitimacy on par with Patty Duke's Valley of the Dolls...and just about as successful. Given grief by critics at the time for not being a believable "type," I think she succeeds in the role chiefly for that reason. Garner's Nancy Ordway is a far more convincing babe-in-the-woods than, say, Anne Baxter's brazenly transparent Eve Harrington in All About Eve.

Pretty much the entire arc of Van Heflin's character

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

To convey the grand style of the New York theater folk at the center of Black Widow, 20^th Century-Fox designer William Travilla whips up a drag queen's wet dream of ostentatious outfits for Ginger Rogers to parade around in. Happily, the longtime dancer is physically up to the task.

Carlotta - To put the kindest face possible on it, the girl was a little horror. A transparent, syrupy little phony with about as much to offer a man as 'cuckoo the bird girl.' Not even Peter with all of his radiant innocence about women could have been stirred for one instant by that dingy little creep.

Peter - Lottie, the girl is dead!

Carlotta - I know...and that’s precisely why I refuse to speak harshly of her!

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

For a movie written, produced, and directed by a single person (Nunnally Johnson of How to Marry a Millionaire, The Grapes of Wrath, The World of Henry Orient, etc.) Black Widow distinguishes itself by being almost completely lacking in distinction. Polished, well-made, and not nearly as vulgar as one might hope given the subject matter, Black Widow looks and feels like Hollywood product, circa 1954, that could have been directed by any number of studio contract professionals.

The tall, lanky fellow holding his hat is future TV producer Aaron Spelling.
Gene Tierney's health problems while making Black Widow necessitated her being seated in virtually all of her scenes

And perhaps that's why, for all its slick competence, Black Widow never coalesces into more than just a pleasantly diverting way to spend 95 minutes. A crime-of-passion movie without passion is a cold affair indeed, and Black Widow, while lovely to look at and fun in a detached sort of way (imagine absent-mindedly playing a game of "Clue") is ultimately most rewarding as a time-capsule view of Hollywood in its final years before it was forced to change in the 60s.

Never intended to break new ground, Black Widow - a 40s noir retrofitted with color and CinemaScope - is but an example of 1950s Hollywood trying to hold onto its audience by giving them brighter and shinier versions of what they've always given them. Sorta like today today's digital, HD, CGI, 3-D opuses.

The black widow, deadliest of all spiders, earned its dark title through its deplorable practice of devouring its mate.

By now I'm convinced that Woody Allen could shoot a science fiction film on the surface of the moon and it would still come out looking as if it took place in New York.
As filmmakers go, Allen is a little like those American tourists who travel all around the world only Westernize the experience: staying at American chain hotels, eating American food, interacting with other American tourists, and insisting on speaking only English. Ever since Allen went to the UK in 2005 to remake Crimes and Misdemeanors…I mean, to film Match Point…critics have been falling over themselves praising the revitalizing effect locations like France, Spain, and Italy have had on his work. I've been a fan of Woody Allen's films since 1969s Take the Money & Run, but for all the local color they reflect, I think his recent spate of off-the-continent films feel more like General Foods International Coffees retreads of his old stuff.
But just as one resigns oneself to copious amounts of rear-screen projection when one seeks a Hitchcock film, it comes with the territory (so to speak) that no matter where a Woody Allen film takes place; you're going to get Manhattan.

I've been entertained by, but haven't really liked, a Woody Allen film since 1994s Bullets Over Broadway (interesting distinction, that). And in spite of my fond feelings for Annie Hall, Radio Days, Manhattan Murder Mystery, September, Broadway Danny Rose, September and The Purple Rose of Cairo, the only Allen film I think of with a great deal of affection is Love and Death (1975), and that's chiefly because it's wall-to-wall funny.

All of that changed for me with Blue Jasmine, a movie that, while taking place both in Allen's beloved New York and a strange, Allen-esque San Francisco where all the working-classes speak with Jersey accents; is nevertheless the very first Woody Allen film in I don't know how long that was able to take me by surprise. In addition, I believe it's the only Allen film I've ever been moved by. His most urgent, vivid film in years, Blue Jasmine teems with an energy and I haven't felt in any of the director's recent going-through-the-motions efforts, and thanks to the monumental performance of Cate Blanchett, becomes a kind of flawless portrait of human weakness.

Cate Blanchett as Jasmine "Jeanette" Francis

Sally Hawkins as Ginger

Bobby Cannavale as Chili

Alec Baldwin as Hal Francis

Peter Sarsgaard as Dwight Westlake

Andrew Dice Clay as Augie

As is his wont, Allen disavows any intentional allusions to either the Bernie Madoff case or Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire in this tale of a chic New York socialite (Jasmine, née Jeanette) whose life falls apart after her husband’s illegal business dealings lead to the abrupt dissolution of her marriage, wealth, status, and tenuous grip on reality. Destitute, disgraced, and more than a little delusional (the penniless Park Avenuer still travels First Class, dressed in Chanel, carting an array of Louis Vuitton luggage); Jasmine is forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. More “estranged" to be exact, as Jasmine flies to San Francisco to live in a manner she’d really rather not grow accustomed to with her adoptive sister, Ginger, a working-class divorcee with two kids and a taste for guys who speak in dese, dems, and dose (cue the Ed Hardy clothing and Jersey Shore douchebag haircut).

"Tip big, boys. Tip big because you get good service."
Jasmine, who has fallen on extremely hard times and in minutes will tell her sister she's "Worse than tapped out," thinks nothing of tipping a cab driver $100

Years spent living a princess’ privileged existence on Long Island and Park Avenue have left Jasmine singularly ill-prepared for coping with the steady bombardment of class-based culture shocks and workplace wake-up calls she encounters in her attempts to start a new life. Attempts thwarted by her own deluded sense of entitlement; a tendency to zone out and talk to herself; and a crippling nervous anxiety she medicates with fistfuls of Xanax washed down with Stoli martinis with a twist of lemon.
As flashbacks reveal the contradictory reality behind the veils of illusion, self-invention and self-deception Jasmine relies upon to get through life, we come to better understand not only the poisonous, disruptive effect she has on those around her, but ultimately how her self-sabotaging ways have caused her to be the instrument of her own destruction.

Blue Jasmine brings thorny cringe-comedy and a surprisingly unflinching emotional intensity (especially for a Woody Allen movie) to an irresistible premise which set class tensions, familial rivalry, accountability, guilt, remorse, ethics, consequence, and identity as the backdrops for a character study of an intriguingly neurotic woman hanging to life by a tether.

"I want to get my degree and become, you know, something substantial!"
Penniless and possessing zero marketable skills, Jasmine is forced to take a "menial" position as a dentist's receptionist

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Blue Jasmine has many terrific things going for it from the outset, starting with the jittery and highly unreliable narrator that is Jasmine French (she’s so unreliable we don’t even know if French is her real maiden name or one she made up). Embodying as she does the worst of the kind of upscale New Yorker Woody Allen vacillates between admiring and resenting (think Interiors), a great deal of pleasure is derived from seeing this insufferable, Paltrowesque snob brought low by her circumstances. But the beauty of the script (and Blanchett’s performance) is that our attitude toward Jasmine grows into something resembling, if not sympathy, then perhaps compassion, in direct proportion how little of her fragile sense of self the film is willing to leave her with. She's a difficult, largely unlikable character, but it's surprising how much I found myself just hoping she could stay out of her own way long enough to pull herself out of the mess she'd created.

The Times of Your Life

I love the narrative structure of Blue Jasmine. Half of the film's most compelling dramatic and comedic conflicts arise out of the forced social interaction of radically dissimilar characters with conflicting/opposing objectives. The second half is like a forensic psychology dissection of Jasmine's earlier life, exposing the glaring and telling discrepancies between reality and the kind of desperate self-centered survivalism that lay behind Jasmine's penchant for turning a blind eye to everything...particularly herself.

Jasmine in Happier Times
A vision of the morally poisonous allure of wealth worthy of Fitzgerald, Dreiser, or Flaubert

PERFORMANCES

When Cate Blanchett was awarded the 2014 Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Blue Jasmine, she always made it a point to thank Woody Allen for his screenplay. I specify screenplay and not performance because, based on everything I've read, Allen, he’s one of those hands-off directors who leave actors to shape their performances for themselves.

I’ve already expressed the opinion that Woody Allen doesn’t really do anything but Woody Allen, and on paper, Jasmine is just another in a long list of his fragile, flinty neurotic females. Had he written it in the 90s, she would be played by Judy Davis; the 80s, Mia Farrow; the 70s, Diane Keaton. Jasmine isn't anyone Allen hasn't introduced us to many times before; it's just that in the very capable hands of Cate Blanchett, she turns a Woody Allen "type" into a real person. Arguably the first real person ever to inhabit a Woody Allen movie.

Another Man, Another Chance
Jasmine's sister, Ginger, meets nice guy, Al (Louis C.K.)

The Australian-born Blanchett (who in 2009 appeared in a Liv Ullman directed production of A Streetcar Named Desire) is as affecting with the scenes requiring stylish élan as she is in the scenes revealing Jasmine’s rapid mental and emotional deterioration. Blanchett is genuinely heartbreaking in these moments, the sprawling messiness of her character’s inability to grab hold of anything real within herself, single-handedly redeeming some of Allen’s more familiar and clichéd bits. (Allen exhibits no feel at all for San Francisco – which very well may be the point – and seems most in his element when giving voice, through Jasmine, to a certain cluelessness as to how regular people go about the business of living without benefit of buckets of money).

Cate Blanchett - Armani spokesmodel and Vogue fashion plate (top) - has a look ideally suited to credibly portray an elegant member New York's elite super-rich. Playing a character whose identity and sense of self-worth has always been wrapped up in how others perceive her; Blanchett is at her most poignant when showing us a woman struggling not to let others see how hard she's fighting to maintain what is essentially a steadily crumbling facade.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Outside of Blanchett’s amazing performance, one of the major reasons I've come to rate Blue Jasmine as my #1 favorite Woody Allen film is because it deals with so many of the themes and subthemes I tend to seek out in movies. I've always been drawn to human-scale stories that hold the potential for emotional violence (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnage, Reflections in a Golden Eye), so a combustible character drama with plenty of strained conversations and heated exchanges like Blue Jasmine is practically an action film to me.

Jasmine's ideal life turns out to be anything but

I also love movies that ask us to examine our notions of wealth and the American success myth (The Day of the Locust, A Place in the Sun), and why it is so many of us are willing to trade our souls and compromise our ideals in its pursuit.

"But a cheat is a cheat."
Jasmine's ethical code goes MIA when she gets the opportunity to start anew with
European diplomat, Dwight, a "substantial" man of wealth and position

I've a weakness for films that dramatize our limitless capacity for fooling ourselves, and not since Shelley Duvall's Millie Lammoreaux (3 Women) has there been a more absorbing depiction of delusional behavior run amok than Blanchett's Jasmine French.

Struggling to find the line between reinvention and self-deception

Although it's Blanchett's show all the way, the entire cast of Blue Jasmine turn in impressive performances. Particularly English actress, Sally Hawkins, who was terrific in Allen's underrated Cassandra's Dream (2007), and Bobby Cannavale, who I liked so much in Annie. (I recently saw the film, Lovelace and enjoyed seeing both Cannavale and Peter Sarsgaard - who share no scenes in Blue Jasmine - in the cast).

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
At 79, Woody Allen is a filmmaker clearly out of touch in a lot of not-so-great ways: as usual, the only substantial roles for blacks you’ll find in Blue Jasmine are on the film's jazz soundtrack (there's something very Jasmine-like about Allen's love of black culture and antipathy for its people); but as one of the few directors still working with real people (not action figures), in actual locations (OK, so everyplace feels like New York, at least it’s not greenscreen), with stories that are actually about something…Woody Allen is also old-fashioned in a lot of ways that got me interested in film in the first place.
Which is to say, by recalling the bravura, female-centric dramas and character studies like Klute, A Woman Under the Influence, Images, and Diary of a Mad Housewife; Blue Jasmine feels like a film made in the 70s. And if you're at all aware of my fondness for that decade, cinematically speaking, you'll know what a major compliment that is.

On the occasion of having completed a collection of Agatha Christie mystery novels gifted to me by my partner this Christmas (in hardback yet!), I’ve taken the opportunity to revisit 1978’s Death on the Nile, the second film in the unofficial Poirot Trilogy from British producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin (Murder on the Orient Express -1974, Death on the Nile -1978, Evil Under the Sun - 1982).

Released in the fall of 1978 at the height of American Tut-Mania born of the 1976 - 1979 tour of The Treasures of Tutankhamun museum exhibit, Death on the Nile was a less stylish, not quite all-star follow-up to the wildly successful Murder on the Orient Express, and marked the first appearance of Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. It seems Albert Finney declined the opportunity to reprise his Oscar-nominated performance from that first film after considering the rigors of applying and wearing the extensive Poirot makeup and prosthetics in the triple-degree heat of the Egyptian desert. Lacking, for my taste anyway, the star quality Finney brought to the role which made him more an equal participant in the proceedings, Ustinov nevertheless brings a character actor’s zest to his interpretation of Poirot, making the character uniquely his own. Ustinov would go on to play Christie’s Belgian sleuth in two more feature films (Evil Under the Sun and the awful-beyond-imagining Appointment With Death) and three contemporized TV-movies.

Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot

Bette Davis as Mrs. Marie Van Schuyler

David Niven as Colonel Race

Mia Farrow as Jacqueline De Bellefort

Simon MacCorkindale as Simon Doyle

Lois Chiles as Linnet Ridgeway

Jack Warden as Dr. Bessner

Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Salome Otterbourne

George Kennedy as Andrew Pennington

Maggie Smith as Miss Bowers

Jon Finch as Mr. Ferguson

Olivia Hussey as Rosalie Otterbourne

Jane Birkin as Louise Bourget

As a huge fan of Murder on the Orient Express but having missed the opportunity to catch it on the big screen, I made sure to see Death on the Nile the day it opened. I recall the audience as being sparse but appreciative, and I remember enjoying the film a great deal; albeit more for its cast and surprising twists of plot (it’s quite a puzzler of a mystery and hands-down the bloodiest film in the series) than anything particularly noteworthy about its execution.

Murder on the Orient Expresswas a glamorous, cinema-inspired recreation of an era, purposefully romanticized, and steeped in nostalgia. Death on the Nile, under the journeyman, traffic-cop guidance of large-scale-logistics director, John Guillerman (The Towering Inferno, King Kong), is, on the other hand, a murder mystery well-told, but one devoid of either mood or atmosphere. The claustrophobic tension of a luxury passenger train is traded for the more scenic vistas offered by a majestic paddle steamer cruising down the Nile. Anthony Powell’s dazzling, Academy Award-winning costume designs do most of the heavy-lifting in the glamour department, the visual splendor of the British countryside and sunny, travelogue-worthy scenes of Egyptian landmarks offsetting the otherwise straightforward, TV-movie-style cinematography highlighting the lavish, stagy sets.

Putting the best spin on it possible, Death on the Nile’s competent but indifferent direction and utter lack of visual distinction immediately put to rest any inclination on my part to compare this film to its (to my taste) far superior predecessor. Divested of any expectation to duplicate that film’s elegant, diffused-light visual style or compete with its first-class pedigree cast, I was able to better appreciate Death on the Nile on its own modest, nonetheless worthwhile, merits.

Nicely adapted by playwright Anthony Schaffer (Sleuth) from Christie’s 1937 novel (which began life as a stage play alternately titled, Moon on the Nile and Murder on the Nile), Death on the Nile finds Poirot (Ustinov) vacationing in Egypt aboard a river vessel jam-packed with potential victims and suspects. Poirot’s distinguished friend, Colonel Race (Niven) is aboard investigating a mysterious passenger; an imperious dowager and her mannish nurse (Davis and Smith); a dipsomaniacal romance novelist and her soft-spoken daughter (Lansbury and Hussey); a pompous Austrian physician (Warden); a peevish Socialist (Finch); a calculating American lawyer (Kennedy); a rancorous French maid (Birkin); a too-rich, too-beautiful, too-happy couple on their honeymoon, (Chiles and MacCorkindale); and a woman scorned (Farrow).

As is to be expected, not a single soul aboard the good ship Karnak is there merely by chance, and all the character's lives connect and intersect in the most intriguing, mysterious ways. The fun to be had in Death on the Nile is seeing these diverse personalities clash, the entertainment is found trying to stay one step ahead as the details of the masterfully intricate mystery at the center of the story come to be revealed.

Bette Davis looks to be channeling a future Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey, while Maggie Smith is putting out a serious Tilda Swinton vibe

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Death on the Nileis one of those movies that plays much better today than when it was released.

When Murder on the Orient Express opened in 1974, its all-star cast and artful recreation of a bygone era rode the crest of the 70s nostalgia craze and the public mania for star-studded disaster films. But by the time Death on the Nile was made, the cultural climate had changed significantly. Thanks to TV’s The Love Boat and several dozen unbearable disaster films (Airport 77, The Swarm, Avalanche) all-star casts no longer meant glamorous...they became synonymous with cheesy. And while not officially a sequel to Murder on the Orient Express(although conceived as one) Death on the Nile was perceived as one in the minds of the public, and thus fell victim to the overall cultural disenchantment with the glut of uninspired sequels Hollywood churned out in hopes of duplicating the success of 1974s The Godfather Part II (Jaws 2, The French Connection II, The Exorcist: The Heretic. etc.).

People seeing Death on the Nile today see the classic stars of All About Eve, My Man Godfrey, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Rosemary’s Baby, The Manchurian Candidate, Romeo and Juliet, and The Great Gatsby, all appearing in the same film. But back in 1978, the film's biggest stars, Bette Davis and David Niven, were appearing on TV or in low-rent Disney movies, Peter Ustinov was best known as "That old dude in Logan's Run," Mia Farrow had not yet hitched her wagon to Woody Allen, Angela Lansbury was better known on Broadway, and George Kennedy was like the James Franco of the disaster genre (he seemed to be in all of them).

Time has been kind however, and the biggest treat now is being able to enjoy all these great stars - many of them no longer with us - in a handsomely-mounted old-fashioned film, looking so outrageously young, entertaining us with the kind of marvelous, once-in-a-lifetime talent it was once so easy for us to take for granted.

Swag
If you ain't got elegance you can never, ever carry it off

PERFORMANCES
Just to lodge two main performance complaints from the getgo: 1) Lois Chiles is drop-dead gorgeous, but I've never understood how she landed so many plum roles in high-profile films. When it comes to flat line readings, she really gives Michelle Phillips (Valentino) a run for her money. 2) Simon MacCorkindale's performance would have improved tenfold had he just been given a scene or two shirtless or pants-less. It's a proven fact (See: Evil Under the Sun / Nicholas Clay).

Dressed to Kill

I love ensemble films, but its almost impossible to write about individual performances without appearing to intentionally slight those not mentioned. I like the cast assembled for Death on the Nile, the weaker actors benefiting from roles requiring them to play a single note; the stronger ones running with the opportunity and creating memorable, ofttimes hilarious, characterizations. Anyone studying acting should keep their eye on David Niven, his silent reactions - whether exasperation at having to play audience to one of Poirot's frequent self-aggrandizing speeches, or delighting in seeing his friend taken down a peg - are more eloquent than most of the film's dialog.

As a fan of camp and bitchy dialog, I find every scene with Bette Davis and Maggie Smith to be pure gold. Their pairing is really inspired. Jack Warden is the master of comical bluster, George Kennedy cleaned up isn't half bad, and I like seeing Mia Farrow and Lois Chiles, who played best friends in 1974s The Great Gatsby, reunited and playing a sly tweak on that relationship. It helps that Farrow is much more compelling as a woman on the edge than she was as Gatsby's dream girl.

The radiant Olivia Hussey (last seen sliding around on bookcases in Lost Horizon) and the late Jon Finch. Finch, looking thinner here than he did in Macbeth, was diagnosed with diabetes in 1974.

Even after having read three Hercule Poirot novels, my mental image of the detective is not so defined as to find any fault with Ustinov's portrayal. Although I personally prefer Finney, Ustinov's more sensitive take on the detective (he has a marvelously heartbreaking exchange with Farrow near the end) is quite good.

Although I read somewhere that the actress feels she went a little over the top in the theatricality of her performance, I absolutely adore Angela Lansbury in this. Light years away from Murder She Wrote's Jessica Fletcher, or her Miss Marple in 1980's lamentable The Mirror Crack'd (but with a hint of Sweeney Todd's Mrs. Lovett) Lansbury's tipsy romance novelist: "Snow on the Sphinx's Face", "Passion Under the Persimmon Tree" - is the comic highlight of the film for me.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Death on the Nile's only Oscar win is also its only Academy nod. Anthony Powell won Best Costume Design for his eye-popping period creations; costumes which indelibly establish the identities of each member of the sizable cast with style, wit, and considerable theatrical panache. Although I'm surprised to learn his astonishing designs for Evil Under the Sun failed to get a nomination, as a six-time nominee and three-time winner (Travels With My Aunt, Tess, Death on the Nile), I don't suppose Powell is losing any sleep over it.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I get too much of a kick out of the surprise and suspense of movie whodunits to ever wish I’d read Agatha Christie earlier, but I must say that reading Death on the Nile after the fact had the pleasant effect of filling in some of the narrative blanks and backstory impossible to include in a film.

What I liked so much about the film version of Murder on the Orient Express is that in addition to a crackling murder mystery, it offered by way of subtext a poignant illustration of the manner in which a single act of violence can have a rippling effect resulting in the harm done to one ultimately wounding a great many others. The film version of Death on the Nile I’ve always felt suffered from being too much of a tale told expediently. It’s a great mystery with interesting characters and many surprises, but I never felt it had anything larger to express. Certainly nothing to justify that aforementioned choke in Poirot’s throat at the end of the film.

Poirot and Colonel Race call the attention of the ship's manager (I.S. Johar) to a matter not at all pleasant

Happily, the novel (which, short of a few excised characters, was faithfully adapted for the screen) expounds upon the larger thematic threads connecting the characters and their actions. Themes relating to the secrets kept, risks taken, and fatal sacrifices made in the name of protecting those we're afraid are incapable of taking care of themselves.
And while I feel fairly safe in stating that little to none of this actually factors in John Guillerman's film adaptation, keeping it in the back of my mind as I rewatched Death on the Nile did wonders for my reappraisal of it.

“Do you have a thing about older women? That’s sort of faggoty, isn’t it?”

Carrie Fisher interrogating Warren Beatty in Shampoo (1975)

Thinking back to those old Popeye the Sailor Man cartoons I watched as a kid, I used to think it was funny the way Olive Oyl ‒ tall, gangly, big-footed, needle-nosed, granny-voiced, and severe-of-hairdo ‒ saw herself as this breathtaking dreamboat, irresistible to men. Funnier still was the fact that in the bizarro world of Popeye cartoons, especially in episodes featuring shapely females of more conventional appeal, not only did Popeye and Bluto pay little heed to the flirtations of more comely lasses, but, obviously sharing Olive’s delusion, fought each other tooth-and-nail for her affections. Of course, it helped that the writers and animators of Popeye were in on the absurdist joke. A factor that goes a long way in making Olive’s subversively contagious brand of self-enchantment feel more like nonconformist self-acceptance than uncurbed mental illness.

Alas, not a trace of fun or self-awareness is to be found in Mae West’s live-action feat of self-delusion titled, Sextette. A film that started out as novelty, slipped into curiosity, careened into embarrassment, and, through its plodding execution and pedestrian lack of wit, leapfrogged right over camp. Its ultimate destination: Bizarre has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed cult oddity.

Mae West as Marlo Manners the female answer to Apollo

Timothy Dalton as Husband #6 Lord Michael Barrington

Dom DeLuise as Manager, Dan Turner

Tony Curtis as Husband #3 Russian diplomat Alexei Karansky

George Hamilton as Husband #5 gangster Vance Norton

Ringo Starr as Husband #4 film director Laslo Karolny

Keith Moon as Roger, the excitable dress designer

Sextette takes place in a world where an 84-year-old silver screen siren is enthusiastically pursued and fawned over by throngs of excited males; the mere sight of her inciting near-riots of inflamed masculine passion and desire. Obviously, such a place does in fact exist in the real world...it’s called the world of the gay fanbase. It’s the world of the camp aficionado, the admirer of the drag queen aesthetic, the diviner of covert gay sensibilities in mainstream entertainment, and the upholders of that enduring mainstay of queer culture - diva worship. Had Sextette installed itself in this world, the only world where it made the slightest bit of sense for men in their 20s to go ga-ga over a woman old enough to be their grandmother, a hint of verisimilitude might have graced this otherwise preposterous Hollywood (it can’t be helped) fairy tale.

But were talking Mae West here. The unapologetic egotist who once told a reporter she never wanted children because, “I was always too absorbed in myself and didn't have time for anybody else.” A woman so self-serious and protective of her image she slapped Bette Midler with a cease and desist order when she saw the up-and-coming performer do an impersonation of her on The Johnny Carson Show. A woman who adored her gay fans yet bristled at any suggestion that her appeal to them might have anything to do with camp.

And so although Sextette’s existence as a film at all is wholly due to the efforts and participation of a battery of gay men both behind and in front of the camera (not to mention a gay sensibility running through it with a ferocity unmatched by any movie until Can’t Stop the Music); gays don’t really figure in the absurdly heteronormative world of Mae West, Sextette, and geriatric sex-goddess Marlo Manners (except as the setup for a tiresome running gag).

(Above) Alice Cooper, the singing waiter, serenades Mae West on a glass piano. (Below) The glass piano - and also, by the looks of it, Alice Cooper's wig - appeared first in the 1974 Lucille Ball musical, Mame.

The world of Sextetteis the world of Mae West, and in Mae West’s world, all men are straight (despite flaming appearances to the contrary), and frail-looking octogenarians dressed in 1890s finery mouthing puerile vulgarisms are the stuff of wet dreams. Watching the film as anything other than a colossally bad joke played on the actress and the audience is a Herculean task worthy of West's small army of porn-stached bodybuilder co-stars. To be asked to accept the plot particulars of this wheezy sex farce while pretending to ignore the fact that the object of unbridled lust and erotic desire at its center is in serious danger of falling and shattering her hip, is more than any viewer should have to take on. Small wonder that the film (completed in 1977) took a full two years to find a distributor and enjoyed a brief, money-losing limited release before taking its place in the annals of misguided movie megaflops. How could it be anything but? The experience of watching Sextette was like a Vulcan mind-meld excursion into the delusional, soft-focus fantasy world of a real-life Norma Desmond.

Hooray for Hollywood
Slow-moving Marlo is welcomed to her honeymoon hotel by a phalanx of singing bellboys

The story is simple…simple for a farce, anyway. Amidst much hoopla and fanfare, movie star and international sex symbol Marlo Manners (West, who else?) checks into London’s ritzy Sussex Court Hotel to honeymoon with husband number six, one Lord Michael Barrington (Dalton). The never-to-materialize comedic hilarity arises out of the happy, horny couple being unable to consummate their marriage due to an endless stream of ex-husbands, show-biz obligations, and a world peace summit (you can't make this stuff up).

While the wacky Love, American Style disturbances are painfully labored and unfunny, they do at least serve to keep West and Dalton from ever getting anywhere close to doing “the deed,” and for that we can all be grateful.

Given how enjoyably smutty Mae West was in 1970’s Myra Breckinridge (the film that brought West back to the screen after a 26-year absence) I thought Sextette - made a full seven years later in hedonistic atmosphere of disco, gay liberation, porno chic, and Plato’s Retreat- had the potential to be a fun, over-the-top, musical comedy capitalizing on everything that there was too little of in the Raquel Welch film. No such luck.

Instead of a hip, off-beat entertainment like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) or cheesy curio like The First Nudie Musical (1976), Sextette was just a crass throwback to those smirking, sexless “wholesome” sex comedies of the 60s. All wink-wink, nudge-nudge, but for a few touches of 70s bluntness, Sextette would have fit right in among those neutered, pre-sexual revolution comedies like A Guide for the Married Man, Boy, Did I Get the Wrong Number!, or Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?. Shot in that murky, flat style so prevalent in on-the-cheap exploitation films of the era, Sextette doesn't recall the Mae West’s glory days or even the glamour of old Hollywood. It feels very 70s, very desperate, and very much an ill-conceived, opportunistic attempt to meld the nostalgia craze with the new permissiveness.The film Sextette most resembles, in both style and content, is the tawdry soft-core vaudeville of trash like The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington(1977)

Before it turned into a career embarrassment, Sextette was envisioned as something of a "best of" tribute to the career of Mae West. It was the hope that fans would delight in all the visual and verbal references to her old films. Here, West's famous Swan Bed from her 1933 film, She Done Him Wrong (below) is recreated (and widened) for Sextette (top).

There would be no movie stars without their fans, but sometimes fans can be an artist’s worst enemy. Fan disapproval kept the talented Doris Day trapped in virginal, goody-two-shoes roles well past the age of expiration, and fans allowed Mae West to believe there was actually a public clamoring to see her shimmy and sashay one last time on the big screen.

I totally get how Sextette came into being. The 70s nostalgia boom was in full swing. In 1976 alone, the following nostalgia-based films were released: W.C. Fields & Me, Gable & Lombard, Bugsy Malone, Won Ton Ton The Dog Who Saved Hollywood, That’s Entertainment II, Silent Movie, Nickelodeon, A Matter of Time, & The Last Tycoon.

That almost all were resounding flops might have raised a red flag for seasoned producers, but in 1976, two first-time movie producers in their early-20s, Daniel Briggs and Robert Sullivan (Danny and Bobby as they were youthfully known in the press) paid no heed and followed instead the clarion call of Late Show fans everywhere. Gable was gone, Bogart was gone, but Mae West, one of the last living legends was still with us, that's all they needed to know.

Hollywood columnist, Rona Barrett
Sextette also features appearances by journalist James Bacon (the white-haired reporter in the hotel lobby), Regis Philbin, and sportscaster Gil Stratton.

Although I can’t imagine she needed much convincing, Briggs & Sullivan came to West with an opportunity to pay tribute to her career while giving her fans what they'd been clamoring for; one last chance to see their idol in all her glory. She'd trot out her old gowns, sing a few songs, recite a few of her famous lines...everybody would be happy. The idea must have seemed like money in the bank. (I suspect West always felt the failure of Myra Breckinridgerested on there being too much Welch and not enough West).

The finished product proved far more dire, of course, with Mae West's performance in Sextette evoking the out-of-control narcissism of Sunset Blvd.'s Norma Desmond making Salome; and aghast critics responding to West's taking herself seriously as a sex symbol with a virulent stream of misogynist, gerontophobic insults on par with the "Old woman's p*ssy" jokes leveled at Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) in The Comeback.

Do Not Disturb
Although she appears to be napping here, Marlo Manners is actually helping leading man Ronald Cartwright (Peter Liapis) with a screen test. Mae West was reportedly only pleased with Dalton and Hamilton as her co-stars. She thought Tony Curtis and Dom DeLuise "too old," and was less than thrilled at the lack of sex appeal of younger stars Ringo Starr and Keith Moon. Alice Cooper likes to repeat the story that West propositioned him, but I have a feeling he means she asked him to help her out of a chair.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Miscalculations of this caliber are rare and should be treasured. Sextette is valueless as a straightforward musical comedy, but it's priceless as a glimpse into a certain kind of insanity possible only through ego (you know who), greed (a good argument could be made for the producers cruelly exploiting West's delusions), and bad decision-making at almost every turn. Perhaps most shocking of all is that Sextette was directed by Ken Hughes, the director of the charming (if odd) children's film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).

A few of my favorite things.

1. The grab bag of songs comprising this musical's soundtrack are not only odd, but sound as if they were culled from scratchy recordings made at wildly different points in West's career. In once scene the tinny arrangement sounds as if started up on a Victrola, another sounds overcranked, and many of the recordings have the hollow sound of demos.
2) The ungainly musical numbers were choreographed by 60-year old Marc Breaux (The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins) and assistant, Jerry Trent (Xanadu). I would like to think the post-dubbed taps coming from the busboys tapping on the hotel's carpeted staircase was an intentionally camp touch.
3) Mae west has exactly two spot-on perfect line readings. (Following a knock on the door) DeLuise: "Who's that?" West: "It ain't opportunity!". The second comes at a moment of exasperation when she says (with all too much feeling) "I don't know how I got into this!"
4) In a film with so many obviously gay men playing straight, casting Keith Moon as a flamboyantly effeminate dress designer is more than perverse.
5) In Mae West's opening interview with the press, I love the way everyone laughs uproariously at everything she says, only to stop in unison while they await her next quip.
6) The way she just kind of slams into that table during the "Next, Next" number.
7) The weird, decidedly sexist alchemy that goes on with older women and men a third of their age (think Judy Garland, Martha Raye and Margaret Whiting): They don't make her look younger, she makes then look gayer.
8) To an athlete: Mae- "And what do you do?" Athlete -"I'm a pole vaulter." Mae -"Aren't we all!"

Mae West made her first and last film with George Raft
West made her film debut in Raft's 1932 film, Night After Night. As a favor to West, he agreed to appear in what turned out to be the last film for them both, Sextette. Story has it that West didn't want Raft to wear the grey hair toupee he always wore (he'd look too old, you see), and Raft refused to wear the jet-black wig they'd picked out for him. Compromise: the hat

PERFORMANCES
Mae West made a total of twelve films, always playing a variation of the Diamond Lil character she created way back in 1928. As a writer, actress, singer, and comedienne, she's a genuine trailblazer and groundbreakingly feminist icon from early days of Hollywood. But, I find (unlike her quote "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!") a little of Mae goes a long way. I like her a great deal in some of her old movies and she isn't without a little bit of charm even in this misbegotten horror show. She doesn't bother me too much in Sextette, possibly because she is virtually impossible to take seriously.
Sure, she makes you gasp or laugh at first viewing, but later you kind of have to give it up to the old girl for still being in there pitching. Also, at her absolute worst, lowest ebb, Mae West is still more talented and interesting to watch than today's no-talent Kardashians, Lohans, or Beibers.

In 1964 Mae West made an appearance as herself on the popular TV sitcom, Mr. Ed. She wore the same gown in that episode (below) that she wears in the final scene from Sextette (above). If you've never seen this, I recommend it. Five minutes of this episode are funnier than the entire running time of Sextette.

Mae West never carries on a conversation. People feed her straight lines, she delivers the gags. This leaves the other actors adapting a every-man-for-himself approach to the material, every "guest star" doing their bit independent of what anyone else is doing, and then disappearing to the sidelines. George Hamilton comes off perhaps best, with Dalton achieving the near-miracle of escaping the whole mess unscathed. The curious prescience of Sextette having Hamilton playing a mafia lug (he would appear in The Godfather:Part III in 1990), and Dalton playing a spy (of course, he became James Bond in 1987).

Keith Allison of the 60s pop group, Paul Revere & the Raiders

In spite of the film's aggressive-but-unconvincing heterosexual thrust (Hmm, sounds like a West-ism), the casting of Sextette veers more to the gay-friendly. Timothy Dalton first came to my attention playing gay/bi-sexual roles in The Lion in Winter and Mary, Queen of Scots. Dom DeLuise always had a kind of comedy style that veered toward the queer as well. In addition to the whole bodybuilder thing which has always been more gay than representative of women's tastes, Sextette's entire cast of extras and dancers looks like gay pride weekend in West Hollywood.

"They're flushin' my play down the terlet."
Mae West speaking to companion Paul Novak as overheard by Ringo Starr

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Images of Mae West surrounded by bodybuilders were used extensively in advance publicity for Sextette. Her gymnasium musical number promised to be more outrageous that Jane Russell's beefcake-heavy "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love" number in 1953s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Unfortunately, like everything else in Sextette, the end result was a disappointment. While there is plenty of eye candy on hand, the entire sequence is little more than a lot of guys standing around feeding West straight lines for her familiar comebacks.
Like my own high-school locker room experiences, this scene is awkward, uncomfortable, full of exposed male flesh, and you'll want to avert your eyes but find you can't.

Former Mr. America Reg Lewis was an alumnus of West's 1954 Las Vegas act

To the left is Cal Bartlett as the coach of the US Athletic Team. Front and center is Ric Drasin. Recognizable to fans of 70s physique porn as Jean-Claude(!)

Roger Callard (aka Stacy) is another 70s alumnus of Colt Studios, a studio specializing in nude male physique photography. At the center is Denny Gable, to the right, former Mr. USA Cal Szkalak

That an Olympic team has for its "mascot" a blow-dried and dewy-eyed male starlet (Rick Leonard) is far more provocative than anything Marlo Manners had to offer. Here Leonard greets Miss West with his best Gloria Upson (Mame) straight-arm handshake. Next to him is Mr. Olympia, Jim Morris

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Those musical numbers....

Love Will Keep Us Together

Baby Face

Next, Next
This upbeat Van McCoy disco composition was a replacement for the ballad "No Time for Tears" which Mae West vetoed for being out-of-character

One might have thought that the best way to deal with Mae West's age is to not make reference to the subject at all. Perversely, most of the songs seem to go out of their way to the topic. There's "Happy Birthday, 21" ; a disco version of "Baby Face"; and the reworked lyrics of "Love Will Keep Us Together" - "Young and beautiful, your looks will never be gone!" Um,...OK.

Walter Pidgeon as the chairman of the World Peace summit.
To the right is Van McCoy,composer of the popular disco classic, The Hustle, and contributor of Sextette's "Marlo" theme song, and the finale "Next, Next." Some sources list him as the film's musical director.

BONUS MATERIAL
You have a chance to hear Alice Cooper singing "No Time For Tears", the finale song from Sextette vetoed by Mae West because (as everyone knows) Mae West never cries over any man.

Watch the season 4 episode of Mr. Ed titled: Mae West Meets Mr. Ed (1964) on YouTube

A 1976 interview with Mae West by Dick Cavertt. Not really an interview, he feeds her a lot of lines, and she says the very same qips you expect. However, there's one terrific moment when she talks about the loss of her mother where you get a fleeting glimpse of a real person and not an image. See it on YouTube

Miss West and the boys bid you goodbye
I think this is the first time I've ever seen her so covered up, or wearing anything even remotely approaching a contemporary garment.
I can see why she stuck to the Gay 90s

In Praise of Older Women or: I Love Lucy, But Even That Has Its Limits

Though not originally conceived as such, this look at Lucille Ball’s Mame makes a fitting companion piece to my previous post on Mae West’s Sextette. Both films were made in the 70s, and both films represent the simultaneous big screen return-of / farewell-to beloved show-biz legends in star vehicles (vanity projects?) modeled after the old-fashioned, large-scale musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Era. Light years away from one other in terms of quality and budget, upon release the press and public nevertheless greeted both films with near-identical waves of incredulity and hostility. The lion’s share centering on accusations of fan-pandering, a distracting over-reliance on age-concealing diffused lighting and fog-filters, and an overall sense of the stars in question being both ill-served by the material and frankly too old for their roles. (West was 84 playing 32. Ball, at 62, begins the film, which spans 1928 to 1946, at roughly the age she should be when it ends.)

Lucille Ball as Mae Dennis

Bea Arthur as Vera Charles

Robert Preston as Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside

Jane Connell as Agnes Gooch

Bruce Davison as Patrick Dennis

Kirby Furlong as Young Patrick Dennis

The eccentric heroine of Patrick Dennis’ fictional 1955 autobiography, Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade- first turned into a Broadway play in 1956, later a film in 1958, and ultimately the 1966 Broadway musical upon which this movies is based - is logically somewhere in her mid to late 40s, but, philosophically-speaking, has always seemed “ageless” (spoken like a press agent). It’s conceivable to me that an actress of any age could convincingly play the wealthy, irrepressible free-thinker who becomes an instant mother when entrusted with the upbringing of her late brother’s son and teaches the child to “Open a new window” and live by the motto,“Life is a banquet and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death.” Provided she has the necessary iconoclastic verve, personality, and spontaneous, life-affirming energy to bring Mame Dennis to life.

Sixty-two-year-old Lucille Ball certainly had plenty of energy, but after six seasons each of I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show, and Here’s Lucy (the last episode aired a week before Mame was released wide), most of it had calcified into drive, determination and will. Ball hadn’t made a film since Yours, Mine, & Ours (1968), and Mame presented the actress with a dream role she actively campaigned to acquire; this in spite of the expressed preference for Angela Lansbury (the role’s originator on Broadway) by the show’s creators: Jerome Lawrence, Robert E. Lee, and Jerry Herman.

Luckily for Ball, there was no way any studio would mount a $12 million film adaptation of Mame without a star of her caliber and popularity attached to it, so, clearly not having learned his lesson from the film version of Hello, Dolly! (where the common complaint was that Streisand was too YOUNG for the role), composer Jerry Herman handed over Mame’s singing and dancing chores to a well-loved household name of advanced age who has repeatedly gone on record decrying her own inability to either sing or dance.

(I’ve read that Herman, so displeased with how Mame and Hello, Dolly! turned out - and apparently after having banked enough money from both to finally buy himself some principles - has since refused to grant permission for the film adaptation of any of his work without his having creative control.)

Mame was one of the most heavily-promoted musicals since 1973s Lost Horizon (and we all know how that turned out). Lucille Ball supported it tirelessly through personal appearances television interviews. (Top) Hollywood's Cinerama Dome theater is decked out like an Easter bonnet cloche hat for the March 26 premiere. (Below) An advance trade magazine ad.

It can’t be said that a movie version of Mame didn’t have timing working in its favor. In 1974 the nostalgia craze in fashion (BIBA), music (The Pointer Sisters, Bette Midler), and TV (The Waltons, Happy Days) was in full swing, along with the films: The Great Gatsby, Chinatown, and the remake of The Front Page, all slated for release within months of one another.

I was stoked to see Mame not only because I was such a huge fan of Rosalind Russell’s non-musical Auntie Mame (perhaps too much so, since I think that film is hilarious and Russell slays in the role), but because, like everybody else, I was raised on Lucille Ball and totally adored I Love Lucy (not so much The Lucy Show, Here’s Lucy, or – and this should have been a tip-off – her film appearances. As Lucy Ricardo, Ball was adorable, warm, and outrageously funny. In films, she tended to lapse into into a starchy, ladylike persona that was rarely any fun).

Mame - starring Diane Belmont
fans expecting to see Lucille Ball's rubber-faced TV persona were surprised to find in its place, the regal, slightly haughty grande dame Lucy of the 1943 Al Hirschfeld caricature that closed every episode of The Lucy Show. Ball goes through most of Mame with her chin tilted up, lips pursed, and cheeks sucked in. A look that does wonders for her close-ups, but absolutely kills the comedy. Diane Belmont was the stage name Ball adopted during her modeling days as the Chesterfield Cigarettes Girl.

Nevertheless, in March of 1974 my family allowed me to drag them (kicking and screaming) to see Mame. And if hard work paid off in entertainment value, I would have had a wonderful time, for Lucy is clearly working her ass off. But under several pounds of make-up, elaborate wigs, movement-constricting Theadora Van Runkle costumes, a network of face-tightening surgical tape and straps - not to mention nursing a leg broken in four places just a year before - I'm afraid there wasn’t much room for fun, élan, or even much in the way of a performance to rise to the surface.

In fact, a character named Mame Dennis is less in attendance in this film than Lucille Ball the revered “comedy institution,” while the musical around her has been transformed into a kind of formal, laugh-free, drag-queen-inspired fandom career tribute. Lucy fans, those who had stuck by their star through 18-years-worth of black-and-white housedresses and dowdy office attire, were rewarded with a two-hour-plus fashion parade of Lucille Ball looking like the glamorous movie star Ricky Ricardo and Mr. Mooney never allowed her to be.

Joyce Van Patten is an all-too-brief bright spot as the conniving Sally Cato

Lucille Ball's age factored in my enjoyment of Mame only insomuch as it seemed to preoccupy the filmmakers to distraction. Everything is so constructed with an eye toward camouflaging its leading lady’s age, filtered lenses, careful lighting, and a raised chin become the film’s dominant motifs. Ball looks terrific throughout, and I really only thought about her age (and that broken leg) when it came to the physical comedy and modest dance requirements. Ball can kick as high as a chorus girl, but I don't think my reactions - alternately, relief that she didn't hurt herself and awe at her moxie in even undertaking these moderately strenuous endeavors - were conducive to getting in the spirit of things. Mame is a character so full of life she gives the impression of never sitting still. Lucille Ball, for all her efforts, always made me want to offer her a chair.

She'll Croak the Blues Right Out of Your Heart!
Much was made of Lucille Ball's "singing." A lifetime of smoking, a voice-damaging stint on Broadway in Wildcat (1960), and a fondness for bourbon left Ball with a distinctive rasp that wasn't always kind to Jerry Herman's songs. Some critics at the time claimed Lisa Kirk (Rosalind Russell's voice in much of Gypsy) dubbed some of the vocals (Ball said Kirk should sue!), but Ball claimed all responsibility. While it would have been nice to have had a singer in the role, if we had to have Lucy (and it seems like we did), I prefer hearing her real voice. I'm not a big fan of dubbing. Marni Nixon's soulless voice ruins West Side Story and My Fair Lady for me, Marianne McAndrew's voice in Hello, Dolly! seems to emanate from her hat, and don't get me started on the voices they chose for Liv Ullman and Peter Finch in Lost Horizon...

If anything, I found Gooch’s age to be far more problematic. I know Jane Connell originated the role on Broadway and all, but I couldn't help wishing that her pregnancy number "What Do I Do Now?" had been scrapped (it's always been pure torture for me anyhow) or refashioned into a menopause anthem or something. She just seemed too old. And her sheltered virgin bit was a cartoon. All through the film I kept imagining what fired-during-rehearsals Madeline Kahn might have done with the role.

Open a New Window
Ball has the best onscreen chemistry with Kirby Furlong, who plays young Patrick (my favorite moment is when he's allowed to slide down the banister in her apartment). The actress's legendary comedy timing seems to have abandoned her throughout much of the film, but whenever she is allowed to smile or laugh, her childlike appeal is irresistible.

For all its faults, I have to say it was rather thrilling seeing Mame on the big screen for the first time; a feeling that has diminished significantly with subsequent DVD revisits. The scale and glossy sheen of the film was breathtaking to me at the time, Ball looking spectacular, if not exactly comfortable, in her elaborate wardrobe (she seems about as at-home in those outfits as she does in the role itself). And if hampered by a lumbering pace, overlong running time, too-familiar plot, and a paucity of real humor (Jerome Lawrence: “The screenplay was by Dostoyevsky…they took out all the laughs!”), something about Mame is so eager-to-please and well-intentioned, you kind of want to forgive it. The same way Ricky always forgave Lucy.

Audrey Christie & Don Porter as the uppity Mrs. & Mr. Upson

Mame does a lot of things wrong, but for me, three of the things they get right are so sublime that Mame has remained a favorite all these years strictly on the strength of them.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The Title Sequence.

In his review of Mame, New York Times critic Vincent Canby observed, "The opening credits, which look like a Cubist collage in motion, are so good they could be a separate subject."
Indeed, the titles are so classy and eye-popping (footage from old Warner films like Public Enemy and Forty-Second Street are utilized) they whet your appetite and set a standard of style and sophistication the film only intermittently lives up to.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Loving You.
It's common practice for musicals adapted from Broadway shows to have at least one original number written for the screen version. Cynics (or are they realists?) say its to make a bid for a Best Song Oscar nomination, as only songs written expressly for a film are eligible. But in the case of Mame, one can make a good argument for needing to beef up the supporting role of Beauregard (he has only the title song) in order to attract a two-time Tony Award winner like Robert Preston. Also, since Mame was marketed to women (so-called women's director George Cukor was initially attached to the project but had to drop out when Ball's skiing accident delayed production for an entire year) there was a desire to place a stronger emphasis on the romance. Plus, Preston could actually sing, and Mame needed all the good voices it could get.

The song composed for the film is "Loving You," and not only does the very dashing Preston sing and perform it beautifully, but the number as staged (a honeymoon montage) is so sweepingly romantic, I find myself moved by it each and every time. It's a great song anyway, but how its presented is so nicely handled. Special applause goes to the musical arrangement. The segment in a great ballroom has the most amazing recreation of a 30s sound orchestral sound, then, when the scene changes to a grand garden, the music erupts into a piano crescendo of such goosebump-inducing romantic lushness, blending magically with the image of the dancing the couple...that the waterworks that had been building up just have to go for it. I just love this sequence. It's so wonderful it really does feel as though it were hijacked from another film.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The Title Number.

In a word: Perfection. Every single thing about how this number is done just puts a smile on my face. It's rousing and old-fashioned in just the right way, vibrantly staged and choreographed...it's everything that ever made me fall in love with musicals. The sight of all those red jackets and white jodhpurs in a kickline on the big screen was quite unforgettable! Had the rest of the film been up to this standard, Mame would have been a classic.

PERFORMANCES
On its release, all the performers were understandably positive about the film. In later years Bea Arthur spoke of Ball being miscast in her opinion and that the film was "A tremendous embarrassment." Even Lucille Ball later recanted all her initial happy talk and described making the film as being, "...About as much fun as watching your house burn down."
Personally, Rosalind Russell spoiled my chances of enjoying anyone else in this role, so Lucy bothers me less than those who perhaps loved Angela Lansbury in the role. I don't think Lucy's very good in the role, but how does one go about disliking Lucy? To this day no other TV show can make me laugh like I Love Lucy, and I think she is a genius in that regard. When she was still around, it was easy to rag on this picture....now that she's gone, I find myself a lot more at peace with my disappointments. She's missed, what can I say?

Other than a few unflattering costumes, the late-great Bea Arthur in Mame really has nothing to be embarrassed about (although she should have been upset the way her hilarious number "The Man in the Moon is a Lady" was butchered by so many cutaways). To my taste, Auntie Mame's Coral Brown IS Vera Charles, but Arthur is Mame's saving grace.

Mame is one of my "Fast-forward Classics": A movie I can't really watch all the way through, but delight in watching a la carte...hopping from one favored scene to another. I highly recommend this method with this film - most of the film doesn't work, but there are flashes of brilliance here and there that are just too good to miss.

BONUS MATERIAL
Here's Lucy: Lucy Carter Meets Lucille Ball. This episode aired March 4, 1974 to tie-in with the release of Mame. Lucy appears in one of her Mame outfits hosting a lookalike contest and plugging her film.

Lucille Ball on The Merv Griffin Show. Ball talks to the host about the making of Mame.

Ginger Rogers in Mame 1969. Mame's choreographer, Oona White also choreographed the original Broadway production. Here's a chance to see the same equestrian choreography from the film as it was performed on the stage.

Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur perform "Bosom Buddies." The 1987 Tony Awards give us an opportunity to see what might have been.

“Just goes to show what can be accomplished when a bunch of closeted gay men put their heads together!” Overheard following a screening of The Last of Sheila

In 1973 Stephen Sondheim, Anthony Perkins, and Herbert Ross - three closeted gay men in show business who knew a thing or two about keeping secrets - collaborated on The Last of Sheila, an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery with a touch of All About Eve vitriol set aboard a luxury yacht on the French Riviera.

The Last of Sheilacame about after Herbert Ross, one-time choreographer (Funny Girl) turned director/producer (The Owl and the Pussycat, The Turning Point), persuaded composer Stephen Sondheim (Company, Follies) to channel his extracurricular passion for inventing elaborate games and puzzles into a movie project. To that end, Sondheim, who at the time was working on the Broadway musical A Little Night Music, sought the help of friend and frequent game collaborator Anthony Perkins (then filming Play It as It Lays) and the two devised a brain-teasing murder mystery thrilling enough to be entertaining and intricate enough so that audiences can play along with the characters in the film.

An early first-draft from these two first-time screenwriters had the mystery take place over the course of a snow-bound weekend in Long Island between business associates. But at Ross’ suggestion, the locale was changed to the more photogenic south of France, and the game-playing participants changed to a glamorous, in-joke cross section of Hollywood movie industry types.

James Coburn as sharkish movie producer Clinton Green

Joan Hackett as heiress and Hollywood outsider Lee Parkman

Richard Benjamin as floundering screenwriter Tom Parkman

Raquel Welch as glamorous movie star Alice Wood

Ian McShane as Anthony Wood, Alice's ambitious manager husband

Dyan Cannon as pushy talent agent, Christine

James Mason as once-famous director Philip Dexter

A year after his gossip-columnist wife Sheila Green (Yvonne Romain) was killed in a hit and run accident near their Bel-Air home, movie producer Clinton Green (Coburn) invites six friends – five of whom were guests at his house that fateful night – to spend a week aboard his yacht (The Sheila) in the Rivera. A gathering that promises to be part vacation, part memorial, and part career-carrot dangled under the noses of a gaggle of show business opportunists willing to subject themselves to week of sadistic game-playing in hopes of being offered a job on Clinton’s planned film about the life of his late, not-exactly-lamented wife. A film to be titled, “The Last of Sheila.”

This being a murder mystery, the murder half gets under way when, in the course of playing an elaborate, subtly cruel, detective/gossip game in which each player is assigned a gossipy secret the others must discover first, one of the participants winds up dead. The mystery revolves around the true inspiration for Clinton's game - the public exposure of the identity of his wife's killer - and whether or not that person or persons is willing to go to even greater lengths to keep their secret a secret. The stage has been successfully set (an isolated group of people seeking to discover who among them is a killer) for a rise in the body count, the typical-for-the-genre tearful revelations, several heated incriminations, and skeletons tumbling out of closets faster than you can say whodunit.

The ability to watch and rewatch The Last of Sheila on DVD has revealed it to be a much sharper and smarter film than it was credited with being when first released. Virtually every single frame and bit of character business reveals information pertaining to the overall mystery.

The Last of Sheilais a cinema rarity: a real corker of a murder mystery which plays fair with the viewer and doesn’t tip its hand in the first five minutes. It’s a nesting-doll of a murder mystery in which people characters start out just playing a game for fun must resort to actually engaging in game-like sleuthing methods to unearth a mystery. A mystery which in itself is one we in the audience are invited to play separately (Sondheim and Perkins are our literal “Clintons”…peppering the film with visual and verbal clues which, should we be swift enough to pick up on, lead us to the solution to the mystery).

And if, as many critics cited at the time, The Last of Sheila lacks the humanity necessary to make this murder mystery scant than just a fun intellectual exercise (the common critical complaint was that the characters are all so despicable you don’t give a hoot about trying to solve the mystery because you couldn’t care less whodunit or who it’s about to be done to); time and DVD availability has been kind to The Last of Sheila experience.

And by that I mean, not only is it a kick to see folks like Richard Benjamin and Dyan Cannon and Raquel Welch all in the same film, but the characters and their deep, dark secrets seem almost quaint in line with what celebrities do these days (and happily tweet about). Most significantly though, the ability to rewind, rewatch, and reexamine The Last of Sheila, a film about whose mystery critic Rex Reed wrote, “…requires a postgraduate degree in hieroglyphics to figure out,” has made watching it a considerably less frustrating experience than it was back in 1973.

Let the Games Begin
The original boat sank before filming. Original cinematographer Ernest Day (A Clockwork Orange) was fired after a week. Joan Hackett refused to say certain lines and was nearly replaced by Lee Remick. Arab terrorist group, Black September, threatened to blow up the set. James Mason couldn't stand Raquel Welch. Welch ruffled the feathers of costume designer Joel Schumacher (later the director Batman & Robin) by arriving with her entire wardrobe already designed and fitted by boyfriend, Ron Talsky. Welch (my, her name does keep popping up, doesn't it?) temporarily halted production when she walked off the film threatening to sue director Herbert Ross for assault and battery.

The Last of Sheilawas made in the 70s, so it almost goes without saying that a post-Watergate cynicism and assertive preoccupation with exposing the ugly side of the Beautiful People runs like an undercurrent throughout the film .

Hollywood is never at its most naïve than when it thinks it has to ratchet up the heartlessness in an attempt to dramatize for us plebeians what a phony, anything-for-a-buck business it is. The joke of course has always been that only Hollywood thinks its cash register heart is a well-hidden secret. Most of us over the age of ten grasped long ago what an assembly line of falseness the movie industry is, and after years of “seedy underbelly” exposés (S.O.B.,The Day of the Locust, Burn Hollywood Burn, The Bad & the Beautiful, Sunset Blvd., The Player, Two Weeks in Another Town, A Star is Born, The Oscar, etc.) I’m STILL waiting on a film to show just how soulless and venal it can be…something perhaps only possible were the film conceived as a horror/porn film with traces of science fiction.

The Last of Sheila
Gossip columnist Sheila Green (Yvonne Romain) moments before she,
as Christine so tactfully puts it "...got bounced though the hedges."

The busy schedules of Sondheim and Perkins prevented the two from having many opportunities to actually write the script while in the same room, thus the bulk of The Last of Sheilawas done through phone calls and courier (Perkins has said only two scenes were written while both were in the same room at the same time), Sondheim handling the particulars of the game (natch), Perkins working hard to infuse Stephen’s academic brain puzzler with scare elements and Hollywood insider atmosphere. The result, while entertaining, sometimes feels as choppy and disjointed as the process of its creation.

The Last of Sheila, is the result of the combined efforts of a composer not exactly known for his warmth; a tortured, somewhat embittered actor whose promising leading-man career was derailed and forever haunted by the spectre of Psycho’s Norman Bates; and a famously grumpy director whose idiosyncratic relationship with his actors rivals that of Otto Preminger. With nary a sympathetic character in sight, The Last of Sheila is a unified cold front of a movie desperately in need of a few real chills and perhaps some script tweaking to help raise the modest level of high-toned bitchery to a level of wit and bite worthy of the intellectual wizardry of Sondheim’s puzzle.

Stephen Who?
With A Little Night Music opening on Broadway in February, a Newsweek Magazine cover story in April, and a June release set for The Last of Sheila; 1973 marked the beginning of Stephen Sondheim's emergence as a household name. (Center) Perkins and Sondheim on the Cannes set of The Last of Sheila.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

To have Joan Hackett, that darling of idiosyncratic vulnerability, in the same film with the magnificent Raquel Welch, a startlingly uncraggy and boyishly cute Ian McShane, and the comically raucous Dyan Cannon, is quite a treat. But the real star of The Last of Sheila is its twisty murder mystery plot and the cunning “game” motif which runs throughout the film.

From the start, an atmosphere of narrative disequilibrium permeates every scene.

All the characters are such phonies with ulterior motives behind everything word and action, it’s clear any number of games are already well underway long before Clinton bullies everyone into participating in what he calls “The Shelia Green Memorial Gossip Game.” Once the real game does begin, it becomes harder and harder to know who to believe, who to trust, trust or who’s reality you're seeing.

And if, in the end, the frequent scenes of lengthy exposition and reenactments necessitated by the complexity of the puzzle have the effect of leaving scant room for fleshed-out performances or dimensional characterizations (in Craig Zadan's book, Sondheim & Co., Perkins concede to he and Sondheim "writing too much" and having to excise some 100 pages of the script before filming); one at least gets to console oneself with the not-unpleasant fact that The Last of Sheila is a fun, difficult-to-solve mystery that respects the viewer’s intelligence and rewards attentiveness.

Elaborate Clues Are Part of the Game

PERFORMANCES

It’s unlikely anyone seeing this now 42-year-old film today knows or even cares that the characters in The Last of Sheila are based on and cobbled together from real-life Hollywood notables (equally unlikely is that anyone could identify them). But at the time of its release, the whole “Who is that supposed to be?” element was just one more of the many games The Last of Sheila set before the viewer.

Of those rumored, Orson Welles was said to have inspired James Mason’s failed director character (even the casting of Lolita's Mason being a bit of a clue to the mystery for the audience). Richard Benjamin was Anthony Perkins' surrogate, and the sex-symbol and pushy husband portrayed by Welch and McShane were presumed by many to be Ann-Margret and Roger Smith. Although more popular opinion favored the filmmakers somehow getting Welch to agree to play herself (and husband Patrick Curtis) in spite of the character’s unglamorous name (Alice “Wood”) being a sly reference to Welch’s acting ability. However, it was no secret that Dyan Cannon was playing super-agent Sue Mengers (Bette Midler portrayed Mengers in a one-woman show on Broadway in 2013), as the actress’s lively impersonation was a major point of publicity at a time when Mengers ruled Hollywood with her client list: Barbra Streisand, Anthony Perkins, Richard Benjamin, Ryan O’Neal, Dyan Cannon, Faye Dunaway, et al.

Any movie that affords the opportunity to hear Dyan Cannon laugh is a worthwhile endeavor

Like pawns in a chess game, the somewhat overqualified cast of The Last of Sheila are there chiefly to be in service to the riddle of a plot, the minimal requirements of their roles rarely rising above TV-movie competency. So even if few are offered opportunities to really shine (Dyan Cannon has the best lines and the most to work with) all are in fine form and The Last of Sheila offers up an attractive gathering of some of the most familiar faces of the 70s. My particular favorites are James Coburn and Dyan Cannon, with the always-terrific Joan Hackett giving the film a much-needed dose of humanity. (With this film, The Group, Five Desperate Women, and The Class of ’63, Hackett must be the queen of reunion-themed movies).

Hunting Clues In An Abandoned Monastery

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I was 15-years-old when I first saw The Last of Sheila, dragging my family to see it the first week it opened (smug in my film/theater geek certainty that I alone among my high school peers knew who Stephen Sondheim was). I recall being very taken with the film as a whole, this being the first time I ever saw the traditional Agatha Christie drawing room mystery setup played out in anything resembling a contemporary setting.

I’m not sure how modern audiences respond to it, but in 1973, the mystery worked especially well because outside of James Coburn, no one else in the cast was ever typed as a villain. What with the Riviera setting and Hollywood types featured, it all seemed very glamorous and sophisticated to my adolescent eyes, the only dissonant chord being how old-fashioned all the name dropping seemed. In the 70s Hollywood of Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty and Ali MacGraw, chummy references to Steve & Edie, Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, and Sandra Dee seemed very Old World.

Oh, and The Last of Sheila introduced me to Bette Midler. She sings “Friends” over the film's closing credits and I so loved the song, I immediately went out and bought The Divine Miss M album. I've been a fan ever since.

Christine tries to convince Anthony that two heads are better than one

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As much as I loved The Last of Sheila, poor advance press (it opened out of competition at Cannes to disappointing word of mouth), mixed reviews (claims of it being indifferently directed and aloof were outdistanced by critics throwing up their hands saying the whole thing was just too damned confusing!), and perhaps the overall sourness of the film's tone, kept it from being a hit. It disappeared from theaters rather rapidly and for years you could mention the title and nobody would lay claim to having heard of it, let alone seen it.

Now available on DVD,The Last of Sheila has developed quite a cult following. Worth checking out if you've never seen it before, worth revisiting to discover all the giveaway clues you missed the first time out.

Friends?

A fun bonus on the DVD is the commentary track provided by Welch, Cannon, and Benjamin. Cannon and Benjamin are obviously watching the film together and having a blast, while Welch (who always comes across more relaxed and funny on the commentary tracks for her films than she does in the films themselves) recorded hers separately.

Little in the way of inside information is imparted - 42 yeas is a LONG time - but in its place is a nostalgia that appears to have erased memories of the troubled, over-schedule and over-budget shoot, replacing them with diplomacy (Cannon alludes to a person causing a long delay because they were dissatisfied with their outfit...one can't help thinking of Ms. Welch) and fond recollections of the experience.
Everyone cops to having found the complex script very hard to follow during filming, and amusingly, Dyan Cannon (who had to gain weight for the role) can't seem to get over how fat she looks, while Raquel Welch laments that she herself looks too thin. All the while Cannon and Benjamin make references to Perkins and Sondheim which make it sound as though they were a couple for a time. I certainly hope so. I'm sure that both gentlemen would be proud to know their sole screenwriting collaboration still has a few gossipy secrets to impart.

“Life is never quite interesting enough, somehow. You people who come to the movies know that.” Dolly Gallagher Levi - The Matchmaker

Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is a (melo)dramatization of what can happen to lives when the consoling balm of idol worship (movie or otherwise) becomes a crutch for self-delusion, avoidance, and the denial of truth.

As anyone knows who has spent more than five minutes at an autograph convention; attended a pro sporting event; visited Comic-Con; stood among the glassy-eyed throngs outside a movie premiere; or navigated the choppy waters of an internet fansite chat room (a drama-queen war zone littered with trolling land mines): fame-culture idol worship and devout religious fanaticism are merely different sides of the same coin.

Life presents us with challenges and can sometimes feel like a cruel, dispiriting, achingly lonely place. In those moments when we feel its sting most keenly, it’s natural to seek solace (and sometimes escape) in the arts: that spiritual oasis of inspiration and beauty that has the power to restore hope to the human soul the way rainfall can restore life to the scorched, arid plains of a drought-plagued Texastown.

But all too often the need to salve the pain of life and fill the void of loneliness through external means (as opposed to, say, self-reflection and action) leads to the quick-fix distraction of fame culture. Fame culture being the existential bait-and-switch that says our personal lives can somehow be enriched through the over-idealization of someone else’s. Particularly the lives of those perfect demigods and goddesses of the silver screen.

Fame culture doesn’t speak to the individual who works to fulfill his/her potential through the inspirational example of the genius and talent of others. Fame culture merely requires one to surrender the concerns of one's own existence to the enthralled pursuit of information about, and preoccupation with, the comings and goings of the rich and famous. Such passive fealty is rewarded with the blessed gift of never having to think for a second about one's own life, one's own concerns, or anything remotely connected to what is real and germane to one's life. As questionable a tradeoff as this seems, it represents the absolute cornerstone of what we jokingly refer to as pop culture.

“Believing is so funny isn’t it? When what you believe in doesn’t even know you exist.”

Entire networks and charitably 85% of the internet are devoted to feeding us ‘round-the-clock updates on what celebrities are up to. Celebrities whose careers and personal lives are staunchly and vigilantly defended against slander and attack by legions of devoted fans. Fandom of the sort that leads to cyber-bullying, broken friendships, and in extreme cases, death threats.

All rather sad when faced with the reality that celebrities by and large go about the business of living of their lives grateful for, but blithely unaware of, said fans’ existence (outside of the hefty dollars fan devotion brings to their bank accounts, enabling them -irony of ironies - to build stronger fortresses, hire more bodyguards, and enforce stricter security…all the better to keep fans at arm's length).

“‘Cause growing up is awfuller than all the awful things that ever were." - Peter Pan

The desire to lose oneself/find oneself in the idealized illusion of salvation presented by the arts and fame culture is something most keenly felt in adolescence. Adolescence being the time when, in the immortal words of The Facts of Life theme song: “The world never seems to be living up to your dreams” - the kind of escapism that can be found in movies is often the only recourse left for bullied and isolated teenagers longing to feel a little less like outsiders and misfits. At its best, the idol worship of celebrities and movie stars can be a catalyst for change and growth, providing a hopeful vision of a world not defined by the limitations of ignorance, bigotry, and small minds. At its worst, fame idolatry can be such an effective pain reliever that it encourages avoidance, inhibits emotional growth, and promotes living in the past.

September 30, 1955
Members of the McCarthy, Texas James Dean Fan Club, The Disciples of James Dean,
react to news of the actor's death

“Think what you can keep ignoring…” Stephen Sondheim - Company

Sandy Dennis as Mona

Cher as Sissy

Karen Black as Joanne

The year is 1975, and on the 20^th anniversary of the death of James Dean, the last remaining members of The Disciples of James Dean (make that the last remaining interested members) - a fan club which held its weekly meetings afterhours in the local Woolworth’s 5 & Dime - return to the drought-ridden, near-deserted, West Texas town of McCarthy for a reunion.

Still residing in McCarthy in various states of arrested development are: moralistic bible-thumper, Juanita (Sudie Bond), who inherited the 5 & Dime after her husband died; goodtime girl, Sissy (Cher), “The best roller-skater in all of West Texas” and over-proud owner of the biggest boobs in town; and Mona (Dennis),James Dean fan club leader and lifetime Woolworth employee whose preeminent moment in life was being chosen as an extra in the film Giant (although no one has ever been able to find her in the film), and who lays claim to being the mother of James Dean’s only son.

Kathy Bates as Stella Mae

The only out-of-town attendees are boisterous Stella Mae (Kathy Bates), now the wife of a Dallas oil millionaire, and mousy Edna Louise (Marta Heflin), pregnant with her 7^th child and still, as she was in high-school, ever on the receiving end of Stella Mae’s relentless verbal abuse.

Into this airless environment of stasis comes Joanne (a wonderfully reined-in Karen Black), a chaos device in a tailored suit, a woman mysterious in a yellow Porsche (Dean died in a Porsche). In true Southern Gothic tradition, her presence incites the unearthing of secrets and the head-on confrontation of several dark and painful truths.
And as for the two Jimmy Deans of the title, they are less a titular redundancy than a reference to the two unseen Jimmy Deans of the tale: The Hollywood actor whose untimely death at age twenty-four assured him a place of cultish immortality; and Mona's twenty-year-old son, Dean's son, a rebel with considerable cause. Both are the unseen male presence - "ghosts" of you will - that figure so prominently in Mona's delusions, making her feel special, giving her life importance.

Marta Heflin as Edna Louise

As titles go, I was never too crazy about Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Deanwhich always reminded me too much of the unpleasant, similarly phrase-titled 1976 film, When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? …which as it so happens, also had a diner setting. But I suppose it might be a nod to Inge's Come Back Little Sheba and that play's similar theme of longing for an idealized past. But who cares about a title when you have Altman alumnae Sandy Dennis (That Cold Day in the Park) and Karen Black (Nashville) joined by pop-star, tabloid queen, Cher, returning to the big screen for the first time since her somnambulistic tile role performance in 1969s Chastity?

I saw Jimmy Deanwhen it was released in Los Angeles in the fall of 1982. The buzz at the time was that, on the heels of the flop trifecta of Quintet, A Perfect Couple, and HealtH (the latter I don’t recall even opening in LA), plus the off-beat oddity that was Popeye; Jimmy Dean was to be a return to 3 Women form for Altman. Filmed on a shoestring budget, shot on Super16mm and blown up to 35mm, in a year of bloated megafilms (ET, Annie, Tron) Jimmy Dean was small, personal, and idiosyncratically appealing (and oh so 70s) in its determination to be an anti-blockbuster.

Featuring the same cast as the film, Robert Altman mounted a much-ballyhooed Broadway production of Ed Graczyk's play early in 1982. The critics were not kind. The show closed after 52 performances. A week later the film version was underway and completed in 19 days.

Long before Carol Burnett’s hilarious “Eunice” character came along and forever altered my ability to take the genre completely seriously, I have been in love with Southern Gothic films. Adapted from the works of authors like Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and William Inge, these extravagantly melodramatic films had their heyday in the sexually repressed climate of the 50s. Their crisis-filled plots – all sex, secrets, lies, and hypocrisy – stylistically dramatizing the submerged conflicts and contradictions of an era obsessed with sex, yet rooted in conservative Christian dogma and the sustained illusion of conformity at all costs.

Though initially drawn to the genre for its female-driven narratives and the camp potential of the traditionally overheated performances; I eventually came to appreciate the subtle queer-coding concealed in so many of the stories related to isolated individuals struggling to find love and self-acceptance in environments unsympathetic to anyone not fitting in with the mainstream.

Making his film debut as Joseph Qualley, a teen bullied for dressing up in women's clothes,
openly gay actor Mark Patton (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) was a real-life victim of bullying
growing up in his hometown of Riverside, Mo.

Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Deanmay not be true Southern Gothic per se, but it has all the trimmings. It’s got ponderous themes (Is the entire world just a deserted dustbowl full of pitiful souls trying to give their lives meaning by worshiping gods that don’t know we exist?); weighty symbolism (Reata, the palatial mansion in Giant, is, like so many of the characters at the 5 & Dime, only a false façade); religious allegory (Mona's assertion that she was "chosen" to bring Dean's only son into the world); and a steady stream of tearful disclosures and shocking revelations done to a fare-thee-well by a cast to die for.

"Miracle Whip is poetry, mayonnaise isn't."
Robert Altman defending one of the improvised changes he imposed upon Graczyk's screenplay.
Sudie Bond as Juanita

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In his book, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, late film critic Robin Wood makes an interesting point about how often the best of Robert Altman’s films are those expressing the female (if not necessarily feminist) perspective. I’d have to agree. Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, makes a superb companion piece to 3 Women: the former being a study in reality imposing itself upon the guarded illusions of women with nothing to cling to but the dreams of the past; the latter a kind of magic-realist exercise in which fantasy and wish-fulfillment come to erode the personalities of three dissimilar women.

While I've always had a little problem with the actual screenplay of Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (five major epiphanies in one afternoon must be some kind of record), I have nothing but praise for the stellar performances, the film's themes, and Altman's sensitive and thoughtful direction. This movie is a MAJOR favorite.

PERFORMANCES

It took the formulaic, “high-concept” Hollywood of the 1980s to unite my favorite iconoclast director with two of the most famously idiosyncratic actresses of the 70s. Much has been written about the mannered acting styles of Sandy Dennis and Karen Black, but in Jimmy Dean, the stark originality of these actresses rescues the film from the kind of Steel Magnolias down-home, southern-fried clichés Graczyk’s screenplay flirts so recklessly with.

As with so many Altman films, the performances here represent the best example of ensemble work, each character fleshed out in ways that make even the most theatrical contrivances of the plot feel genuine and emanating from a place of authenticity.

Deservedly so, Cher was singled out for a great deal of critical acclaim for her performance. After having become something of a tabloid punchline for the public soap-opera that was her personal, she amazed audiences by more than holding her own with several formidable seasoned professionals. Her relaxed, natural performance nicely offsets the more eccentric contributions of her costars (although Sudie Bond comes across as perhaps the most real of Graczyk's characters) and she is a delight to watch. Mike Nichols, after seeing her in the Broadway production, cast her opposite Meryl Streep in 1983s Silkwood.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

One of my favorite quotes is Bergen Evans’ “We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.”

In Jimmy Dean the past of 1955 and the present of 1975 play out simultaneously on opposite sides of mirrors situated behind the Woolworth’s soda fountain counter; each side serving to illuminate and provide insight and counterpoint to the actions and motivations of the characters.

I’ve never seen a theatrical production of this film, but on the DVD commentary, the playwright says it was Altman’s idea (one he didn’t agree with) to have the same actors play their adult and 16-year-old selves. Maybe the decision isn’t true to Graczyk’s vision, but Altman’s idea is makes for a marvelous visual commentary on how these characters never change. Watching the 1955 sequences played by the mature actresses reinforced for me the feeling that the seeds of what these characters would become has already taken root. It’s a creative choice that imbues Graczyk's sometimes overstressed plot points with poignancy and poetry.

Maybe people don't change. Perhaps we just never saw who they really were.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Robert Altman has often expressed a dislike of idol worship and fame culture, feeling it distracts people from looking at their own problems and, like religion, encourages them not to think for themselves. It's certainly a theme he’s addressed before in his films (Nashville, Buffalo Bill & the Indians, HealtH, and The Player).

In a 1982 interview for New York Magazine, Robert Atman stated that one of the main reasons he was drawn to making Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean was to counterbalance his 1957 documentary, The James Dean Story. A sparse, nonsensationalistic look at the brief life of the actor he felt was misunderstood and subverted into a work of hagiography by James Dean cultists.

Thanks to the internet, I at last got to see that for-years-rumored-about nude photo of James Dean that figures in the narrative and Stella Mae paid over $50 dollars for (Edna Louise: "Is that a tree branch in his hand, or what?"). I don't think it looks much like him, but I do love a good myth.

Altman’s adaptation of Graczyk’s play, which depicts the most devout of Dean’s worshippers as an intensely unbalanced woman coping with the emptiness of her existence by shrouding herself in an elaborate delusion, does indeed stand in stark contrast to the harmless, romanticized view of fandom promoted by the media and so-called entertainment news. A point of view all the more rarefied when applied to otherwise unassailable pop-cultural icons like James Dean, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe.

But what I found most provocative and what gave me the most food for thought in Jimmy Dean is how ingeniously it dramatized the two-way mirror effect of idol worship.

One side of the mirror is idealized fantasy, the other is reality. The idealized side is the side we project ourselves into when we escape into movies or obsess over the lives of celebrities. There, time is frozen. We don’t have to grow up, and the only risk is that it can become a time-stealing distraction.

The reality side of the mirror offers nothing but the naked lightbulb of having to look clearly at ourselves and our lives. Tragedy is when the world of dreams feels so compelling to us, reality pales in comparison. Salvation comes through the realization that it is only on the reality side of the mirror where genuine happiness and fulfillment is possible.

Altman may have disliked celebrity culture, but idol-worship (in the form of the standing-room-only
throngs crammed into the Martin Beck Theater to see Cher's legit stage debut)
played a huge role in the play lasting even 52 performances

Like a great many gay men of my generation who grew up feeling isolated and misunderstood, movies were my solace, escape, salvation, and inspiration. I grew up loving movies and movie stars, and, as the title of this blog asserts, they were the stuff to inspire dreams. I was one of the lucky ones in that I didn’t lose myself in my love of movies (well, not completely) and that my own pop cultural obsession (Xanadu…yes, THAT Xanadu) altered the course of my life and led me to a profession which has been more fulfilling to me than I ever could have imagined.

Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is a reminder that the arts are here to help us better cope with life, not retreat from it.

BONUS MATERIAL
Somewhat hooty 1982 TV commercial for the brief Broadway run of Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

Robert Altman's documentary: The James Dean Story (1957) on YouTube.

Cher actually made her feature film debut playing herself opposite Sonny Bono in the musical comedy spoof, Good Times - 1967 (it's also director William Friedkin's first film, and is in its own way, every bit as terrifying as The Exorcist). In 1969 with a script by Bono, Cher made her dramatic acting debut in Chastity, A film in which she plays a hippie drifter with one facial expression. Both are available on YouTube and are prime examples of late-60s cinema.

The DVD of Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean has as its only extra feature, a great, many-axes-to-grind interview with playwright Ed Graczyk, who. while respectful, clearly did not relish working with Robert Altman. Like listening to an embittered Paul Morrissey griping about how Andy Warhol got all the credit for the films he directed, Graczyk seems loathe to extend any gratitude to Altman for his part in making Jimmy Dean the playwright's most well-known play. Instead he devotes considerable time detailing (in admittedly enjoyable behind-the-scenes- anecdotes) the many ways in which Altman deviated from his original concept.

The Disciples of James Dean - 1955
James Dean is the perfect pop culture icon. A figure of idolatry who didn't live long enough to
disappoint, disillusion, or age (in other words, seem human), Like all gods, he remains forever unchanged in a state of youthful perfection,

Latest Images