THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT 1977

You can’t really appreciate the benefits of a film like The Other Side of Midnight until you’re confined to your bed for three days with an ass-kicker of a late-winter flu. Only when one’s energy has been sapped from inactivity, muscle weakness, and a ceaseless intake of liquids (followed, with breathtaking immediacy, by the expulsion of same from every imaginable orifice); when a toxic blend of physical inertia, mental malaise, and miserable weather renders futile all possibility of doing anything remotely productive; only then can one fully understand what a panacea to the beleaguered spirit is the extravagantly trashy film.

"The Romance of Passion and Power"
Sidney Sheldon (the man who gave the world The Patty Duke Show & I Dream of Jeannie) wrote The Other Side of Midnight for folks who find sociopathology, brutishness, premeditated murder, and abortion by wire hanger to be the stuff of epic romance.

 Sometimes it takes a thing like a 100 degree fever to break down one’s resistance enough to allow for the guilt-free enjoyment of gilt-edged sleaze like The Other Side of Midnight. A film that, at a running time of over 2 ½ hours, is an over-embellished potboiler of love, sex, and revenge so narratively antiquated, so routine and clichéd in execution, that even on first viewing it feels like a rerun. Yet it is nevertheless thoroughly engrossing and strangely reassuring in its by-the-numbers familiarity and adherence to type. It's all there, everything that you'd expect from a soap opera: the sex, the romance, the betrayals, the power plays, vengeance, retribution...the whole shebang. Directed with a daring lack of distinction by Charles Jarrot (Lost Horizon), this big-budget adaptation of the 1973 Sidney Sheldon bestseller is a comfort food movie that requires nothing more of your brain than that you leave it on the nightstand and let the glistening images and warmed-over histrionics enshroud you like an electric blanket. Lovely to look at, easy to ingest, and 100% lacking in anything remotely substantive, The Other Side of Midnight is the filmic equivalent of a sugar-pill.

Marie-France Pisier as Noelle Page (short a, as in Pajama)

John Beck as Larry Douglas

Susan Sarandon as Catherine Alexander

Raf Vallone as Constantin Demeris

Clu Gulager as Bill Fraser

When Jacqueline Susann, the queen of crass, (and I wouldn't have it any other way) passed away in 1974, she left a sizable void in the supply pool of high-gloss motion picture camp-fests. The last of her novels to be adapted for the screen was Once is Not Enough (1975), a delightfully squalid take on the Electra Complex and May/December romance among the Hollywood elite. After that, devotees of true highbrow smut had to wait for 1983, when Harold Robbins and Pia Zadora would pick up the torch and deliver the legendarily craptastic, The Lonely Lady (1983). Between 1975 and 1983, with the “slick sleaze” landscape populated by the likes of Judith Krantz, Danielle Steele, and Jackie Collins; the one book and film adaptation that genuinely felt like a worthy successor to the Susanne crown was The Other Side of Midnight. A film virtually forgotten today but heavily promoted at the time and arriving at theaters with an incredible amount of promising advance buzz. A summer release, it bombed rather stupendously.

Father Knows Worst
"Noelle, war is coming...you have beauty. It is your only weapon of survival. Use it. Let the hand under your dress wear gold, and you'll be that much ahead of the game."
How do you say "Yuck!" in French?

A kind of last-gasp, big-screen entry before the TV miniseries would corner the market on this kind of globetrotting/bedhopping glamour drama, The Other Side of Midnight begins in 1939 and tells the story of Hard-Luck Noelle (Pisier). Noelle is a breathtakingly beautiful French woman (they’re always breathtakingly beautiful in these kinds of books) who, over the course of one remarkably bad year, has her father sell off her virginity to an employer; runs off to Paris and is robbed of all of her belongings within minutes of arrival; gets mistaken for a whore; and has a mad, rapturous love affair with Larry, American Army pilot (Beck) who ultimately abandons her, pregnant and alone, after telling her to go out and buy a wedding dress and wait for his return.

The Agony & The Ecstasy
Above: Noelle learns of love at the extremely hirsute hands (and back) of horny French couturier, Auguste Lanchon (Sorrell  Booke...yes, Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard).
Below: Noelle's fate is sealed when she falls in love with caddish RAF pilot Larry Douglas (Beck)

Taking a kind of “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude about the cruel objectification she’s suffered at the hands of all those beastly males, the embittered Noelle embarks on a curious course of revenge that involves pimping herself out to the highest bidder in an effort to secure enough fame, money, and power to eventually stick it, but good, to her fleetfooted wartime paramour, whom she learns is alive and well (and very married) in Washington, D.C. 

It’s raunchy fun watching Noelle’s Evita-esque bed-climb to the top (wherein she plies her considerable sexual skills on an increasingly unappetizing assortment of men), but it’s only after Larry weds the lovably kooky dipsomaniac, Catherine (Sarandon), that The Other Side of Midnight really shifts into high gear and becomes the vengeance-fueled bitchfest I was hoping for. It's then that it becomes clear that for all the travelogue scenery, the sequences detailing post-war difficulties of military men adapting to civilian life, and pseudo-feminist parallels made by showing Catherine's climb up the ladder with her brains contrasted with Noelle's degrading use of her body; The Other Side of Midnight is mostly fancy window-dressing in service of a diamond-encrusted parable on fury and women scorned.

No Wire Hangers
Even fans of glossy trash have their limits, and this hard-to-watch abortion sequence was a real deal-breaker for many

In a previous post I wrote of my weakness for films whose reach exceeds their grasp. Films whose intentions are at direct odds with their execution. In the case of The Other Side of Midnight: a “love” story, if you can call it that, between two totally reprehensible people (admittedly poor Noelle doesn’t start out that way); there exists a gross misinterpretation of the source material.

From watching the film and listening to the hilariously on-the-defensive DVD commentary, I’m given the distinct impression—both from the movie itself and—that the filmmakers thought they were making an epic love story with a strong, resilient heroine at its center…like Gone with the Wind. Pisier may be a headstrong and Beck sports a pencil mustache, but that is where any similarity ends. Believe me, the self-destructively monomaniacal Noelle Page is no Scarlett O’Hara, Larry, the oafish lout, is no Rhett, and The Other Side of Midnight is no Gone With the Wind…not unless I missed the scene where Scarlett and Ashley make plans to bump off Melanie.

Fatal Attractions
In spite of being an unrepentant jerk of a boyfriend and the worst husband since Guy Woodhouse, Larry has two women who suffer untold agonies to be with him. However, only one of these women is off her rocker.

Given how shabbily she's treated by men, I understand how admirable we are supposed to find it when Noelle decides at last she will no longer be anyone's victim. Everyone harbors at least one revenge fantasy (in my case, several), so it's really a lot of vicarious fun watching Noelle systematically plot and carry out her plans. But, given all she goes through to get back at Larry, her eventual "revenge" is rather toothless and a slap in the face to whatever "empowerment points" we've granted Noelle up to this point, because after one kiss from him (one of those romance novel "Unhand me you brute!" type of kisses, at that), she turns to mush in his arms. All sympathy for Noelle goes out the window when she demands that Larry kill  his hapless wife, Catherine (who, at this point has been treated so shabbily by Larry that the idea seems to benefit HIM more than it does Noelle). I think Sidney Sheldon needed some Third Act action and arrived at this unsympathetic about-face for Noelle that doesn't at all support what had come before it. It would have made more sense for Noelle and Catherine to finally meet (the depiction of their parallel lives serves little narrative purpose) and together plot a way to kill ol' Larry. N ow THAT would have been a crowd-pleaser!
Were The Other Side of Midnight a better film, I would say its moral ambiguity regarding Noelle was intentional (it can’t make up its mind if she is a villain or victim/ her quest for vengeance is sick or empowering) but I really don’t think it is. It’s just one of those overproduced Hollywood “properties” so preoccupied with plot and giving fans of the book all the glamour, romance, and spectacle they can muster; no one noticed that the film’s underlying themes comes off as comically amoral and wrongheaded, and that the so-called heroine kind of loses her mind somewhere up the ladder of success.

Although The Other Side of Midnight takes place in Europe between 1939 and 1947, war and the events of the world fade into the background for the psychotically single-minded Noelle. Here, seen preening before an open window with a swastika in the distance, Noelle remains blithely oblivious to anyone's suffering but her own.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:
As Joan Collins would learn four years later withe the premiere of the primetime television drama, Dynasty, the bad girls have all the fun and get the best lines. The Other Side of Midnight is no exception.   If there's any fun to had in the sometimes drawn out proceedings that make up the film's dual-story plotline, the fun is to be found in seeing to what lengths Noelle is willing to go to enact her revenge on Larry, and in witnessing her transformation from naive waif to, as one character puts it, "a first-class bitch."

Goodnight and Thank You
Social-climbing Noelle is about to throw over her current director/lover (Christian Marquand) for the bigger fish that is
super rich Greek tycoon, Constantin Demeris.

PERFORMANCES:

The late actress Marie-France Pisier (who first came to the attention of American audiences in the 1975 French comedy, Cousin, Cousine) has the requisite beauty to play the role of a woman who relies almost completely on her desirability to achieve her aims. In this, her first American film, Marie-France is considerably better in dragon-lady mode than in the scenes requiring a conveyance of more subtle emotions. The film was intended to launch her as a major American star, but outside of a few TV mini-dramas, Pisier continued to do her best work in her native country. A true class act, whenever prodded by the press to dish about the tacky film Hollywood chose to launch her US career, Pisier would only say that the studio treated her like a queen and made her feel like a star before she even became one.

The exquisitely beautiful Marie-France Pisier passed away in 2011

Pisier is very appealing but her performance in The Other Side of Midnight is perhaps too superficial to help the hackneyed narrative to rise very far above the suds. For a truly harrowing portrait of obsessive love and a performance that strikes at the self-consuming desperation behind it all, check out actress Isabelle Adjani in Francois Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (1975). 

The Other Side of Midnight is the parallel story of two women who share the same man but never meet.
Susan Sarandon (two years after The Rocky Horror Picture Show) has a relaxed, natural style that stands out in the starchy surroundings, but she suffers from an underwritten role.

Jay Leno, Larry Douglas, & Clutch Cargo
In popular entertainment, a strong or prominent chin can either signify a hero (Roger Ramjet, Dudley Do-Right), or villain (Dishonest John, Dick Dastardly).
Anyone care to venture a guess as to how many villains we have pictured here?

THE STUFF OF FANTASY: 

After sex and illicit romance, the major drawing card for a film such as this is the promise of exotic locales, glamorous costumes, and opulent surroundings. The Other Side of Midnight makes good use of its France and Greece locations (plus a few obvious studio sets), but perhaps at the price of narrative cohesion. The Other Side of Midnight is a film that purports to disapprove of the ways in which people debase themselves for money, but an entirely different, conflicting message is given when the camera lovingly lingers on the material things that all that wealth can provide.

My  personal favorite image of extravagance: the over-sized backgammon board

THE STUFF OF DREAMS: 

I suppose it's because I wasn't around during the heyday of the"Women's Film" (the late 30s & 40s) that the glossy soaps of the 60s and 70s hold so much appeal for me. By and large they are inferior films in most every aspect beyond the technical, but they represent to me a wholly pleasant diversion and return to an old-fashioned, if not archaic, method of filmmaking we're not likely to see again. 

As the years go by and more and more contemporary films start to take on the arid, distancing look of video games and computer screens; old-fashioned trash cinema like The Other Side of Midnight begin to look better and better. (I have no idea what the title means. It's most likely meaningless, like the title of that old Johnny Carson soap opera satire, The Edge of Wetness.)

Here We Go Again
Oh, and for those who care about such things - In 1990, the ever-prolific Sidney Sheldon wrote a sequel to The Other Side of Midnight titled, Memories of Midnight. In 1991 it was made into an indifferent TV miniseries starring Jane Seymour and Omar Sharif. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

VERTIGO 1958

I guess it says something about a suspense thriller when you can watch it multiple times, long after the central mystery of its plot has been revealed, with no lessening of engagement or enjoyment. In the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s mesmerizingly bizarre Vertigo, the film itself is so unusual; its subject matter so psychosexually dark; I find myself forgetting the “surprise reveal” of the mystery altogether and just getting lost in what a perversely obsessive vision of romance a major Hollywood studio was able to get away with in the repressed environment of the late-50s.

As one of five films owned by Hitchcock and removed from circulation in 1973 so his lawyers could better hammer out new deals for their television and theatrical distribution rights (the others being The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rope, Rear Window, and The Trouble With Harry), Vertigo wasn’t available for viewings of any kind, singular or multiple, during my high school and college years.

The deceptively simple suspense plot about a retired detective who falls in love, and later becomes obsessed with, the woman he's been hired to follow, is one of the darkest and self-revealing films in the Hitchcock canon.

Barely Hanging On
Vertigo is a film about a man's psychological spiral into the abyss

Considered neither a commercial nor critical success on its initial release, Vertigo’s reputation had grown significantly by the mid-70s, due in large part to the film’s unavailability, but perhaps most significantly as a direct result of the emerging, youth-inspired / New Hollywood reevaluation of Hitchcock and his works. Spearheaded by the French New Wave and director François Truffaut’s by-now-classic 1967 book of interviews: Hitchcock by Truffaut, a generation of young movie fans had come to regard Alfred Hitchcock (previously considered little more than an efficient workmanlike, studio-system director of suspense thrillers)  as an auteurist maverick in the manner of contemporaries John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles.

This well-taken (if functionally naïve) position was readily adopted by me and most everyone else I went to film school with—the mean age of the collective student body betraying  the fact that Vertigo was, to most of us, one of those films more discussed than actually seen.

Jimmy Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson

Kim Novak as Madeline Elster

Kim Novak as Judy Barton

Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge Wood

As a kid, the full extent of my knowledge of behind-the-scenes motion picture personnel were the opposite-ends-of- the-spectrum names of Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. With only the most cartoonish notion of what a director or producer actually did (I had, after all, seen all of the “Lucy goes to Hollywood” episodes of I Love Lucy), thanks to the TV anthology series Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and Alfred Hitchcock Presents I knew one thing: Disney meant funny and Hitchcock meant scary. Hitchcock’s The Birds and the deeply traumatizing Psycho had enough of a “Creature Features”/ William Castle vibe about them to satisfy a young person’s notion of what a scary movie should be. But Vertigo (which had its network TV premiere in 1965 and reran consistently), despite Hitchcock’s name and the similar one-word title, was just too slow and kissy-faced to hold my interest.

For Bay Area kids in the 70s, scary movies meant one thing and one thing only: Creature Features

Once it became clear that Kim Novak’s rigid hairdo wasn’t in danger of crow attack, or that Jimmy Stewart wasn’t going to be donning a dress or wielding a knife anytime soon, I gave up on trying to sit through it. By the time I reached my teens and interest in Vertigo renewed, it was too late. I ultimately didn't get to see Vertigo until after it was released on DVD, restored and pristine, in 1999.

Alfred Hitchcock's much-analyzed "pure cinema" style is greatly in evidence throughout Vertigo.
The dizzying spiral motif.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Contrasted with my youthful antipathy towards Vertigo, my adult response to the film was near-obsessive adoration. I immediately fell in love with its absorbingly intriguing plot and the descriptively cinematic methods Hitchcock uses to both tell the story and reveal character. A trait shared by most of the filmmakers I most admire is their fluency in the visual language of film. They don’t just record events with a camera; they use the medium to shape our perceptions of what is happening and what the characters are feeling. I’m not always persuaded by Hitchcock’s sometimes jarring shifts from visually striking location shots to patently fake-looking studio sets and process photography, but in a story as subjectively stylized as Vertigo, even artificiality works in the film’s favor.

(My partner, who doesn’t exactly worship at the altar of Hitchcock, thinks the director’s predilection for rear-screen projections and patently sound-studio outdoor sets recall  the look of Disney’s live-action films. A running gag is for him to poke me in the ribs at any instance of obvious rear-projection or stagy outdoor sets in a movie and exclaim (in mock sincerity), “Oh look, Ken…a Hitchcock film!”)

Hitchcock was the best at using imagery to convey emotional states

PERFORMANCES:

I’ve commented before on my theory that movie star appeal (as opposed to actor appeal) is rooted in a performer’s ability to consistently project a distinct personal quality about themselves from film to film. To, in effect, imprint each role with their personality rather than lose themselves within a character.

I don’t know very much about Kim Novak’s personal life, but of all the 50s sex symbols, she has always struck me as one of the most sad-eyed and reluctant. She never appeared to enjoy the objectification that is the sex symbol’s stock in trade; rather, like the character she played in the film Picnic, Novak always seemed to be of a somewhat shy personality, sensitive and desirous of someone to take notice of something about her beyond her beauty.

Vera Miles was originally cast in the Kim Novak role but had to drop out of Vertigo due to pregnancy.
Hitch was not happy

It’s this quality Kim Novak brings to the dual characters of Madeline/Judy in Vertigo. A quality one might go so far as to say is exploited by Hitchcock, given how painfully tangible Novak makes Judy’s longing for Scottie to love her for herself.

As dramatically compelling as they are, I confess that I find the sequences where Scottie attempts to make Judy over in Madeline’s image to be particularly painful to sit through. There’s no pleasure to be derived from the subtle self-deprecation glimpsed behind Judy’s poignantly eager-to-please glances and nervous smiles as Scottie demands more and more of the real Judy to retreat into his fantasy. These scenes are so difficult to watch because those flashes of resigned sadness in Judy harken back to that dolefulness I’ve always perceived in Novak’s eyes in other films.

There's been much written about the tortured  character of Scottie, but equally compelling is the character  of Judy, a woman who allows herself to be made over not once, but twice, in the image of another man's ideal.
It's a lamentable, psychologically brutalizing motif standardized in the fashion industry and even romanticized and rendered "cute" in movies like Grease. I think Kim Novak is marvelously affecting and heartbreaking in Vertigo and her performance is easily the best of her career.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

As a former resident of San Francisco, I have a weak spot for movies that make the city look like my idealized memories of it. The San Francisco of Vertigo is long before I ever moved there, but it’s every bit as picturesque.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”

Frederico Fellini

Show me a filmmaker who denies his work has autobiographical subtext, and I’ll show you a filmmaker with good reason to try to convince himself of the lie. (Back in 1971, Roman Polanski “doth protest too much” when critics took note of his Manson-esque depiction of slaughter in Macbeth; likewise, Woody Allen took the same tact when the whole Mia Farrow/Soon Yi mess made the 42 year-old man/17 year-old girl romance at the center of Manhattan seem forever icky.)

On its own merits, Vertigo is a near-perfect suspense thriller with a devastating tragedy at its center. The lovers are plagued by personal flaws and compulsions that induce them to act in ways that doom their union no matter how many times it’s played out. It’s a strange, deeply romantic film whose themes feel assertively antithetical to the kind of romantic myth typical of Hollywood films in the 1950s.

Top: In Vertigo Hitchcock takes full advantage of the strange, spectral quality of the color green.
Below: The same eerie hue was used to equally chilling effect in the poster art for my favorite film of all time, Rosemary's Baby

What provides the film with its extra, voyeuristic kick is how closely Vertigo’s narrative hews to what has come to be known about Alfred Hitchcock’s personal obsessions and compulsions. Whether apocryphal or substantiated, the Hitchcock section of the library is loaded with tale after tale of his fixation on icy blondes and apparent fetish for eyeglasses. Stories of his professional relationships with actresses Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren read like a character analysis of Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson.

I've never been much of a fan of Jimmy Stewart, but if Vertigo works at all, it's because of his movingly tortured performance. Cast against type as a somewhat unpleasant and haunted character, Vertigo seems to tap into a heretofore unexplored cruelty in the actor that makes his Scottie so flawed and vulnerable. I've never seen him better.

It’s this personal overlay that gives Vertigo its eerie punch and makes it feel at times as if the film were a subtly confessional probe into the darkest corners of what we sometimes label desire.

Jimmy Stewart & Kim Novak were paired again in the 1958 comedy, Bell Book & Candle. Here they make a cameo appearance on the film's soundtrack album cover in this shameless bit of product-placement from the Shirley Booth TV show Hazel. (Both were produced by Columbia Studios.)

Vertigo is not my favorite Alfred Hitchcock film (that would be Shadow of a Doubt) but for me it’s the movie where he most perfectly conjoins popular entertainment and art. It’s a beautiful film that’s very watchable, but there is something unpleasant and sad about it. Something that nevertheless feels very human and is therefore very familiar.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER 1970

“There is so much talk now about the art of film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art.”

Pauline Kael

One of the things I’ve always loved about the late Pauline Kael, film critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, was that, as intellectual and committed to the arts as she was, she was not a movie snob. She was one of the few film critics who understood how trash films and pop entertainments can hold as much appeal and be every bit as satisfying and uplifting as great art. 

In her time, she continually repudiated the efforts of critics who sought to promote a narrow, academic definition of cinema art: One shrouded in high-mindedness, “good taste,” and self-seriousness-- ignorant of film’s more accessible, subjectively emotional appeal.  Kael seemed to be on a crusade to stop moviegoers from feeling guilty for enjoying movies as pop culture pleasures, and to encourage them to relate to film's immediacy, passion, and ability to get under our skin. In short, to learn to connect to cinema as the “lively art” that it is.  

But this didn't mean that there was no room for discernment and judgment. Kael drew the line at lazy, cynical, boxoffice-geared, product that pandered to the lowest common denominator and insulted the intelligence of the audience. For a movie to be worthwhile it had to have imagination, vitality, ideas, and something elemental in its plot that strikes a chord with the soul’s need to find beauty, joy, heroism, or myth. If a film can convey to an individual even a shred of what that person holds to be beautiful about the world, it doesn't matter if it’s Beach Party or The Seventh Seal.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, I bring this all up as a way of ushering in this essay about Vincente Minnelli's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever; a grievously imperfect film that I nevertheless find to be perfectly, for lack of a better word,  hypnotic.

Barbra Streisand as Daisy Gamble / Melinda Winifred Wayne Moorpark Tentrees, nee Wainwhistle

Yves Montand as Dr. Marc Chabot

Warren Pratt

Jack Nicholson as Tad Pringle

Bob Newhart as Dr. Mason Hume

John Richardson as Robert Tentrees

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is based on the moderate success/probable flop 1965 musical by Burton Lane/Alan Jay Lerner that starred the incandescent Barbara Harris and ran for 280 performances on Broadway. It’s a breezy romantic comedy with a glorious score and a charmingly original, if problematic, plot centering on ESP and reincarnation. It’s also the film that contains my favorite Barbra Streisand musical comedy performance of all time.

Simplified, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever relates the story of Daisy Gamble (Streisand), a nervousy introvert who seeks the services of psychiatrist / hypnotherapist Dr. Chabot (Montand) to help her to quit smoking. Daisy is a shrinking violet (hee-hee), a colorless wallflower (ditto, hee-hee...flowers are a major motif in the film) so cowed by her button-down fiancé, Warren (Blyden) that she tries to suppress the fact, to others as well as herself,  that she is actually gifted with ESP and, among her many talents, can make flowers grow simply by talking to them. 

"Hurry! It's Lovely Up Here"
If any voice could coax flowers out of their beds in the morning, it's Streisand's 

Under hypnosis, Daisy reveals herself to be the reincarnation of a 19^th century British clairvoyant named Melinda Tentrees who was executed for treason. Melinda is everything that Daisy is not; alluring, self-assured and unreservedly sensual. For Dr. Chabot, fascination with Daisy’s case soon turns to infatuation with the elusive Melinda, while Daisy, misreading the doctor’s attentions, starts falling for Chabot.

That's quite a lot going on, what with fantasy flashbacks to the sumptuous Regency period to sort out the whys and wherefores of Melinda's untimely death; at least two, possibly three, romantic triangles (a hexagon, I suppose: Chabot/Daisy/Melinda & Warren/Daisy/Tad); a college scandal; plus time out to squeeze in several musical numbers. There’s not enough time devoted to some things (the obviously truncated Nicholson subplot goes nowhere, and I would have loved to have seen more of Leon Aames, the father from Minnelli's classic, Meet Me in St. Louis), and too much devoted to others (there's entirely too much of Simon Oakland, who seemed to be the boss in every TV cop show in the 70s). The overall result is strangely choppy and uneven in tone. The film is, at turns, out and out funny, whimsical, stylish, lyrical, and sometimes breathtaking, but it frequently feels like we are watching the work of independent artists...not collaborators on a film. Too much of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever feels like the gathering of isolated scenes and skits capable of being enjoyed independently and on their own. When placed together, the individual parts, no matter how artfully executed, don't exactly add up to a satisfying whole.

On the rare occasions Minnelli ventures out of the studio, good use is made of the film's New York locations. Here, Yves Montand stands atop the Pan Am Building imploring Daisy to "Come Back to Me"
(or, as transposed by critic Rex Reed per Montand's French accent, "Cum Buck Dooo Meee!")

I suspect this all has a bit to do with the prodigious amount of cutting the film had to endure on its way to the screen. Conceived as a roadshow* attraction, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever bears the brunt of the many songs, scenes, and subplots that were excised in the interest of whittling the film down to a marketable running time. But that doesn't wholly explain On a Clear Day You Can See Forever saddling itself with a leading man so thuddingly dull that the film loses all romantic longing; production values that would have looked dated back in 1959; scenes constructed as if to prevent interaction between Streisand and any cast member with comedic talent; and the head-scratchingly self-destructive decision to remove all of the score's liveliest and peppy numbers (and this movie could use all the pep it can get) and leave only the ballads.The score (among my favorites) is lushly romantic, but the film itself (a protracted, metaphysical cockblock) has been cast and directed in such a fashion as to render all potential romance undesirable. (Personally, I didn't want Daisy to end up with ANY of her suitors.)
*A popular distribution method for “event” films in the 60s, roadshow films were higher priced, reserved-seat screenings with overtures, intermissions, and exit music. These films were habitually 2 ½ to 4 hours long. They gradually fell out of favor in the late 70s.

Dr.Chabot hypnotizes Daisy through telepathy

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever was only the second Barbra Streisand film I’d ever seen (the first being What’s Up, Doc?), and one I somehow hadn’t even heard of until 1975 when it was booked as the bottom half of a double-bill at the San Francisco movie theater where I was working as an usher. Because of my job, I was only able to see bits and pieces of the film, but the first thing that struck me was how beautifully it was shot. The ultra modern classroom scenes were an overlit bust, but the flashback sequences and stylized artificiality of the rooftop scenes bore Minnelli’s trademark stamp of picturesque opulence. 

The Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England features in one of the film's many stunning flashback sequences.

The second thing that grabbed me was the music. Many of the songs from the original score had been excised and a few new ones written just for the film, but of those that remained, who knew that so many of my parents’ favorite standards—the virtual entirety of the Eydie Gorme, Robert Goulet,  Jack Jones, Kay Stevens songbook— came from this show? I was so taken with what I was able to glimpse of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever that I began to make up excuses to leave my lobby post: check for smokers, feet on the backs of chairs… anything, just so I could get another Streisand fix. And what a fix it was. Lit to look like a goddess and costumed with decolletage for days, Streisand was a heady dose of 70s-style movie star glamour. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever was the movie that made me fall in love with Streisand (alas, a short-lived romance that ended with 1979s The Main Event) and my personal siren song was her gangbusters delivery of the title song. I made a point of always being the usher stationed near the doors at the end of each screening just so I could stand inside, flashlight in hand, mouth agape, and wait for her to rattle the crystal on the chandeliers with that final note.Wow! Talk about your goosebumps moment. 

Not sure if this was a wig or her real hair, but this is the look I always associate with Streisand

Although On a Clear Day You Can See Forever played at San Francisco's Alhambra Theater for two weeks, I never got to see the film in its entirety until I saw it at a Los Angeles revival theater many years later. After finally getting the chance to see the entire film from start to finish, I was struck to discover that I actually enjoyed On a Clear Day You Can See Forever more when I was seeing it a la carte. Seeing it in sections, I was dazzled by the visual style and Streisand's star quality. Seen as a whole, I was kind of surprised, given that the story is kind of magical and sweet-natured, at how how lacking in charm the whole enterprise is. It's professional, well-done, and definitely enjoyable, but for a musical about mysticism, it's sorely lacking in that intangible kind of charm Minnelli pulled off so beautifully in Meet Me in St. Louis. Perhaps it's impossible to find an actress charismatic enough to be a musical lead, yet believably bland enough to make a convincing Daisy Gamble. (Streisand's Daisy doesn't really make sense. She's supposed to be a drip but she's the most stylish, funny, and interesting person in the film. She's the only one you want to spend any time with.) Hard to feel that the legendarily meticulous Vincente Minnelli had his heart in this one. He was 63 at the time and while making this film his third marriage was breaking up, and his first wife, Judy Garland, had died.

"What Did I Have That I Don't Have?"
Streisand's vocal performance and acting on this song is peerless. I've seen it dozens of times and it always gives me waterworks.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Sure, the two leads have zilch in the chemistry department, and Barbra Streisand pretty much single-handedly gives the film all it has in the way of humor and pep. The film vacillates between feeling like there is too much plot and then not enough; and exactly whose idea of a counter-culture dropout is clean-cut Jack Nicholson with his distractingly mature hairline? It's a romantic comedy that strenuously works to keep the leads apart, one that piles on plot complications and nifty visuals so we don' t really notice that the gorgeous musical score is far more emotive than the story at hand. And yet...On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is a film I find endless delight in. The whimsical plot makes me smile, and I really like Streisand here. I kind of fast forward through most of Montand's scenes, anyway, and it really doesn't matter that any time Streisand is off the screen the film just kind of lies there, inert. It doesn't matter because every few minutes or so, there is the sublime distraction of costumes, sets, and the bliss of getting to hear Streisand sing.

The visual pleasures of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever are considerable

Lane & Lerner's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is generally considered to be a wonderful score in search of a better book. The musical is rarely revived. In 2000, Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth headlined a concert version of the show ("Look ma! No book!"), and in 2011, Harry Connick, Jr. starred in an expensively-mounted Broadway revival that used several of the songs from the film and provocatively reworked the plot so that the character of Daisy Gamble was now a gay male assistant florist named David Gamble who discovers he's reincarnated from a brassy female big-band singer. (A cute idea, but when his character asks the musical question "What Did I Have That I Don't Have?" it seems to me an audience would have to exercise considerable self-control not to want to call out to the stage, "A vagina!") The show lasted for little more than a month.

At left: the film's original "pot head" theatrical release poster. At right: Things are getting desperate. In an effort to draw a younger audience, newspaper ads featured an out-of-character, hippie-fied Barbra. Pic used is a Richard Avedon portrait from a photo shoot for Streisand's 1969 album, "What About Today?"

PERFORMANCES:

If in Funny Girl Barbra Streisand seemed raw, and in Hello Dolly, lost; then in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever she seems more in charge of her talents than ever. And she's remarkably good. When she's helped by the script (as in the crackling first hypnosis scene) she's at the top of her game. At last given a chance to play sexy, in the flashback sequences, she literally wills you to find her beautiful.

The Great Profile

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

Vincente Minnelli was the most painterly of directors, and the visuals he brings to On a Clear Day You Can See Forever are no exception. A feast for the eyes, the vivid period production design and more stylized contemporary sets of John DeCuir elegantly compliment the splendid costumes by Sir Cecil Beaton (period costumes) and Arnold Scaasi (contemporary costumes). 

"I'll have what she's having."

Daisy's Emancipation / Melinda's Emancipation
 Daisy's recognition and acceptance of her reincarnated self is dramatized in the echoing of her costuming

The ultra-modern Arnold Scaasi designs used in the contemporary scenes of  On a Clear Day You Can See Forever provide a striking contrast to Sir Cecil Beaton's lavish19th century wardrobe. This simple little crowd-pleaser was worn by Streisand in a scene deleted from the film. And for those too young to have been around in 1970- no one ever actually wore an outfit like this in public...no matter what drugs they were taking.

For fans of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever who want to get depressed, here are links to sites offering more info on all that was cut from the film.  Just click on the highlighted sentences.

Behind the scenes info on the making of "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever"

YouTube audio (with stills) of the deleted Barbra Streisand / Larry Blyden duet: "Wait 'till We're Sixty-Five"

YouTube audio (with stills) of Jack Nicholson singing "Who Is there Among Us Who Knows?"

If they can restore 1973s Lost Horizon, why not On a Clear Day You Can See Forever ?

THE STUFF OF DREAMS: 

I absolutely love the title song and Streisand's performance of it is stellar. She sings it so beautifully... it still can give me chills. Just crazy about the way Streisand begins the song like it's an idea that gradually starts to take root, then grows, then bursts with an assurance and awareness. If it was Streisand's intention to magnify the "flower" theme of the film and convey a sense of the character of Daisy "growing" into herself, she does a tremendous job of it. It's a lesson on how to put over a song so it's more than just pretty vocalizing...it's a first-class acting performance. Barbra Streisand's rendition of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is for me what I can imagine Somewhere Over the Rainbow is for Garland fans.

Copyright © Ken Anderson