THE STRIPPER 1963

This forgotten little film has long been a favorite of mine and used to show up fairly regularly on late-night television when I was a kid. Until it resurfaced recently on YouTube, I can say it’s easily been 40 years since I last saw this last-gasp effort in Hollywood’s love affair with the works of Faulkner, O’Neill, Williams, & Inge.  

Adapted by Meade Roberts (The Fugitive Kind, Summer & Smoke) from William Inge’s little-known 1959 play A Loss of Roses, and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton, The Planet of the Apes, Sphinx); The Stripper is, like a great many of my favorite films from the '50s—especially those written in the Southern Gothic/Midwest Melodrama tradition—a heavy slice of mordant Americana served up with plenty of lost illusions and broken dreams on the side.

Joanne Woodward as Lila Green

Richard Beymer as Kenny Baird

Claire Trevor as Helen Baird

Robert Webber as Ricky Powers

Shot in somber black and white (then de rigueur for contemplatively downbeat movies), The Stripper is the so-familiar-you’ll-swear-you’ve-seen-it-before story of Lila Green (Woodward); a down-on-her-luck wannabe actress touring with a seedy theatrical troupe (The Great Renaldo & Madame Olga: Magic & Mirth Par Excellence). Abandoned mid-tour in a small Kansas town by her equally seedy boyfriend Ricky (Webber), Lila is forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. Not literal strangers, mind you, for this just happens to be the town where Lila grew up before a Betty Grable look-alike contest provided her with a second-class means of escape to Hollywood. No, the strangers Lila seeks out are merely friends from her past. Friends to whom Lila now appears as gaudy and out of place as a fur coat in July.

Kenny Thinks Lila Is Hot
And indeed, she is, for it's mid-summer in Kansas and Lila flounces about in a leopard fur coat.
Before settling on the grossly misleading The Stripper, other titles considered for this screen adaptation of A Loss of Roses were: Celebration, Woman of Summer, and A Woman in July

Lila secures temporary lodgings with Helen Baird (Trevor), a widow for whom she once babysat in her youth. Helen, now a full-time nurse pulling swing shift as a fault-finding, overprotective mother-hen to her only son Kenny (Beymer). Helen is initially glad to be of assistance to the prodigal cooch dancer, but she begins to doubt the soundness of her philanthropy when it becomes clear that the restless son she has such high hopes for has developed a major infatuation for the glamorous, at least ten-years-older new tenant in stretch pants.

Much in the same way the arrival of a train-hopping drifter shook up the small-town residents in William Inge’s Picnic, the emotional (and sexual) disruption instigated by the intrusion of Lila—a peroxided, emotionally-wounded, aging starlet with a squalid past and a childlike disposition—into the vaguely oedipal Baird household is the source of The Stripper’s central conflict.

For Lila, the return to the birthplace of so many of her unrealized dreams rekindles a desire to reclaim her lost innocence. For Kenny, irresolute in his manhood over failing to fill the idealized shoes of his late father; Lila’s age and superficially worldly charms are like a beacon of maturity. Helen, conflicted in wanting Kenny to grow up and stand on his own two feet, yet prone to clingy exclamations like "You're all I have to live for!" grows concerned when Kenny's intensifying infatuation with Lila turns to mutual attraction. 
Adding fuel to Helen's anxiety that Lila's bad influence will hasten her son's inevitable departure is the simultaneous concern that the flashy older woman will corrupt Kenny's interest in pretty Miriam Caswell (Carol Lynley), their "good girl" (aka, virginal) neighbor. In this environment, everyone seems to be looking to someone else for salvation, rescue, liberation, or redemption.

Carol Lynley as Miriam Caswell

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The Stripper is something of a “Best of” collection of what had become, by 1963, the over-familiar clichés in the Tennessee Williams/William Inge oeuvre (it was Williams’ The Glass Menagerie which inspired Inge to write his first play). Set in the fictional small town of Salinson, Kansas (the same town Kansas-born William Inge chose for his play, Picnic), The Stripper has it all: the emotionally fragile fallen woman; familial discord; small-town provincialism; sexual restlessness; Freudian psychology; and the eternal battle between idealism and truth. And, of course, heat and summer used as metaphors for passion.

Seeing the film again after so many years, it’s so clear to me why I was all over this genre when I was young. First, they were situationally accessible to my limited frame of knowledge and experience. Unlike James Bond movies which took place all over the world, or exotic action adventures featuring acts of derring-do and non-stop danger; these films took place in the familiar, low-tech settings of town and neighborhood. The drama was often operatically over-the-top, yet human-scale enough in that it concerned itself with relationships, family tensions, and the applicable-at-any-age struggle with how our character flaws work to keep happiness at bay. 

Legendary real-life stripper Gypsy Rose Lee as Madam Olga St. Valentine
Louis Nye as Ronnie "The Great Renaldo" Cavendish

On the more “entertaining” side, not only were these films “daring” and “sex-obsessed” in ways suitable to a young person’s comprehension level (aka, all talk and no action), but the main characters were invariably women who could just as well have been gay men. Overwrought, theatrically histrionic gay men. I of course wasn’t aware of it then, but due to the times, Williams and Inge (both closeted gay playwrights during a time when homosexuality was criminalized in most states) were only able to express their truth through their female characters. Thus, their female protagonists were often imbued with a depth and dimensionality lacking in most roles for women written during this period.

As a youngster, the stoic, heteronormative macho leading man never spoke to any reality I knew. But I did recognize parts of myself in the bruised, vulnerable, idealistic outsiders Inge and Williams wrote so empathetically about.

Dreamers
Lila shows Kenny her prized possession: Film clips of her failed Hollywood screen test
 for the 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As much as I enjoy this film, I’m inclined to agree when I encounter reviews labeling this movie “lesser Inge.” The Stripper has a lack of subtlety and obviousness of intent that made me think it was early William Inge (it's a little like an episode from one of those '60s anthology TV programs like Playhouse 90). In reality, it’s one of Inge's late-career career misfires. One of the playwright’s first Broadway flops following a string of unbroken successes starting with Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1945), Come Back Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), and Bus Stop (1955). 

Indeed, as A Loss of Roses signaled the beginning of a reversal trend in Inge’s career, the problematic play has a legacy of misfortune surrounding it rivaling that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Michael J. Pollard as Geoffrey "Jelly" Beamis
Pollard and Webber are the only members of the original Broadway cast to recreate their roles in the film

The first victim was Shirley Booth, who had previously won both a Tony and an Oscar for her work in Inge’s Come Back Little Sheba, and accepted the role in A Loss of Roses when promised the character of Helen would be made more prominent. Alas, Booth wound up quitting the show just days before its Broadway debut for the rumored reason that Inge was shifting the production to favor a Broadway neophyte he had developed a crush on: an actor by the name of Warren Beatty, making his Broadway debut.

The second victim was William Inge himself. For although he had faith in the play and expressed the belief that A Loss of Roses was a “sure thing,” the play opened to disastrous reviews and closed after a mere 25 performances. It was Inge’s first flop, and one that so devastated him, he never had another stage success again.

The third victim was Warren Beatty. For although his performance in the play garnered a Tony Award nomination, the experience was so unpleasant, it is said to be the reason he has never appeared onstage again. On the plus side, Inge's enduring crush on Beatty (when Jane Fonda met Beatty for the first time in New York, she thought he was Inge's boyfriend) gave the young actor a foot-up in Hollywood. He made his film debut in Inge's Splendor in the Grass, and starred in the Inge-penned All Fall Down, a 1962 film with an older woman/younger man theme similar to The Stripper.

Victim number four was 20^th Century Fox production head, Buddy Adler, who, on the strength of Inge's reputation and track record, purchased the rights to A Loss of Roses for a whopping $400,000 (in 1950s dollars, yet!) before it even opened on Broadway. As he told columnist Louella Parsons at the time: “Yes, we paid a big price, but Inge writes only hits. He wrote 'Bus Stop,' 'Picnic,' and 'Dark at the Top of the Stairs.' There were a number of producers trying to get 'A Loss of Roses' so we were lucky to get it.” 

Something's Gotta Give
As she strips, Lila sings the 1954 Johnny Mercer song Fred Astaire introduced in Daddy Long Legs--the movie she unsuccessfully screen-tested for. Ironically, the song is also the title (grammatically cleaned up as Something's Got to Give) of Marilyn Monroe's last film. The Stripper was released a year after Monroe's death in August of 1962, and the movie is loaded with reminders of its originally being a Monroe vehicle.

Victim number five was Fox Studios. Adler purchased A Loss of Roses for then-under contract Marilyn Monroe, and teen heartthrob Pat Boone (!). Both turned the film down. Monroe (who enjoyed great success with the film version of Inge’s Bus Stop in 1956) likely found the Lila character - a stripper with lousy taste in men, who at one time tried to kill herself and was institutionalized - a tad too close to home; while Boone objected on moral grounds, finding the illicit affair between the young man and slightly pathetic stripper all wrong for his image.

Victim number six was actor Richard Beymer. Boosted to leading man stardom after West Side Story (1961), The Stripper jinx apparently hit a bullseye, for this was his last major motion picture.

Finally, victim number 7, Joanne Woodward. An Academy Award winner for The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Woodward retired from the screen not long after marrying Paul Newman and having two children. The Stripper was to be her comeback vehicle, but its DOA performance at the boxoffice got her career reemergence off to a rocky start from which it never fully recovered.

Helen Interprets Kenny's Birthday Gift as a Gesture to Replace his Father
A great many of the unhealthier aspects of the mother-son relationship in
A Loss of Roses were excised when it became The Stripper

PERFORMANCES

While many found fault with Inge’s original play and Meade Roberts' considerably less sordid adaptation, critics were largely in agreement over the quality of Joanne Woodward’s performance. Overcoming a stiff, blonde, cotton candy wig that always appears to hover at least an inch above her scalp, Woodward has some really remarkable moments playing a character who’s part Blanche DuBois and part Charity Hope Valentine.

Looking pretty spectacular in her Travilla wardrobe (Monroe’s designer), Woodward occasionally falls prey to the gimmicky tricks of smart actors trying to play dumb (laying it on a bit thick). But she truly shines in the film’s final scenes and achieves several moments of heartrending poignancy.

"I want my roses back."
Promotional stills of several sequences not in the film suggest the already problematic storyline
of The Stripper underwent a significant amount of post-production editing.
Below, a segment of an 1891 Emily Dickinson poem quoted in the film: 

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us - don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

The rest of the cast is solid, if perhaps let down a bit by a script that doesn't offer supporting characters much beyond making a quick superficial impression. Richard Beymer is good as the juvenile, but never succeeds in getting me to understand Kenny's darker, brooding side. The always-welcome Claire Trevor is a standout as the mother who fills an empty life with overconcern for her nearly-adult son.
Carol Lynley doesn't get much of a chance to be anything but gorgeous in a thankless "girlfriend" role, and there really is far too little of the quirky Michael J. Pollard and the Auntie Mame-ish Gypsy Rose Lee. TV stalwart Robert Webber is convincingly oily.

In spite of the film's sensationalist title, Woodward makes for a very covered-up stripper.
Happily, the same can't be said for her co-star

THE STUFF OF FANTASY 

In all these years I have never forgotten The Stripper's opening, pre-title sequence. It's just that terrific. It promises a level of camp sleaze the movie never delivers, but how can you lose with a movie that opens with a shot of the original, iconic Myra Breckinridge showgirl billboard?

Bus Driver: "We are approaching the world-famous Sunset Strip. Here you will see in the flesh the great names of show business you've only watched on the screen before." 

Tourist #1: "Look! There's Jayne Mansfield!"
Tourist #2: "No it isn't, it's Kim Novak!"

Bus Driver: "No it isn't, lady."
Tourist #1: "Then who is it?"

Bus Driver: "Nobody."

BONUS MATERIAL
"The Stripper" Watch the complete film on YouTube. HERE

The Stripper's sole Oscar nomination was for the costume designs of William Travilla (Valley of the Dolls, Black Widow, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). 

"It's what I want more than anything. More than winning contests or being a movie star,
or anything like that. 'Cause if you know you've got one person who loves and respects you,
then you don't need love from a lot of people, do you?"

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2015