LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR 1977

In hindsight, it seems coincidental and full of foreboding that both Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever were released within months of each other at the tail end of 1977 (October and December, respectively). These films brought a somber, reflective conclusion to a year that began with the release of George Lucas' escapist blockbuster Star Wars.

Diane Keaton as Theresa Dunn

No one could have known it at the time, but Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever sounded the dissonant, disco-beat death-knell tolling the end of the '70s and the demise of the sexual revolution. The looming specter of AIDS only serving to make Looking for Mr. Goodbar's dispiriting linking of sex and death feel positively prescient.
Both of these films embodied attitudes that stood as barbed provocation to the 1970s in general, and the Utopian promise of sexual liberation in particular. The hopeful assurance that drugs, free love, sexual exploration, feminism, group therapy, hedonism, the new morality, and porno-chic were the self-fulfillment remedy for the oppressive restrictiveness of the past. Meanwhile, on a somewhat minor, but no less catastrophic cultural scale, cinematically speaking, the blockbuster success of Star Wars signaled the waning days of major movie studios showing any interest in making mature, challenging films like Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

When, in 1976, I saw Martin Scorsese’s trenchant urban nightmare Taxi Driver, I thought then that I had seen the most depressing film the '70s had to offer. Clearly, I hadn’t reasoned on what 65-year-old writer/director Richard Brooks (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, In Cold Blood) had up his sleeve in bringing Judith Rossner’s controversial 1975 bestseller Looking for Mr. Goodbar to the screen. It was, without a doubt, the feel-bad movie of 1977.

Inspired by the gruesome 1973 real-life murder of New York schoolteacher/singles bar habitué Roseann Quinn, Brooks’ Looking for Mr. Goodbar is part opaque character study, part sociosexual thriller. It chronicles (with provocative moral ambiguity), the confused emancipation/dissociation of Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton): gifted teacher of deaf children by day, by night, pill-popping, singles bar-hopper salving her scars—literal and psychological—through submersion in the twilight world of detached, casual-sex encounters with anonymous, increasingly unsavory partners.

Theresa’s through-the-looking-glass (darkly) journey is largely a reactive one. Her romantic skepticism, a result of an over-idealized fling with an emotionally abusive college professor (Alan Feinstein); her lack of desire for children, a dual response to her sister’s multiple abortions, and her own fear of passing on congenital scoliosis. Her determined need for independence is most assuredly a backlash against the stifling life options proffered by her bellicose father (Richard Kiley) who would have Theresa settle down with a nice Catholic boy, cranking out one baby after another like her kid sister Brigid (Laurie Prange).

That Theresa’s emancipation ultimately takes the form of a paradoxical dual existence—"Saint Theresa by day and swinging Terry by night”—signals not only her unresolved inner conflicts, but underscore a point I think is germane to the appreciation of  Looking for Mr. Goodbar as something more complex and infinitely smarter than a simplistic moral cautionary tale about the dangers awaiting single women in the big, bad city.

It sheds light on the fact that the “New Morality” of the '70s did absolutely nothing to minimize or reconfigure the sexual double-standard. In spite of the newfound freedoms of the era, women were still viewed in terms of Madonna/whore. Their bodies and reproductive rights, open-forum landscapes for religious, politico-social debate; their very independence rendering them more vulnerable than ever as targets of male sexual aggression.
By way of example: most movie critics at the time blamed Theresa's violent fate on her reckless behavior. As though death was a foregone conclusion or some kind of patriarchal retribution for the sexually promiscuous female. Many weighed in on how self-destructive the character was, or how she harbored a death wish, but I don't recall a single critic placing the blame where it belonged: on her violent, mentally unstable rapist/murderer.  That and a homophobic culture that encourages men to loathe anything feminine within themselves, and to gauge their masculinity on a scale of sexual performance and aggressive behavior. 

Teaser ad from The Hollywood Reporter - 1977

When I saw Looking for Mr. Goodbar at the Regency Theater in San Francisco the first weekend of its opening, I was at the time just a sidelines observer to the sexual revolution. A 20-year-old virgin attending college in one of the most progressive cities in the world; I neither drank nor smoked, didn’t partake of drugs, and had yet to set foot in a disco. But the era was so alive and abuzz with change, excitement, and energy, even a Catholic-reared, late-bloomer like me walked around in a near-constant haze of sensual distraction. Honestly, San Francisco in the '70s was so stimulating an environment, you would have sworn the city's fog was at least 50% amyl nitrate.

Richard Gere as Tony Lo Porto

That being said, I think it was precisely my sidelines status that contributed to my taking note of signs of battle fatigue within the sexual revolution. What had started out as a cultural movement of joy and self-discovery had, by 1977, transmogrified into something quite different. The sexual revolution had become a commoditized, cynically co-opted wave of sex merchandising and lifestyle branding that exposed the unspoken lie behind the rhetoric of sexual freedom and liberation. The lie (or perhaps, the naïve hope) being that sex was not intimacy, human physical contact bore no psychological or spiritual consequence, and that we as humans were not profoundly affected by its lack. What led me to this conclusion was the odd phenomenon of getting a good look at the faces of all the high-profile hedonists of my generation. John Holmes, Marilyn Chambers, Hugh Hefner, Linda Lovelace...they all looked like hell. The average 1970s swinger, toward the end of the decade, tended to look like a hollowed-out pod person.

Surely, something beyond alcohol and drug use accounted for the glazed, dead eyes staring out from all those glossy sex magazines like Playboy, Viva, and Hustler. Was there a reason suburban swingers always looked so vacant and debauched? Why was it, whenever I passed by the doors of singles bars, none of the clientele ever looked particularly happy? If the new morality was as joyous and life-affirming as the pop culture media hype kept assuring me, why did its practitioners look so cheerless?
Something told me that the enraptured lyrics (and moans) of all those disco songs weren't telling the whole story.

The '70s: The era of sexual revolution or dehumanization?
Sex was more visible, but attitudes were still mired in sin, shame, and debasement

Although I hadn’t yet read the book, I knew enough about Looking for Mr. Goodbar and the incident that inspired it to be excited by the prospect of a contemporary film attempting to capture a cultural climate teeming with contrasts and contradictions. 

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

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

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

When the relatively hang-loose permissiveness of the late '60s evolved into the self-conscious hedonism of the mid-'70s, it wasn’t difficult to detect a hint of desperation behind disco music’s over-emphatic exuberance. The search for fulfillment through sensual expression ofttimes gave off the sense of a prowl or hunt...but for what? With all the rampant drug and alcohol use, had sexual liberation, once thought to be the gateway to honest and open human interaction, become just another means of escaping reality? To numb the pain of existence? To shelter our darker demons? To create a greater distance between people? 

Looking for Mr. Goodbar could have been subtitled: The Pleasure Paradox
The Pleasure Paradox is the belief that happiness, when pursued 
(that elusive Mr. Goodbar), remains ever beyond one's grasp 

Behind Looking for Mr. Goodbar's topicality and incendiary commingling of sex, guilt, and religion which so distracted critics at the time, the film is both artful and honest in its attempt to address many of the above-stated issues. More so than any film I've yet to see. Looking for Mr. Goodbar explores the fissures that began to show in the “If it feels good, do it” façade of the new morality. Tackling simultaneously: feminism, religious hypocrisy, the sexual double-standard, and America’s intractable linking of sex and violence.

When I first saw Looking for Mr. Goodbar, I knew right away it was something special. From the first saxophone strains initiating that gloriously unsettling title sequence, I was hooked. (The title sequence is like a short film in and of itself. It's a flowing montage of gritty black and white still shots capturing the vaguely dangerous allure of singles bars.)
The entire cast, Diane Keaton especially, makes something poignant and frighteningly real out of a story begging for sensationalism. Director Richard Brooks keeps to a palette motif of lights and darks; contrasting and paralleling the lighter scenes at the Dunn household (pitched to operatic levels) with the darkness of the emotional violence lurking on the sidelines of Theresa's solitary, but not lonely, independent life.

Richard Kiley as Theresa's no-patience-for-imperfections father

The jarring use of sound and William Fraker's dark, dark, dark cinematography (I initially thought it was shot by Gordon Willis) contribute to making Looking for Mr. Goodbar one of the most powerful movies of the '70s. And make no mistake about it, this movie scared the bejesus out of me. The book was so popular, even if you hadn't read it you knew how it was going to end; but knowing is not the same as being prepared. The harrowing, near-unwatchable concluding moments of Looking for Mr. Goodbar left me feeling shell-shocked. That opening weekend, I still believe the reason I  remained in the theater to watch it a second time was simply because I was just too stunned to move out of my seat.

Not everyone’s cup of tea for any number of reasons, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (dubbed Mr. Goodbarf by many left queasy by the film's violence) is for me an example of American self-reflective cinema at its best. Not the least because it’s an adult film that takes the risk of allowing itself to be misunderstood. I like that it doesn’t spell everything out and tell you how you should feel or react. It has a point of view and even an agenda, but it doesn't invite you to agree with it so much as it encourages you to just think about it. Some people dismiss the film as simplistic, others find it to be moralizing and misogynistic, and some just don't care for it because the topic is too depressing and sordid. No matter what people ultimately think, few find it to be forgettable. 

William Atherton as James (here washing the very knife that will play a role in the film's hellish denouement), the slightly creepy "nice guy" whose resentful response to being moved into the friend zone is to behave in an aggressive,  possessively entitled manner every bit as unstable as the woman-hating "bad boys" he thinks he's superior to.
 Sound familiar?

PERFORMANCES

Because there were so many interesting actresses around in the '70s, it’s easy for me to forget that the decade was largely a boys’ club devoted to buddy movies and misunderstood anti-heroes. By way of illustration, when the time came to adapt Rossner’s woman-centric bestseller to the screen, only male directors were considered: Bernardo Bertolucci, Bob Fosse (I shudder at the thought), Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, and Roman Polanski.

LeVar Burton as Cap Jackson
Looking for Mr. Goodbar marked the feature film debut of Burton, who became an overnight household name when the landmark miniseries, Roots aired earlier in the year

Closer to the reality of the '70s is that on those rare occasions when an actress was called upon to play something other than the girlfriend or male support system (to get Goodbar, Keaton turned down the largely thankless Julie Christie role in Heaven Can Wait), the characters were so well-written (Katharine Ross–The Stepford Wives) and performances so superb (Jane Fonda–Klute), their prominence in my memory contradicts their actual scarcity. 

Looking for Mr. Goodbar is unequivocally my all-time favorite Diane Keaton movie. I actually think it’s the best work of her career. But, apropos of the dark/light contrasts of the Theresa Dunn character herself, I don’t think I would have fully appreciated her work here were it not for my having previously seen her in Annie Hall (released the same year). Onscreen almost constantly, Keaton's performance here is astonishingly raw.
The range and depth of her characterization appear simultaneously natural and going-for-broke risk-taking. As screen heroines go (anti-heroine?) Keaton's Theresa Dunn is a true original; I've never seen a character like her in a film before or since. She's dimensional, complex, contradictory, funny, and operates under her own agency. For my money, Diane Keaton is simply staggering and was a very inspired choice for the part. It really makes you wish the actress had pursued more dramatic roles.

Alan Feinstein as Professor Martin Engle

As for the character itself, I've always considered Theresa Dunn to be '70s cinema’s first anti-heroine: a female sexual outlaw and cultural nonconformist. And, like all rebels, she’s not always likable, smart, or rational–just a paradoxical, vulnerable human being struggling to make sense of the contradictions of her nature, deciding for herself what she wants to be, and accepting the risks (which, as it turns out, are considerable in our culture of normalized female-directed aggression) of choosing to live life on her own terms.
Like a great many of her male counterparts in '70s cinema (portrayed by the likes of Richard Benjamin, Jack Nicholson, and Dustin Hoffman), Keaton's character delves into sex and drugs in a quest for self-discovery. And for once a woman’s exploration of her sexuality is presented in a manner both perceptive and honest enough to allow for the enjoyment of no-strings sex for its purely sensual appeal and the addictive nature of its ability to dull existential pain. 

"Get this into one of your two heads, the one that can think...I am my own girl! I belong to me!"

Controversial and prone to dividing critics and fans alike into "love it/loathe it" camps exclusively, I think the fact that Looking for Mr. Goodbar is such a downer of a film is the reason it never received the credit it deserved for the rather groundbreaking sincerity and seriousness with which it approached female sexuality. Anyone coming to Goodbar hoping for gauzy, soft-core porn cloaked in faux-feminist empowerment rhetoric (a la the popular Emmanuelle franchise) was in for a shock. Similarly, those who sought to see an allegory of a bad girl punished for her sins were left wanting, as well.

If screenwriter Brooks is guilty of anything, it's in being too honest. Taking a tack different from the book, the Theresa of the film is not the self-loathing masochist with a death-wish Judith Rossner wrote about (and so many critics longed for in order to help explain away their discomfort with the story's theme). She is simply a flawed, perhaps emotionally damaged woman who pays dearly for making one too many bad choices. Incidentally, Rossner was said to have been displeased with the film, finding Keaton's character too "happy."

Because things end badly for the character of Theresa, Looking for Mr. Goodbar was seen by many as an anti-feminist cautionary tale for single women. But I challenge that point of view as one laid at the feet of the viewer, not the film itself. I mean, things ended very badly for Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, but I don’t recall anyone calling that film a cautionary tale for hippie drug dealers.

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

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I only got around to reading Looking for Mr. Goodbar two years ago, an experience which left me appreciating even more what Richard Brooks' skill as a screenwriter (his first career) brought to the film version. To me, his work is a vast improvement over the source material, which I found too quick to place a big, glaring bullseye on Theresa's back. Richard Brooks, when faced with the challenge of making the character more sympathetic (aka, real) and extracting suspense from a story whose ending most everyone already knows, builds tension through the stylized application of a motif that's almost Biblical in its emphasis on the argument of free will vs the predeterminism of fate.

Brooks cannily uses innocuous events in the "light" parts of Theresa's life (as a teacher) to foreshadow the progressively violent trend of her "dark" nocturnal pursuits.

In assisting a deaf child to feel the forming of a word, Theresa has the girl hold her throat. A choking image that will be reenacted (horrifically) later. 

Asked to come up with words that will produce enough air to move a feather, a child repeats the word "punch." When asked to come up with a less violent word, he responds with repeated shouts of "help!"

Having overslept due to a night of partying, Theresa is greeted by an angry classroom. On the board is written, "You don't care!" The phrase: an inadvertent commentary on her desire for emotional disengagement in her private life. The death-mask skull: an ominous foreshadowing of the film's final image.

At the time, so much was made of Theresa's "double life" (warmhearted teacher of deaf children by day / emotionally detached bar-hopper by night) as being a sure sign of her schizophrenic, self-destructive nature. A hetero-normative, gender-based double standard rearing its head once again. Looked at from a feminist or LGBTQ perspective, many individuals in the '70s, particularly gay people, lived lives of duality. Forced to behave one way during the day to keep their jobs, only free to be themselves on weekends or in the evenings at bars and clubs. From this point of view, Theresa's duality is less an indicator of a conflicted sexuality than it is representative of our culture's prudish double standards. Society consistently reveals its inability to recognize self-identified female sexuality beyond the confines of partnered/male validation (boyfriend, husband).

A scene reflective of our culture's inability to visualize women's agency outside the scope of their relationship to men: Theresa has difficulty convincing a one-night stand that her desire for him to leave is born of a personal choice. Instead, he's convinced she's awaiting the arrival of a boyfriend or husband. This is similar to when a man comes on to a woman, ignoring her personal claim of not being interested. She has to say, "I have a boyfriend," for it to be valid. Men are traditionally raised to respect other men's "property"--they're not often raised to respect a woman's personal choices.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

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

Louis CK (I know, I know)

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

Stand-up comic 

"Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them."  

Margaret Atwood

Theresa's flights of fantasy reflect her conflicted self-identity

Looking for Mr. Goodbar was released decades before Sex and the City, so there were few cultural paradigms in place through which audiences could process the notion of a sexually active single woman living alone in a metropolitan city without resorting to blame-the-victim thinking and terminology. In discussing the film and Keaton's character, it was the rare reviewer who didn't resort to words like self-loathing, nymphomaniacal, self-destructive, desperate, mentally ill, masochistic, unstable, depressive. 
The whole thing was quite ironic: while calling out Richard Brooks for making a morally reactionary sexual thriller, movie critics couldn't stop themselves from reaching the conclusion that promiscuity, drugs, and drinking were a certain fast-track to death for a single woman. A point which failed to acknowledge that promiscuity, drugs, and drinking were cornerstones for a great many male coming-of-age films of the era, but nobody saw anything fatalistic in men engaging in such "boys will be boys" behavior.

Tom Berenger as Gary

On a similar note, Goodbar came out long before the concept of rape culture, so at no time could one find a journalist willing to devote even a paragraph to the castigation of the brutish, violent behavior of the men in the film. Nor could you find articles addressing our normalized attitudes on the matter of rape and other forms of female-directed aggression in the age of sexual permissiveness. All I recall reading were a lot of human-interest articles about parents taking their daughters to see the film as a means (I can only suppose) of terrorizing them into celibacy. Of course, there were no stories about sons being taken to the film by their parents to teach them not to rape and abuse women.

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

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2014

THE FOUNTAINHEAD 1949

When it comes to The Fountainhead, I wish there was a way for me to return my mind back to the state of blissful ignorance I enjoyed the first time I saw this amazing film. That was many years ago. Back when The Fountainhead’s chief attractions for me were director King Vidor’s overripe, purple-prose approach to the material―a style always threatening to soar even more over-the-top than his notorious sex-and-sand opus, Duel in the Sun (1946)―and the overheated, over-emphatic screenplay by famed author, Ayn Rand, adapted from her hefty novel.

The plot of The Fountainhead: ruggedly individualistic architect Howard Roarke (Gary Cooper, still sexy, but looking a tad careworn at 47) doing battle against a world of cartoonishly single-minded villains hell-bent on commodifying his genius— was always less interesting than its presentation. What I took delight in was the dramatic persuasiveness of The Fountainhead applying a patently theatrical and artificial method of acting to a script of arch, over-embellished dialog, all in service of an extravagantly overwrought post-German Expressionist visual style. Ayn Rand’s verbose, almost feverishly nonsensical novel resisted any kind of realistic adaptation.  King Vidor, in never once rooting the film in any kind of recognizable reality, managed to fashion an compellingly excessive film that served her work well.

Gary Cooper as Howard Roark

Patricia Neal as Dominique Francon

Raymond Massey as Gail Wynand

Robert Douglas as Ellsworth Toohey

As a dyed-in-the-wool visual aesthete whose lifelong relationship with film has been a battle with the influence of style over substance; I’m aware that my fondness for The Fountainhead has little to do with a sober assessment of its merits and faults. I’m nuts about the movie chiefly because it’s so visually striking and intoxicatingly stylized. I respond on an almost visceral level to how dazzling it is to look at, and I marvel at how closely the performances, in all their profound solemnity, hew so closely to that mannered, posturing style so expertly played for laughs in those old Carol Burnett Show movie spoofs. Indeed, in all of the areas where The Fountainhead seems to overplay its hand (it makes its points early and easily, then goes on to reiterate those same points, ad nauseum, scene after scene) I find I don’t fault the film so much as chalk it up to a particular type of broad-strokes, post-war American filmmaking.

The window of the past can do that…things you’d find unforgivably false in a film today look perfectly acceptable in a black & white film from the late '40s.

 Examples of The Fountainhead's breathtaking cinematography (Robert Burks) and art direction (Edward Carrere).

Well, that’s how things started for me and how things remained for some time. Unfamiliar with Ayn Rand or her philosophy (in any direct way), I was content to revel in The Fountainhead’s overwrought romantic melodrama and ravishing imagery with nary a thought given to its portentous themes. Themes that, even as a callow youth, struck me as slightly sophomoric.

When, many years later, I finally got around to reading The Fountainhead, I was actually surprised at what a windy polemic against Collectivism it was. I enjoyed the novel’s descriptive passages very much, and welcomed the fleshing out of the slim characterizations of the film, but its central plot was almost buried below a lot of ideological redundancies. It was nevertheless a book I enjoyed immensely, and, intrigued by Rand’s penchant for narrative overkill, I ventured forth and tackled her last and most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged. Bad move.

 I won’t turn this post into a diatribe against Objectivism or the unfortunate adoption of Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s philosophies by America’s Tea Party Movement. But let’s just say that when it came to learning more about Ayn Rand’s philosophical beliefs, more was decidedly less.

Flirting with Fascism
Ayn Rand liked to make it easy to identify the heroes and villains.
The villains have weak, effete names like Ellsworth Toohey, and are prone to striking 
dictatorial poses at the slightest provocation

  

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Before I had read The Fountainhead, it never crossed my mind that the film adaptation was, in some ways, little more than a visual-aid lecture on Objectivism. I just thought it was a great-looking movie saddled with an over-obvious, poorly-written screenplay. In viewing the film from Rand’s perspective, I can well imagine why she despised it; the power of King Vidor’s images overwhelm her words. 

And it's a good thing, too, for The Fountainhead is a real “movie lover”s movie. And by that I don’t mean lovers of good film; I mean folks who love the stylized artificiality of film. Realism in film has its place, but films that attempt to speak to us through metaphor or symbolism (like Charles Laughton’s The Night of The Hunter) benefit greatly from an overabundance of cinematic stylization. The Fountainhead is such a film. It’s full of gorgeous cinematography; sumptuous sets; movie stars who look like movie stars; fabulous costumes, and soap opera emotions. That none of it bears the slightest resemblance to human life as we know it only adds to its charm. 

The Fountainhead is one of those movies where people carry on entire conversations without ever looking directly at one another. Here, Patricia Neal assumes a familiar pose (looking off into the distance) while Raymond Massey and Gary Cooper try in vain to get her attention.

PERFORMANCES

I’ve always liked Patricia Neal. Her unadorned earthiness in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963) were the best things about those films. In a sea of lacquered, blonde bombshells, Neal was a home-grown Anna Magnani reminding us that sex appeal didn’t require a bullet bra and the disavowal of intelligence. Familiar only with latter-day Neal, imagine my surprise in seeing her at 22, given the full Hollywood-glam treatment in The Fountainhead, her second film. I had no idea she could be so stunning.

Cast as Dominique Francon The Fountainhead’s sole female character (was a time you’d have to open a novel by Sidney Sheldon or Jackie Collins to find a name like that), Neal is first seen heaving a Greek statue out of the window of her high-rise apartment because, “I wanted to destroy it rather than let it be part of a world where beauty and genius and greatness have no chance!”

And if you think there’s not an actress on earth who can pull off dialog like that, well, you’re right. It’s just the first of several scenes where Neal strives mightily against some of the strangest human dialogue ever committed to page. She’s not always successful, but she’s never less than fascinating to watch. Juggling numerous lovers and hard-to-fathom-motives, she manages to be glacially aloof and sexually agitated at the same time. 

Dominique Francon is a woman of high ideals who, before finding her spiritual equal in the noble Howard Roark, feels frustrated at having to live in a world that worships mediocrity. She vents her frustration by engaging in behavior favored by smart and successful women to this day: she intentionally becomes involved with inferior men. 

Her fiancé, the weak-willed Peter Keating, she chose because “He was the most safely unimportant person I could find.” She later weds hack newspaperman Gail Wynand to make good on her promise, “If I ever decide to punish myself for some terrible guilt, I’ll marry you.” 

Dominique is nothing if not a gal with a few issues she needs to work out.

Obsessing over Howard Roark's drill

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Shave off all the whiskers and fluff from Rand’s one-sided proselyting. and The Fountainhead is a pretty satisfying triangular love story with a few interesting things to say about society. The rather unconventional romance between Dominique and Howard (controversially incited in the novel by an off-putting rape, but, thanks to the usual stylistic obfuscation of sex in Production Code-era Hollywood, comes off in the film as the usual yes/no, male/female roundelay) is lent credence by the palpable chemistry between real-life lovers Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.

The rather salient points made by Rand about the dangers of a society committed to the lowest common denominator (are you listening Michael Bay, Vin Diesel, and Adam Sandler?) lack the bite they might have due to the deck being so heavily stacked on the side of Roark and his philosophy. The story tilts so far in his favor there's almost no real conflict. Indeed, Gary Cooper (not the most expressive actor when it comes to dialog) is asked to reiterate his character’s position so often that it creates the effect of someone trying to convince himself of an argument, not others.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Living in Los Angeles, a city of agonizingly random architectural design, I can identify with all the heated discussions on design that take place in The Fountainhead.  Indeed, in establishing an analogical relationship to architecture and any creative endeavor which must struggle to maintain its personal integrity in the face of public opinion, The Fountainhead is at its most successful. In this age when individuals justify the most heinous points-of-view with the claim “I’m not the only one that feels this way!” (as if that was ever a gauge of honor), and when widespread ignorance is proudly defended as anti-intellectual-elitism, The Fountainhead should feel more relevant than ever. Unfortunately, Ayn Rand can’t seem to get out of her own way long enough to let the points she wishes to make stand on their own merits of logic. Like the character of Ellsworth Toohey, who feels he has to tell the public what to think, Rand doesn’t trust the viewer to weigh the issues of Objectivism for themselves. Rand's fondness for words fails to let the medium of film do what it does best; evoke, not explain. Rand's handling of her own work is all-too-obvious. When I say The Fountainhead is black and white, I’m not just referring to the cinematography.

Ayn Rand wasn't fond of the architectural designs art director Edward Carrere used in the film. She wanted the buildings to reflect the works of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Watching the film today, it takes considerable effort to get my mind to relax and just let the movie entertain me as it did in the past. It feels like I spend the first ten minutes or so just trying to blot out the sermonizing. Mercifully, if I allow myself to focus on the sumptuous Max Steiner score (Gone With the Wind, Casablanca), and sink into Robert Burks’ rapturous cinematography (Vertigo, North by Northwest), pretty soon I’m back where I want to be. No longer a postulate at the lectern of Objectivism, just a movie fan enjoying a staggeringly gorgeous film.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING 1972

"She asked where he lived. 'Second to the right,' said Peter, 

'and then straight on till morning.'"

Peter Pan   J.M. Barrie

On the DVD commentary for Hammer Film’s Straight on Till Morning, British actress Rita Tushingham speaks of having been saddled with the image and moniker of “ugly duckling” since making her film debut as Jo in Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1962). A role the inexperienced 18-year-old won after answering a brazenly forthright newspaper casting ad seeking an “ugly unknown” to star in Richardson’s forthcoming film adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s groundbreaking 1958 play.

A Taste of Honey, while winning Tushingham a crateload of awards (BAFTA, Golden Globe, Cannes Film Festival) and overnight stardom, also branded the actress with the persistent screen persona of being the common-touch antithesis to the Julie Christies, Judy Geesons, and sexy dolly birds of the ‘60s New Wave in British cinema. Whether assaying roles tackling kitchen-sink drama: The Leather Boys (1964), the sexual revolution: The Knack….and How to Get It (1965), the swinging London scene: Smashing Time (1967), or the international market: Doctor Zhivago (1965); Rita Tushingham's large eyes and unconventional beauty inevitably figured significantly in defining her characters.

Rita Tushingham as Brenda "Wendy" Thompson

Shane Briant as Clive "Peter" Price

Katya Wyeth as Caroline

Clair Kelly as Margo Thompson

A critic’s darling regarded as a serious actress with a flair for absurdist comedy, Tushingham had never been approached by Britain’s independent Hammer Films (“My teeth weren’t long enough,” she jokes, in reference to the company’s bread-and-butter staple of vampire films) prior to producer Michael Carreras—pivotal in the studio’s ultimately unprofitable move toward expanding Hammer’s image beyond color-saturated Gothic—coming to her with a proposal from playwright John Peacock (Children of the Wolf - 1971) to write an original screenplay especially for her to be directed by Peter Collinson (The Italian Job – 1969).

The collaboration resulted in Straight on Till Morning, an unorthodox, character-driven psychological thriller that’s a very grim fairy tale about a naïve and disturbed young woman with a Wendy Complex drawn to a psychotic Prince Charming lethally suffering from Peter Pan Syndrome. While the film represented a departure for Tushingham in terms of genre, the working class, socially-awkward character she plays feels a deliberate composite of many of the roles she’d played before.

At this point in her career, Straight on Till Morning represented at least the
fourth film in which Rita Tushingham portrayed an unsophisticated character
who moves from Northern England to find a life for herself in London

Brenda (Tushingham) is a timid young librarian sharing a drab flat in a particularly dreary section of Liverpool with her widowed mother. It's established early on that Brenda is a fantasist who retreats from reality by writing fairy tales about a beautiful princess named Rosalba who lives in a magical kingdom with a handsome prince. Though ostensibly children’s stories she hopes one day to publish, these fairy tales are actually Brenda’s escape-from-reality fantasies of the life she envisions for herself. 

A life she peruses with avid, if misguided, fervor after one day quitting her job and informing her mother she is pregnant and moving to London to find a man to take care of her and her unborn baby. It’s a lie, of course, as the withdrawn Brenda is a virgin. But the part about going to London to find a father for her baby is accurate, if deceptively worded: in truth, she’s going to London in search of a man to have a baby with.

Tom Bell as Jimmy Lindsay

And indeed, after acquiring a tiny apartment and landing a job at a trendy boutique (where she’s squirreled away, out of sight, in the wrapping department), Brenda plunges headlong into an indiscriminate, ultimately fruitless search for a man. Due to her method of flirtation...approaching sundry men on the street and greeting them with a simple “Hello!” and nothing else....Tushingham comes across as something of am oversized Flicker Farkel, the hyper-friendly, monosyllabic little girl Ruth Buzzi portrayed on Laugh-In.

Brenda’s prospects improve briefly when she jumps at the news of pretty co-worker Caroline (Katya Wyeth) looking for someone to share her well-trodden apartment (“She’s man mad! Non-stop men and parties”). Unfortunately, soon after moving in it becomes readily apparent that if Brenda’s own unfiltered desperation and clumsy social skills don’t already sabotage her chances with the guys, then the competition from her stunning roommate most certainly will. 

James Bolam as Joey

After rapidly losing a potential suitor to her roommate (in Brenda's mind, anyway…the crass, unappealing fellow she sets her sites on never once treated her with anything other than bored indifference) a dejected Brenda salves her sorrows with a late-night walk and comes upon a scruffy-looking dog who’s got away from his owner. Upon catching sight of the dog’s owner—a tall, impossibly blond, strikingly handsome gentleman possessed of the androgynous beauty of a fairy tale prince—Brenda does what anyone would do under the circumstances: kidnap the dog, bathe it, and, using its tag as a guide, contrive a face-to-face meeting with the owner under the guise of returning the "lost" dog.

But we have seen that these two have met before. We have been made privy to the fact that they are both childlike dreamers who retreat into nursery rhymes and fairy stories while looking for magic. So, when we learn that the dog’s name is Tinker, the young man calls himself Peter (Shane Briant), and that he wishes to call Brenda by the name of Wendy and have her move in and take care of him …we know at once that each has found what they have been looking for.

Which isn’t exactly the same thing as finding what they want.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

As a teen I always enjoyed the horror anthology movies released by Britain's Amicus Films (The House That Dripped Blood, Tales from the Crypt, Tales That Witness Madness, and Asylum) because they were contemporary, colorful, and, like the horror comic books I read as a kid, the scares they provided were of the fun, creepy type…not disturbing.

These films always played at the Embassy Theater on San Francisco’s Market Street on some low-budget double-bill, and so always had about them the air of grindhouse. Never much a fan of gothic horror, I largely avoided Hammer films. which seemed to my young mind to be the British answer to American-International: the US independent studio that made a name for itself by supplying a steady stream of cut-rate biker and beach flicks to the underserved youth market. 

However, when Hammer Films (struggling financially for survival in the early '70s) began experimenting with suspense thrillers in a way that resembled the Amicus films, my interest was peaked. Abandoning--for a time, anyway--the vampires, mummies, and Frankenstein monsters for psychological horror, the contemporary setting and departure from the norm that Straight on Till Morning represents is precisely why I found it so fascinating.

"And three days later the Princess Rosalba was married to the prince of princes who
would love her for all time. And they lived happily ever after."

Fairy tales have always been a great deal darker and more horrifying than their Disney adaptations would have us believe. John Peacock's original screenplay for Straight on Till Morning employs the violence and cruelty of classic fairy tales to spin a dark fable that serves as a warped commentary on the role physical beauty tends to play in the stories written for children.

Fairy tale tradition has it that all evil people are ugly, their villainous hearts manifest in their exteriors in the form of witches, hags, ogres, and monsters. By the same token, all good and happy people in fairy tales are beautiful. Glinda's explanation to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz that "Only bad witches are ugly," is pretty much broad strokes shorthand for how things go in fairy tales. 

But by way of a narrative sleight of hand that must prove confusing to the very young, fairy tales simultaneously like to promote the notion that even with all those externally beautiful princes and princesses running around, all true beauty comes from within, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and  all that glitters is not gold. A happy heart and loving soul makes everyone beautiful on the outside, and sometimes, beneath the unprepossessing exterior of a beast, frog, or ugly duckling can flow a stream of inner beauty just waiting for the kiss of love to allow it to emerge.

Brenda Beautifies Tinker(bell)

Straight on Till Morning uses this fairy tale idealism as a foundation for a psychological thriller that proposes nightmare consequences as the price paid for the avoidance of reality and retreating into worlds of illusion.
Clive is the childlike prince, loved and admired only for his looks, who comes to loathe his beauty—and in turn, all beauty—because of what beauty has done to him...left him lonely, unloved, and uncared for. Brenda is the even more naive and childlike swan princess who dreams of finding happiness with a prince whom she can love, who will love her in return, and with whom she can have a baby. Her wish is that they’ll live happily ever after in a magic kingdom of gold. But the swan princess is under an enchantment that makes everyone who looks at her only see an ugly duckling. In her loneliness, she ceases to believe herself capable of being loved, and in turn focuses all her energies on finding someone (a prince, a baby) to give love to.

Wendy Keeps Peter Happy By Telling Him Stories 

The dark twist of Straight on Till Morning is that Clive and Brenda are actually oddly, perversely well-suited to one another. But their relationship proves to be a collision of fantasies, not a union. Brenda’s fantasy, while idealized, is at least rooted in the grow-up world of romantic love and sex. Clive, while finding Brenda unpretty and therefore someone he can love, wants only a mother; someone who will take care of him, allow him to forever remain a child, and has no desire for him because of his appearance.

When Brenda agrees to move with Clive and be the platonic Wendy to his Peter Pan living together in the isolated Neverland of his apartment, she does so on the strength of his vague promise (“We shall see…”) that he will be the father of the baby she so desperately wants.
Clearly, both of these individuals are deeply disturbed, but it is Clive who has the homicidally dark past that makes us worry for Brenda’s safety when at last she grows frustrated with their arrangement and assumes things will improve if she can only make herself beautiful.

Pretty For You
Brenda's fatal mistake is assuming no one could love her as she is

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Straight on Till Morning is an original and effectively creepy thriller loaded with strong performances, a terrific (if a tad dated) look, and many good ideas and intriguing themes. But I’d be lying if I said they’re all given the opportunity to be fully realized. Part of the problem is with the script, which seems to have perhaps too many irons in the fire and thus suffers on occasion from jarring, dissonant shifts in tone. Some of the problem is to be found in Peter Collinson’s direction.
His extensive use of close-ups proves marvelously personal and intimate (and feels wholly unnerving after a while) and makes clever, extensive use of crosscutting and flashbacks to underscore themes. But—and this may be due to my personal fondness for Rita Tushingham as an actress—I think he severely miscalculates the depth of Tushingham’s sympathetic appeal, and thus at times, the film feels unduly harsh on her pitiable character (her beauty makeover is horrific). Indeed, I’d wager that the film’s poor reception and dismissed reputation is related at least in part to the film’s overall unpleasantness and irredeemably bleak vision of mankind. 

In an extreme departure for Hammer Films, the visual style of Straight on Till Morning is strongly redolent of late '60s experimental movies. As the camera follows several concurrent stories, characters who will formally meet later in the film are shown intersecting (often colliding) in early scenes. Throughout the film dialogue and inner thoughts are accompanied by contradicting or ironic imagery reflective of their pasts or their tenuous grasp of reality.
Since I've seen the film so often, I've become aware that several scenes visually echo and mirror one another as well. For example, Brenda's roommate Caroline appears in two pivotal sequences in which her seduction of a man ends in having a cataclysmic effect on Brenda's life. Both scenes are preceded by echoing images (the poised cup and unbroken gaze) where Caroline exhibits a sexual directness completely alien to Brenda.
As a side note, I like that the character of Caroline, whose form of beauty usually accompanies a bitchy personality in these kinds of film, turns out to be one of the most compassionate and unselfish.

Peter and Wendy Grow Up

PERFORMANCES
Because I think Rita Tushingham has an absolutely fabulous face, it takes a while to get used to everyone in the film taking it as a given that she is plain and unattractive. (She does, however, sport a doozy of a '70s hairdo that rivals Susannah York's in 1972s X, Y and Zee for long/short schizophrenia). An engagingly natural and appealing actress I've liked since first seeing her in A Taste of Honey,  Tushingham's participation is the main reason I was drawn to this film I'd somehow never heard of until about two years ago.

Jazz singer Annie Ross appears briefly as one of the many blowsy mother figures (make that Sugar Momma figures) in Clive's psychotic past. Ross was the singing voice for Ingrid Thulin in Salon Kitty (1976) and dubbed Britt Ekland dialogue in The Wicker Man (1973). She sings and wrote the music for this film's title tune, screenwriter John Peacock contributing the lyrics.

I've read reviews of Straight on Till Morning that simply describe the character of Brenda as timid and withdrawn...no mention of her being a seriously unbalanced woman. This, I think, is Tushigham's triumph. She inhabits her character so truthfully, you accept the character's vision of herself (Brenda doesn't see herself as deluded or disturbed). Shane Briant gives Tushingham a run for her money in the distracting hairdo sweepstakes (those pouffy '70s hairstyles made real hair look like wigs) but is happily on course when it comes to his performance. He's really quite good as the haunted boy/man, particularly near the end when he's able to somehow plumb the sympathetic depths of an absolute monster.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I have no memory of when Straight on Till Morning hit the theaters, but I've read that it was released on a double-bill with Hammer's Fear in the Night, a nifty thriller that pairs Judy Geeson with Joan Collins doing her patented Alexis Colby bitch shtick.
With big studios getting into the horror market with polished projects like The Mephisto Waltz (1971) Straight on Till Morning was one of a crop of films released by Hammer in the early '70s hoping to compete. Unfortunately, it was an outright flop and cited as one of the against-type releases that hastened Hammer Studios' ultimate demise (the studio's final production was The Lady Vanishes - 1979).

Which is too bad, really, because I really liked the '60s vibe of this '70s movie. All brown tones and eye-catching camerawork. As thrillers go, it's plenty eventful enough for me (in fact, I wouldn't have minded if a couple of the more unpleasant scenes were shorter or excised entirely) but fans of the genre may find it slow going. I appreciated the film's deliberate pacing, finding the time spent on developing the characters allowed both for the opportunity to savor the strong performances and ample time to cover your eyes once the screaming starts.

BONUS MATERIAL
Although Rita Tushingham has expressed little fondness for Straight on Till Morning, that didn't stop her from appearing the following year in another John Peacock-penned thriller with a fairy tale theme (and playing yet another repressed librarian). This time for an episode of the BBC-TV anthology series, Armchair Theater.

Rita Tushingham as Grace in Little Red Riding Hood  1973

This essay is an entry in The 2nd Great Hammer-Amicus Blogathon hosted by Cinematic Catharsis & Realweegiemidget Reviews. Check out the links to read about more films!

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2019