THE GRASSHOPPER 1970

I first saw The Grasshopper in 1979 at Filmex, the now-defunct Los Angeles Film Festival, at a special screening titled "Underrated American Films" (an event that also introduced me to Robert Altman’s masterpiece 3 Women, and was hosted, if memory serves, by Roger Ebert). Seeing The Grasshopper in a packed theater of film enthusiasts was the best possible way to see a film that, when initially released, was sold as an exploitation flick and likely never played to full theaters. I'd been wanting to see this flawed little gem since I first laid eyes on the film's soundtrack album back in 1970. 

Then just 13-years-old, I was drawn to the photo on this bi-fold LP jacket which offered, on the front, an image of star Jacqueline Bisset locked in a passionate embrace with co-star Christopher Stone. On the back, however, was the racy "reveal" of their tryst location being a shower stall. At thirteen this was pretty heady stuff. Coming across it in a record store made it even more of a shock to the senses. 

Looking at the album cover today, I'm surprised how sexy an image it remains given its relative modesty.  Have I mentioned what's on the inside? The actual soundtrack album is very good, featuring songs by Brooklyn Bridge, a pre-"The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" Vicki Lawrence, and that song's composer, Bobby Russell, who was at the time Mr. Vicki Lawrence. 

The Grasshopper is a coming-of-age film with 25-year-old Jacqueline Bisset playing 19. As a rule, I tend not to be overly fond of coming-of-age films, chiefly because so many of them are about men and hinge on but a single narrative theme: the hero wants to get laid. The rest then dissolves into a lot of male wish-fulfillment fantasies leaning heavily on the callowness of youth as an excuse for the screenwriter to indulge in a lot of puerile sexism and misogyny-for-laughs. On the other hand, female coming-of-age films, while considerably rarer and seldom very well-known, tend to be more to my taste because the focus is more often on the emotional lives of the characters. (My absolute faves of this sub-genre are A Taste of Honey -1961 and Smooth Talk - 1985.)

The female perspective is so infrequently explored in films that even one that lists to the side of exploitation strikes me as a welcome change.   

The Grasshopper offers great glimpses of late-'60s Las Vegas 

In attempting to dramatize the aimlessness of late-'60s youth while satirizing the swinging, anything for kicks attitude prevalent at the time, The Grasshopper at times feels like the crasser, less artful American cousin of John Schlesinger’s Darling. But despite the film's unsure directorial footing (TV sitcom director Jerry Paris—best known as the neighbor on The Dick Van Dyke Show—shows no real aptitude for sustained drama. Scenes play out episodically, like they've got built-in commercial breaks) The Grasshopper does succeed in capturing the essence of a particular type of American woman at a particular point in time in our culture. Of course, the “American” woman I speak of is the very British Jacqueline Bisset, serviceably, if unconvincingly, identified as Canadian for the film. (Which is ironic, given that the heroine of the little-known novel upon which this film is freely adapted—The Passing of Evil, by Seance on a Wet Afternoon author Mark McShane—is British, the story taking place in London.)

The Goodbye Girl

The late '60s and early '70s offered dozens of American movies focusing on the heroically romanticized plight of the misunderstood heterosexual white male as he struggled to find his identity in a society in flux and shifting beneath his feet. Black women are perhaps still waiting for their own definitive coming-of-age-films (a good place to start: Ossie Davis’ woefully overlooked 1972 film, Black Girl, or Kasi Lemmons' brilliant Eve's Bayou), but for women in general, The Grasshopper provides a period-relevant (now perhaps dated) portrait of a woman on a quest to find herself. A free spirit inflicted with the kind of existential restlessness usually only afforded male characters in movies. 

Jacqueline Bisset as Christine Adams

Jim Brown as Tommy Marcott

Joseph Cotten as Richard Morgan

Christopher Stone (in his film debut) as Jay Rigney

Corbett Monica (yes, THE Corbett Monica, Ed Sullivan fans) as Danny Raymond

Ed Flanders as Jack Benton

The Grasshopper was promoted with the tagline: “The story of a beautiful girl’s lifetime between the ages of 19 and 22.” And lest one assume the “beautiful” adjective was inserted solely for the purpose of a little sex-bait ad copy; rest assured, The Grasshopper’s Christine is one in a long line of movie heroines whose destinies are shaped as much by their provocative beauty as by their flaws of character. When Valley of the Dolls' Neely O'Hara bitchily comments on how Anne Welles got through life on a pass because of her "Damned classy looks," she is speaking of girls like Bisset's Christine. Girls whose looks open up so many doors for them that not until those looks begin to fade does it begin to dawn how few of those actually led anywhere. 

As the film begins, 19-year-old Christine Adams (Bisset) has dropped out of junior college in Kingman, British Columbia, left a note for her parents and slipped away in the wee small hours of the morning in her beat-up convertible. Her destination: Los Angeles, where she has plans to surprise and later shack up with her high school sweetheart Eddie (Tim O'Kelly). Her youthful optimism unfazed even when her car breaks down en route, idealistic hitchhiker Christine informs a friendly pick-up, “It’s very simple what I want to be; totally happy, totally different, and totally in love!” Of course, as soon as she says this, we know she doesn't have a chance in hell of being any of them.

You're Gonna Make It After All

What is Christine over the course of the story's three years? In no particular order: a bank teller, a mistress, a would-be actress, a schoolteacher, a flight attendant, a real estate saleswoman, a Vegas showgirl, a high-class call girl, a discontented housewife, a sugar mama, a widow, a kept woman, and (inevitably) a hooker. Whew! She also must have been very tired.

As you must have gleaned by now, the "grasshopper" of the title is Christine. She's the human embodiment of America’s "instant happiness" culture. A culture fearful of boredom, unable to withstand even a moment of silence, illness, or introspection, happiness is sensation. And if you don’t find it in your own backyard, America’s a big place with lots of backyards. All you need is a suitcase, a little resourcefulness, and who knows? Maybe happiness can be found in the next thing...and the next thing. 

Impetuous Christine falls for down-to-earth former quarterback Tommy Marcott 
Christine: Tommy, sometimes I envy you.
Tommy: Why?
Christine: You don't always have to be doing something. With me, it's sort of a disease. I guess it's because no matter what I'm doing or how much fun I'm having, somewhere way back in my head I'm thinking somebody somewhere else is having more fun than I am. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
In its over-earnest efforts to reflect the timbre of the times, The Grasshopper is guilty of cramming so much into its story that it comes across as more sensational than sincere. So many controversial topics are covered and touched upon in the film’s scant 98-minute running time, Bisset's character seems at times like a tour guide through a new Disneyland attraction called Sixtiesland. We have rock bands, groupies, free-love, homosexuality, lesbianism, interracial marriage, nudity, drugs, prostitution, pedophilia, and physical abuse. It all sounds like pretty incendiary stuff, but as the events are processed through Christine's dissociative gaze, a great many of the most hot-button social issues of the day are presented in a disarmingly matter-of-fact manner.  

No '70s "Now" movie worth its salt was without at least one gay character. The Grasshopper doubles the "with it" quotient by featuring both a lesbian and a gay couple. Atypically for the time, all are presented casually, as just part of Christine's circle of friends. 

PERFORMANCES
Throughout the early 1970s, Jacqueline Bisset and Raquel Welch were the two sex symbols most publicly vociferous in their claims of never being taken seriously as actresses or offered non-ornamental roles. The modestly-talented Raquel Welch had a point; she was pretty much offered one crap role after another, each hinged on how well she filled out her requisite bikini. Bisset, on the other hand, after surmounting forgettable fluff like The Sweet Ride landed, in succession, three major releases with sizable, showy, female lead roles: The Grasshopper (1970), The Mephisto Waltz (1971), and Believe in Me (1971). 

Bisset is at her relaxed best in the brief scenes she shares with the always-welcome Joseph Cotten

Because I like Jacqueline Bisset so much, I wish I could say that she made the most of these opportunities, but as a young actress (she improved immeasurably in later years), Bisset was a bit like a hot-air balloon; as events in the story around her heats up, she seems to get lighter. With little of her character's inner-life coming through, we're left with her precise, clipped British accent and camera-friendly face as compensations. Bisset is fine in scenes requiring wide-eyed optimism or vague restlessness, but as Christine's life begins to spiral out of control, one is made aware of Bisset's emotive shortcomings.  

We're Gonna Make Our Dreams Come True
The Grasshopper was co-written and produced by TV's Garry Marshall (Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley). Here Garry's baby sister Penny Marshall (Lavern herself, left, holding the ruler, pictured with Eris Sandy) plays a member of the "Plaster Casters" - a reference to real-life '60s visual artist/groupie Cynthis Albritton, who famously made plaster casts of the erect penises of rock stars.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Showgirls:1970. In his autobiography Wake Me When It's Funny, producer Garry Marshall writes that the original leaping pattern for The Grasshopper in preliminary screenplay drafts was considerably more global (London, New York, Hollywood) but for budgetary reasons, Las Vegas became the dominant location. I can't say I mind one bit. The shots of a long-gone Vegas Strip and the behind-the-scenes glimpses into those old-fashioned Vegas reviews are fabulously nostalgic.

The grasshopper perched first one place, then another...wherever she happened to land. And then she moved on. (Ad copy from the film's poster)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
When it comes to authenticity of voice, I suspect The Grasshopper would have benefitted from having at least one woman and one person under the age of 30 involved in its creation. The screenplay, a collaboration of three men on the far side of their teen years, is more of an outsider's rumination on the young. Christine's swift journey from innocence to world-weariness... a look at a rapidly changing world and a portrait of the emotional cost of no-strings freedom...has the air of a cautionary tale about it, and I don't really think that was the film's objective. 

What's lacking is Christine's voice. She's at the center of everything, be we watch her from a remove and can't really put our finger on the source of her personal dissatisfaction. This leaves her as a Candide-like character, reacting to the world and being changed by it, but not really conveying to us what she wants from it short of non-stop sensation. 

In Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (released the same year) Jack Nicholson also played a character who didn't know what he wanted from life or what life wanted from him. That film had been preceded by seemingly a dozen others similarly fixated on the state of the disillusioned white male, and its success guaranteed that it would be followed by just as many.

By no stretch of the imagination is The Grasshopper in the same category as Five Easy Pieces, but you can understand why it might hold a special place of nostalgia for me. It's not often (Michael Sarne's Joanna - 1968 qualifies) that the movies even considered how the modern world might be dissatisfying for women. Plus, no one gets abandoned at a gas station restroom.

And a parting shot in memory of that glorious backside that sparked my interest in The Grasshopper in the first place...

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012