THE STERILE CUCKOO 1969

Before I saw The Sterile Cuckoo in 1969, I had only the vaguest impression of Liza Minnelli. I had a dim memory of her as this somewhat hyperactive, inauthentic personality who popped up occasionally on her mother’s variety TV show, and another as an over-earnest Red Riding Hood in a 1965 musical TV special titled The Dangerous Christmas of Little Red Riding Hood. Having missed her film debut in the 1967 Albert Finney vehicle Charlie Bubbles, The Sterile Cuckoo marked my first encounter with Liza Minnelli, the actress, and, in the character of Pookie Adams, my first exposure to what eventually evolved into Liza Minnelli, the screen persona.

Liza Minnelli as Mary Ann "Pookie" Adams

Wendell Burton as Jerry Payne

The Sterile Cuckoo, the first film effort by late director Alan J. Pakula (Klute, Starting Over) is a fairly straightforward, bittersweet tale of first love presented as a touching, coming-of-age character study. Soft-spoken biology major Jerry Payne (Wendell Burton) encounters bespectacled oddball Pookie Adams (Liza Minnelli) as both are waiting for a bus to take them to their first semesters at neighboring colleges. The extroverted but socially awkward Pookie, who either misinterprets Jerry's passive malleability as interest or willfully disregards what is more apt to be amused indifference, insists that the two have instantly bonded and share a mutual attraction ("We got along terrifically on the bus!" she asserts).

Pookie, an outcast who aggressively overcompensates and guards her lonely vulnerability behind the labeling of others as “creeps,” “weirdos,” or “bad eggs,” is clearly drawn to the nice, button-down sweetness of the biology major, but one senses that she's a type that habitually latches onto strangers. For his part, the overwhelmed Jerry doesn't so much warm to Pookie’s charms as succumbs to the force of her persistent will.

Pookie worms her way into yet another heart

Yet in that strange way in which a relationship is often forged from an individual of somewhat amorphous character being drawn/surrendering to the superficially dominant character of another; the very dissimilar Pookie and Jerry embark upon a swift but tenuous romance. Taking place over the course of one school year, The Sterile Cuckoo follows the couple’s evolution and eventual dissolution as Jerry begins to grow into himself just as Pookie’s love-starved neediness starts to reveal itself to be part of larger, more deeply rooted emotional problems.

Tim McIntire plays Jerry's roommate Charles Schumacher (or Shoonover...the film can't seem to make up its mind), a typically macho, hard-drinkin' fratboy given to an excess of sexual braggadocio. On the surface. The reality of this ostensibly "popular" character's life underscore The Sterile Cuckoo's theme that all teens struggle to find their identities. Pookie's self-absorbed wallowing in her own problems blinds her to an awareness of  the feelings of others. 

As a 12-year-old kid enamored of too-mature films I scarcely understood, The Sterile Cuckoo was one of the few movies I saw during this period that didn't feel like a two-hour excursion into the uncharted territory of mysterious adulthood. Although the characters are supposed to be 18 or 19, the issues plaguing Pookie and Jerry (friendships, identity, loneliness, peer group acceptance) were, for the most part, things to which I could both relate and recognize within myself. I identified with Jerry’s timidity and deliberate, watchful approach to others. Likewise, as a gay youth, I empathized both with Pookie’s perception of herself as an outsider and her reject-them-before-they-reject-you, knee-jerk defense mechanisms.

The painful paradox of finding yourself snubbed by the very group you profess to have no interest in being a part of is brought to almost excruciating life by Minnelli in this scene at a campus hangout. Hoping to have found someone with whom she can share her outcast isolation, Pookie is unnerved to discover that Jerry, by all appearances a quiet loner, is actually rather socially poised and liked by others.

But what I think I responded to most was the film’s insight into the dynamics of a relationship between two loner personalities drawn together in their isolation. Both Pookie and Jerry are insecure, but each responds to their circumstances differently. Pookie’s insecurity causes her to alienate all others except the one person she selects to smother with all the love she has, all the while emotionally draining them with demands for all the love she needs. Jerry lacks confidence as well, but as his insecurity is neither fear-based nor self-defensive, he's capable of recognizing that most everyone is a little afraid to reach out to others, and that what matters is that one make a little effort.
Unlike the offensive message behind the beloved 1978 musical Grease, whose moral is to encourage teenage girls to change everything about themselves in order to gain peer acceptance, The Sterile Cuckoo is not a film about the need to conform... it's about the inevitability of growing up.

"Pookie, maybe they aren't all so bad. Maybe everybody's just a little cautious of everybody."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Always a sucker for movies about vulnerable characters (and movies that make me cry), I fell in love with The Sterile Cuckoo and saw it about six times back in 1969. It sold me on Liza Minnelli as a genuinely talented actress, and inspired me to read the surprisingly different-in-tone John Nichols novel. For the longest time I harbored a memory of The Sterile Cuckoo as just a sad/funny look at first love, and perhaps that’s all it's intended to be. But seeing the film today, in light of all we've come to learn about mental illness (coupled with our culture’s obsession with medicating all idiosyncrasies out of the human personality); I’m struck by how seriously disturbed Pookie seems to me now. That certainly wasn't the case when I was young. She starts out as some kind of early exemplar of the Manic Pixie Girl cliché, but what with her self-delusions, pathological lying, death-obsession, mood swings, and crippling persecution complex, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Pookie is considerably more than just a wounded misfit in search of someone to love her.

Death-fixated Pookie likes to hang out in cemeteries

PERFORMANCES

Liza Minnelli deservedly won an Oscar nomination for her intense and deeply committed performance in The Sterile Cuckoo. Cynics and the industry savvy might take issue and label such an ostentatiously underdog role as Pookie Adams--significantly altered and made more sympathetic (pathetic?) than in the novel--to be just the sort of calculated Oscar-bait to attract Academy attention. But given that a similar gambit didn't work for Shirley MacLaine that same year for what many consider to be an equally manipulative and maudlin turn in Sweet Charity; I think it’s fair to say that Minnelli put this one over in spite of Pakula’s and screenwriter Alvin Sargent’s (Paper Moon, Ordinary People) determination to stack the emotional deck so heavily in her favor.

The character of Pookie Adams was conceived for the screen as one far more tragic than depicted in the novel.  

It’s popular to dismiss the less-showy work of newcomer Wendell Burton in the reactive, relatively thankless role of Jerry Payne, but I think his low-key naturalism and likability provide the perfect contrast to the nervous hyperactivity of Minnelli’s character (it’s impossible to watch her Pookie Adams and not think of Anne Hathaway's legendary eagerness to please). His character’s subtle growth is very well played, and to Burton’s credit, he’s never wiped off the screen by Minnelli (no easy feat, that). At the time of The Sterile Cuckoo's release, Burton appeared poised for stardom. But after next appearing in an almost identical role as a soft-spoken prison inmate in Fortune & Men’s Eyes (1971) he worked primarily in TV before retiring from acting in the late 1980s.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Earlier I mentioned how The Sterile Cuckoo marked my introduction to Liza Minnelli, the screen persona. By this I mean that for all intents and purposes, one can find the genesis of the entirety of Liza Minnelli's adapted screen persona in The Sterile Cuckoo’s Pookie Adams. Nowhere is this more obvious than in its similarities to her Oscar-winning role in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1971). Fans of that film are apt to recognize in Pookie Adams a nascent version of Sally Bowles.
Pookie & Sally: A Comparison

1. Both sport waifish, gamine bobs.
2. Both mask their inherent insecurity behind displays of delusional self-confidence. 

3. Both win over reluctant, passive men through the sheer force of their personalities.

4. Both suffer from neglectful fathers.
5. Each has a big emotional breakdown scene that virtually screams, “Give that girl an Oscar!”
6. Both have pregnancy scares.

7. Both have gaydar issues. Pookie thinks (perhaps correctly) that Jerry’s roommate is gay, while Sally fails to detect that her boyfriend and her lover are bisexual.
8. Both wind up scaring off their lovers.

Come-on: Would you like to peel a tomato?

Come-on: "Doesn't my body drive you wild with desire?"

The Sterile Cuckoo (top) and Cabaret (bottom) share scenes of Liza Minnelli as the sexual aggressor. Here she attempts to seduce lookalike males with her supine figure.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The Sterile Cuckoo is one of those forgotten movies in need of rediscovery. It’s more character-based than story-driven, so it's not heavy on plot; Pookie’s character can prove more annoying than poignant to some; and if you take a dislike to the film’s Oscar-nominated theme song “Come Saturday Morning,” you’re likely to be sent screaming into the streets, for it comprises the totality of the film’s soundtrack. But to me, it’s a perfectly wonderful film of humor, sensitivity, and considerable emotional insight. Beautifully shot and an authentic-feeling record of the late '60s, The Sterile Cuckoo has standout performances throughout (Minnelli is at times phenomenal in this), and I think the conveyance of the brief romance is beautifully handled...both its beginning and its painful end. Definitely worth a look.
Oh, and as to the significance of the title? Nowhere to be found in the film (allegedly cut), but referenced in the novel as a poem Pookie writes about herself.

At the start of the film, we don't understand the silence between the two characters sitting on a bench waiting for the arrival of a bus. When this image is echoed at the end, we have a better understanding of the pattern of Pookie's life and a sense that this has been-- and will continue to be--a scenario she'll play out again and again.

Mark, at Random Ramblings, Thoughts & Fiction and a few Internet friends have all shared with me tales of having had encounters with a real-life Pookie Adams, so I figured I should share my own.
My particular Pookie was a bit of an outcast, wore glasses, and was ragingly funny. She was keenly perceptive and cutting when it came to the shortcomings of others, yet oblivious to her own. She was a deeply loyal friend, but somewhat suffocating in that if you were her friend, you had to be only HER friend. There was no room for anybody else. She was happiest in having the two of us share all of our time together sitting apart from others and putting them down. In my own insecurity, this felt for a time like a kind of strength to me, too, but it wasn't long before I recognized what a self-defeating, one-way street this attitude was. 

We were an insulated, impregnable world of two, but it was a world of cowards. As much as I enjoyed her company, the ultimately toxic nature of her mean-spirited humor (it was so obvious that she was in pain and so afraid of others) drove us apart.  I see in The Sterile Cuckoo and Liza Minnelli's excellent performance an exacting depiction of a certain kind of wounded personality. One I'm learning is not as unique as I'd once thought.

Scene from "The Sterile Cuckoo"    1969

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 -2013

THE GREAT GATSBY 1974

You pretty much know what you’re in for in this, the third screen adaptation of  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel The Great Gatsby when the film begins with a series of loving, beautifully lit, perfectly framed, Architectural Digest-worthy shots of property and objects. Instead of a haunting rumination on romantic obsession as a means of recapturing the past, poetically framed by a bitter indictment of materialism, the American Dream, and the emotional recklessness of the rich; this is The Great Gatsby as told from the perspective of nostalgia fetish.

The Great Gatsby suffers a bit from a confused point of view. When the camera lens is trained on Gatsby's beautiful objects, I suspect we're supposed to respond to the hollow allure of materialism. Unfortunately, the images are so arrestingly beautiful that they invite audiences to ooh and ahh over their luster. In essence, to view the items from the acquisitive, money-enamored perspective of Daisy. A bit of a problem, given that she is one of the more superficial and morally corrupt characters in the film.

In this Jack Clayton directed (The Innocents, Room at the Top) adaptation of an overly-reverential screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, the unrequited love affair between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan takes a back seat to the love affair the camera has with all the 1920s Art Deco knickknacks, gimcracks, and gewgaws on display throughout. This The Great Gatsby is a fashionista’s orgy of breathtaking period costuming, a production designer’s wet dream of glittering Jazz Age opulence, and an antiquities museum curator’s idea of a motion picture. Lovely to look at, yet emotionally arid, antiseptic, and hermetically sealed.

Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby

Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan

Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan

Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway

Karen Black as Myrtle Wilson

Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker

Miscast, misguided, and overproduced (the latter an odd thing to say about a movie that revels in the excesses of the wealthy). That this film ranks at all amongst my picks of memorable movies to write about for this blog is largely due to The Great Gatsby being one of my top, all-time favorite novels, and this version being a particularly faithful big-screen adaptation. Painstakingly so, in fact. Indeed, the paradox of this nearly $7 million mounting of The Great Gatsby is how it is able to faithfully replicate so many intricate details of the novel (including sizable chunks of dialog and virtually the entirety of the book's events and characters) while still managing somehow to leave out both the book's passion and its pathos. It’s like one of those lifelike celebrity waxworks at Madame Tussauds: identical in every superficial detail, but falling short of being a true representation of life because it lacks a soul.

How this came to be can perhaps be traced to the film’s troubled genesis, recounted in fascinating detail in Bruce Bahrenburg’s book, Filming The Great Gatsby (my own yellowed and tattered copy, purchased in the heat of 1974’s studio-generated “Gatsby Fever”). Originally conceived and developed as a wedding present vehicle for Ali MacGraw by then-husband Robert Evans, The Great Gatsby was derailed when MacGraw threw a gold-plated, 14-carat monkey wrench into the works by falling in love with her The Getaway co-star, Steve McQueen. While the hunt went out for a new Daisy (in which several credible applicants like Faye Dunaway and Candice Bergen were passed over for, in my opinion, the absolutely incredible choice of Mia Farrow), an ailing Truman Capote was fired as screenwriter and later sued the studio. Meanwhile, the beautiful but inexpressive Lois Chiles was entrusted with the showy role of Jordan Baker simply because she was the girlfriend of the cuckolded Robert Evans, and studio head Charles Bluhdorn figured the poor guy needed to catch a break.

Daisy & Gatsby
Mia Farrow (absolute perfection in Rosemary's Baby) is an actress I greatly admire, but for me, she was totally out of her depth as Daisy Buchanan. Lacking the ability of say, Julie Christie, who can somehow play shallow and self-absorbed as interesting and sympathetic, Farrow's Daisy is mostly annoyingly fey and shrill. To be fair, F.Scott Fitzgerald's daughter, Frances, told People magazine at the time, "Mia Farrow looks like the Daisy my father had in mind." However, this was said during the filming. I've no idea what she thought after seeing the finished product.

Most movies have tortuous paths to completion, but The Great Gatsby is one of those films that gives the appearance of an inordinate amount of time and energy being spent on engineering a marketable property, not making a film. We still have the basic story of the millionaire with the shady past who attempts to reignite an old love affair with the socialite who threw him over years ago when he was poor, but that's almost all we have. Very little of what can be deemed effective is done with the novel's themes involving class, idealized romance, and morality.
One rarely gets the sense that anyone involved in the making of The Great Gatsby had even read the novel, much less understood any of what Fitzgerald was trying to say about the corrupting allure of the shiny side of the American Dream. Had more than a few seconds of thought been afforded these concerns, surely someone would have noted the contradiction inherent in making an ostentatious, large-scale behemoth about the pernicious vulgarity of the rich. I have a hunch that Paramount, in having made a fortune with Erich Segal’s Love Story, merely saw Fitzgerald's book as a "great romance." I'm sure it was their hope to combine the crowd-pleasing romanticism of Love Story (1970) with the moneymaking, sentimentalized nostalgia of The Way We Were (1973), and never gave a thought to much else.

Hype Gripe
The amount of publicity surrounding the release of The Great Gatsby was near-suffocating and ultimately off-putting to the public. In 1974 Warner Bros had Mame waiting in the wings, while  Paramount had Gatsby as well as Chinatown. The entire country was swept up in a nostalgia craze that even the decade's eventual disco fever couldn't quell.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

For all my complaining about what a prefab piece of Hollywood machinery The Great Gatsby turned out to be, I nevertheless get quite a kick out of the film. This in spite of my not finding the film to be particularly good, yet feeling a certain attachment to it due to a few sentimental, Gatsby-esque reasons of my own. The pleasure I derive from watching The Great Gatsby these days is chiefly nostalgic in nature, and directly related to the memories I have of my sixteen-year-old self in 1974. Back then I was caught up in all things movie-related and willfully swept up in the Gatsby hype. I bought all the magazines containing Gatsby articles, purchased the soundtrack album, and dragged my family to see it several times. I did everything short of begging my mother to purchase and serve our meals on the limited-edition The Great Gatsby Corelle® dinnerware they sold at the local department store.

At that time, I hadn't yet read Fitzgerald’s novel, so I didn't have any expectations waiting to be dashed. Nevertheless, in spite of my enthusiasm (or perhaps, because of it) when the film finally opened, I was a bit underwhelmed. It was nothing like the moving romance I was expecting, but it was a great deal like a film adaptation of a campy, self-serious Harold Robbins novel. Then, as now, I find it a gorgeous film to look at, and with each passing year, I grow ever fonder of the old-fashioned movie magic of large crowds of extras, big sets, period detail, all accomplished with no CGI. But it's still a film whose every scene is haunted by the twin ghosts of what-could-have-been and unrealized potential.

A Fine Romance
If Gatsby and Daisy failed to sizzle for some audiences, their lack of heat is nothing compared to the non-romance of butch professional golfer Jordan Baker and Tony Perkins-esque narrator Nick Carraway. According to IMDB trivia, original screenwriter Truman Capote wrote Nick as a homosexual and Jordan as a lesbian. Sounds about right to me. 

My DVD of the film is a treasured guilty pleasure, but I can't help wishing it were otherwise. A consolation of sorts is that the joys I currently find in this surprisingly joyless movie (Gatsby’s parties look well-populated and busy, but not the least bit fun) are of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. I honestly could watch this film every day, yet I wouldn't recommend it to a soul. It's a very watchable, amiable kind of failure. One which yields new campy treasures and glaring misjudgments with each viewing.

A couple of examples:

Daisy’s hair. In her memoirs, Mia Farrow felt her performance was “undermined” by the unflattering wig she was forced to wear, claiming that for the duration, “(It) felt and looked like cotton candy.” Can’t disagree with her there.

The clothes fetish. I know everyone in this movie is supposed to be rich and can afford fancy garb, but this is one of those movies where all the clothes have that distracting “never been worn” look. This also applies to the never-lived-in sets and all those pristine automobiles on display. These cars are so drooled over by the camera that when Myrtle meets her end at the fender of Gatsby’s gorgeous yellow Rolls Royce, I'm tempted to think audiences were left in a moral quandary...were they upset by her grisly death, or because she left such a big, ugly dent in that perfectly lovely automobile?

Author Tom Wolfe: "I'll never forgive the 1974 version of 'The Great Gatsby,' which was the Fitzgerald novel as reinterpreted by the garment industry. Throughout the picture, Robert Redford wore white suits. They fitted so badly that every time he turned a corner there was an eighty-microsecond lag before they joined him."

PERFORMANCES

According to Roman Polanski, his dream casting of the role of Guy Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby would have been Robert Redford. Upon seeing the lack of chemistry displayed between Mia Farrow and Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby, I'm inclined to think he dodged a bullet there. Certainly the Clark Gable of the ’70s, Robert Redford is a strikingly handsome man (I could write a sonnet about the way the sun hits the blond fur on his upper thighs in his swimsuit scene); but he is woefully stiff and colorless as Gatsby. It’s unimaginable that anyone this bland could harbor an obsessed fixation on anything other than perhaps Miracle Whip.

Most of the acting in The Great Gatsby falls into one of two categories: stiff or fussy. As garage owner George Wilson, actor Scott Wilson (so good in In Cold Blood) somehow manages to combine both as he's allowed to go through the entire film with the exact same watery-eyed, self-pitying expression you see here. The exasperation expressed by wife Myrtle (Karen Black) is pretty much on par with my own.

By way of contrast, we have my personal 70s fave, Karen Black, giving what can most charitably be described as a ridiculous performance as 20s hotbox, Myrtle Wilson. Karen Black won a Golden Globe for it, so perhaps it’s just a matter of taste, but I don’t believe her Myrtle for a minute…which is not the same thing as saying that I don’t love her performance. Acting her ass off in an almost alarmingly mannered fashion, Black is terrible in that Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara way. And as such, she’s close to being the only life the film has. I'm not sure whose idea it was to make Myrtle so hapless (over the course of the film, Black falls down a flight of stairs, shoves her hand through a plate window, and suffers a rap across the mouth), but hers is a physical, black comedy performance (pun intended) very faithful to the idiosyncratic skills of the actress. Tone and tempo of the rest of the film be damned.

Actress Brooke Adams, (l.) who would star in 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and actor Edward Herrmann (r.) who played FDR in the 1982 musical, Annie show up in bit parts as party guests in The Great Gatsby.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

There’s not a lot that Mia Farrow does right in The Great Gatsby, but there is one scene where she so completely nails it that it almost makes her being so poorly cast worthwhile. It’s the scene that takes place in the Buchanan household when everyone is sitting around the dinner table complaining about the heat (taking place over the course of one summer, everybody sweats a lot in this movie…from the neck up, anyway. No one’s clothes are ever damp). In this scene, Daisy forgets herself and speaks to Gatsby as though the others aren't there. “Ah, you look so cool. You always look so cool,” she says dreamily. Catching herself, she blushes and starts to rattle off a nonsense explanation that hilariously trails off to nowhere. Farrow seriously knocks that little bit of business out of the park. It’s the single most authentically character-based acting she does in the film, and she’s great. In that one minute, I can see what kind of woman Daisy was perhaps supposed to be all along.

Very Pretty People Capable of Very Ugly Things

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Trusting a sensitive book like The Great Gatsby to an industry comprised of individuals who wouldn't recognize a moral imperative if it tapped them on the shoulder and asked if it could park their Hummers for them, is a little like asking Donald Trump to act like a human being for five minutes: the desire may be there, but the tools to pull it off aren't.

This version of The Great Gatsby is almost valueless as drama, but it's the perfect kind of screen adaptation of a literary classic for showing in high school English Classes. For while it is a faithful visual representation of the body of the text, at no time does the film tip its hand toward revealing what the novel’s underlying themes are, leaving students free to discuss amongst themselves.

Toned, tanned, & terrific, beefcake Redford provides a glimpse of what is 
so great about this particular Gatsby.

Because in my heart I consider The Great Gatsby to be a book of ideas and moral concepts poetically dramatized, I have my doubts as to whether it’s the kind of book that will ever lend itself to a satisfying screen adaptation. I must say I’m intrigued by the little I've seen of Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming adaptation (although I'm not sure if I'm up for another one of Tobey Maguire's stare-a-thon roles). Its considerable visual dazzle once again raises the issue of whether or not it is possible for a film to simultaneously condemn and chronicle extreme wealth. If not, I guess we'll be left with another example of the past repeating itself...in 3-D, no less.

Gatsby reaches out toward the light at the end of Daisy's dock.

Nick: “You can’t repeat the past.”

Gatsby: “You can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.”

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

LAST SUMMER 1969

The occasion of a recent TCM screening of this forgotten minor masterpiece from the late ‘60s jogged my memory back to when the film collaborations of the matrimonial/professional team of director Frank Perry and screenwriter Eleanor Perry represented the bright promise of the New Hollywood. Their films, David and Lisa (1962), The Swimmer (1968), and especially the excellent Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), felt almost European in their blending of arthouse aesthetics with exploitable, mainstream commercial themes.  

Goodbye, Gidget. Farewell, Frankie and Annette
An awful lot had changed since the release of the final Beach Party movie in 1966

I was 13 years old when Last Summer, and, in truth, I had no business seeing so adult a motion picture at such a young age. I may have had no business seeing it, but I wanted to see it like crazy. But thanks to having a much older sister who served as the accompanying “adult guardian” making possible my admission to a slew of age-inappropriate movie farein previous years—Barbarella, Rosemary’s Baby, Bonnie and Clyde, and Secret Ceremony, to name just a few—I had already convinced myself that I was far too mature an adolescent to waste time on the movies marketed to my age demographic. 

The MPAA movie rating system was in its infancy then (when G, M, R, and X were the designations), and I had self-seriously deemed that anything below an “M” was simply not worth my time. After all, I wasn't a child!

Of course, I know now that this attitude was as much born of fervid sexual curiosity (aka, adolescent horniness) as intellectual inquisitiveness, but when you’re that young, there really isn’t all that much of a difference between the two.

Last Summer premiered in New York with an X-rating. By the time it opened
in San Francisco two months later, it had been edited down to an R-rating

The release of Last Summer was on my radar because I had read that it was to be given an X-rating, and back then, to me, X-rated meant sophisticated. To my mind it was a rating that, in keeping with the critical and boxoffice success of the recent X-rated release Midnight Cowboy (1969), held the promise of being just the start of a whole slew of Hollywood movies made for grown-ups (and me, of course) that were free to tell important, contemporary stories unencumbered by the constraints of censorship or the worry of meeting the bland criteria of "wholesome family entertainment."

And indeed, for a time, that appeared to be the case. There came a string of films with intriguingly elevated themes that fell under the X-rating umbrella: Greetings! (1968), The Damned (1969), Medium Cool (1969), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Last Tango in Paris(1972). But soon the “X” rating was appropriated by the porn industry, and whatever chance an "X-rating" had of signifying hands-off censorship interference was short-lived.  

Barbara Hershey as Sandy

Richard Thomas as Peter

Bruce Davison as Dan

Catherine Burns as Rhoda

I saw both Midnight Cowboy and Last Summer within months of each other, and the reason I'm harping on the whole "X-rated" thing is that it became part of Last Summer's lore, and contributed to a lot of misremembering on my part. At the time, everyone was talking about these two high-profile, controversial, X-rated features. John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy maintained its X for the duration of its run, but Last Summer, after playing briefly in NYC with the "X" tag, Frank Perry agreed to delete a couple of swear words and a few frames from the film's harrowing climax to give his film an R-rating before going into wide release. 

What TCM screened a few weeks ago was said to be the R-rated theatrical release from 1969, and likely the same film I saw back then. But over the years, there have been so many edited versions of Last Summer in circulation (remarkably, I don't think it ever had a VHS or DVD release) that I have my doubts. This isn't helped by my having two bootleg versions of the film, one running about a minute and forty some seconds longer than the other. (The extended time seems due to longer shots in the final sequence. The longer version is recognizable by the inclusion of Bruce Davidson's line "She's gonna swallow her braces," after Barbara Hershey's remark "You look like you're gonna choke.")

This shot, part of an extended verbal exchange, was missing, along with several other brief cuts
to this sequence, from the version of  Last Summer broadcast on TCM 

So, despite what I do and don't remember about the version I saw back in 1970, at least we know there are at least two different cuts of Last Summer floating around. 

Both Midnight Cowboy and Last Summer received high praise from critics, Midnight Cowboy going on to make history as the first (and to date only) X-rated movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. But somehow, Last Summer, despite having garnered a Best Supporting Actress nod for newcomer Catherine Burns, and launching the long careers of its other young stars, managed to fall through the cracks. All but forgotten due to the film's unavailability. 

Affluent teens vacationing on Fire Island with their disinterested parents 

bond after saving the life of an injured seagull

With its title a darkly ironic harkening back to the innocent, sun-and-sand Gidget movies of the sixties, or those sexually innocuous Frankie & Annette Beach Party romps, Last Summer is perhaps one of the harshest eviscerations of adolescent social dynamics I've ever seen. Neither a youth-pandering idealization of the Pepsi Generation of the sort typified by late-'60s films like The Graduate and Easy Rider, nor one of those nostalgically sentimental coming-of-age films that would later flourish in the '70s (The Summer of ’42, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti), Last Summer is adolescence presented as a state of proto-barbarism. Where the youthful cry for "freedom" is met with the notion that, if left to their own devices, would the Love Generation be any less savage than the Over-30 set?

In a scene emphasizing Sandy's sexual acquisitiveness and dominance over the boys' relative sexual hesitancy, Sandy and Dan come across two lovers making out on a remote stretch of beach. When it's discovered that the lovers are men, Dan wants to leave, but Sandy insists they stay and watch. 

A trio of teens vacationing with their parents on Fire Island strike up an intimate friendship when callow, future fratboy Dan (Davison), and sensitive go-alonger Peter (Thomas) come upon sexually precocious brainiac, Sandy, tending to a wounded seagull on the beach (Sandy: Well you asked me, so don’t think I’m boasting, but my IQ is 157.”) Bonding over their shared isolation, sexual restlessness, and an overweening, heretofore unplumbed disdain for the feelings of others, the threesome find the dynamics of their tightly-knit group challenged with the appearance of Rhoda, a bright but shy and awkward outsider who insinuates herself into the fold.

The vulnerable don't stand much of a chance with this crowd. Rhoda is introduced committing a simple act of deceny (which already makes her a misfit): she tries to get the trio to stop tormenting the seagull they're attempting to turn into a pet.  

Plump and pale to their tall and tawny; braces-wearing and happy to act her age to the trio’s fevered acceleration into adulthood; it’s fairly obvious from the start that Rhoda’s emotional self-assurance and killjoy, sober decency is a wrong mix for this crowd. Yet the point is keenly made by the film that in adolescence, the pain of loneliness can be so acute that even the belittling company of those who fail to see your value is sometimes preferable to being alone.

In Rhoda, Sandy finds another "project" ...like the seagull. 

Here, Rhoda models the update from her "old lady" bathing suit 

Last Summer's poignancy is derived from the realization that, what with all four teens coming from broken or troubled homes, they could have been helpful to one another, and that the summer would wind up being memorable to them for a lot of good reasons. But, being at its heart an existential parable on power, hurt people hurting others, and the question of whether cruelty is a choice or an instinct, Last Summer leaves our young protagonists irrevocably changed, and unlikely for the better. 

"You have an unmapped face. It doesn't come right out
and say what's going to become of it."

The gentle connection that Rhoda and Peter begin to develop stands to threaten the dynamic of "the trio." 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

 Like so many of my favorite films from this era: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Midnight Cowboy, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, even Rosemary's Baby; Last Summer is for me a marvelous example of how fascinating American movies were becoming in the late-60's, early-'70s when they began to venture into realms of storytelling that were not overtly tethered to their commercial potential. 

Sure, there's always the marketable angle of sensationalism, and films like Last Summer were more than willing to make their boldness and daring a part of their marketing. 

But what made the films of this era different from those released even a few years earlier (and, sadly, just a decade later) was their willingness to go to the darker places of the American myth and challenge our concepts of ourselves and the world we live in. 

So often, I find movies today tend to feed us comforting images of ourselves and set out to reinforce tissue-thin myths we harbor about everything from gender politics to racism. Although I don't require it in every film I see, I must say I enjoy it when movies hold up a mirror to American culture that reveals the decay behind the gloss, proposing, in the exposure, that we have the potential to do and be better.  

Again, the vulnerable are seen as targets, not subjects of empathy

Last Summer doesn't shy away from the exposing the privileged arrogance of the of these blond teens who, sheltered in their all-white enclaves make comic/idiotic jokes in the contrived slave dialect of Gone With the Wind, or, in this painful scene, make blantantly racist jokes at the expense of Anibal Gomez (Ernesto Gonzalez), a sweet and lonely Puerto Rican computer date set-up for the reluctant Rhoda.

Movies in the '60s/'70s were comfortable with revealing the darker shades of human nature. In fact, one of my strongest memories from this period in filmmaking was the distinct impression I was never going to see a movie with a happy ending again. I enjoyed seeing movies that made me think, made me feel...but at times it seemed as if every movie released during my teens ended in some devastating tragedy. Even the musicals were downers: Sweet Charity!

PERFORMANCES

Relying perhaps on type-casting and using his young cast's relative acting inexperience to their benefit (Last Summer is the film debut of all but Barbara Hershey, who appeared in Doris Day's last film, With Six You Get Eggroll, just the year before), Frank Perry gets natural and surprisingly complex performances out of everyone, particularly Catherine Burns. Although lacking in the sort of easy, obvious camaraderie Peter Bogdanovich was able to achieve with his cast in The Last Picture Show--most apparent in a visibly forced, "beer as truth serum" sequence that gives credence to Hershey's claim years later that despite the intimacy required of their roles, the cast didn't become close during the making of the film--each actor achieves a kind of heroic bravery in allowing themselves to be presented so honestly and unpleasantly.

When Last Summer was released, the entire cast was applauded for their performances, but it was Catherine Burns who emerged as the breakout “star,” garnering the lion's share of the film's best reviews and Last Summer's sole Academy Award nomination. Though reunited with Richard Thomas in 1971's Red Sky at Morning (a film I haven’t seen), Hollywood didn't seem to know what to do with her, and so after being wasted in a few TV movies and disposable roles in episodics, she bowed out of the industry for good, becoming a published author. She passed away in 2019.

The role of Mr. Caudell, Sandy's sexual assaulter dubbed "Snow White" due to his inability to tan, is played by character actor Peter Turgeon. Recognizable to fans of Airport (1970) as the annoying passenger who eventually gets slapped by a priest. 

Barbara Hershey's assured and dynamic performance as the dreamgirl sociopath is one that has really stayed with me over the years. Carnal, conniving, straightforward, and deeply troubled, I think her characterization is so genuinely terrifying because she is just such a recognizable brand of emotional/intellectual bully. Long a favorite of mine and a definite object of a boyhood crush, Hershey's impressive and enduring career includes BAFTA and Oscar nominations. 

Barbara Hershey (born Barbara Hertzstein) briefly changed her name to Barbara Seagull out of guilt surrounding the death of the seagull that was accidentally killed during the filming (the scenes involving the bird are another reason why Last Summer is a very unsettling affair).

Poster for the 1975 heist film Diamonds, featuring Barbara Hershey with her "Seagull" billing

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Perhaps the parallel symbolism is all too heavy-handed for some, but what I loved about this film in 1969 and what still stands up marvelously in 2013 are the parallels drawn between the film's early sequences involving the attempt to rehabilitate and then train the wounded seagull, and the introduction of the character of Rhoda into the group. The foreshadowing of the film's agonizing denouement is as clear-cut and unalterable as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but what grips me is what lies behind why it happens at all.

To see this film now is to understand what occurs inside any group or individual in power when threatened with the loss of that power. Whether it be the behavior of the GOP in the last election or the reluctance of certain states to grasp the inevitability of marriage equality, it all fits and paints an ugly portrait of cowardice cloaked in entitled domination. To find all of this within a teenage coming-of-age film is just brilliant, and provides one more reason why it's such a shame this film is so hard to track down. 

That Sandy would most likely be happiest were Dan and Pete to be somehow merged into one person feeds the already heady homoerotic sexual tension that exists within this tripartite friendship.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

For years on the internet, there have been reports of Last Summer finally getting a DVD release. Its reemergence on cable TV and a recent American Cinematheque screening of a long-lost, uncut 16mm print hint that perhaps one day soon this might very well be the case. I certainly hope so. 

Not only is it one of Frank and Eleanor Perry's best films (and Frank Perry doesn't deserve to be remembered in perpetuity for being the man who gave us Mommie Dearest and Monsignor,  does he?), but I also think it's one of the more important and representative films of a significant era in American film.  

Scene from "Last Summer" (1969)

BONUS MATERIAL

I read Evan Hunter’s 1968 novel Last Summer not long after seeing the film. Eleanor Perry’s screenplay is surprisingly faithful to the source material, and it's every bit as disturbing as the film. The novel provides a bit more backstory to the characters and is told in the form of a flashback memory recounted by an emotionally shattered Peter to his psychiatrist. In 1973, Evan Hunter wrote a sequel to Last Summer titled Come Winter. I don't know if any significance should be placed on the fact that while I read it much more recently than Last Summer, I nevertheless can't recall a thing about it. 

A deleted scene from Last Summer featuring Ralph Waite as Pete's father. Waite and Thomas would go on to appear on TV as father and son for five seasons of The Waltons.

The Manor (2021)
Bruce Davison and Barbara Hershey were reunited as co-stars for this Gothic horror film set in a retirement home. Oh, if only some clever writer had thought to make this an extended sequel to Last Summer. Would Dan and Sandy have changed?  Would that summer have scarred them for life? 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009- 2013