THE GO-BETWEEN 1971

"You flew too near the sun; you were scorched."

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for discussion

Gee, I can’t imagine why one of my most beloved and cherished films from the early 1970s is a movie about a sheltered and naïve adolescent boy who becomes hopelessly infatuated with Julie Christie.

Well, perhaps I can.

To anyone who knows me, it’s hardly a secret, and indeed, has become something of an overbelabored point, that I have been ga-ga over Julie Christie since I was a pre-teen...way back in the days when The Beatles were still together.  

What started out for me at eleven years old as a mere crush after seeing Julie Christie on screen for the first time in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) has only grown more adulatory and devoted over the years. My admiration for Christie's talent and twitterpated adulation of her beauty found echoed justification with each successive film. 

The face that stared out at me from our living room coffee table

Though (paradoxically) I think Julie Christie tends to shine most brilliantly in period films, it has always been her distinctly contemporary quality that most defined her appeal to me. Combining a direct, emotional honesty with assured intelligence, wit, sexual independence, and self-possession, Julie Christie seemed to me the very embodiment of the modern image of woman in film. An image updated and of a very different stripe than the Hollywood leading ladies I grew up watching.

Looking back, it's quite a sobering thing to reflect that I’ve been absolutely, unabatedly besotted with Julie Christie for more than half a century.

And The Go-Between is all about reflecting.

By beating out Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice for the Grand Prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, The Go-Between’s win represented a distinct personal-rivalry victory for director Joseph Losey. But the prestigious Palme d’Or ultimately failed to work its magic at the American boxoffice or hold much sway with Academy voters, for the film was largely a critical success and received only the scantest Oscar attention (a Best Supporting Actress nod for Margaret Laighton was the film’s sole Oscar nod). 

I saw The Go-Between in 1972, when I was 14, and recall being surprised—what with the above-the-title Christie and Bates paired for the first time since Madding Crowd—that the film’s focus was not on its adult characters, but on the experiences of a boy very nearly my age. And though nothing about the story’s timeline and setting (England, 1900) suggested I should encounter anything even remotely relevant to me, my life, or limited frame of experience, I was thrilled to discover just how much the film truly resonated with me personally.

I don't recall ever before having the experience of feeling that I both understood and could relate to the inner nature of a character whose life, while nothing like my own, nevertheless held several canny and "I thought I was the only one who felt that way!" parallels… parallels far and beyond the whole “adolescent crush on the exquisite Julie Christie” angle.

Julie Christie as Marian Maudsley

Alan Bates as Ted Burgess

Dominic Guard as Lionel "Leo" Colston

Margaret Leighton as Mrs. Madeleine Maudsley

Edward Fox as Viscount Hugh Trimingham

Michael Gough as Mr. Maudsley

The Go-Between is a picturesque and commendably faithful adaptation of the 1953 novel by L. P. Hartley (author of The Hireling). Directed by Joseph Losey (Secret Ceremony, Boom!) from a literate script by playwright Harold Pinter, The Go-Between marks the duo’s third and final collaboration, following their synergistic partnership on the films The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967). 

The titular Go-Between of the story is Lionel “Leo” Colston (Dominic Guard), a sensitive, earnestly sincere 12-year-old of a somewhat dreamy nature that all-too-easily—and injuriously—lends itself to a kind of emotional fragility and flights of superstitious fancy. Out of a need to feel he has some power over his life—his father recently died, his mother’s finances are strained, and he’s bullied at school—Leo places great stock in the determining forces of the Zodiac, half-convincing himself that he has the power to levy magical curses.

Marcus Maudsley (Richard Gibson) introduces an anxious Leo to Brandham Hall.
Their modes of dress highlight the stark differences (among them, class and the
 unearned self-assurance of wealth) between the schoolmates

The course of Leo’s life changes irrevocably when he accepts an invitation from a wealthy classmate to spend a sweltering summer at the latter's family’s baronial country estate, Brandham Hall—a sprawling, Gosford Park-ish affair that, by the looks of it, takes up a sizable chunk of Norfolk, England. There, Leo, an outsider unversed in the caste-specific rules and obligations of the upper classes, becomes the unwitting and naively complicit facilitator in a scandalously illicit affair between the aristocratically betrothed Marian (Julie Christie) and Ted, a working-class tenant farmer (Alan Bates), when he’s elected as the covert couple’s letter-carrying liaison.

Leo is so dazzled, he's blinded.

Set in the Edwardian Era and told from Leo’s fish-out-of-water perspective, The Go-Between is most manifestly a turn-of-the-century coming-of-age story that offers a trenchant indictment of the rigid, suppressive constraints of the British class system. But through Pinter’s insertion of brief, melancholy flashforwards to the late 1950s—wherein we encounter Leo as a sad-eyed adult (Michael Redgrave) and learn that what we’re watching are his memories of that fateful summer—it becomes clear that The Go-Between is also a reckoning-with-the-past story.

Michael Redgrave as the adult Leo Colston

Thanks to Gosford Park, Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age, and, most significantly, the Merchant-Ivory films, period costume dramas are now as familiar to American audiences as the Western.

But back in the early ‘70s, they were still something of a rarified genre, typically coming in one of two varieties: mouldily old-fashioned Oscar-bait (Nicholas and Alexandra -1970, Ryan’s Daughter - 1970) or highbrow deconstructivist (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis -1970, Death in Venice -1971).

The Go-Between most determinedly qualifies as the latter. In their thematically exacting adaptation of Hartley’s often misunderstood novel, Losey and Pinter use the temporal beauty of a meticulously recreated, period-romantic world to beguile the viewer (as it does Leo) before pulling the Victorian rug out from under us, revealing the dappled gentility of The Go-Between to be mere window dressing masking a tale of lacerating emotional brutality and psychological trauma rivaling anything in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  or They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

That Noise You Hear Is the Sound of Illusions Shattering
Reality inevitably intrudes upon Leo's blinkered idealization of Marian and Ted  

1970s cinema distinguished itself as the age of disenchantment, unhappy endings, and antiheroes, making The Go-Between—a tale without heroes, set in a world full of hypocrisy, class elitism, and the callous manipulation of the vulnerable by the wealthy—a perfect Nixon-era zeitgeist piece.

Moral ambivalence is also a characteristic of '70s cinema

Lacking a male figure in his life, Leo responds to the paternal kindness of the two very different men in love with Marian—Ted, whom she loves but cannot wed, and Hugh, to whom she's obliged to wed, but does not love. Leo is faced with a moral dilemma when his go-between duties come into conflict with his conscience. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What I love about this film? Well, Julie Christie, of course — as commanding a screen presence as ever — in a role that finds her once again finding the humanity in a superficial character and leveraging her sirenic beauty with chilling assurance. The word "chilling" points to one of the top reasons The Go-Between captured my imagination as a youth, and why it has remained a film I never tire of revisiting. 

With its dark subtext and its setting used as a dominant, active participant in the narrative, watching The Go-Between is like watching a Gothic fairy tale (a Sunshine Gothic, if such a thing exists). 

Against a backdrop of bright daylight, frilly frocks, and posh British accents, Leo, like Wonderland’s Alice and Oz’s Dorothy, is introduced as an innocent transported to an unfamiliar world where his adventures lead to a harsh moral education, resulting in a devastating psychological reckoning/loss of innocence. 

Michel Legrand’s lushly romantic, subtly ominous score for The Go-Between (replacing composer Richard Rodney Bennett) contributes invaluably to the film's mounting sense of dread. With each new lie told, each risk endeavored, and each confidence unstably guarded, Legrand's melodramatic piano motif drives home the tense certainty that none of this can end well.

The Go Between is the 2nd of four films that
Alan Bates and Julie Christie would make together

And speaking of tense...one aspect of the film's psychological tension that registered more acutely in the film than in the novel is the way in which The Go-Between plays with the viewer's alliances. Initially, Marian and Ted, as lovers thwarted by the draconian inanities of classism, are the objects of sympathy. But with the introduction of Hugh, someone we expect to be the problematic "other guy," but who is, in actuality, a decent, likable, and quite dashing fellow, the lovebirds' actions come off as deceitful and cruel. 

Looming large over Leo in this shot are the two differing
ideals of masculine identity that Hugh and Ted represent  

Then there's social-climbing Mrs. Maudsley, who, though ceaselessly shooting daggers of distrust at her daughter, is nevertheless all hospitality and egalitarian graces when it comes to lower-class Leo. So... despite my empathizing with the difficult position he has been placed in, during a scene where Leo engages in an ill-masked deception, telling a bald-faced lie to the woman who had heretofore only shown him kindness, my heart went out to Mrs. Maudsley. 

From the novel: 

Leo - “I saw how green I must have looked to her and how easy to take advantage.”  

It's Not Easy Being Green

The gift of a Lincoln green summer suit (from Lincoln, England, the shade associated with Robin Hood)—an act of kindness that endears Marian to Leo and engenders his loyalty—comes to take on the hue of something tarnished when Leo learns from his friend: “It’s green [referring to a bike Miriam intends to give Leo on his birthday...to help him deliver messages faster] Bright green. And you know why? Because you are green yourself. It’s your true color. Marian said so herself.”

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Cinematographer Gerry Fisher (Secret Ceremony, Fedora) imbues The Go-Between with a studied romanticism that reinforces the film’s picturesque setting while shoring up its darker psychological themes. The film's visual texture, designed to transport the viewer to a time and place distant and alien from the present—making tangible the novel’s famous opening line, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”—also establishes the film's narrative perspective; we’re seeing this world through Leo’s eyes.  

Glowingly honey-colored and sun-dappled at the start (the tale is set, significantly, at the turn of the century…Leo’s innocence standing in for pre-war England’s optimism), the film grows incrementally gloomier (radiant sunshine giving way to torrential rainstorms) in coincident conveyance of Leo’s disenchantment and loss of innocence.  

Leo checks the mercury thermometer daily, believing that, though
the power of his will, he can induce the summer heat to rise 

The concepts of fate and destiny are poignant, cross-purpose leitmotifs in The Go-Between. Fate's neutral dominance and intractability are symbolized by nature, while destiny manifests as the misdirected efforts of characters who believe (fallaciously) that they have control over the outcome of events. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As an adolescent, I felt isolated as a middle-class Black kid in white-majority neighborhoods and schools; lonely because, despite having four sisters, I lacked someone to talk to; shy, which became my survival skill as a gay teenager; and lacking a male guidance figure since my mom had recently remarried, making my stepfather still somewhat of a stranger. I also had an inner life that felt more authentic to me than my outer reality. 

Movies became my refuge, escape, and discovery. 

I approached The Go-Between seeking escape, but instead, discovered a white, British, fin de siècle version of myself reflected back at me. In a Norfolk suit, no less. 

Leo's Monumentally Unlucky 13th Birthday

Scenes depicting Leo’s outsider’s awareness of being “in” Brandham Hall but not “of” Brandham Hall reminded me of every I'm-the-only-Black-person-in-the-room experience I had growing up. Just as my being a child of the H-bomb-anxiety '60s (the root of all those fantasy TV sitcoms of the day: My Favorite Martian, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie) made me relate to the coping mechanism comfort Leo finds in the quick-fix, wish-fulfillment belief in possessing magic powers.

Have To Believe We Are Magic
Until I saw this movie, I didn't know that the desire for magical powers is a common fantasy in children. I once failed to study for an upcoming test at school and wished-wished-wished to get sick overnight so I could stay home. No such luck. But when I got to school the next day, the TEACHER was sick, and we had a sub...and no test!!
At the time, you could not have convinced me it wasn't all my doing. 

As I was an internal, self-serious kind of kid, I particularly identified with Leo's idealization of adults. With me, it manifested in a tendency towards being crush-prone whenever any grown-up paid me the slightest bit of attention (in grade school, I fell in love with a teacher who happened to look just like Sally Kellerman, simply because she asked for my help rolling the film strip projector cart back to the AV room).

A scene that’s always intrigued me is the one where all the Brandham Hall boys are off swimming, and Leo, who doesn't know how, is off to the side, sneaking a peek at Ted, who is sunbathing in the nude. The scene is ambiguous, leaving the viewer free to interpret, on Leo’s part, either a natural curiosity about a stranger (he and Ted have not yet met) who is relaxed and comfortable in himself, or an equally natural adolescent sexual curiosity. Being that I’ve always been of the mind that Alan Bates could arouse sexual curiosity in a rock, I saw it as the latter, projecting another point of identification with the character of Leo.

It's a perception that felt, if not “correct,” then perhaps validated when, in later years, after finally reading The Go-Between, I learned that author L.P. Hartley was gay and based his book on a summer he spent at an estate in Norfolk called Bradenham Hall when he was sixteen. It seemed Hartley only publicly acknowledged his sexual identity came late in life, and in 1971, published The Harness Room, his only gay-themed novel. 

PERFORMANCES

OK, what can I say about La Christie that I haven't already covered in the NINE essays already posted about her films?  Julie Christie is marvelous in The Go-Between, and of her performance I contend that if it can be said she possesses a niche gift, it's her peerless ability to inhabit and humanize (without trying to make them likable) characters who are blithely cruel. (Christy's Kitty Baldy from 1983's The Return of the Soldier [with Alan Bates] is like Marian Maudsley...the later years.)

18-year-old Dominic Guard in Picnic at Hanging Rock -1975

The Go-Between is a reminder of what a tremendous impact a well-cast leading child's role can have on a film (the young actors in 1972's The Other and that TV version of The Shining ruined both movies for me). Dominic Guard is perfection...simply because his natural, unaffected reactions feel as nascent as everything about Leo and his sense of self. Contrasted with the young actor who plays Leo in the 2015 BBC-One adaptation of The Go-Between: the kid is excellent...but he's acting the hell out of the part, and I was never unaware of that fact. 

The Go-Between, as realized by Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter, is for me a near-perfect screen adaptation of Hartley's heartbreaking novel, capturing both the beauty and the brutality of the story.

Of course, it isn't lost on me that my revisit to this movie some 54 years after my first experience of it, fittingly parallels the film's flashforward sequences that have adult Leo returning to "the scene of the crime" of the death of his innocence.

Happily, that's where the parallels end, for when I look at this 1971 masterpiece now, I feel more keenly than ever its humanist soul. The world that my 68-year-old eyes look out at today seems in a race to make a virtue of what is most weak in us (our capacity for cruelty) while turning the only true strength humans have (our compassion) into a liability.

The Go-Between is like a cautionary tale, reminding me of the damage that's inflicted by oppressive social structures, and what's at stake for humanity when we forget that we really should handle one another with a great deal more care. 

Clip from "The Go-Between" (1971)

BONUS MATERIAL

May December (2023)

Michel Legrand's mesmerizing score for The Go-Between was used to evocatively melodramatic effect when it was reorchestrated and adapted by composer Marcelo Zarvos for the Todd Haynes film May December, starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.

The Go-Between (2015)

Randy old sod that I am, the only improvement I could find in the faithful, perfectly serviceable TV adaptation of The Go-Between is that it grants us several Leo 's-eye-view shots of Ted Burgess (Ben Batt) in the altogether. Broadcast in September 2015, this version features Vanessa Redgrave and Jim Broadbent as old Marian and old Leo, respectively.

The Go-Between opened in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 13, 1971  

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2025

MIKE'S MURDER 1984

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for the purpose of discussion.

Falling into the category of favorite obscurities that fascinate as much as they frustrate is James Bridges’ distinctively internal neo-noir, Mike’s Murder. A thoroughly unique and obviously heartfelt project from one of the more underappreciated directors of the '70s. 

Mike's Murder fascinates because it’s one of those films that slipped through the cracks, released both too late—the ‘70s were over, small, hard-to-categorize movies were out, and ’80s blockbusters and high-concept franchises were in; and too soon—personal, quirky movies only came back into fashion with the indie film boom of the ‘90s. Mike's Murder frustrates because, as much as I absolutely love this film, it nevertheless remains a movie that, much like its characters, is haunted by its past.

Living In Rear-View in Car-Centric L.A. 

Looking back is the only way she can move forward 

My own enthusiasm for Mike's Murder stems significantly, though only partially, from being a huge fan of Debra Winger, whose nuanced, almost delicate performance—arguably one of her best—is the glue holding this melancholy thriller together. But as one of those emotionally insular, urban-set, psychologically dark films of the sort that have always appealed to me (like Midnight Cowboy, Klute, Looking for Mr. Goodbar), it can also be said that Mike's Murder—figuratively speaking, anyway—already had my name all over it. 

The real mystery: Was it love or limerence? 

I first saw Mike’s Murder at the Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard the week it opened in March of 1984. I sat in a theater that was less than half full, and I recall being surprised by the low turnout, especially considering how popular Winger was at the time. 

The romantic An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) had significantly boosted Winger's visibility, and the subsequent Oscar nomination she received for it branded her a bona fide star-on-the-rise. Not to mention, Winger's most recent film, Terms of Endearment, for which she received her second Best Actress Oscar nomination just a couple of weeks earlier, was still in theaters, attracting large audiences.

However, part of me wasn't entirely surprised by the half-empty theater I occupied, for Mike’s Murder—a film completed and scheduled to be released before Terms of Endearment—had arrived at theaters under a cloud of poor word-of-mouth and almost a year’s worth of negative publicity related to its troubled production history. E.g., its original release date kept being moved forward; the studio's initial reaction was so poor that it was nearly shelved; and leaked reports hinted of the film undergoing extensive reshoots and heavy re-editing. After all that, it seemed its distributing studio had ultimately lost faith in the movie altogether, resulting in it being quickly dumped into theaters in an effort to ride the crest of Winger's Terms of Endearment fame wave.

 The film's title sequence shows the making of a Big Tomy's chiliburger in such mouthwatering detail that, to this day, seeing just a few seconds of it can set off chiliburger cravings that can last a week. Big Tomy's opened in 1982 and, still in operation, has become an LA landmark.

An early Mike’s Murder casualty was the scrapping of much of the original score composed by ‘80s New Wave artist Joe Jackson and replacing it with a more traditional (and superb) score by Academy Award-winning James Bond composer John Barry.

But nobody weaned on the films of Robert Altman and Joseph Losey pays any attention to bad reviews, so I forged ahead, heedless of the critics calling Mike's Murder a complete waste of time and talent. And perhaps there's some validity to those claims, for even after cable-TV and VHS exposure, Mike's Murder never really did find an audience. 

Well, not exactly. I fell in love with Mike's Murder from the word go. I was utterly won over by everything about it. 

As yet another moody rumination on one of my all-time favorite movie themes—the innate human desire to find connection—Mike’s Murder resonated strongly with me as a lens held up to the urban “fear of being alone” phenomenon. That big city dread of loneliness that leads people to settle for what's available rather than going without or asking for what they truly want. 

And best of all, for a movie with such an assertively '80s vibe, Mike’s Murder genuinely felt to me like a film made during my favorite, most experimentally exciting period in moviemaking—the New Hollywood Era of the late '60s- ’70s. 

Debra Winger as Betty Parrish

Mark Keyloun as Mike Chuhutsky

Paul Winfield as Phillip Greene

Darrell Larson as Steve

Conceived as a uniquely Los Angeles “Cherchez L’homme” crime-mystery and character study told from the tentative perspective of its female protagonist, bank teller Betty Parrish, Mike’s Murder uses the detached attachments of LA hookup culture and the irrevocable undertow of violence in the Beverly Hills-Brentwood drug scene of the coked-up '80s to explore themes of isolation, ambiguous loss, unresolved grief, and reconciled loneliness in The City of “Whatever.” 

(A character’s answer when pressed to define the status of a relationship -- “New lover, boyfriend, whatever…?” Also, the only appropriate response when a guy like Mike says, "I’ll call. I mean it." ).

When news of James Bridges making a film titled Mike’s Murder first started appearing in the trades, I wasn’t sure whether that possessive apostrophe referred to a murder Mike commits or one he falls victim to. 

Betty Parrish has her life well organized. She has a nice job, a cute house, a cool car (a helluva cool car), caring friends and family, she dates from time to time, and owns a baby grand piano. The only kink—literally and metaphorically—in her otherwise structured life is “The C-scale out of tune,” as she calls him: Mike Chuhutsky. A puppy-dog-cute Ohio-to-Los Angeles transplant and rootless ladies’ man who gets by on occasion. As in, occasionally giving tennis lessons, occasionally dealing drugs, occasionally telling the truth, and occasionally being the live-in, transactionally bisexual object of affection of a wealthy record producer named Phillip Greene.

A character describing Mike: “He had all kinds of stories that he used on different people. He was always preparing a face for the faces that he met.”

“On occasion” is also an apt description of Betty’s dickmatized, casual-to-the-point-of-impromptu relationship with the chameleonic Mike, whose freewheeling life—no phone, no car, no steady address, and disappearances lasting up to six months—leaves their hookups overly-reliant on chance encounters or the odd booty call. 

Although mutually attracted and sharing a strong sexual chemistry, Betty and Mike are very nearly complete strangers (perhaps explaining where all that great sexual chemistry comes from). So, when one of Mike’s characteristically flaky no-shows turns out to be due to his having been brutally murdered in a botched drug deal, Betty is thrown into an emotional tailspin. Confronted with the abrupt finality of her present—all of her unexplored and unresolved feelings for him are now subsumed by grief—Betty grows increasingly, and ultimately dangerously, invested in piecing together the disturbing fragments of Mike’s shrouded past to get a better handle on just why this guy has made such an indelible impression on her. 

Playing on Betty's radio is the 1982 Chaz Jankel song "Without You"

Debra Winger on Betty being sexually fixated on Mike: “She was brought up well and has a great relationship with her mother. She has a good job and does it well. But she has this other side that people may not see at first. She needs that guy every three months. She and Mike don’t light candles. It's hot stuff. It’s sweaty, fast, and sometimes rough. She doesn’t introduce Mike to her mother. “

Atmospheric, tense, and one of those movies I knew I would return to again and again to pick up details of plot and character, I remember my first thoughts after seeing Mike’s Murder were: 1) Debra Winger is astonishingly good, and 2) this movie is gay as fuck.

The innate Queerness of Mike’s Murder leapt out at me years before I even knew its producer/writer/director was gay. Mike's Murder is a labor-of-love passion project by the late two-time Oscar-nominee James Bridges (The Baby Maker, The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy) that was inspired by a tragic real-life event shared by Bridges, his life partner Jack Larson (who produced), and their friend Paul Winfield.

In fact, Winfield’s role has him cast essentially as himself—Winfield, a privately out gay man who was professionally closeted—was tasked with revisiting and reenacting what certainly must have been a very painful period in his life. James Bridges, who became somewhat of a mentor to Debra Winger after casting her in Urban Cowboy, wrote the role of Betty especially for her. 

“The Ephemeral is Eternal” 

Personal favorite Dan Shor (Wise Blood, Strange Behavior), as video performance artist Richard Howard—he's Betty’s “whatever”—reinterprets Baudelaire’s “Extract the eternal from the ephemeral” to endorse his personal philosophy that the present is all that matters. In doing so, he inadvertently offers Betty a bit of cautionary insight: dwelling on the past and mourning the brevity of time spent with someone is futile. The duration of something's existence has no bearing on its significance to us, as even the most fleeting experiences hold the potential of becoming part of our lives forever. 

Mike's Murder's Queer aesthetic is tethered to the film's unconventional spin on the mystery genre and to its on-the-fringes perspective. Though critics and audiences at the time were annoyed to distraction by its failure to adhere to even the most basic crime thriller expectations (no cops!), I rather liked that Bridges used the titular murder as a device for exploring themes of urban alienation rather than as a kickoff to a traditional mystery.

Cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos supports this by establishing a visual motif wherein much of Mike’s Murder is shot in confined, tightly framed close-ups that convey the sense of its characters—who speed past one other in cars, conduct business from their vehicles (Betty’s job is in one of those hermetically sealed-looking drive-in banks), communicate via phones and answering machines, and peer at one another through cameras and videotape recorders—rarely ever touch and always seem to be alone…even when they’re together. 

Barriers and Separation
Betty and Mike often have things that come between them  

The look of Mike’s Murder so fits the story at hand that it almost acts as the visual equivalent of those noir voice-over narrations, drawing attention to the fact that the lens through which Bridges sees the world of Mike’s Murder is so personal that it borders on cinéma vérité. In fact, Mike’s Murder is easily the most recognizably lived-in, truthfully-realized vision of Los Angeles in the ‘80s I’ve ever seen (rare in movies, even the driving scenes are geographically accurate!) 

This personal touch stamp extends beyond the film’s appearance, as Mike’s Murder finds Bridges—who, like Winfield, was also openly gay in his private life but professionally closeted—taking his boldest step forward in integrating his personal life into his professional work. While the homoerotic gaze has long been a hidden-in-plain-sight attribute of several of James Bridges’ movies, Mike’s Murder is the first film by the director to include an entirely out gay character.

September 30, 1955 (1977)

Dennis Christopher (right) played a queer-coded supporting character in Bridges’ semi-autobiographical September 30, 1955 (the date actor James Dean died). The character that Bridges based on himself—the James Dean-obsessed Jimmy J, played by Richard Thomas—is depicted as straight. (Though a case could be made that the character is, like perhaps Bridges at that age, questioning.) 

Of all the films in Bridges’ abbreviated filmography (he made only eight movies in his career), Mike’s Murder is my absolute, hands-down favorite. And I say this knowing that the version I fell in love with isn’t the director’s original vision, but one whose tonal shifts and inconsistent, alternating points of view betray the battle scars of a year’s worth of edits, reshoots, retooling, and tinkering following a legendarily disastrous preview screening. 

Initially slated for a spring 1983 release, Mike’s Murder was sneak-previewed in January 1983 at two Bay Area theaters. Audience response was overwhelmingly negative. Bridges spent a year making changes—much of it funded personally—to address the most frequently criticized elements: the explicit violence and the nonlinear narrative. The revised Mike’s Murder premiered in Los Angeles on Friday, March 16, 1984, at the Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. 

It always rang false to me when Bridges, in damage-control, PR-speak interviews about the revamped Mike’s Murder, claimed, “This is a better picture than it was.

Mainly because I grew up in the Bay Area and knew that the locations chosen to preview Mike's Murder were two of the most white-bread, conservative suburban enclaves you could find. In short: the audience comprised precisely the demographic least likely to be receptive to—especially in the homophobic, Reagan '80s—a movie as artistically unorthodox and sexually transgressive as Mike’s Murder.

If Bridges hoped to salvage Mike’s Murder by restructuring it to appeal to THIS demographic, you’ll never convince me that his edits made the film "better"—only that they made it less “upsetting” to the multiplex set. The extreme form of hostility expressed at the previews (accounts cite booing, yelling, laughter, walkouts) doesn’t describe the reactions of people bored or confused by a movie. It’s how people react when they’re affronted.

Being as passionate about this film as I am, it's kind of torture to watch the
 theatrical trailer because it’s made up almost entirely of scenes no longer in the film.
Link to the TRAILER 

“Date night” preview audiences expecting another standard thriller from the director of The China Syndrome, or hoping Winger—by now typed in the public’s eye as a romantic ingénue thanks to Urban Cowboy and An Officer and a Gentleman—to be swept off by the leading man in the final reel, must have gone into apoplexy when confronted with Mike’s Murder’s blunt Queerness (a line from the original cut had Winfield telling Winger about his first encounter with Mike, “Before I knew it, he was in my arms, and my cock was up his ass...”); unfiltered sexuality (the original version of the phone sex scene was said to have made audiences particularly uncomfortable); liberal politics (a critique of the hypocrisy of the Moral Majority); and explicit violence attached to the kind of racial “optics”  (Mike’s retribution murder is carried out by two Black men) apt to trigger both white fragility and claims of racism.

Brooke Anderson as Patty Parker

It could be said that the boxoffice failure of Mike's Murder is something of a casualty of James Bridges' fame. After The China Syndrome and Urban Cowboy, he was seen as a high-profile director of mainstream motion pictures. Mike's Murder—which I always thought was too personal and niche a film to ever appeal to a broad audience—was a small film, an art film, if you will, that should have been pitched to that market.

Since the reedited version of Mike’s Murder ultimately flopped as resoundingly as the original was likely to do, it’s a shame that Bridges’ original vision, flaws and all, wasn’t what was released. 

In Mike's Murder, photographs serve as symbols of the attempt to hold onto that which is impermanent, so I have always had a soft spot for this striking, discarded poster artwork, which evokes a still from a photographer's contact sheet with a red greasepencil edit mark foreshadowing Mike's bloody erasure. Fortunately, composer Joe Jackson, compelled to release his album of songs written for the soundtrack early due to the film's changing release schedule, kept the image for his album cover.

William Ostander as Randy

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of the great things about Mike’s Murder is that it doesn’t neatly fit into any specific film genre or category. Except one.

Independent of what it was intended to be, meant to express, or how it came to be perceived, looking at it now, Mike’s Murder resonates with me most persuasively and forcefully as an underappreciated work of Queer Cinema. It’s a gay art film, with —if not inauthentically, then perhaps non-essentially—a centered heteronormative perspective. Kind of like a post-Gay-Lib/AIDS-Epidemic-Era throwback to the days when queer artists (Inge, Williams, Capote), prohibited from telling their stories honestly, had to resort to filtering their truths through heterosexual surrogates—most often female characters.

"(Mike) loved having his picture taken. He was impatient
and liked to see the results immediately."

From camera angles foregrounding Mark Keyloun’s rather splendiferous butt, to the introduction of Paul Winfield’s character in a semi-nude state, and the notably extended (and welcome) screen time allocated to the half-dressed muscular physique of wannabe Chippendales dancer Randy (William Ostrander, making a lot of a mysteriously-written role), the eroticized gay gaze in Mike’s Murder feels both thematically relevant and boldly subversive in a mainstream film.

"He talked about you all the time."

Each time I watch Mike’s Murder, I’m hit over the head with the conspicuous truth that, for me, the film’s real story, most interesting relationship, and most genuine narrative arc exploring the themes of love and loss in LA, is between Mike and Phillip, not Mike and Betty. 

Phillip’s entrance in the film arrives at a point when the viewer is desperately in need of a clear-eyed, unfiltered sense of who the mask-wearing Mike truly was, and the character of Phillip, middle-aged, sophisticated, and a little world-weary, provides that.

And thanks to the effortless gravitas of Paul Winfield’s performance, Betty's discovery that the one person who really knew Mike—who picked him up in Ohio and paid for his first-class flight to LA...who both knew and loved the sides of him she never saw—happens to be a man, elevates the film’s emotional depth and tension in a way I wanted to see more of. 

Robert Crosson as Sam Morris
A lonely photographer with a paternalistic streak
 whose affection for Mike is channeled into a voyeuristic preoccupation

When the Betty character isn’t coming across like a lone female tourist lost in an androcentric world of drug dealers, Sugar Daddies, father figures, and the opportunistically sexually-fluid young men who love and/or use them; from a strictly neo-noir angle, I do like that her character feels like a (intentional?) genre callback to the Dana Andrews role in Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir, Laura.

In that film, a detective falls in love with the dead woman whose murder he’s investigating, and I think something like that is what happens to Betty. 

It’s left up to individual interpretation whether one thinks Betty is in love with Mike at the start of the film (my take is that she only thinks she is). The tragedy is that she only ever “meets” the real Mike after his death. At the end, when she’s at her piano, and we hear that she has had that out-of-tune C-scale fixed, I think Betty has indeed fallen in love with Mike. And is slowly learning how to let him go.

No matter how many times I see it, Winger always wrings the waterworks out of me during this scene. She is SO, good. I can't imagine that the character of Betty, a completely average woman, looked like much of a role on the page, but Winger inhabits her and gives Betty an inner life we can see play across her face.

Even in those moments when I wish for a version of Mike's Murder that was less hetero-centric, I can never get past the personal reality that less of Debra Winger is anything is just simply not a good idea.

NO ONE IS INNOCENT

Comparative allusions to Preminger’s Laura and Mike’s Murder don’t stop with Winger’s role, but extend most pointedly to the way the titular characters in both are these dominant figures whose presences are felt throughout the entirety of the film. Influencing the action, whether or not they are onscreen, whether or not they are alive.  

As embodied by the ideally cast Mark Keyloun, Mike Chuhutsky (I love that name. As one reviewer observed, it stands out as the last remnant of his true self; the part of himself he hadn’t yet got around to changing), like all good hustlers, has that complacently nebulous, passive/assertive, all-things-to-all-people quality that makes him the perfect blank screen upon which others can project exactly what they want and need. He can look like an innocent, he can look like a criminal.

Hustler White

“A confused kid who sold a few drugs to pay his rent.” 

Themes related to privilege and the default presumption of white innocence emerge provocatively and ambiguously—vacillating between critique and perpetuation—in the “They're just reckless boys making bad decisions” tone of scenes depicting Mike and his twitchy friend Pete (an excellent Darrell Larson) engaging in what, in any other context (i. e., if they weren't white), would simply be regarded as criminal behavior.  

The physical contrasts between the two men—sharky city boy Pete next to cherubic Midwest cornpone Mike—invite audiences to ascribe a naïve blamelessness to Mike. But the crisp editing (credited to BAFTA-winning editor Dede Allen and Jeff Gourson) tells a different story, capturing Mike’s complicit “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” glances and culpable “Go ahead” nods.

In fact, there’s something well-observed in the (evenhandedly accurate) depiction of Mike and Pete as a particular genus of young man. Those whose survival instincts always lean toward dishonesty, duplicity, double-dealing, and exploiting an advantage, yet who never assume their actions will ever lead to (or are deserving of) serious consequences.  

A darkly compelling (and often heartbreaking) look at love, loss, and loneliness in the city of missed connections, Mike's Murder is a more-than-worthy addition to the canon of Los Angeles neo-noirs. It's a film that deserves reevaluation. Better still, Mike's Murder is a film that needs to have its original cut restored. 

Life partners James Bridges (who started out as an actor) and Jack Larson (associate producer of Mike's Murder and, of course, TV's Jimmy Olsen of The Adventures of Superman) met when both appeared in the film Johnny Trouble (1957). Bridges passed away in 1993, Larson in 2015

I once described Albert Finney as a movie star with the heart of a character actor. I think James Bridges was a mainstream filmmaker with the heart of a Queer Cinema auteur. And the two worlds come together magnificently in Mike’s Murder, James Bridges' most authentically personal film. 

Clip from Mike's Murder (1984)

BONUS MATERIAL

When I mentioned earlier that Debra Winger’s character drives a cool car, it’s because the moment I saw her driving that silver VW Rabbit convertible in Mike's Murder, I went ga-ga over it. My first VW Rabbit, purchased in the '90s was red, but in 2000, I got the silver model that I'd always had my eye on.  

I actually had the opportunity to observe James Bridges and Jack Larson at work when, about five months after seeing Mike’s Murder, I got a job as a dance extra in Bridges’ next film, Perfect (1985). Filming took place over seven days at the end of summer at the Sports Connection fitness center in West Hollywood, and it was a marvelous experience and a great deal of fun. True to the Hollywood axiom, nobody knows they're making a bomb until it detonates.

Debra Winger signed my Black Widow poster: 
"To Ken, my favorite guy to move with" 

In the mid-‘90s, I worked in Santa Monica as a dance instructor and fitness trainer, and for a brief time, I had the “Somebody pinch me!” thrill of having Debra Winger as a client. I couldn't believe my luck, and it took every ounce of professionalism I had not to go completely fanboy over her on our first meetup. She relayed to me that she selected my class because she couldn’t stand “perky” (my class demeanor was not dissimilar to that of Louis Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman). She's such a sweetheart, and I had (have) such a crush. 

 Bridges and Larsen cast Mark Keyloun after seeing him play a Times Square hustler
 in Paul Morrissey's Forty-Deuce (1982)

The real-life case that inspired Mike’s Murder was the stabbing death of Mark Bernolak in his apartment in Brentwood on October 12, 1980. Bernolak, a former lover of Paul Winfield and an acquaintance of Bridges and Larson, was a part-time tennis instructor who also dealt drugs while trying to get work behind the scenes in films. 

IMDB lists him as an assistant on the 1979 The Who documentary The Kids Are Alright, and a university archive has seven photos Bernolak took of author Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy (both friends of Larson and Bridges). The details surrounding the actual case are tragic and a bit dodgy, but far less sensational than what Mike’s Murder depicts (Those interested can Google: Mark Bernolak and UCLA football). 

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