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

LIPSTICK 1976

Spoiler Alert: Crucial plot points are revealed in the interest of critical analysis and discussion

Lipstick is a dramatized exposé and social critique on the serious topic of rape in the same way that Mommie Dearest is a dramatized exposé and social critique on the serious topic of child abuse.  

For all its purported noble intentions and "socially conscious" pre-release hype, Lipstick, a slick, high-concept dramatic thriller with a whopper of an identity crisis, is a film that can’t help having its motives called into question. Since its release, Lipstick has suffered a public perception problem arising out of the cacophonous dissonance struck by the seriousness of its subject matter contrasted with the profound superficiality of its treatment. 

Poised to be the first major motion picture to thoughtfully address the dual victimization women face in cases of sexual assault—the crime itself and, later, the "victim blaming" judicial system—Lipstick hoped to provoke the kind of cultural controversy and heated social conversations sparked by Martin Scorsese’s then recently-released Taxi Driver. But the only dialogue Lipstick prompted was widespread criticism of what many saw as a tasteless attempt to exploit a serious issue by using “social relevance” as a smokescreen for a routine rape-and-revenge flick. 

And, indeed, audiences—unpersuaded by the film’s $3.5 million budget; team of legal technical advisors; and Oscar-adjacent pedigree…its cast included an Academy Award-winner (Anne Bancroft) and nominee (Chris Sarandon [Dog Day Afternoon]), its crew, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bill Butler [One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest])—recognized Lipstick for what it was: an exploitation B-movie in A-list clothing.

Corner of Sunset and Larrabee

Logo design by Sandy Dvore

Producer Dino De Laurentiis, who scored a major hit with the Charles Bronson vigilante thriller Death Wish in 1974, hoped to land another jackpot with Lipstick. A movie that instead proved that you can take the exploitation flick out of the grindhouse, but you can't take the grindhouse out of the exploitation flick.  

Critics (those wholly unacquainted with feminism, anyway) were quick to label Lipstick "A feminist Death Wish," while a bemused public, tasked with trying to make sense of a film so clearly at cross-purposes with itself, fractioned off into two distinct camps. 

One camp comprised exploitation movie fans who enthusiastically embraced Lipstick's post-Billy Jack /neo-Taxi Driver zeitgeist and cheered the film's extravagant tawdriness and outrageously contrived (and outrageously satisfying) violent ending. 

Though perhaps unintentional, Lipstick's hyperfocus on model Margaux Hemingway's beauty somewhat clouded (if not outright contradicted) the film's determining theme that rape is an act of violence and control, not desire and sexual attraction  

The second camp was individuals who detected in Lipstick’s advance publicity and early plot synopsis, similarities to the real-life legal cases of Joan Little and Inez Garcia—two women at the center of two headline-making, mid-’70s court trials in which the rape victim killed her assailant—and hoped the film would be an illuminating examination of the thorny issue of violence and victim’s rights. This was the group most disappointed and offended by Lipstick, voicing the common head-scratcher complaint /query: who thought it was a good idea to make a glossy, glamorous movie about rape?

Since American culture holds the not wholly inaccurate perception that the wealthy and beautiful are shielded from life's harsh realities, I think Lipstick, in choosing to have as its subject an uncommonly beautiful woman who makes her living off of the elevated status that comes with beauty, sought to dramatize that no woman or girl is invulnerable to the threat of violent sexual assault. 

But somehow, that message didn't really seem to land. 

"The built-in sensuality of the film medium presents a permanent dilemma: A director, even with good intentions, can hardly help turning a beautiful woman into a sex object, and there is always the danger that what starts out as an exposé becomes exploitation." 

Molly Haskell, in her 1974 book "From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies."

Of course, there was a third camp—the word "camp" being particularly germane in this instance—who saw in Lipstick's earnest self-seriousness and heedless vulgarity a true cult film in the making. Normally, lovers of Bad Taste Cinema would have to look to the films of Andy Warhol, John Waters, or Russ Meyer to find a more preposterous co-mingling of haute couture, gratuitous nudity, sweaty-palmed villainy, flared nostril acting, and off-putting violence. 

Not this time. If it can be said that Lipstick is in any way successful, I contend that it truly triumphs as an unintentional trash classic and an early contender for the title ascribed to Andy Warhol’s BAD the following year: “A picture with something to offend absolutely everybody.”

Whose Gaze Is It, Anyway?
Mr. Stuart cools his cobblers while making an obscene music phone call

In telling its story, Lipstick plays fast and loose with just whose perspective we're afforded. In the early part of the film, the camera's gaze is actually more sympathetic to the rapist's experience. This is evident both in how the brutal assault is shot and in the ways its editing concerns itself with protecting the modesty of the assailant. All the while never missing an opportunity to expose the victim's nudity in sometimes startlingly crass tableau. 

Were Lipstick even a marginally better-made film, I think I’d find it too disturbing (or offensive) to sit through. So I take it as a kind of mercy that it’s a movie that lavishes appreciably more imagination and care on its modeling sequences and fabulous disco synth soundtrack (by French composer Michel Polnareff) than on the darker implications of its central drama.  It’s clear Lipstick strives for “ripped from today’s headlines” realism, but its melodramatic tone almost dares you to take it seriously. 

Margaux Hemingway as Chris McCormick

Chris Sarandon as Gordon Stewart

Mariel Hemingway as Kathy McCormick

Anne Bancroft as Carla Bondi

Perry King as Steve Edison

In a reversal of the standard ‘70s practice of made-for-TV movies borrowing the plotlines of then-current feature films, Lipstick’s plot has much in common with the groundbreaking 1974 TV movie A Case of Rape. Both films dramatizing how a woman’s thwarted efforts to put her rapist behind bars expose a judicial system that instead puts the victim’s life and sexual history on trial. But where the Emmy-nominated Elizabeth Montgomery TV film opts for a somber tone of social realism, Lipstick’s unsubtle approach prioritizes shock. 

In a choice that seems to go against everything this film pretends to be about, screenwriter David Rayfiel gives Chris a brother who's a brother…or rather, a priest (played by John Bennett Perry, father of the late Matthew Perry). Given the size and inconsequence of the role, his presence feels like a tacked-on, tone-deaf signifier of  Chris' virtue. The sexist "good girl" -"bad girl" moralizing behind antiquated rape laws is what this movie is supposed to be denouncing...not perpetuating.

Story: Model Chris McCormick (Margaux) agrees to meet with her 14-year-old kid sister Kathy’s (Margaux’s own 14-year-old kid sister Mariel) favorite teacher, Gordon Stuart (Sarandon), to listen to his experimental music compositions. Stuart ends up sexually assaulting Chris, but when charged with the crime, he convinces the court that it was consensual rough sex initiated by the sexually jaded plaintiff. 

In the wake of the court’s Not Guilty verdict, Chris suffers losses both personal and professional. When Mr. Stuart targets Kathy in a second assault, big sister is forced to take matters into her own hands.

Despite Lipstick’s pervading tone of reality-challenged sensationalism, it does manage to make the occasional hamfisted point or two. Either by using Bancroft’s legal prosecutor character as a rape-statistics mouthpiece, or via the whittling down of complex issues into gratuitous setpiece moments calculated to provoke maximum audience outrage and catharsis. 

But as a representative dramatization of what a distressing percentage of women go through, Lipstick is both too specific and too far-fetched to resonate as any sort of larger, relatable social indictment. Even the most obvious angle of social commentary available to the film—using the profession of modeling to explore the role that media and advertising play in perpetuating and normalizing rape culture—proves to be an opportunity largely squandered.

In an act of guerilla programming, filmmaker Martha Coolidge (Rambling Rose, Valley Girl, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge) released her debut feature Not a Pretty Picture—a sensitive semi-documentary about date rape—in New York on Wednesday, March 31, 1976…just two days before Lipstick opened in theaters on Friday, April 2nd. Though not widely seen then, critics hailed it for being, in execution, all that Lipstick sold itself to be. 

Directed by Lamont Johnson (That Certain Summer - 1972) and written by David Rayfiel (Three Days of the Condor -1975), Lipstick was released in a surge of social relevance and pop culture topicality. The latter, courtesy of Margaux Hemingway, the 6-foot supermodel and granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway whose then-ubiquitousness (appearing on the cover of  Time and landing a million-dollar contract with Fabergé Cosmetics, all in less than a year) made worthwhile the gamble of handing over the lead role in a major motion picture to an acting neophyte.

I Found A Million Dollar Babe

Cringe ads like these, promoting the dominance of the male gaze and implied proprietary physical access to women's bodies, were very common in the '70s. It was my hope that part of Lipstick’s agenda included exploring the role advertising plays in rape culture and normalizing the casual objectification of women.  

Lipstick first came to my attention when I saw the movie's lip-shaped logo featured in a full-page teaser trade ad in Variety. Combining two of my favorite things—movies with one-word titles and movies with catchy slogans—I had no idea what any of it meant, but I was all in. 

I took it as a hopeful omen that many of my recent favorites were movies with symbolic, single-word titles: Nashville, Smile, Shampoo. Plus, in a '70s movie landscape overcrowded with buddy films and male-centric stories, Lipstick felt like a signal heralding an emergence of more movies about women and featuring stronger female characters.

The courtroom scenes never rise above Perry Mason-level familiarity, and the terrible case Bancroft's prosecuting attorney mounts will have you screaming at the screen. Performance-wise, it's hard to tell if Bancroft is overacting or just seems that way next to the TV-scale performances of her co-stars. 

What really boosted my enthusiasm was when I learned that Lipstick was to open in San Francisco at MY theater! Which is to say, the movie theater where I’d been employed since high school--The Alhambra Theater on Polk Street. The once spacious Alhambra had been divided into two smaller theaters in 1974, and Lipstick was slated to replace Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in Alhambra #1 (after a staggering 13 months!), while Alhambra #2 turned things into an unofficial Chris Sarandon Film Festival by hosting Dog Day Afternoon.   

The only downside to this terrific news was my awareness of the Alhambra being a neighborhood movie theater (sister theater to the first-run Regency on Van Ness), and as a result, we rarely ever got the movies that the studios had confidence in. 

I’m not sure if the fault lies with the actor, director, or simply how the role was written, but given that the reality for many women is that rapists look like the average guy-next-door, it does the film no favors to have Sarandon's character be a weird, twitchy, Norman Bates type. At our first glimpse of him, he's so obviously off-the-rails that we question Chris' judgment in letting her little sister near him in the first place.  

With a dash of trepidation now introduced to my otherwise unbridled sense of anticipation, I was reluctant to see Lipstick in the usual manner of theater ushers…in out-of-sequence bits and pieces while standing in the back of the theater with a flashlight. Craving the full, uninterrupted Lipstick experience, I went on opening night (on my day off) and sat in a sparsely populated, virtually all (gay) male audience. The porno theater vibe of the experience was hard to ignore. 

After its first week of release, Paramount knew it had a bomb on its hands. Marketing went from understated to alarmist, with newspaper ads in major cities disclosing local rape statistics over increasingly violent imagery

Lipstick had been booked into the Alhambra for a month, but there was no way it could survive four weeks as a solo. After the first week, Lipstick was paired with Straw Dogs (1971), then Chinatown (1974), and finally Once is Not Enough (1975).

I think I went into Lipstick expecting something perhaps along the lines of Klute…a gritty crime story built around a character study of a woman. I was way off. I sat through Lipstick twice that night, liking it more the second time when I surrendered to it being the schlock exploitationer it was. And while it was not the movie I had hoped it would be, it was somehow both better and worse than I could ever have imagined.

And if you think that sentence sounds convoluted and paradoxical, well, say hello to the two words that perhaps best describe Lipstick.

Vogue meets International Male

Handsome Perry King has little to do as Chris' semi-supportive boyfriend with the blown dry hair and dubious mustache.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

As a lifetime devotee of so-bad-they’re-good movies, and confirmed aficionado of Cinema de Strange, virtually everything I love about Lipstick stems from its outré luridness. It's so trashy! It’s like a Sidney Sheldon potboiler crossed with an Italian Giallo. And as Lipstick’s alluring but superficial gloss isn’t offset by anything more substantive in the way of writing, acting, or characters, none of it actually feels tethered to reality. Too much of Lipstick’s rape & revenge plot feels engineered to provide a visceral experience, not a contemplative one.

Dressed to Kill

What can you say about a movie whose apogee and nadir is the blissfully baroque image of a beautiful, statuesque model, lacquered and coiffed, racing through the parking lot of the Pacific Design Center in a glittering red evening gown while brandishing a rifle? It’s got Ken Russell written all over it.

It’s important that I not be too dismissive of Lipstick, for though it was a commercial and critical flop (one critic called it a “Tower of Trash”), Lipstick actually did influence rape laws in California. In late 1976, the California Legislature passed a resolution that prohibited the mention of a rape victim’s sexual history from being brought up in court. It was named The Margaux Hemingway Resolution No. 109 in her honor. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

That Lipstick is a triumph of style is nowhere more evident than in the superb title sequence, which, for me, is alone worth the price of admission. The film’s opening 3 ½ minute model photoshoot economically combines a chic, music video-style credits sequence with the subtle (the first and only time that word can be applied to anything related to this movie) establishment of Lipstick’s undeveloped subthemes regarding the normalized dehumanization at the core of sexism and misogyny. 

We see a woman, passive and silent, attended to by a phalanx of men devoted to enhancing her appearance. Often using the language of seduction (tellingly, the only female voice present is dismissed summarily). We're left to ask ourselves. is the woman we’re watching being glorified or objectified? 

It's practically documentary: Margaux Hemingway is photographed by the man who launched her modeling career, Francesco Scavullo. Also present are Scavullo's assistant and life partner, Sean Byrnes,  Way Bandy (makeup), and Harry King (hair). The only fictional addition is actress Catherine McLeod, playing an ad agency executive. 

PERFORMANCES

Though ill-served by a script that conceived her character as almost entirely reactive, I like Margaux Hemingway in Lipstick and never thought she was as bad as the critics made out. True, she doesn’t have much range, but she has an appealing presence and earthiness that might have been showcased to better advantage with a director more protective of her limitations (you don’t keep cutting to reaction shots of someone with so little variance in expression). Still, if you compare Margaux’s performance in this, her first movie to, say, Raquel Welch in her 13th feature film…1969s Flareup (which shares with Lipstick a similar “A woman’s outrage, a woman’s revenge!” dramatic arc), Margaux comes off looking like Liv Ullmann.

Everything that was said and written about Mariel Hemingway stealing the movie out from under everyone is quite accurate. As the most authentically realized character in the film, her performance is remarkable in its naturalness and sensitivity. When the failure of Lipstick signaled the end of  Margaux's lucky streak, the accolades Mariel received created a rift between the sisters. Margaux was quoted as saying: “She ended up stealing the movie and deserved the acclaim, but I was upset. Because it was as if people were tired of me and gave her the attention.”

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I can't say whether Lipstick is simply a timepiece that stands as evidence of an era when no one batted an eye that a team of men would craft a movie about rape without the creative input of even a single woman, or if it's a movie that deserves credit simply for drawing attention to a topic few major films were even willing to tackle. For me, part of its lingering legacy is the sad, meta intersection of reality and fantasy that comes with the participation of the two Hemingway sisters and all that we now know that we couldn’t have known then.

Cover Girls
Cover: An item placed in front of something to protect or conceal

It's discomfiting to watch a film about rape/sexual abuse that stars siblings who themselves faced issues concerning mental health, body image, eating disorders, alcohol and drug abuse, and sexual abuse.  

Margaux Hemingway died of an overdose on July 1, 1996, at the age of 42. Mariel became a successful  Oscar-nominated actress (Manhattan - 1979) and is currently a tireless advocate for mental health.

Lipstick co-stars Mariel Hemingway and Chris Sarandon went on to work together in three other films: Road Ends, 1997; Perfume, 2001; and above, a Canadian film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Men, 1998.

BONUS MATERIAL

Lipstick's fabulous opening sequence. 

From Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) to Faye Dunaway stopping traffic in Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), fashion shoots in movies have always been a favorite of mine. 

The disco-era vibes are strong in “(You’re) Fabulous Babe” - 1977- a tune written by advertising whiz Bob Larimer to launch Fabergé's BABEfragence line. Sung by recording artist Kenny Williams.

Francesco Scavullo

Copyright © Ken Anderson      2009 - 2024