If prostitution didn’t exist, Hollywood most certainly would have had to invent it. How else to surmount the troubling obstacle presented to screenwriters required to develop women characters not defined by the label of wife, mother, or girlfriend? How else to include as much sex, salaciousness, and female objectification as possible while still tent-poling the dual hypocritical obligations of have-your-cake-and-eat-too moralizing necessary to keep one step ahead of the censors, and the proper amount of after-the-fact, self-righteous finger-wagging to placate audience guilt?
America loves its sex, violence, and debauchery, but never really lets itself enjoy the fun it has rolling around in the gutter unless also afforded the opportunity to give itself a good slap on the wrist after it’s all over. This need to have one’s "sensitive adult material" served up with a healthy dose of religious dogma goes a long way toward explaining why a moralizing piece of Hollywood sleaze like Walk on the Wild Side is such an enduringly entertaining hoot.
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| Laurence Harvey as Doug Linkhorn |
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| Jane Fonda as Kitty Twist (nee Tristram) |
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| Capucine as Hallie Gerard |
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| Barbara Stanwyck as Jo Courtney |
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| Anne Baxter as Teresina Vidaverri |
Published in 1956, Nelson Algren’s anecdotal, relentlessly downbeat, essentially unfilmable (at least in 1962) Depression-era novel A Walk on the Wild Side bears scant resemblance to the sanitized movie adapted from it, save for a few characters' names and the excision of the “A” from the title.
The film version, rumored (quite remarkably) to be the work of no fewer than six writers, including playwright Clifford Odets (The Country Girl) and screenwriter Ben Hecht (Spellbound), strives to be a tale of lost souls seeking redemption through love on the sordid side of the streets of New Orleans.
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| Richard Rust as Oliver |
However, the challenge of balancing sexual candor and social uplift becomes apparent in nearly every scene and dialogue exchange, ultimately proving far too unwieldy a burden for director Edward Dmytryk (Raintree County, Murder My Sweet), who, it is said, stepped in after the original director, Blake Edwards, was replaced.
In the end, the movie promoted with the self-serving warning “This is an ADULT PICTURE - Parents should exercise discretion in permitting the immature to see it,” ended up being no more than another teasing Hollywood soap opera.
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| The composition of this shot pretty much sums up Walk on the Wild Side's major conflict |
The time is the 1930s (you’ll just have to take the film’s word for that; everything looks like 1962). After his sick father, an alcoholic, unordained preacher, dies, Arroyo, Texas farm boy Dove Linkhorn (Lithuanian-born Laurence Harvey) travels to Louisiana on a quest to find his long-lost love, Hallie (French-born Capucine), an amateur painter and sculptor.
En route, he crosses paths with savvy runaway orphan Kitty Twist (Fonda), who teaches him the tricks of riding the rails and thumbing rides. Although Kitty has a few other tricks she’d like to teach him, Dove says no to hobo hanky-panky because his heart remains true to Hallie, whom he calls his religion.
A brief stopover at the rundown café of Mexican head-turner Teresina Vidaverri (Baxter) brings out Kitty’s claws, resulting in her stealing from the proprietress out of jealousy. The morally offended dirt farmer sends her on her way and stays on at Teresina’s place as a hired hand.
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| The composition of this shot pretty much sums up Walk on the Wild Side's secondary conflict |
Cut to New Orleans’ French Quarter and to the popular bordello known as The Doll House. Run by no-nonsense man-hater (aka, coded lesbian in '60s Hollywood screenwriter parlance) Jo Courtney (Stanwyck) and given assist by her devoted but ineffectual husband, former carny strongman Achilles Schmidt (Karl Swenson), who lost his legs in a train accident.
The Doll House, typical of most movie whorehouses, doesn't look like very much fun, but business appears to be booming. The big shocker (to the screenwriters perhaps, but certainly to no one with even a passing familiarity with soap opera plotting) is that Dove’s virginal and virtuous Hallie is the Doll House’s most desirable and sought-after prostitute… Jo categorically taking top honors as Hallie’s most persistent and ardent pursuer.
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| As Hallie, statuesque ex-model Capucine embodies the kind of regal, exotic glamour suitable to a high-priced escort ("Upscale and sophisticated enough to take anywhere!"). But, breathtaking beauty aside, the woman comes off as the least fun hooker you're likely to rent. |
Of course, when Dove finally reunites with his wild Texas love, the woman with whom he shared his first kiss and more: “Afterwards, in the moonlight...we danced like we was celebrating a miracle. A crazy kind of dance. And then we sang and shouted...like it wasn't real!.” (of course, once we set eyes on the haughty, high-cheekboned regalness of Capucine, this already a laughable reminiscence now becomes surrealistically inconceivable). Alas, the romantically idealistic hayseed is a tad slow on picking up on how Hallie has managed to support herself all this time, and how she's able to afford all those expensive 1960s Pierre Cardin-designed frocks. When he does, his heartbroken disillusionment gives way to the usual macho possessiveness and proprietary protectiveness.
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| The intense dislike Capucine and Harvey had for one another is the stuff of legend |
At this point, we see that the film does not regard Hallie’s virtue as something that is her own damn business to do with as she pleases, but as something that has been taken from Dove. What Hallie feels about her life as a sex worker is secondary (well, really of no consequence to the screenwriter at all) to Dove, who acts like the wounded party in all this. Thus, he takes it upon himself to save and safeguard Hallie's body and soul, especially from the over-ardent attentions of The Doll House madam.
Resorting to his father's bible-thumping ways, Dove proselytizes ... I mean, explains to an understandably exasperated Teresina (who I'm not entirely sure he hasn't been shacking up with all this time, but now is left to douse her torch in tequila) his philosophy and the film's narrative through-line:
“In the Bible, Hosea fell in love with Gomer. She was a harlot. They got married, but she couldn't stay away from men. Hosea got mad and threw her out. Sold her into slavery. But he couldn't get her out of his mind, so he went looking for her. When he found her, he brought her back home. But it was no good. Before long, she was up to her old tricks again [literally, it would seem]. But he loved her anyway, and he couldn't give her up. So he took her into the wilderness...away from temptation. Away from other men. And that's what I have to do with Hallie.”
If you think this sounds like he's talking about a child or a pet, not a grown woman with a mind of her own, then, like me, Dove won't look to you quite like the virtuous hero he and the screenwriters think he is.
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| I'm sorry, but we're supposed to believe that these two stunning, continental-looking creatures spent even one minute in dustbowl Texas? |
The remaining bulk of Walk on the Wild Side occupies itself with being a romantic triangle-cum-spiritual tug-of-war between Dove (representing honest values and true love) and Jo (representing well-dressed depravity and perversion), with the magnificent but I’m-not-all-that-convinced-she’s-worth-all-this-trouble Hallie at the center.
Happily, by way of distraction, we have the welcome reappearance of Kitty, the former boxcar good-time-girl transformed into garter-snapping sexpot, as the newest employee of The Doll House. And then there's chipper Southern chippie, Miss Precious (the always terrific Joanna Moore, Tatum O’Neal’s mom), a Doll House resident who sleeps on a Confederate flag pillow and punctuates even the shortest sentences with “The Colonel always said…”. On the distaff side, there's the reptilian sexiness of short-tempered strong-arm man, Oliver (Richard Rust of Homicidal), who has an eye for the ladies and suede gloves to keep his hands nice and unbruised when he roughs them up.
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| Inquiring Minds Want to Know Menacing roughneck Oliver (Richard Rust) needs some answers from Kitty |
Posters for Walk on the Wild Side proclaimed: “A side of life you never expected to see on the screen!” Which is not altogether false, given you've got a 4-time Oscar-nominee playing one of the screen’s first lesbians (who lives to the final reel, yet!), and the daring-for-its-time setting of a New Orleans brothel. The rest, alas, is what Hollywood has always done: a) Offer up endless reworkings of the Madonna-whore dichotomy as soap opera and love story, b) attempt to shock and scandalize, but in the end, always heralding staunch conservatism and prudery.
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| Joanna Moore as Miss Precious A personal favorite and incapable of giving a bad performance, this incandescent actress with the very sad life story is one of the bright spots in Walk on the Wild Side |
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I'm not sure if the genre has been identified by any other name besides Southern Gothic, but I am a major fan of the overheated, sex-and-psychosis dramas of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Carson McCullers. And when these southern-fried potboilers are crossed with a touch of the soap-opera overstatement associated with Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann, and Sidney Sheldon ...well, I'm in 7th Heaven. Walk on the Wild Side has all the luridness of Williams, the pretentiousness of Inge, plus all the unintentional humor of anything bearing the stamp of Susann.
There's dialogue that sounds as though it were written by a robot; overearnest performances that are nevertheless as limp as a clothesline; the ever-present topic of sex that is hinted at and alluded to but never spoken of in even remotely direct terms; and clashing accents left and right: Texas drawl, Southern twang, Georgia singsong, French, British, and Spanish (sort of).
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| Riding the Rails Jane Fonda looks a good deal like her father, Henry, in The Grapes of Wrath in this shot of Dove and Kitty catching a ride in a freight car |
Fans of the by-now-anticipated unwillingness and inability of '60s films to remain faithful to the era they depict will have a field day with Walk on the Wild Side's interpretation of the Depression-era South. Outside of a few automobiles and some distant dress extras, the look is 1962 through and through. A costume designer friend of mine once suggested that this practice is not an unintentional or careless phenomenon. As the makeup and hairstyles of an earlier era often look odd or unflattering to audiences, he suggested that the modern look of so many period films is just the industry's recognition that the stars of romantic films must appear "attractive" to their audiences, and very often that means adhering to contemporary styles in makeup and hair.
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| Another inconsistency: we're asked to accept that Hallie, a woman who quotes T.S. Eliot and asks johns for Brancusi sculptures as gifts, ever had anything to do with a man as "basic" (read: boring) as Dove |
When a studio is forking over big bucks for a glamorous star, they want the audience to "see" the glamour. The aesthetic concern is that the baggy fashions and severe makeup styles of the 1930s (such as thin eyebrows, bow lips, thick stockings, and figure-concealing frocks) will look odd or comical to 1960s audiences. A point well taken, I concede. But it doesn't address the jarring incongruity of seeing women with '60s bouffants and bullet bras stepping out of 1928 DeSotos.
PERFORMANCES
The beautiful Capucine may not be much of an actress, but she's not helped much by a script that calls for her to behave like a non-stop pill from the minute she's introduced. Male screenwriters unfamiliar with how women actually think are often guilty of writing about "beauty" as though it were an actual character trait rather than a physical attribute. In the case of Hallie Gerard, so little of the character's much-talked-about passion, restlessness, or joy is conveyed that we're left to imagine she's fought over by Dove and Jo simply because she's so outrageously gorgeous. If the Hallie we now see is supposed to represent a broken woman whose life-force has been drained out of her by her having "Fallen down the well," as she puts it, the backstory we're left to fill in requires an actress substantially more skilled than the one we're given. You get about as much emotionally out of Capucine as a walking/talking entity as from one of her model photo shoots from the '50s.
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| The late-great Juanita Moore as Mama |
PERFORMANCES
Where to start? To say that I enjoy all the performances in Walk on the Wild Side is not at all saying that many of them are any good. If anyone emerges from the chaos with their dignity intact, it's Barbara Stanwyck. An actor virtually incapable of giving a false performance, Stanwyck is not really called upon to deliver more than a professional, standard-issue, tough-broad routine, but she's nevertheless the most compelling character in the film for me. She wants Hallie, and I don't doubt it for a minute.
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| A rare shot of Barbara Stanwyck showing off her bust |
Barbara Stanwyck was outed as a lesbian in two substandard books: The Sewing Circle by Axel Madsen, and one that got right to the point with its title-- Hollywood Lesbians by Boze Hadleigh. If either book is to be believed, Walk on the Wild Side was a film set with more closets than a Feydeau farce: leading man (Harvey), leading lady (Capucine), and co-star (Stanwyck).
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| You can say Jo Courtney wants to lead The Glamorous Life, as in, She Don't Need a Man's Touch |
In this, Stanwyck's first film since 1957's Forty Guns, the very private Stanwyck was yet another classic-era star forced to embrace the burgeoning era of movie permissiveness and take on a role I'm certain at one time would have thought unsavory. Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons disapproved of Stanwyck taking on such a role, to which Stanwyck is said to have responded, "What do you want them to do, get a real madam and a real lesbian?" On the bright side, at least the film she was featured in was a major Hollywood production. Come 1964, Stanwyck would be following in Joan Crawford's B-movie footsteps and appearing in William Castle schlock like The Night Walker.
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| Cheekbone Wars Capucine circa 1922 and Faye Dunaway, 1974 vintage (in The Towering Inferno) both rock twin towers of hair along with their Grecian-style gowns |
Laurence Harvey has always been a favorite of mine (owing at least in part to my tendency to develop matinee crushes on birdlike, Tony Perkins types), but he really seems out of his element here. The thoroughly engaging (and sexy) energy he brought to I Am a Camera (1955), or 1959's Expresso Bongo, is nowhere to be seen in his tediously virtuous Dove Linkhorn.
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| All of Anne Baxter's scenes are enlivened by her terrible Mexican accent ("Wha' hoppen?") |
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Is there some axiom that says the cooler the opening credits sequence, the more likely one is to be let down by the film? Outside of the brilliant and stylish art-deco title sequence for the 1974 screen adaptation of Mame, which got me all hyped-up only to then lead me down a path of soft-focus croaking, Saul Bass' snazzy, jazz-tinged title sequence for Walk on the Wild Side (assisted immeasurably by the Oscar-nominated Elmer Bernstein, Mack David theme music) sets one up for a film that never materializes.
Edward Dmytryk would go on to direct Richard Burton and Joey Heatherton in Bluebeard.
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Walk on the Wild Side is, like the 1976 US/USSR collaboration that resulted in the dreadful musical mistake that was The Bluebird, a film whose backstory is infinitely more interesting than the movie itself. Conflict-of-interest deals were behind much of Walk on the Wild Side's grab-bag casting (Laurence Harvey was being promoted by the wife of the head of Columbia Studios, while Capucine was being promoted by producer Charles K. Feldman). The film was plagued by constant rewrites, deleted scenes (the internet is full of rumors regarding a curiously missing-in-action hairbrush spanking scene between Stanwyck and Capucine...be still my heart), costly delays, and a cast that was often openly antagonistic to one another as well as to the director.
Is there some axiom that says the cooler the opening credits sequence, the more likely one is to be let down by the film? Outside of the brilliant and stylish art-deco title sequence for the 1974 screen adaptation of Mame, which got me all hyped-up only to then lead me down a path of soft-focus croaking, Saul Bass' snazzy, jazz-tinged title sequence for Walk on the Wild Side (assisted immeasurably by the Oscar-nominated Elmer Bernstein, Mack David theme music) sets one up for a film that never materializes.
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Walk on the Wild Side is, like the 1976 US/USSR collaboration that resulted in the dreadful musical mistake that was The Bluebird, a film whose backstory is infinitely more interesting than the movie itself. Conflict-of-interest deals were behind much of Walk on the Wild Side's grab-bag casting (Laurence Harvey was being promoted by the wife of the head of Columbia Studios, while Capucine was being promoted by producer Charles K. Feldman). The film was plagued by constant rewrites, deleted scenes (the internet is full of rumors regarding a curiously missing-in-action hairbrush spanking scene between Stanwyck and Capucine...be still my heart), costly delays, and a cast that was often openly antagonistic to one another as well as to the director.
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| Character actress Kathryn Card, fondly remembered as Mrs. Magillicuddy, Lucille Ball's ditsy mother on I Love Lucy |
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| Four-time Oscar nominee Barbara Stanwyck (she won an Honorary Oscar in 1982) made only two films after Walk on the Wild Side: Roustabout with Elvis Presley, of all people, and the aforementioned William Castle thriller The Night Walker, both in 1964 |
Woefully tame and coy by today's standards, Walk on the Wild Side maintains its historical notoriety as one of the earliest major motion pictures to feature a lesbian character. As the years have passed, the film has revealed itself to be a movie with a fairly high behind-the-scenes LGBTQ pedigree as well. The names of Laurence Harvey, Capucine, and Barbara Stanwyck have all been mentioned in various celebrity memoirs as being gay or bisexual, while Jane Fonda has written in her own autobiography about participating in bisexual three-ways with her husband, Roger Vadim.
Click on image to enlarge
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| Walk on the Wild Side opened in Los Angeles on Wednesday, March 7, 1962, at the Stanley-Warner Theater in Beverly Hills |
Clip from Walk on the Wild Side (1962)
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| OK, it's actually a Walk on the Mild Side |
Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2014
