ANNIE 1982

After seeing so many billboards, bus shelters, and mega-posters around town heralding the forthcoming release of the latest (2014) screen incarnation of Annie – that pint-sized, ginger juggernaut of Broadway 1977 (and for those keeping score, this marks adaptation # 3)—I figure I'd better get around to covering John Huston's 1982 mega-budget, mega-hyped, mega-merchandised movie version before public reaction to the remake—pro or con—influence my memories.

Since remakes, as a rule, tend more to be the brainchild of accountants than artists, I usually think of them as irksome, Hollywood-as-industry inevitabilities easy to dismiss on principle alone. When looking back on the recent remakes of classic and iconic films (for example,  Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Brian De Palma's Carrie), I can only see them as obvious fool's errands; useful only as reminders of what was so brilliant about the originals. 

But when it comes to remaking flawed or flop films, I confess to being rather open to the idea. I mean, it does afford the opportunity for a new filmmaker to correct what might have gone awry with a property in its first outing, a chance to "get it right" the second time around.

The 1982 movie version of Annie is regarded as a beloved children's classic to many today, but it took quite a few years for it to grow on people. Upon its release, Annie was greeted with a mixed reaction by the press (it was nominated for 5 Razzie Awards, winning one for Aileen Quinn as Worst Supporting Actress); the considerably less-than-anticipated interest from the public; and was trashed in the press by the show's lyricist, Martin Charnin ("Terrible, terrible, it distorted everything!"). And although it emerged as one of the top ten moneymakers of the year, its steep budget ($40 to $50 million), hefty marketing campaign ($10 million), and record $9.5 million spent on acquiring the rights, meant it would be years before it came anywhere near to showing a profit.

While I wouldn't go so far as to call Annie a classic, neither would I label it the out-and-out failure its detractors make it out to be. Sure, at times the script is uneven to the point of feeling erratic (Hannigan's 11th-hour character redemption happens so abruptly it'll give you whiplash), but I still find many of its narrative changes to be a marked improvement over the theatrical production. And, thanks to its bouncy score, boundless—if unharnessed—energy, and capable, hardworking cast; Annie manages to be very entertaining despite never really gelling into the kind of touchstone movie musical event its Broadway success (and producer Ray Stark's investment) augured.

Aileen Quinn as Annie

Albert Finney as Oliver Warbucks

Carol Burnett as Miss Agatha Hannigan

Ann Reinking as Grace Farrell

As every living human must by now know, Annie is the significantly retooled movie version of the Tony Award-winning musical phenomenon based on Harold Gray's "Little Orphan Annie" comic strip. Set in the Depression-era New York of 1933, Annie is the story of a spunky, unflaggingly optimistic little orphan who, while dreaming of finding her wayward parents, manages to rescue and adopt a bullied stray mutt; win the heart of a billionaire industrialist (or war profiteer, if you will); play cupid for his devoted secretary; thwart a Bilko scheme cooked up by the villainous orphanage matron, Miss Hannigan and her partners in crime, Rooster and Lily; and by fade-out, appears poised, with the help of FDR, to take on the Great Depression itself.

Bernadette Peters as Lily St. Regis, Tim Curry as Rooster Hannigan

As the estrogen-laced answer to 1962s boy-centric Oliver (what DID little girls do in dance recitals before this show?) Annie is notable—before "Tomorrow" took on a life of its own and became one of the most overexposed (and, in turn, annoying) songs ever written—for representing something of a 1970s pop cultural turning point. In a social climate reeling from inflation, the oil crisis, post-Watergate disillusionment, Vietnam fallout, and the hedonism-as-religion retreat into sex & drugs which typified the Disco era (Annie opened on Broadway in 1977 mere months before the release of the bleak Looking for Mr. Goodbar): Annie was among the first non-ironic, unapologetically hopeful entertainments to emerge from a decade noted for its cynicism. Annie's assertively retro "corny is cool" philosophy rode a nostalgia zeitgeist that embraced the intentional camp of TV's Wonder Woman, Star Wars' updating of the 1930s sci-fi serial, and was part of the comic book mania that spawned 1978's Superman and Robert Altman's musicalized take on Popeye (1980).

While Annie's overwhelming success guaranteed it a movie sale (at the time, commanding the highest price ever paid for a theatrical property), media over-saturation in the intervening years of its theatrical run also made it a prime target of parody. When producer Ray Stark (Funny Girl) announced his plans to mount a big screen version, industry naysayers wondered how 1982 audiences would respond to what many now perceived as the show's machine-driven sentimentality and diminished novelty factor. Questions arose as to the issue of overexposure (Annie was still running on Broadway, and would until 1983) and wondering if the public was up to weathering yet another shrill rendition of "Tomorrow" sung by a red-tressed, brass-lunged moppet.

Instead of turning Annie's most well-known song into a potentially wince-inducing showstopper, director John Huston (or Ray Stark, depending on the source) wisely gets the song out of the way by having Quinn sing a traditional version over the opening credits. Later she performs a subdued, a cappella rendition when she meets FDR. Then, as Eleanor & Franklin join in (Lois De Banzie& Edward Herrmann), Warbucks' comic, schmaltz-resistant reluctance effectively diffuses any similar audience reactions.

As a West Coaster with access to only those Broadway shows successful enough to have touring companies, I'm one of those guys who'd rather have a poor movie adaptation of a Broadway musical than none at all (see: A Little Night Music. However, Richard Attenborough's A Chorus Line is the exception that proves the rule). So I was on board for a movie version of Annie from the get-go. But what really made it a must-see film for me was the unusually high caliber of talent Stark had secured both in front of and behind the camera.

What he assembled was a dream cast for Annie; actors who not only visually fit their roles to a T, but bravely bucked recent Hollywood musical tradition by actually being able to sing and dance. Albert Finney, while acquitting himself very nicely in the 1970 musical, Scrooge, would be the first to admit he's neither a singer nor dancer, but Carol Burnett, Ann Reinking, Bernadette Peters, Tim Curry, Geoffrey Holder (Punjab), and Roger Minami (the Asp) were all seasoned performers who got their start in Broadway musical theater. 

By 1982, Andrea McArdle, Broadway's original Annie, was roughly the appropriate age to play Lily St. Regis, so a massive, year-long, publicity-baiting global search was launched to find the perfect little orphan for the film version. Cute 9-year-old Aileen Quinn beat out 9,000 crestfallen (if not scarred for life) Annie applicants, winning the title role in what was then the most expensive musical ever made. 

She & Sandy Make a Pair, They Never Seem to Have a Care.
Cute Little She... it's Little Orphan Annie
Aileen Quinn was paid the exact same salary as Bingo (one of three dogs portraying Sandy) 

Now, this is where things started getting weird. Broadway veteran Joe Layton (Thoroughly Modern Millie) was on hand to create the musical numbers (which makes sense), but the choreographic chores for this 1930s period musical—an innocent, if not naive, family entertainment swarming with children—fell to Arlene Phillips (which makes no sense at all). Certainly not if you're even remotely familiar with Phillips' very contemporary, hypersexual choreography for the Eurosleaze dance troupe Hot Gossip, or if you've ever seen her patented brand of disco/aerobic writhing in the films The Fan and Can't Stop the Music. I'm a huge Arlene Phillips fan, but even I had to scratch my head on this one. However, nothing raised eyebrows higher than the news that Annie, now known as Ray Stark's baby ("This is the film I want on my tombstone"), was to be directed by Oscar-winner John Huston, a Hollywood veteran of forty years, making his first musical at age 75.

If "Easy Street" falls short of what one would expect for a rollicking number featuring the likes of Bernadette Peters (who looks absolutely gorgeous), Carol Burnett, and Tim Curry--and it does--it's because it was shot two months after the film was completed (and by the looks of it, in a hurry) when it was decided to scrap the full-scale, already in-the-can version which is rumored to have resembled the "Consider Yourself" number from Oliver.

Theories abounded as to the soundness of such a decision (Mike Nichols, Herb Ross, and Grease's Randal Kleiser had all been attached to the project at various times), but insiders likened Stark's handing over a lavish musical to a veteran director best known for gritty dramas (Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Misfits) to hoping history might repeat itself. Back in the '60s' three of the decade's biggest musical hits were the work of two veteran directors who'd never made a musical before: Robert Wise with the phenomenally successful West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965), and William Wyler hit paydirt with Funny Girl (1968).

Radio personality Bert Healy (Hollywood Squares host, Peter Marshall) is joined by the lovely Boylen Sisters in a rendition of "You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile"

After months of the kind of strenuous prerelease hype that turns critics against a film before it even opens, Annie premiered here in Los Angeles at Mann's Chinese Theater in May of 1982. I was in line opening night (fewer kids at evening shows) having by now fairly whipped myself into a veritable frenzy of enthusiastic anticipation. With that cast, director, choreographer, and score, I was certain that Annie would be every bit "The Movie of Tomorrow" its ads promised.

A photo I took of the Burbank backlot that Warner Bros. and Columbia Studios have shared since the mid-'70s. Behind this wall stood Annie's $1 million New York outdoor street set 

Maybe…

I love that I get excited by movies (seriously, I gave myself a nosebleed at the SF premiere of Thank God It's Friday), but I had double reason to be worked up over Annie. First, as one of the biggest movie musicals to be released since my Xanadu epiphany (read here), Annie represented the first musical I'd be seeing since I started studying dance and took it up as a profession. In fact, I took classes with a couple of the dancers in the film who had been hired for reshoots of the Radio City Musical Hall sequence and the since-jettisoned, grand-scale "Easy Street" number, and they both assured me that Annie was going to be a bigger hit than Grease. 

Annie's Orphan Pals
Captured in one of the rare moments one of them isn't staring directly into the lens
or glancing distractedly at something off-camera.  

Primed for Annie to be more of an event than a movie (it was one of the first films to charge a then-record $6 admission price), my first viewing was so ruled by my desire (need?) to like it, that I couldn't attest to really having seen the actual film at all. As I recall it, my first look at Annie was an exhausting evening of willful self-deception and near-constant internal cheerleading. I laughed too loud and hard at bits of business that barely warranted a grin, and I gasped in delight at predictable plot developments that must have seemed ancient back in the day of Baby Peggy. My only reactions that weren't artificial and inappropriately oversized were to the showy musical numbers, which were, indeed, pretty spiffy. Still, I'd literally worked up a sweat trying to stave off disappointment...all in an effort to convince myself that I was having a better time than I had. 

And the weird thing is, I really did have a good time. I just didn't have a great time, which is what I expected of a $40 million film that took two years to make. This leads me to ponder the double-edged sword of hype: when it comes to movie marketing, there's sell, and there's oversell...the former being when you give the public information, the latter is when you give them ammunition.
Seeing Annie a second time convinced me that the film's problem wasn't that it failed to live up to expectations but failed to live up to its own potential. 

Make a Wish
A victim of its own success, Annie was torn between the simple charm of its storyline
and the Hollywood dictate that it be a larger-than-life musical extravaganza

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

As I'm fond of saying, a movie doesn't have to be perfect in order for it to be either enjoyable or someone's all-time favorite. Annie's a glowing example of this principle in that it's a movie I never recommend to people, yet one I often revisit when I need my occasional overproduced movie musical fix. Straight dramas and comedies require cohesion in order to work. Not so with musicals. Musicals (happily) are by-design, broken into singing and non-singing interludes which, if need be, can be appreciated table d'hôte or à la carte. Annie is arguably at its best when experienced as separate scenes and isolated dance numbers. This way, the effectiveness of certain scenes (such as when the confounded Warbucks watches Grace put Annie tenderly to bed) isn't handicapped by clumsy adjoining sequences, and the musical numbers that click ("We Got Annie") get to stand alone and apart from those that fizzle ("Easy Street," to my shock and amazement).

I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here
When Annie gets something right, it does so spectacularly. Annie's first look at the Warbucks household ("Is this a train station? Are we going on a train?") is one of my favorite sequences. The member of the staff upon whose shoulder Annie is riding is dancer Don Correia (ex-Mr. Sandy Duncan) one of several A Chorus Line alumni in the film's dance chorus

PERFORMANCES

One of the more fascinating things about those old Our Gang comedies of the '30s is how natural all those kids were. No matter how often they were called upon to mimic grown-up behavior, the charm was in their essential, unaffected childishness shining through.

In Annie, the little girls cast as orphans are all experienced troupers culled from Annie productions all over the country, and it shows. While the film is desperately in need of an Annie with the kind of screen magnetism of a young Patty Duke, Hayley Mills, or Jodie Foster—something to set her apart from the other orphans and justify an audience's concern for her welfare—Aileen Quinn is a perfectly swell Annie (to use the vernacular). While not blessed with that intangible "something" that made Shirley Temple a charismatic and charming screen presence, Quinn has an earnest, winning quality, a pleasant voice, and best of all for an old grouch like me, fails to grate on my nerves.
This is in stark contrast to the rest of the orphans who are literally children working like Trojans to act like children…and they don't succeed! Annie was my first exposure to this kind of Disney Channel, plastic child-actor aesthetic that seems to have become the norm these days: old-before-their-years showbiz kids who can only impersonate (badly) the behavior of real children.

"You step on my cues Molly, and you'll find your close-ups on the cutting-room floor."
Had Quinn been a star, no one would fault her for pulling a "Helen Lawson"
in regard to her scene-stealingly cute co-star, Toni Ann Gisondi.

I've no real quarrel with the performances of Annie's grown-up cast. Finney is amusingly broad and cartoonish as Warbucks, Reinking is at her most eloquent when she lets her lithe body do the acting, and, the always-fabulous Carol Burnett is left to do all the comedy heavy-lifting as the perpetually pickled Miss —a role she's ideally suited for. Perhaps too much so. Burnett is a lot of over-the-top fun and never less than fascinating and spot-on. But watching her, I can't help thinking, as I often do when watching Maggie Smith on Downton Abbey, that she could do this kind of role in her sleep.

Carol Burnett made her Broadway musical debut in Once Upon a Mattress in 1959.
Annie marks her very first movie musical appearance

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Annie's musical numbers always put a smile on my face. Sometimes, because they're so good, sometimes because the lip-syncing is so poor or the execution is so unpolished, I have a hard time believing they made it into the completed film. Six songs from the Broadway show failed to make it into the film, and I honestly can't say I miss them. And of the four songs written expressly for the film, the only two I could have done without are "Dumb Dog/Sandy" (in which the lyricist commits the Sondheim-wouldn't-do-this crime of putting the sophisticated word "residing" into the mouth of a little girl we'd previously heard say "piana" for piano). Also, I'm not particularly fond of the whole Rockettes section of "Let's Go to the Movies." 

We Got Annie
In one of my favorite numbers, Roger Minami, Ann Reinking, and the
late great Geoffrey Holder dance together all too briefly, but it's pure magic. 

"I guess I'll never know the feeling of running fingers through your hair..."
Burnett's delivery of this witty lyric from the duet, "Sign" got one of the film's
biggest, most spontaneous laughs from the audience I saw it with

It's The Hard Knock Life
Can we please pause a second and appreciate Annie's amazing horizontal split jump?

I Don't Need Anything But You
Annie gets it right in the charming finale, which gives Quinn
the closest thing to a Shirley Temple moment 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Mimicking the fate of many beloved children's movies that were not exactly hits when first released (The Wizard of Oz and the aforementioned Willy Wonka being the most famous examples), Annie may have had to take her lumps back in 1982, but, true to her optimistic credo, she's weathered a great many more "Tomorrows" than her more critically-revered peers.
Meanwhile, my own feelings about Annie have remained roughly the same, with time adding (in equal measure) a degree of nostalgia and cheesy camp to my revisits to it, making for a win-win situation whatever mood I'm in. So, whether it's to laugh at the baffling amateurism of some scenes (what must the outtakes of the orphan's rendition of "You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile" look like if this one, with its poor lip-synching and self-conscious "fun" was chosen?); ponder the possibility that perhaps all those up-the-skirt shots and peeks at women's underwear are part of a visual motif, or merely marvel at how impossibly young everybody looks... Annie may no longer be the movie of Tomorrow, but it offers a pretty pleasant look at yesterday.

I wish the 2014 remake of Annie all the best. We have yet to have our quintessential big-screen Annie.

"We Got Annie"

BONUS MATERIAL
Want to watch a grown woman (Arlene Phillip) yelling at a bunch of overworked kids? Want to catch a glimpse of the deleted "Easy Street" number? Check out Lights! Camera! Annie! a 1982 PBS "Making of" documentary on YouTube.

Tony Award-winner Andrea Martin portrays a grown-up Annie in this classic SCTV parody.

Not sure where it's available to stream, but Life After Tomorrow is a fascinating 2006 documentary about the lives of former Annie orphans. 

IMDB notes in its Trivia section that the sound effects man during the Iodent radio broadcast is actor Ray Bolger in an unbilled cameo. As you can see from the photo above, the actor in question does indeed bear a resemblance to the Wizard of Oz star, but is NOT Ray Bolger. A call out to film buffs to identify this character actor.

Disco touched everything in the late '70s, and sunshiny anthems by mop-topped orphans were no exception. In 1977 disco diva Grace Jones performed what can best be described as a confrontational version of "Tomorrow" HERE.

Speaking of disco, did you know Aileen Quinn released a solo album? Me neither. Her album, Bobby's Girl, was released in 1982 to take full advantage of the Annie media blitz. Although disco was fairly dead by this time, that didn't stop Quinn from driving at least one child-sized nail into its coffin by performing an ill-advised cover of Leo Sayers' 1976 boogie anthem, "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing." "Arf!" goes Sandy.

"I love you, Daddy Warbucks."

Trade ad heralding the start of production

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014

A WEDDING 1978

There are websites, documentaries, and touring museum exhibits paying deserved tribute to the legacy of the late, great Stanley Kubrick; a talented director the likes of which we're not apt to ever see again. But, as good as Kubrick was, no one could accuse the man of being a softie where humanity was concerned. At film school, where every director was pigeonholed for convenience, Kubrick was dubbed "The Master of Misanthropy": a title which sounds like criticism, but for me perfectly summarizes the director's piercingly unsentimental world view.

The director I personally miss the most, one whose humanist contribution to cinema is most grievously felt due to its near-absence in the films of today, is Robert Altman. Altman was one of the few directors I grew up on whose films I always respected even when I didn't always like them. In his dogged insistence on making the kind of movies he wanted to see (not what the market was buying), and branding each with a idiosyncratic stamp of personal integrity and artistic innovation, Altman was a reminder to me that not all mainstream directors gained success by underestimating the intelligence of their audience. Not feeling the need to spell everything out for us, Altman made movies that were smart and insightful, and, best of all, surprising!

Amy Stryker as bride, Muffin Brenner

Desi Arnaz, Jr. as groom, Dino Corelli

Never one to make films that fit into easy-to-label, marketable packages, Altman eschewed formulas and just told good stories. And when he didn't have stories to tell (something critics often accused him of) he had the audacity to think that there was something of value to be found in just training his lens on interesting and complex characters struggling to make some sense out of their existence. The entertaining uniqueness of Altman's work, for me, put an emphasis on the fact that a film’s performance at the boxoffice should be the least of a good director's concerns, not the primary. This is not to paint Robert Altman as a pure artiste who shunned wealth and fame in pursuit of his art. No, Robert Altman was an ambitious director who may have bristled at authority, but nevertheless actively sought success. It's just that his offbeat and iconoclastic resume of films proved that he cared about movies just a little bit more more.

Silent screen star Lillian Gish as Nettie Sloan, family matriarch and keeper of all secrets

Perhaps I’m just wallowing in idealized nostalgia here, but it says something about a director when even their misfires (for me, that would be Beyond Therapy, Dr. T and the Women) are more interesting than most director's hits. In the economic landscape of today's film world, a world that demands movies appeal to the broadest audience possible, fewer films are being made that challenge, confront, or contradict the ways audiences already think. In that aspect alone, Robert Altman's sometimes-undisciplined, always-passionate style seems to be of another world. Were Altman around today, I could never imagine the independent-minded filmmaker to be one of these modern directors allowing themselves to be influenced and dictated to by the opinionated tweets and texts of preteen fanboys/fangirls.

Mia Farrow as Buffy Brenner, sister of  the bride with a doozy of a secret

Directors want their films to be successes because they wish to continue to making more films. Audiences, on the other hand, tend to want directors to keep revisiting the same success over and over again. Fans were disappointed when Robert Altman followed the success of M*A*S*H (1970) with a string of wildly dissimilar (not to mention unprofitable) films: Brewster McCloud - surreal comedy; McCabe & Mrs. Miller - revisionist western; and Images - psychological thriller. Likewise, after the critical triumph of Nashville (1975), audiences were thrown for a loop when Altman went all Ingmar Bergman on them with the enigmatic, 3 Women.

Thus, when in 1977 it was announced that Altman’s A Wedding was going to be a return to the all-star, multi-character, overlapping-dialog formula he had more or less patented with Nashville (but somehow failed to pull off with Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson), expectations were understandably high. Alas, perhaps too high.

With a cast of characters double that of Nashville (48 to Nashville’s 24); stars as intriguingly diverse as Carol Burnett, Lillian Gish, Vittorio Gassman, Mia Farrow, Geraldine Chaplin, Dina Merrill, Howard Duff, Viveca Lindfors, and Lauren Hutton; all centered around an American ritual as ripe for satire as a society wedding…well, nothing could really live up to the potential of such an undertaking. And to many, that’s exactly what Robert Altman’s A Wedding proved.

Simply told, A Wedding is 24-hours of systematic disasters—familial, sexual, climatic, mortal, clinical, emotional, and physical—attendant a formal Catholic wedding uniting old-money society pariahs, the Sloan-Corelli clan, with the new-money, hayseed Brenner family. As poster ads for the film stated, “There is more than one secret at a wedding,” and Altman uses the socially-imposed politeness of a traditional wedding as an opportunity to give us a comedy of manners in which nothing is as it seems and everyone has something to hide.

Katherine "Tulip" Brenner (Carol Burnett) finds herself the object of in-law Mackenzie Goddard's (Pat McCormick) extravagant affections

Socialite Clarice Sloan (Virginia Vestoff) and Sloan household manager Randolph (Cedric Scott) have been secretly involved for years

To wed wealthy Regina Sloan (Nina Van Pallandt) Italian waiter Luigi Corelli (Vittorio Gassman) has had to deny his past. Meanwhile, Regina, following the difficult birth of their twins, has become a drug addict.

High-strung nurse Janet Shulman (Beverly Ross) tries unsuccessfully to keep Antionette Sloan-Goddard (Dina Merrill) in the dark about a death in the family.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I saw A Wedding on opening day in 1978. In a nearly empty theater in Hollywood I sat through A Wedding two times in a row, obviously in the minority in finding it to be a delightfully funny film that was even a little touching. (Note: Given the sheer number of characters and stories one has to keep straight, A Wedding is a film that actually plays out better and feels less frenetic with repeat viewings.) As satire, A Wedding is too superficial and broadly farcical to compete with Nashville’s more thoughtful and expansive delineation of America's politics as show business lunacy; but its ensemble cringe-comedy predates the family dysfunction of television’s Arrested Development (including that program’s non-stop, full-frame activity that demands your constant attention), just as the camera’s penchant for capturing characters in moments of unobserved vulnerability anticipates today’s reality TV craze and the mockumentary style of Christopher Guest & Co. (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, For Your Consideration).

Former supermodel Lauren Hutton plays the head of a quarrelsome film crew enlisted to capture the events of  the wedding. Her cameraman is Allan Nicholls, co-screenwriter of A Wedding who also composed songs for and appeared in Nashville and many other Altman features. On sound is Maysie Hoy,  assistant editor on Nashville and 3 Women who appeared as an actress in several Altman films as well.

PERFORMANCES

Altman’s movies tend to be exceptionally well-cast. I’m not sure how he did it, but he seemed to be capable of casting “to type” and “against type” simultaneously. In this chaotic, culture-clash merging of the working-class millionaire Brenner family of Kentucky with the inherited-wealth Sloans of Illinois society, Altman makes things infinitely easier for us viewers by having the Brenner’s somewhat anemic-looking strawberry blonde and redhead family contrasted sharply with the reedy platinum and gold cool of the Sloans. Wittily, all the actors are cast in groups that believably look as though they could actually be related (Carol Burnett, Dennis Christopher, Mia Farrow, and the wonderful Amy Stryker are a particularly inspired example).

The actors all “look” like the types they’re supposed to embody, but Altman’s well-chronicled technique of getting actors to develop their own characterizations through improvisation and experimentation result in many amusing and surprising twists.

Geraldine Chaplin is superb as Rita Billingsly, the stressed-out wedding planner

My personal favorite performances in A Wedding belong to Paul Dooley and Carol Burnett as "Snooks" and "Tulip" Brenner, the parents of the bride. Each realizes their characters so completely that one can effortlessly envision their life together beyond the parameters of the film

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A Wedding has been criticized by some for being plotless, but to my eye, contriving a situation wherein a wildly divergent group of people are forced to interact in ways both formally ritualized and circumstantially familiar, is very nearly an irresistible recipe for all manner of human drama. Plot structure can impose a sort of order to the messy business of life that may well be comforting to audiences, but isn't always necessary. Sometimes a free-form film like this, one that exposes human foibles and follies without attempting to ascribe motive and reason beyond those interpreted by the viewer, can provide a far more rewarding experience.

Ladies in Waiting
Mona Abboud, Marta Heflin, and Lesley Rogers check out the males 

Society doctor Howard Duff casually dispenses "feel good" drugs to ailing wedding caterer Viveca Lindfors

Pam Dawber (here with Gavan O'Herlihy) made her film debut in A Wedding, playing a character 360 degrees away from her Mork & Mindy TV persona. Two years later, Mork himself (Robin Williams) would make his film debut in Altman's Popeye.    

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

A Wedding is a consummate example of Robert Altman's patented "comedy of proximity." He starts with a wide-angle view of some slice of Americana...a view glimpsed just far enough away so that we can comfortably impose upon these familiar people and situations, our preconceived notions about them. 

As Altman methodically draws us into closer proximity to the people (individuals we thought we "knew" by way of cultural stereotyping), we are forced to confront the fact that few of the people and almost none of the events are as we assumed them to be. The beautiful turn out to be pretty monstrous; the self-satisfied, the most delusional; the ones least suspected of having any value are in fact the most authentic. As layers of pretense and self-concealing  facades are eroded away (through comedy that often strips characters of their thin veneer of dignity) it becomes obvious that after being made to confront all we thought we knew about these people at the start of the film, we're left being made more keenly aware than ever, that in the end they are all just human. Not in any way different from us and the people we know. No better, no worse.

Robert Altman's biggest joke is how easily the bride and groom turn out to be the least important people at A Wedding

A Wedding ranks high on my list of favorite Robert Altman films. Its humor and take-no-prisoners view of humanity an acquired taste, to be sure. But it shows off Altman in particularly fine form, and it's a film that can still make me laugh out loud just as sure as its melancholy conclusion never fails to touch me. It's not Nashville, and it's not Gosford Park...but it's a worthy saga that falls (pratfalls, would be more like it) somewhere blissfully in between.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES:

Carol Burnett dwarfed by the statuesque Ann Ryerson (as Victoria, a member of the Sloan family who wears a Greek toga and inexplicably addresses everyone in terrible French), and the lovesick Pat McCormick

Pat McCormick

Ann Ryerson - 1978
Inscription: "I'm more excited than you that you recognized me! I'm happy to sign this!"

Pam Dawber - 1980

Copyright © Ken Anderson