Showing posts with label Carroll Baker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carroll Baker. Show all posts

Friday, May 16, 2014

HARLOW 1965

There, there…just put it out of your mind. Just put it out of your mind that Joseph E. Levine's Harlow will actually have anything whatsoever to do with the life and career of Jean Harlow, the 1930s MGM star and Hollywood's first "blonde bombshell." Don't worry your little head over anything even tangentially redolent of the '30s seeping in to corrode the assertively mid-'60s vibe and aesthetics of this lacquered, $2.5 million soap opera. Dispense with all hope of accuracy—from made-up names to fabricated events, Harlow is an absolute work of fiction. Don't look for logic—Jean Harlow looks exactly the same AFTER her Hollywood glamour makeover as she did when we first meet her as a struggling dress extra. Don't pay any attention to physics—Harlow and her mother appear to be roughly about the same age. And don't search for credibility—Red Buttons plays a near-mythical character: a "Hollywood agent from Mars" of such ludicrous selfless, principled devotion and honesty he makes the denizens of Hogwarts look plausible by comparison.

The question you'll be asking yourself as the movie's end credits roll   


No, Harlow is a market-driven exercise in expediency and exploitation. A movie as artless and willfully artificial as a Dacron® polyester housecoat. Its purpose is neither to pay homage to its titular subject, nor to say anything meaningful about fame, the film industry, or even recognizable human psychology. It is, pure and simple, an act of commerce. A product designed to capitalize on the popularity of Irving Shulman's sleazy 1964 bestseller Harlow: an Intimate Biography, and a project divined as yet another bid in the campaign waged by producer Joseph E. Levine to sell protégé Carroll Baker to the public as successor to the Marilyn Monroe sex symbol throne (Monroe died in 1962).

Over the years, I've found that by accepting Harlow for what it is—a slick, schlock titillation package with no bearing on Hollywood, history, or even reality as we know it—I am then free to get down to the important business at hand: joyfully reveling in Harlow as a campy, satin-covered, marvelously misguided, miscast, multi-million dollar mistake.

Carroll Baker as Jean Harlow
Red Buttons as Arthur Landau
Angels Lansbury as Mama Jean Bello
Peter Lawford as Paul Bern
Mike Connors as Jack Harrison
Martin Balsam as Everett Redman, head of Majestic Pictures
Leslie Nielsen as Richard Manley
Raf Vallone as Marino Bello
For those genuinely interested in the fascinating and brief life of Jean Harlow (she died at age 26 of uremic poisoning), there are several books available that provide a more fact-based overview of the actress' career than Shulman's largely discredited work of biographical fiction. The internet offers a wealth of information in the form of written profiles and video documentaries available on YouTube. But better yet, just check out any one of Jean Harlow's feature films (my favorite, Dinner at Eight) if you want to get a sense of Harlow's unique brand of star quality, and appreciate how she was more persuasive as a gifted light comedienne than a sex goddess.
Look anywhere but to Joseph E. Levine's expensive-but-cheap-looking rush job, filmed at a careless, breakneck speed in an (unsuccessful) attempt to beat a low-budget rival Harlow film to the boxoffice in 1965. (The 2011 book, Dueling Harlows by Tom Lisanti, details how Levine chopped months off of his own film's pre-production schedule when made aware of an independent studio's plans to release a Harlow movie starring sound-alike actress Carol Lynley, and utilizing an inexpensive television-based technology [saddled with the William Castle-esque name of "Electronovision"] requiring no more than an eight-day shooting schedule.)
According to Carroll Baker, filming on Harlow began without a completed script. 
During filming, a feud erupted between Baker and Levine resulting in the termination of her six-picture deal with his Embassy Pictures. An act that led to her suing the producer (and winning) for breach of contract. Levine's revenge was to have a shrill witch of a character named Cheryl Barker--modeled to look just like Baker--appear in his film next film, The Oscar

Truth be told, when it comes to Joseph E. Levine's Harlow, those unfamiliar with the actual life and personage of Jean Harlow will find themselves at a distinct advantage. The movie is a wholesale work of inaccuracy, gossip, and time-tripping anachronisms; the less one knows (especially pertaining to how people dressed and looked in the '20s and '30s), the better. But while Harlow is valueless as historical biography, it's fairly priceless as a laugh-out-loud comedy of the absurd. A shining, overlit example of that uniquely '60s brand of glossy, overwrought melodrama mixed with tentative sleaze. Harlow promised to salaciously blow the lid off the many myths surrounding the life of the silver screen goddess. Yet, little did audiences suspect that the film's taunting tagline: "What was Harlow really like?" was really a literal, non-rhetorical imploration posed by the screenwriter and producer to anyone within earshot. 
The best way to enjoy Harlow is to ignore its allusions to reality and perhaps see it as a show business parable, the second entry, if you will, in Joseph E. Levine's unofficial "Hollywood as Cesspool" trilogy: The Carpetbaggers (1964), Harlow (1965), and The Oscar (1966).
In The Carpetbaggers, Carroll Baker played the Jean Harlow-inspired movie star, Rina Marlowe. In that film, Rina engages in a wild bedroom tussle with Jonas Cord (George Peppard), a character based on Howard Hughes. The movie Harlow affords Baker a second, undisguised go at Jean Harlow in addition to a copycat bedroom scene in which she gets to wrestle around on a bed with another Howard Hughes-based character. This time in the form of Leslie Nielsen as movie mogul Richard Manley (why some porn star hasn't taken the name of Dick Manley by now, I'll never know). 
As evidence of Harlow's hurried production schedule, note the crewmember captured in the marbled glass in the second screencap above. In her 1983 memoir Baby Doll, Carroll Baker recounts tales of filming being so rushed on Harlow that there was no time for rehearsals, the script was being written as they went along, and, barring any major technical gaffes, the printing of first takes was the norm.
It shows! It shows!
Body Talk
Baker seductively shimmies to composer Neal Hefti's song Girl Talk, a marvelous (ragingly chauvinist) bit of '60s light-jazz that incongruously crops up in this scene taking place in the early 1930s. Although the song went on to become a pop standard of the day (but failed to garner Oscar attention), I've never been able to figure out just what this very modern song is doing in this period movie. But why look for logic? Later in this same montage sequence, Baker actually breaks into a spirited 1960s twist!

Screenwriter John Michael Hayes (The Carpetbaggers) decides on Harlow's point of view: "I can either write the story about a girl who slept with everybody to get to the top, or an innocent girl who fought off the wolves, kept her integrity intact, and made it to the top on her own merits. Which do you think?" Baby Doll: An Autobiography- Carroll Baker -1983

Seriously? Those were the only two options?

Hayes, opting for the latter, reduces the entire scope of Harlow's screen legacy to the banal issue of "Will she?" or "Won't she," thereby making this already trite movie even more insipid than it needed to be. Presented as something akin to a human pressure cooker unable to keep the lid on her own overflowing sex appeal, Jean Harlow is introduced rebuffing the advances of a lecherous actor. And the film tirelessly keeps offering up variations on this theme well-nigh for the next two hours.
Made up to look more like '60s-era Marilyn Monroe than Harlow, and carrying on throughout as though she were Ross Hunter-era Doris Day caught in a loop of The Constant Virgin; Baker sports an astonishing number of flattering, form-fitting costumes, and some of the stiffest, ugliest wigs I've ever seen in a major motion picture. 
Jean Harlow and her agent, Arthur Landau, take in the rear-projection scenery
The real moral behind Harlow is that talent agents
are the most trustworthy people in show business

The plot, such as it is, is summed up by the man who discovers Harlow, the only man who sees her as a talent and not a piece of tail--the saintly talent agent Arthur Landau (whose portrayal as a paragon of virtue can be attributed to his being the main information source for Shulman's book). He tells the wannabe star, "You're the sweet, beautiful girl next door. But on fire inside."
And so the die is cast. Through a passive mother (Lansbury), a parasitic stepfather (Vallone), skirt-chasing moguls (Nielsen), matinee idols (Connors), and impotent husbands (Lawford), Harlow is made up of vignettes that keep hammering us over the head with the same message: The world's most famous sex symbol had a lot of trouble with sex in real life. Zzzzzzzzzz.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Anyone familiar with my twisted taste in movies knows that every complaint fired at a film like Harlow is actually a valentine. Bad movies are made all the time, but it's a special kind of art to make a  watchable lousy movie. And for me, Harlow is a bad movie classic. It's so gonzo in its half-baked, "1930s as filtered through a 1960s prism" sensibilities; it reminds me that they just don't make 'em like this anymore. I love every hair on Carroll Baker's ghastly Dynel wig.
The ever-dull Mike Connors (he'll always be "Touch" Connors to me)
plays a Gable-like matinee idol
I love the vulgarity at the core of movies like this. I love the garish sets, the superficial overemphasis on glamour, the tin-eared dialogue, the broad-strokes acting, and thoroughly loopy disregard for period detail. Perhaps it's cruel and reveals a small spirit on my part, but I have a special place in my heart for grandiose flops like this (that's flop in the artistic sense. Harlow, while no blockbuster, did make money). Joseph E. Levine produced a number of my very favorite "good" films (The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, The Lion in Winter), but as the saying goes, when he was bad, he was better. Harlow, along with  The Oscar, Where Love Has Gone (1964), and The Adventurers (1970), are the best of Levine's worst. Just brilliantly gauche, sex-obsessed behemoths that look like the kinds of films Ed Wood, Roger Corman, John Waters, or Paul Morrissey would come up with if they'd been given the budget.
In this scene, we're asked to believe that the rather mature-looking Carroll Baker
 is too young to sign a movie contract without her mother's signature.

PERFORMANCES
While I lost my respect a long time ago for what it meant to be a "Method" actor when I learned that Edy Williams was once a student of Lee Strasberg (yes, THAT Edy Williams of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). Baker puts great stock in her Method training, and indeed, the Oscar-nominated actress (Baby Doll) can be pretty effective under the right circumstances (Giant, Andy Warhol's Bad, Star 80). 
Harlow isn't one of those circumstances. By all accounts, Baker was rushed into this film, exhausted, unwilling, and unprepared. And I'm afraid it shows. Her flat line readings are matched only by her unconvincing display of even the simplest emotions. Of course, given the lines she has to speak, I can't blame her for phoning it in.
The always-wonderful Angela Lansbury is a standout
 in her all-too-brief scenes as Harlow's mother
As is so often the case with female-centric camp-fests like this, the male cast is a dull and sexless bunch. Peter Lawford looks like the walking embodiment of the word "debauched," Raf Vallone has spark, Red Buttons might as well be wearing a sign saying "Nominate me for Best Supporting Actor, please," and Leslie Nielsen proves once again that when it comes to drama, he's a hell of a comic actor. Angela Lansbury, on the other hand, is so good it's as if she'd wandered in from a different movie.
As a fan of Hazel Aiken, the crass, New Jersey hit-woman Carroll Baker played in Andy Warhol's BAD (1977),  I have to say, Baker only shines when she has sarcastic dialogue to deliver. Perhaps working off her feelings about producer Levine, Baker only comes alive (the same can be said for the screenplay) when Harlow requires her character to display contempt for her stepfather, Marino Bello.

Harlow: Cheap, shoddy greaser!
Bello: Nobility runs in my veins.
Harlow: King liar, Prince loafer, Count ne'er do well, Baron loudmouth!

Bello: I'll turn you over my lap and spank some respect into you!
Harlow: I'm too smart to get that close to your lap.

Bello: Perhaps your agent would find a part suitable for me…
Harlow: He only handles people.

Bello: Hey, sweetheart, your paycheck...?
Harlow: There isn't any.
Bello: But I have a horse running at 3 O'clock!
Harlow: Better tell him to walk.

Harlow plays fast and loose with history. Paul Bern (Lawford) is portrayed as
 Harlow's first and only husband. 
In truth, he was the second of three.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
They're called clichés for a reason. Harlow traffics in so many over-familiar melodrama/soap opera tropes, even on first viewing you'll swear you've seen this film before.

The tortured, waking up in a strange bed in a sleazy room with a sleazy stranger, scene 
1. A downsliding (albeit, artfully posed), Harlow reacts in silent horror to the depths to which she's fallen
2. In Valley of the Dolls, Patty Duke's less artfully-posed Neely O'Hara doesn't fare much better

 The self-disgusted, "I can't stand the sight of you!" cold cream on the mirror scene
1. Glass in hand, a boozy, bed-hopping Harlow has had her fill of herself
2. In Queen Bee, Joan Crawford finds even she can only tolerate just so much Joan Crawford

The firm and testy "This is for your own good!" avuncular agent intervention scene
1. Harlow's agent tells her she looks bloated, puffy, and older than her years
2. Neely's agent tells her she looks bloated, puffy, and older than her years
 
The hitting rock bottom, "Been down so long it looks like up to me!" beach scene
1. A drunk and depressed Harlow throws herself a beach pity-party
2. In Valley of the Dolls, Anne Welles swallows her dolls with a bit of water (not to mention lots of seaweed and sand)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I was eight years old when Harlow was released, but I remember absolutely nothing about the whole Jean Harlow mania that erupted due to Schulman's sordid biography. A huge bestseller; I remember my mother had a copy of the book around the house, but, being unfamiliar with the actress, I paid it no mind. Had I known of the book's scandalous reputation, I'd have been all over it. According to the New York Times, in 1964 all four of the major studios had Harlow films in the works. Only Joseph E Levine's "authorized" version and producer William Sargent's B&W Electronovision version were left standing when the smoke cleared.
Carol Lynley's Harlow opened three months before Levine's version and flopped at the boxoffice (and at the cost of a mere $500,000, that isn't easy to do). Levine's heavily promoted film opened to good boxoffice but scathing reviews.
For her part, Carroll Baker refused to see Harlow, only managing to catch it by mistake three years later when it was shown as the in-flight movie on a plane she was taking to Buenos Aires ("I was trapped! Actually, as I watched it, I was pleasantly surprised," Baker later wrote). Now, who can ask for a better recommendation than that?
Suffering in Mink- my favorite subgenre of film
That's Hanna Landy (Hutch's gal-pal in Rosemary's Baby) as Arthur Landau's wife, Beatrice.

BONUS MATERIAL
The rarely-seen 1965 Carol Lynley "Electronovision" version of  Harlow 
In this film, Lynley offers a very different, less flattering take on Jean Harlow (she's pretty self-possessed), it has Ginger Rogers as Mama Jean (in her last film role, and very good!). Hurd Hadfield (The Picture of Dorian Gray - 1945) is splendid as Harlow's husband Paul Bern. No production values to speak of, but in several ways, an improvement over Joseph E. Levine's version.

These early publicity shots show Baker in more period-appropriate makeup, suggesting that there was perhaps a time in the pre-production phase when authenticity was sought in the costuming and makeup. Had the film been shot in B & W (the way we see Jean Harlow in our minds), I think Carroll Baker would have looked great. But by evidence of that color photo, the period look was possibly scrapped because it was so harsh and unflattering. 

Oh, and can we take a second to talk about that other shameless pitch for a Best Song Oscar nomination - "Lonely Girl" which plays over the film's closing credits? I don't know if it's the song itself or Bobby Vinton's thin, reedy voice, but it all adds up to the musical equivalent of a cat scratching glazed pottery.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

ANDY WARHOL'S BAD 1977



Back in my dating days, I had what I call my "Taste Test Films" (two such films, in fact: Robert Altman's 3 Women and Andy Warhol's BAD). These are films for which my appreciation is so intensely personal and self-defining that I used them as a gauge in determining the compatibility of my tastes with those of potential partners I felt I might be getting serious about. Both films are so completely my aesthetic, humor, and world view, I reasoned that if someone didn't "get" these movies and their appeal to me, they likely wouldn't "get" or understand me, either. Similarly, if you were the kind of guy who appreciated the idiosyncratic allure of these films (spanning the rather broad spectrum between acute human empathy to outrageous, misanthropic black comedy), it was a pretty safe bet that you'd be my kind of fella.
3 Women is such a thoughtful, intriguing film that most anyone I was interested in was likely to find something to like in it, but Andy Warhol's BAD (directed by Jed Johnson, but a delirious mash-up of those camp/trash geniuses, John Waters and Paul Morrissey) was definitely the litmus test.
Carroll Baker as Hazel Aiken
Perry King as L.T.
Susan Tyrrell as Mary Aiken
Charles McGregor as Detective Hughes
Bridgid Polk as Estelle
Hard-as-nails Queens housewife Hazel Aiken (a perpetually pissed-off Carroll Baker) operates an electrolysis business ("Six-Hundred and Fifty hairs an hour!") out of the home she shares with her ailing mother; ineffectual, unemployed husband; and whiny daughter-in-law (Susan Tyrrell) and grandson. To make ends meet and subsidize her cache of furs, jewelry, and perfumes, Hazel also runs a dial-up, all-girl hit squad. The dispassionate efficiency of her bloody all-female enterprise is compromised when circumstance necessitates the reluctant taking on of a slow-witted punk (Perry King).


WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Strange as it may seem, Andy Warhol's BAD reminds me of a simpler, gentler time in America. Back when there was really such a thing as a "counter-culture"; back when movies designated as "underground" or "independent" actually were; and back when standards of morality and decency were observed by enough members of the population that they could be burlesqued in a film like this. Today we live in a country where ignorance is rewarded (thank you, Jersey Shore), bad behavior is commonplace (Arnold "The Sperminator" Schwarzenegger), and nobody denounces the hamburger for posing as steak (calling all Kardashians). Andy Warhol's BAD, once thought outrageously offensive enough to warrant an X-rating, is positively quaint and remarkably moral in comparison. You can't poke fun at tacky, suburban aspirations towards upper-class chic in a world that can't distinguish class from trash.
French Provincial Luxury- Hazel, enjoying the fruits of her labor
Viewing this film feels like having front-row seats to the end of an era. You just can't make a film like this anymore. When the lowbrow and sleazy becomes the cultural standard, there's nothing left to satirize. It used to be that you had to seek out underground films from Warhol or John Waters to enjoy comically amateurish performances and flat, monotone line readings. Now, you need look no further than the multimillion-dollar multiplex crowd-pleasers from Michael Bay and Vin Diesel. Andy Warhol's BAD tries very hard to be nasty and mean-spirited - the ever-present TV is forever spewing out bad news, people perform the most heinous atrocities without batting an eye - but the entire film is kinder and more humane than any 10 minutes of The Bachelor.

Hit-girls, Marsha (l.) and Glenda (r.) flank the misanthropic Estelle as she plots revenge on a neighbor.
Estelle: "I'm telling you, people stink. All they do is eat, fuck, and watch TV!"
Marsha: "I know. The more you smell, the more they stink."
Estelle: What's that supposed to mean?"

PERFORMANCES
To her credit, Carroll Baker held no illusions about Andy Warhol's BAD providing her with any kind of American film comeback (It was her first American film since leaving the country in 1965). Quoted as recently as June of 2011 on working on the film:
"It had nothing to do with film-making, it had nothing to do with any other experience I ever had. It was like working on the moon. But he (Warhol) wanted me, he cast me in it, I wanted to do it, and it was such a big hit in Europe."     Carroll Baker  New Journey Journal

Baker's level-headedness serves her well in Andy Warhol's BAD, for she creates in Hazel Aiken (the role was originally offered to America's Ethel Mertz, actress Vivian Vance) one of cinema's most memorably twisted villains. Devilishly deadpan in her single-minded belief that she is just doing what has to be done ("I like to help people!"), if Beaver Cleaver's mom was an avaricious sociopath, she'd be something like Hazel. A woman so lacking in decency she cheerily accepts calls in her kitchen for contract killings and views Polaroids of gruesome slayings as if they were vacation slides. The only remotely competent person amongst a menagerie of slackers and oddballs, Hazel's near-constant exasperation finds amusing subtext in Carroll Baker; an Academy Award-nominated, Method actress, working alongside Warhol's "actors"... many of whom sound as if they learned their lines phonetically.
(Substantiating my theory that big budgets sap the imagination of indie-filmmakers, John Waters, with a budget more than ten times that of Andy Warhol's BAD, mined similar material in 1994's Serial Mom, but it wasn't half as funny.)
Mary - "What kind of a grandmother are you? Having baby-killers in the house with a baby? She'd kill any baby!"
Hazel - (Indignant) "She would not! She only does what she's paid to do. You wouldn't pay her, so she wouldn't do it!"
Mary - "You're crazy! You're really not all there!"

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
All-girl hit squads were a camp/pulp staple of 70s exploitation flicks (and, my personal fave—the 1967 James Bond spoof, Casino Royale) but the women in Andy Warhol's BAD are something else again. These girls don't kill for kinky thrills, they seem to do it just because they're bored. Funniest by far are Marsha and Glenda (real-life sisters Maria & Geraldine Smith): the Laverne & Shirley of Murder Incorporated. Armed with thick New York accents and a canny sense of comic timing, their scenes are among the sharpest and off-the-chart hilarious in the film.
Dressed to Kill
Looking like models in a Laura Mars photoshoot, Marsha (brandishing the stiletto) and Glenda lie in wait for their next victim.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Andy Warhol's BAD is a darkly comedic satire on the banality of evil; a topic that's fascinated me since Rosemary's Baby (1968) posed the provocative notion that a harmless group of elderly New Yorkers could unleash the living Devil into the world. We movie fans find it reassuring when our monsters can be  easily identified—usually as crazily hateful maniacs and criminally unbalanced psychopaths. Perhaps that's because it's so unsettling in real-life to be offered evidence on a daily basis (most of which we prefer to ignore) that unspeakable evil is often perpetrated by the so-called "normal" members of our society.
Hazel Aiken's cockeyed ethical standards, which are played for absurdist laughs (a proud capitalist, she willingly kills man, woman, or child for a fee, but draws the line at vulgar language and keeping stolen property in her home), underline what is so scary about most truly evil people: they consider themselves to be the most normal of all.
All In A Day's Work
Amidst the trappings of middle-class domesticity, Hazel gets a call for another contract killing
Hazel, with all her pragmatic speeches about personal responsibility, work ethics, and doing what has to be done because nobody else will do it, reminds me a lot (too much, actually) of the fear-goading political candidates, flag-waving radio commentators, and defenders of family values who cloak themselves in "normalcy" to rationalize philosophies of hate.
The 1965 film The Loved One, which satirized the L.A. funeral industry, was promoted with the slogan "The motion picture with something to offend everyone!"  Twelve years later, Andy Warhol's BAD promoted itself with the New York Post review quote: "A picture with something to offend absolutely everybody." The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Hazel - "You're really sensitive, aren't you? Well, I can't afford the luxury to be sensitive because I have to do everything myself!"
I find it interesting to note that today, neither of these films, which had their battles with the censors and were met with much hand-wringing over the declining state of the world, is really very offensive at all. Indeed, in failing to in any way glamorize the lives and behaviors of its principals, Andy Warhol's BAD is, as I've indicated above, very moral in its view of the world. It presents the characters as the bottom-feeders they are, and even throws a bone of hope to the audience when the lunkhead, played so nicely by Perry King, reveals that as bad as he is, he isn't prepared to do anything for money. 
What's ironic are the number of safe, family-friendly entertainments of yesteryear (classic films, Warner Bros. cartoons, TV sitcoms) that, due to blithely accepted attitudes of sexism and racism, I consider to be blisteringly offensive today. (One example: an entire episode of the "feminist" 60s sitcom That Girl actually attempts to extract laughs from the far-from-hilarious plot point of a husband breaking the jaw of his loudmouth wife with an ashtray.)
Talk about the banality of evil.
"Looks aren't everything."
Oh, and for the record, both of my "Taste Test" films have been officially retired. I showed them to a fellow I was dating who not only loved them as I did, but, on a single viewing, opened my eyes to insights and jokes contained in both films that I had never seen before. Understandably, I couldn't let a guy like that go. That was 16 years ago going on 17, and we still get a kick out of re-watching these films together. Even after all these years, we can make each other laugh just by uttering the raging Estelle epithet: "O'Reilly O'Crapface."

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011