BOOM! 1968

"I don't believe God is dead, but I do think he is inclined to pointless brutalities."

Tennessee Williams

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton made a total of ten films together (11 if you count the presciently-titled 1973 TV-movie Divorce His/Divorce Hers) over the course of their highly-public, passionate-but-rocky, ten-plus-one-years marriage (wed in 1964, they divorced in ’74, remarried a year later, re-divorced a year after that). By the time they appeared in their 8^th vehicle together, Joseph Losey's Boom!, unkind film critics--worn down by years of ceaseless press coverage of the couple's top-of-the-line lifestyle and bottom-of-the-barrel movie resume--had taken to referring to the paparazzi-popular pair as a traveling vaudeville act. A difficult point to argue against at the time.

Branded infamous for their scandalously out-in-the-open, adulterous canoodling during the making of Cleopatra (1963), the combination of gossip and public curiosity helped turn cinematic dogs like 1963s The VIPs (neither had secured divorces from their respective spouses by then) and the following year’s The Sandpiper (their first onscreen pairing as man and wife) into boxoffice blockbusters. Yet it wasn't long after scoring an unexpected critical and boxoffice bullseye in Mike Nichols’ film adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), that Taylor and Burton developed the reputation for saying yes to any film offer that promised a hefty payday, major tax break, or exotic locale in which to work. 

Il Palazzo di Goforth
Built especially for the film, the mansion of Mrs. Flora Goforth is situated high atop the limestone cliffs of Isola Piana, a small island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Sardinia. Along the bluffs are replicas of the Easter Island moai heads, six of them, representing perhaps the spirits of the six husbands she outlived. Some interiors of the mansion were sets in Rome.

Boom! offered all three, plus the prospect of granting Taylor an unprecedented Tennessee Trifecta: Having already appeared in two successful Tennessee Williams screen adaptations—Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)—garnering Oscar nominations for both, surely reuniting with Williams for Boom! (working titles Goforth and Sunburst) would result in delivering the third cherry for a boxoffice jackpot. 

In his diaries published in 2012, Richard Burton admitted that The Sandpiper—a substantial financial success, but critical flop—was a film both he and Taylor knew to be a joke, but accepted solely for the opportunity to work together and as a cash-grab of convenience should negative public opinion about Le Scandale lead to their never working again. On the topic of the $5 million mega-flop that was Boom!, Burton asserts that it was a film both he and Taylor very much believed in and very excited to do. In fact, after watching dailies mid-production, Burton writes of the film looking “perverse and interesting,” and optimistically intones, “I think we are due for another success, especially E [Elizabeth].” Given the dismal returns on their most recent releases The Comedians (1967) and Doctor Faustus (1967), perhaps the words "long overdue" are more apt.   

Elizabeth Taylor as Flora "Sissy" Goforth

Richard Burton as Christopher Flanders 

Noel Coward as Baron William "Billy" Ridgeway, aka The Witch of Capri 

Joanna Shimkus as Francis "Blackie" Black

Michael Dunn as Rudi

Elizbeth Taylor is eccentric millionairess Flora (“All my close friends call me Sissy”) Goforth. Cloistered away in a majestic mountaintop villa on her private island in the Mediterranean, Sissy Goforth dictates her alternatingly introspective/self-aggrandizing memoirs to her put-upon secretary (Joanna Shimkus) while being overzealously watched by her sadistic bodyguard Rudi (Michael Dunn). It’s summer (isn’t it always in a Tennessee Williams movie?) and Signora Goforth is dying. But not to hear her tell it.

 After burying six husbands--five wealthy industrialists and a penniless poet/adventurer who was the love of her life--the widow Goforth fancies herself as an indefatigable force of nature and nothing less than eternal. And, in point of fact, after getting a load of her constant carping, bellowing, and hurling of coarse invectives at all and sundry, one can well imagine that even death itself, when faced with the prospect of coming face-to-face with Flora Goforth, might opt to pass her by.

In 1968 Boom! and Rosemary's Baby earned the dubious distinction of being the first American feature films approved by the MPAA (Production Code Seal) to feature the word "shit."

"The doctors are disgusted with my good health!” Flora insists. Even in the face of nightly pain injections, blood transfusions, regular vitamin B shots, a steady diet of pills and medications, and the distressing increase in the number of paper roses blooming in all corners of the villa (a paper rose is Flora's bleakly poetic name for the many discarded wads of tissue stained with her coughed-up blood.) 

But for all that money can buy, it can't buy immortality, so the gravely ill Flora Goforth...racing against time to complete her memoirs...is fated to go forth from this plane of existence. But not until she’s good and ready. And ready she’s not. The "dying monster," as she's referred to by her scornful staff, is not yet willing, prepared, or capable of relinquishing her vicelike grip on life. Or, closer to the truth, that which has come to represent life tor her: wealth, power, possessions, position, acquisition, and excess. 

The Walking Dead
By way of her vulgarity, cynicism, lack of compassion, and ostentatious flaunting of wealth,
it's inferred that Flora Goforth's spiritual death occurred long ago.

As though metaphysically summoned, a trespassing stranger named Christopher Flanders (Richard Burton) arrives at the villa carrying two heavy bundles and professing to have been invited. Flanders, whose saintly Christian name proves to be as symbolically relevant (and subtle) as Flora’s surname, is an itinerant poet, mobile artist, aging gigolo, and professional houseguest. Most recently, among his circle of imposed-upon jet-set friends, he has come to be known as “The Angel of Death.” A bitchy-but-accurate name assigned to him after a pattern emerged involving his paying visits to some of his aging and ailing benefactors shortly before their deaths.

With Christopher’s arrival, the already sublimely bizarre Boom! takes on the form of a spiritual allegory played out in a highly-stylized manner suggesting a Western interpretation of Eastern kabuki theater. Flora, facing mortality by stubbornly ignoring its existence, clings ever tighter to what she wants. Meanwhile, Christopher, whose physicality inflames Flora’s lifelong use of sex as a means of denying death, dares to suggest that beyond the things she wants lie the things she actually needs. 

Death Takes a Holiday
Flora amuses herself by dressing Chris (whose clothes were shredded by her attack dogs) as a samurai warrior, but the joke may ultimately be on her. The flowing black kimono and samurai sword present Chris as a kabuki variant of the traditional black-robed Grim Reaper with his scythe.  

Hostess and guest engage in verbal sparring matches exhibiting the one-upmanship strategizing of games. An element emphasized both in the costuming (Flora & Chris are dressed in the colors of chess pieces) and art direction (chess boards and B&W domino tiles are scattered throughout the villa). Between bouts of seduction and bargaining, their parry and thrust conversations circle around existential fundamentals like acceptance of the inevitable and the relinquishing of the inessential. 

As the sun sets on Flora Goforth's island and indeed, Flora herself, Tennessee Williams’ paradoxically heavy-handed and confoundingly opaque screenplay leaves us with the metaphorical food for thought that “Saint” Christopher has trudged up that mountain to assist Flora in her journey to the other side. And in the recurring device of having Chris' requests for food (especially a drink of milk) met with refusal or completely ignored, the presumed takeaway is that Mrs. Flora Goforth is singularly lacking in the figurative ‘milk of human kindness,’ its train long having ceased pausing at her lonely threshold. 

Flora Goforth, appearing to be engulfed by a stylized golden shroud, is at last ready to go forth. But in reciting the title of the 1963 Broadway play upon which Boom! is based, lets it be known that she...like Helen Lawson...intends on going out the way she came in. 

Such is the tale Tennessee Williams hoped to tell. What he delivered was a wordy, over-stylized exercise in opulent incoherence that, had the cast been a decade younger, would likely have been labeled a youth-culture "head trip" movie. As it stood, the generation still interested in the life-in-a-fishbowl antics of Taylor and Burton were either baffled or bored. It didn't take long for word about Boom! to get around, and, as the saying goes, people stayed away in droves.

Taking advantage of a little breather between Goforth tantrums,
her houseman Etti (Fernando Piazza) and her attending physician Dr. Luilo (Romolo Valli) 

PASSION PROJECT

One of the more persistent Hollywood myths that gains traction every award season is that of the passion project. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen Oscars triumphantly hoisted overhead as the recipient shares the same “tenacity rewarded” tale of never giving up on a beloved movie vehicle despite years of studio rejection. This then cues everyone watching to shake their heads in amazement at the thought of all those studio dummkopfs failing to recognize the value of a project whose obvious merit now shines so brightly. As reassuring as all this is to those who romanticize the never-say-die spirit, I think it neglects the equally-valuable flip side: recognizing when it is both wise and prudent to let something go. Ironically, one of Boom!’s major themes

Even those who meet Boom! with, as one journalist phrased it "almost gleeful critical contempt" are apt to be impressed by the glorious compositions of Douglas Slocombe's stunning cinematography, and the breathtaking production design and art direction by Richard McDonald and John Clark.

If any Tennessee Williams work can be called a passion project, it’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. How else to explain the alarming fact that Boom!’s screenplay represents Williams’ 4^th crack at the same material and he STILL failed to work out bugs?  What began life in 1959 as a short story titled Man Bring This Up Road (a line of dialogue that survives in Boom!) morphed into a stubbornly unsuccessful Broadway play that had the unprecedented honor of bombing twice in the same season. Claiming it to be one of his most obsessively beloved yet most difficult plays to write, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is partly 52-year-old Williams confronting his own creative decline (his last hit was 1961's The Night of the Iguana), part his processing of the 1963 death of Frank Merlo, his partner of 14-years, from cancer at age 40.

Flora Goforth's secretary, Mrs. Black--the most honest and compassionate character in the play--owes her name to Williams paying tribute to his love, Frank Merlo. Merlo is the Spanish name for a blackbird, one of which appears in a golden cage in Boom!

In what feels like a desperate, last-ditch effort to get his point across, Williams has a character simply verbalize one of the film's themes: "Sooner or later, a person's obliged to face the meaning of life!" but Joseph Losey's stylized direction works just as hard making sure little as possible makes sense. What comes through (almost in spite of itself) is that death is the ultimate solitary act. No manner how many friends or how much money and "stuff" we amass, we can't take it with us and we must "go forth" alone. Boom! in its clumsy, campy way, proposes the gladdening notion that life offers us final mercy...the appearance of someone (something?) to ease our fear and escort us on our irrevocable journey.  We may claim it was never invited, but death requires no formal invitation. It's been summoned the instant of our birth. 

In his 1975 memoir, Williams relates that he was both astonished and overjoyed when the film rights for The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore had been purchased and director Joseph Losey (The Servant) assigned to the project: “Then a dreadful mistake was made. [Producer Lester] Persky offered the film to the Burtons.”

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Were I the gambling type, I’d wager that the very reasons Tennessee Williams saw the Burtons as the least-favorable casting option for Boom! are the very reasons I find them to be absolutely ideal for the material. The stunt-miscasting of Taylor & Burton in Boom! was a bald-faced effort to try and recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of Mike Nichols’ “And you thought she/he was all wrong for the part!” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  hat trick, while simultaneously exploiting the screenplay's many Taylor-related bits of self-referential coincidence. Flora was supposed to be a past-her-prime battleax grinding to a halt in her 60s (Taylor was 35), Chris a fading gigolo in his early 30s (Burton was 42). Neither really fit their roles in ways having nothing to do with their ages, but say what you will, Taylor's mesmerizingly purple performance abutted by Burton's Sunday-morning-hangover thesping are the sole and primary reasons Boom! achieves any level of watchability at all.

Chris: (Indicating cigarette) "May I have one?" 
Flora: "Kiss me for it."

But I’m the first to admit that the Boom! I adore is probably not at all the Boom! Losey & Co. set out to make. As a play cloaked in Brechtian minimalism, it reads like a needlessly convoluted rehash of themes Williams has already explored…with more poignance and coherence…in Sweet Bird of Youth, The Fugitive Kind, Summer and Smoke, and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. As a film, not only does Williams’ trademark brand of cloaked symbolism and Freudian metaphor sound cobwebby in the era of “tell it like it is,” but no one involved in the project seemed aware that high-minded drama and high glamour have a funny way of canceling each other out. The end result is like watching a Theater of the Absurd sequel to Valley of the Dolls dramatizing the final days of Helen Lawson.

Since Mrs. Goforth on her deathbed looks better than most people in the full bloom of health,
it's kinda hard to wring much pathos out of her plight. 

Representing murky ideologies rather than people, the king-size personalities of Burton and Taylor, left with no characters to inhabit, resort to playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Portraying Death and often looking like it, Burton staggers about while letting his trained voice do all the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, Taylor, tottering around in high heels and even higher hair, plays Flora Goforth as a female impersonator doing a burlesque of Elizabeth Taylor. Yet they’re impossible not to watch. The film's sole concession to a contemporary sensibility is achieved in having a character written as a gossipy queen actually played by one. The Witch of Capri is traditionally played by a woman, and the producers had hoped to snare Katharine Hepburn. But granting the role to famed playwright/composer Noel Coward is inspired if ultimately affectless. 

Losey’s directorial style is languid and lovely and the storytelling clumsy, but there’s no end of delights to be found in the Burtons in their scenes together. Or in the regal blowsiness of Liz and her coughing, barking, swearing, drinking, glowering, and bitching. It entertains and maybe even enthralls.

Despite his initial reservations, Tennessee Williams, feeling his screenplay for the film was much better written than his play, ultimately warmed to Elizabeth Taylor's interpretation of Flora Goforth. Even going so far as to call her performance "The best that she's done." 

Howard Taylor (Elizabeth's older brother, who died in 2020) appears briefly as a journalist 

THE GAWK FACTOR

Before reality TV, the only opportunity fans had of getting a glimpse into the private lives of the rich and famous was when movie stars obliged them by taking on roles audiences were encouraged to interpret as fictionalized versions of themselves. They called it the Gawk Factor. Boom! is a movie loaded with Gawk Factor. The play was written for Tallulah Bankhead, but new generations of viewers are to be forgiven if they assume the role of Flora Goforth was Taylor-made.

Liz Taylor Loves Jewelry
Flora Goforth is a widow who sports a huge diamond ring that (tellingly) cuts into her hand every time someone tries to hold it. It's Taylor's 1956 engagement ring from 3rd husband Mike Todd. Two weeks prior to Boom!'s 1968 premiere, Burton gifted Elizabeth with the famous...and much larger...Krupp Diamond.

Mrs. Goforth has been married six times; Taylor beat that number by one (Burton was husband #5). The one husband Goforth truly loved died in a mountain climbing accident. Mike Todd (whom the fan magazines were fond of claiming was Elizabeth's one true love) died in a mountain plane crash. It's difficult to argue that these fact/fiction similarities weren't exploited, because in the play, Goforth's husband dies in a car crash.   

Liz Taylor Loves To Drink
Enjoying what appears to be a glass bucket of Bloody Mary, Goforth subsists on coffee, cigarettes, codeine tablets, and alcohol. In real life, Taylor suffered from alcohol addiction and helped destigmatize the illness by being one of the first celebrities to go public with her rehab treatment. Boom! is rumored to have been a very liquid set.

Liz Taylor Loves Kaftans
Goforth reveals closets overflowing with colorful kaftans. In the late '60s and '70s (until she found Halston) it was the rare photo that did not feature La Liz in a flowing, colorful kaftan.

Other exploitable Goforth/Taylor parallels pertain to Flora being known for her beauty ("If you have a world-famous figure, why be selfish with it?"), and Flora being plagued by numerous health maladies. Taylor enjoyed poor health throughout much of her life, her paparazzi-attended hospital visits as numerous as red-carpet premieres.

John Waters has called Boom! a “failed art film,” which I think is a very accurate description. It’s just ironic that Boom! is a movie that never could have found financing without the star-system leverage of the Burtons attached, yet the duo's megawatt star-quality is precisely what turns so many scenes in Williams’ elegiac “poem of death” into The Liz & Dick Show. 

But I don’t really have a problem with that because I think I must be a little in love with Elizabeth Taylor. How else to explain my finding her to be both epically awful and some kind of wonderful in this ambitiously off-beat camp curio that feels more emotionally truthful the older I get?

No, Boom! is not a perfect film, it's possibly not even a good one. But it's a risk-taking film. And the risk-taking Burtons of fascinating flops like this one are infinitely more affecting and fun to watch than the play-it-safe Burtons of moneymaking snooze-fests like The Sandpiper.

What does BOOM mean? It's...

BONUS MATERIAL

Robert Redford portrayed Death as a kind young man who comes to ease an old woman’s (Gladys Cooper) fear of dying in the 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone titled "Nothing in the Dark." 

Divine Intervention
A favorite blogger writes about BOOM! as drag inspiration HERE

That's Tab Hunter embracing Divine in the 1981 John Waters film Polyester. Hunter appeared opposite Tallulah Bankhead in the second Broadway incarnation of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. British actress Hermione Baddeley starred in the original production which opened 11-months earlier. 

In 1997 a red-wigged actor Rupert Everett (My Best Friend's Wedding, Another Country) portrayed Flora Goforth to David Foxxe's Witch of Capri in a London production of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore at the Lyric Theater. 

Early casting considerations for Joseph Losey's film version (likely never moving past the discussion stage) were Simone Signoret and Sean Connery; Ingrid Bergman and James Fox. Donald Sutherland was wanted for the role of bodyguard Rudi.

BOOM! opened on Wednesday, May 29, 1968 at Hollywood's Pantages Theater. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2021

PERFORMANCE 1970

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

For as long as I can remember, I've been drawn to movies about the fluidity of identity. From the great grandmother of all identity crisis movies, Ingmar Berman’s Persona (1966), to mind-melding favorites that have intrigued and captured my imagination over the years: Secret Ceremony (1968), The Servant (1963), Images (1972), Obsession (1976), Single White Female (1992), 3 Women (1977), Vertigo (1958), Fedora (1978), Black Swan (2010)—the cinema of self-exploration has always held a weird fascination for me.

Perhaps it has to do with my childhood. After all, I did grow up during television's Golden Age of the polar-opposite-twin. That '60s pop-culture window when The Patty Duke Show (identical cousins!) spearheaded the trend for every sitcom coming down the pike to feature characters who are identical twins with yin/yang personalities: Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, That Girl, Gilligan’s Island, etc. Prolonged exposure to that kinda stuff can't help but mess with a kid's head.

Alas, the less fun but more persuasive theory is that I'm drawn to movies about fragmented personality because the most impressionable years of my adolescence hit at precisely the same time America was in the deep throes of an ideological identity crisis. Responding to the Vietnam War, social injustice, and a veritable laundry list of grievances leveled at standard cultural norms, the nation trained a mirror on itself and began the process of deconstructing years of conformist conditioning.
With consciousness-expansion and self-exploration the rallying cries of the counterculture, young people challenged society's demand for individuals to always be in performance; constantly donning masks and role-playing in support of hollow, outdated concepts of so-called normalcy. Few films have captured the generational ethos of the "put-ons" (traditionalists adopting false personas to conform) vs. the "drop-outs" (bohemians withdrawing from society and rejecting convention) with as much assurance and visual distinction as Performance.   

James Fox as Chas Devlin

Mick Jagger as Turner

Anita Pallenberg as Pherber

Michele Breton as Lucy

The hallucinatory brainchild of screenwriter Donald Cammell (Demon Seed) making his collaborative directing debut with cinematographer/co-director Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now), Performance is set in the waning days of the Swinging London era, circa 1968. Albeit, a shadowy, considerably seamier Londontown than one might associate with Twiggy or Austin Powers. (Performance was completed in 1968, but distributing studio Warner Bros. was so appalled by the results, they shelved it until 1970).

Dandyish Chas Devlin (James Fox) is an enforcer for genial protection racketeer Mr. Flowers (Johnny Shannon). Chas' inherently sadistic nature makes him a man happy in his work, but when his equally-inherent arrogance and temper lead to the death of a rival partner, he winds up running afoul of both his gangland employer and the police. Assuming the unwittingly self-aware persona of a professional juggler named Johnny Dean, Chas takes refuge as a roomer in a dilapidated Notting Hill townhouse owned and occupied by a retired, reclusive rock star named Turner (Mick Jagger), and his two bisexual bedmates: longtime paramour Pherber (a Delphic Anita Pallenberg) and boyish hanger-on Lucy (16-year-old Michele Breton).

Predating Father Merrin's portentous arrival in The Exorcist (1973), Chas'  appearance at 81 Powis Square signals his entrance into another world. In fact, when he enters Turner's house, we never see him go through the door. One minute he's outside the door speaking through the intercom, the next he's standing in the entryway; as though passed through another dimension or beamed aboard an alien spacecraft.

Two (dis)similar men, tenant and landlord, both in hiding of sorts, under the same roof. One violent and aggressive, ever looking into mirrors and (too) quick to assert that he knows exactly who he is. The other, a nowhere man, an erudite “male, female man” creatively adrift after being abandoned by what he calls his inner demon. The uncurious Chas, certain he has landed in a madhouse ("It's a right pisshole. Longhairs, beatniks, fee-love, foreigners...you name it!"), simply wants to lay low while awaiting a fake passport and passage to America (Turner: "Place to go, isn't it, for gangsters?").

But for Turner, Chas holds a strange fascination. Recognizing a brethren showman and fellow mask-wearer behind the fastidious swagger (Chas is the Joan Crawford of mobsters), Turner endeavors to get into the gangster's head to find out why the turn-on of violence has always been life's crowd-pleasing, repeat engagement headliner compared to the turn-on of drugs, sex, and rock & roll.

Convergence

A psychedelic head-trip whose themes of fragmented identity and malleable reality illuminate every frame, Performance gives the appearance of being a hallucinogenic enigma, but it's a film that knows precisely what it wants to say, its path and vision clear as crystal. From its dizzying opening montage, Performance establishes itself as a bombardment to the senses and assault on reality.
Hitting the ground running, it volunteers nothing in the way of explanation, exposition, or exits as it sets about dismantling linear notions of personality and identity in a startling tapestry of images and ideas. And it goes about it at breakneck speed, fairly daring you to keep up.

Anthony Valentine as Joey Maddocks
Early drafts allude to a past sexual relationship as being the source of the
ambiguous acrimony between Chas the enforcer and Joey the bookie

Contrary to its reputation for being impenetrable and opaque, Performance's plot is really pretty straightforward in and of itself (slim, even); it's in the telling where things take a headlong turn into crazy. With duality as its defining thematic and visual motif, everything about the look and feel of Performance—from its fluid representation of time (past, present, and future intersect kaleidoscopically) to its recurring patterns of mirrors and twinning—is linked to the concept that everyone and everything has its shadow and light, yin and yang.

Peace & Love / Hate & Violence
The paradox of the '60s "All You Need Is Love" flower power hippie movement is that the '60s was also an extremely violent and socially turbulent decade. Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated three months before filming began on Performance. Here, a newspaper clipping referencing King's 1964 trip to Oslo, Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize has been posted on a headboard by one of Turner's previous tenants.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Performance is the Doublemint Gum of head movies. A double your pleasure, double your fun mind-fuck expedition to the axis points of male/female, sex/violence, queer/straight. Virtually everything in this film is the mirror image of something else; a reflection viewed through a fractured prism that turns in upon itself and back around again.
Performance’s most ingenious application of dualism is in having the film itself—paralleling the arc of its two lead characters—structured as two separate movies that ultimately converge into one.

The first film is a brutal gangster movie about a preening East End hoodlum. The second is something like a stoner’s homage to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd.; the recluse in this instance, a past-his-prime rock star (“He had three number ones, two number twos, and a number four!”) numbing himself with drugs and decadence. Their eventual convergence—a dive into the deep end of the magic realism pool—leads to the dreamscape collision of two separate worlds and the hallucinatory merging of two disparate men.

Memo from Turner

Making good on his desire to get into the head of his houseguest, the vampiric Turner assumes the dual role of mobster and rocker in Chas’ drug-fueled musical hallucination. A taunting ode to brutality, dominance, macho posturing, and their role in repressed queer desire. 

SHOOT

Chas and Ferber take aim. He with a gun, she with a movie camera.

"Who am I? Do you know who you are?"

Identity and image. The watcher and the watched. Throughout the film, characters suddenly appear to be looking directly at us, addressing us and challenging our presumptive certainty that we have the slightest idea who's who, what's what, or can discern reality from fantasy.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Though Performance was not successful in its initial release, it has since gained the reputation of being the film that defined an era. And in many ways, that’s true. While Hollywood depictions of the '60s and hippie culture invariably leaned towards the absurd (Skidoo -1968) or exploitative (Angel, Angel, Down We Go – 1969), Performance distinguishes itself through its matter-of-fact depiction of bohemian drop-out culture, casual drug use, and libertine sex. Further anchoring it to the era is its visual style, which is reflective of the underground and experimental films of the day.

The gender-fluidity that's now practically a prerequisite for pop music stardom was far from common back in the '60s. Even with the proliferation of long hair, gender representation in rock has always been assertively male and hetero. Jagger was among the first to mine the hip marketability of androgyny and bisexuality.

The life that Turner lives defines the epitome of the hippie ideal: no work; an independent income; a sprawling house overflowing with pillows, posters, and Moroccan accents; and nothing to do but spend the day screwing, getting high, listening to music, and reading Jorge Luis Borges.
But where Performance truly excels is in capturing the era's fascination with psychedelics and inner-exploration. The 1950s, with its emphasis on conformity and rigidly-defined gender roles, was the decade that professed to know all the answers. In direct contrast, the late-1960s was all about questions.

Dressed in a caricature costume of a gangster, Chas' self-identification with his work asserts brutality, aggression, and power as the provinces of maleness. Turner shakes up Chas' already wobbly self-certainty by proposing that when you change your drag, you change your perceptions. Identity-based labels like masculine, feminine, male, female, are but another form of discardable, reusable performance.    

PERFORMANCES

Actor James Fox is no stranger to identity crisis dramas. He first gained notoriety for The Servant (1963), which was another film about mind games and power plays carried out in a sexually cryptic arena. From the first time I ever saw him (1967’s Thoroughly Modern Millie), I’ve felt Fox radiated an appealingly ambiguous “Is he gay or just British” vibe that is put to good use in Performance. His finishing school take on an East End Cockney thug is as frightening as it is canny.

Johnny Shannon as gay crime boss Harry Flowers. Anthony Morton as gang member Dennis 

Making his film debut, Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger may have frustrated Warner Bros. stockholders by making his official entrance into the film at roughly the 45-minute mark, but it’s the kind of delayed unveiling that bestows gravitas and narrative heft on a character before they utter a sound. Playing a man of mystery, Jagger gets to let his rock star mystique do most of the talking, bringing both erotic danger and a sort of touching melancholy to his role. I’m not sure if he’s very good or very well-used, but his Turner is perfection.

As the Black Queen/The Great Tyrant in Barbarella, Anita Pallenberg almost stole that film from Jane Fonda. And she nearly does the same with Performance. Hers is a captivating, devilish performance.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Being that I was 12-years-old in 1970, Performance’s scandalous reputation and gender-bending ad campaign were sufficient reasons for my parents to forbid me to see it during its original release. I was in my 20s when I saw it for the first time in a Los Angeles revival house.

What impressed me about Performance then is what I contend to this day; it is one of the rare examples of a genuinely startling film. Not shocking in terms of explicitness, but audacious in the uniqueness of its personal vision and so very unlike anything I’ve ever seen. And I gotta say, seeing it now on Blu-ray with the much-needed assist of subtitles is like discovering the film anew.

Truth and illusion. Masculinity redefined. Identity reassigned.

BONUS MATERIAL

When Chas arrives at Turner's home, he notices on the stoop several bottles of milk, a box of mushrooms, and four Mars candy bars. This is a jokey reference to the notorious 1967 drug bust at the Redlands country estate of Rolling Stones' Keith Richards. The arrest made headlines (and later refuted) because, along with finding drugs, reports claim that when the police broke in, Jagger was seen eating a Mars bar out of the vagina of then-girlfriend Marianne Faithful.

Documenting Decadence and Debauchery

In the short film from 2016, actor James Fox and Performance producer Sandy Lieberson discuss photographer Cecil Beaton and his visit to the set in 1968. Watch it HERE.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2020

THE APPLE 1980

The BIG Science Fiction Romantic Rock Opera of the '80s

                                                                           Movie poster tagline

It comes as a bit of a surprise to me when I realize that after so many years heralding the relative merits of often inarguably awful movies (and we're talking MAJOR bombs, mind you); this piece on Cannon Films’ dystopian glam-rock musical The Apple will be my first hate-watch movie post.

What do I mean by hate-watch? Well, when it comes to bad movies, whether unabashed camp-fests like Girls Town, Kitten With a Whip, and The Oscar, or pedigreed stinkers like Audrey Hepburn's Bloodline or Barbra Streisand's A Star is Born, there’s not a single terrible film I’ve disparaged and poked fun at on these pages for which I don’t also harbor genuine feelings of affection. Even if that affection is merely gratitude for all the hours of enjoyment they've given me at their expense.

Call it an affinity, call it a connection…, but if I'm going to watch a movie for the sole purpose of laughing at its ineptitude and wrongheadedness, I have to have at least a tiny soft spot for it in my heart. Otherwise, the experience feels only mean-spirited and snarky.
I call it hate-watching when I'm masochistically drawn to watch a movie that, for whatever reason, I already know I don't like all that much. What I expect to get out of such an experience is hard to parse out, but I'm gonna guess that self-flagellation, schadenfreude, and misanthropy play into it.
All of the above and more are to be found in schlockmeister director Menahem Golan's notorious 1980 musical misfire, The Apple.

"First you sell it, THEN you make it. That's marketing!"
The line of dialogue above is from The Apple, a movie set in the world of music. But it could just as easily stand as the business model for Cannon Films under the auspices of the producing/directing team of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. A company that never met a misleading ad it didn't like. There's a very good chance this trade ad began appearing (cobbed from the wishful-thinking likeness of John Travolta's 1978 Time Magazine cover) long before a screenplay was written or a dime of funding secured for this $8-10 million miscalculation

The Apple, if known at all, is widely considered one of the worst musicals ever made. A credential it exhaustively earns and defends in every sequin-encrusted, spandex-encased frame. But movies dismissed by the masses invariably end up as prime candidates for cult adoration, and The Apple is no exception (although it took some 24 years to bring that about). Today, The Apple is enthusiastically embraced for the very things that, in 1980, brought the World Premiere audience at the Montreal Film Festival to its feet in a chorus of boos. The Apple swiftly disappeared when the film's limited American release yielded a groundswell of less demonstrative but no less unfavorable critical response. So few people saw it that over time, The Apple's must-be-seen-to-be-believed awfulness became the stuff of myth.

Despite my fondness for cinema dogs and movie turkeys (fittingly, The Apple's L.A. release was a week before Thanksgiving), I failed to catch The Apple during its initial theatrical release. Not because I accidentally missed it... for some reason, I just had no interest in seeing it. Which is grossly out of character for me. A guy who dotes on disco, is mad for musicals, and who ordinarily can't get enough of craptacular cinema. 

Catherine Mary Stewart as Bibi Phillips

George Gilmour as Alphie

Vladek Sheybal as Mr. Boogalow

Grace Kennedy as Pandi

Allan Love as Dandi

Ray Shell as Shake

The Apple is a pseudo-Biblical Faust allegory set in a hyper-futuristic vision of America in 1994 that frequently betrays its true setting: Berlin, 1979. Taking significant liberties with the Book of Genesis, the film presents us with an unreasonable facsimile of Adam and Eve hailing from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan (a colorless folksinging duo with the Teletubby names of Alphie & Bibi) tempted by fame and lured into the Mephistophelian clutches of one Mr. Boogalow, the head of an entertainment megacorporation known by the acronym BIM (Boogalow’s International Music).

But much like Disney or The Kardashians, BIM has very little actual interest in entertainment itself, its primary interest being global mind control and the deployment of its far-reaching pop culture tentacles for world domination. Mr. Boogalow's fiendish plan--as far as I could make out, anyway---has something to do with weakening people's will through the forced exposure to tacky, Vegas-style glitter-rock-cum-disco revues performed by substandard talent. Enter Alphie & Bibi. 

The Bland Leading The Bland
Flavorless heterosexual folk music in a Eurovision-style face-off against spicy, gay disco  

Boogalow schemes to hornswoggle the naive, soporific duo into a restrictive recording contract, replacing his current BIM Stars Dandi (Allan Love) and Pandi (Grace Kennedy). After the high-minded Alphie has a premonition of disaster (the film’s premiere, no doubt), he refuses to sign with Boogalow but is unsuccessful in persuading the soft-headed...I mean, soft-hearted Bibi to do the same. So, while Alphie beats as hasty a retreat as his extraordinarily tight pants will allow, Bibi signs away her soul for stardom, a crimped hair makeover, and a pair of perilously high, pointy-toed thigh boots.  

I've Seen the Future, and it's Starburst Filter Lenses
The Apple frequently looks as though it were shot by a film school student given
an assortment pack of camera filter lenses they're dead-set on making use of 

Leap ahead an indeterminate amount of years (or is it days?): a despondent Alphie is learning that sanctimonious soft-rock doesn’t sell; Bibi has become a literal howling success (“Speeeeed!”); and America/Berlin has fallen under the despotic, fascist way of BIM and Mr. Boogalow. Beset by state-mandated dancing, compulsory mylar sticker-wearing, and the micromanaging of individual behavior, the country has been transformed into a soul-killing, dystopian glitterscape oddly reminiscent of some six months I spent back in the mid-‘90s working for fitness guru Richard Simmons.

The National BIM Hour of Exercise

The power of love ultimately proves more potent than the power of bad music, and it isn’t long before Bibi starts questioning her fashion choices and Alphie embarks on a quest to rescue his lady love from the evils of multiethnic nonbinary pansexuality. It's at this point, for reasons known only to the drug suppliers of The Apple's creative team, that Alphie and Bibi’s musical odyssey takes an abruptly ecclesiastical turn, complete with superannuated hippies, rapid-growth offspring, and a celestial visitation that made me think Janis Joplin was way ahead of her time when she asked God to buy her that Mercedes Benz.

BIM pop stars Dandi & Pandi (she's the one dressed like Ami Stewart)
Seriously, what's with these names?

Adding further to The Apple's compendium of crazy is a litany of undistinguished pop songs; a Deus ex machina character named Mr. Topps who pops up out of nowhere; future BAFTA-winning actress Miriam Margolyes as a chicken soup-wielding Jewish stereotype; and costumes and sets that evoke memories of the Dolly Parton quote, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

Yes, every descriptive detail pertaining to The Apple confirms its reputation as a Grade-A, four-star disasterpiece.

BIM Headquarters
Alphie forgets to check his package at the door

Following the success of Tommy (1975), Grease (1978), and 1977’s Saturday Night Fever (not a musical, but its #1 soundtrack album revolutionized the movie marketing tie-in), studios everywhere rushed pop/rock musicals into production. The megabudget flops of The Wiz (1978) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) signaled a potential shift in public tastes, but by then, the soundtrack-driven musical juggernaut was already too far underway.

1980 alone saw the release of Fame, The Blues Brothers, Can’t Stop the Music, Xanadu, Coal Miner's Daughter, The Jazz Singer, and Popeye. Hit hardest were Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu, two high-profile musicals that went into production at the height of disco mania and hoped to capture its white-hot, up-to-the-minute urgency. Of course, by the time they hit the screens, both movies looked hopelessly dated and old-fashioned. The Apple (which would have had its work cut out for it no matter the cultural climate) was initially slated for Easter release, giving it the jump on most of the year's other youth-oriented musicals. Alas, The Apple arrived at the very tail-end of the year. By that time, movie musical oversaturation and public impatience with disco, legwarmers, shiny fabrics, and glitter had all reached the point of no return.

Harbinger of Doom: The Apple opened in Los Angeles on November 21st, 1980 at the Paramount Theater on Hollywood Blvd. The same theater where Can't Stop the Music flopped so resoundingly just six months earlier. This newspaper ad promotes the opening day soundtrack giveaway that is said to have resulted in less-than-thrilled patrons hurling the LPs at the screen like Frisbees.

Although I wasn’t all that crazy about its dull poster art and no-name cast, I didn’t want to see The Apple because of my familiarity with Cannon Films. Even before its purchase by Golan-Globus, I associated the studio exclusively with Charles Bronson and schlocky low-budget action movies. Alas, later, when I'd read the flood of terrible reviews The Apple received, it crossed my mind that perhaps I'd missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime "I was there!" moment. The kind of experience cherished by folks who saw the original theatrical releases of legendary fiascoes like The Swarm or Lost Horizon. But mostly, I just felt as though I'd dodged a bullet.

I finally got around to seeing The Apple some 25 years after its release, not long after it had resurfaced on the midnight movie circuit and emerged as a surprise cult hit.

But the circumstances surrounding my watching The Apple for the first time were not the most advantageous for a film this off-the-rails: I was in bed with a particularly nasty bout of the flu when my partner surprised me with a DVD copy of The Apple to cheer me up.

Maybe it was my very real flu-induced fever colliding with the movie’s fever-dream weirdness, but The Apple not only failed to cheer me up, it genuinely made me sick. 

1. Things started out badly when I gave myself a headache from trying to make out if the endlessly-repeated chant in the opening number is “BIM’s on the way,” “BIM’s the only way,” “BIM all the way.” or whatever the fuck.

2. The jewels glued to Shake’s front teeth looked less like glitter rock bling than grossly neglectful dental health, so that kinda turned my stomach.

3. My fluey stomach synced with the film's clumsy choreography and started turning sympathy flips.

4. The script was so rushed, chaotic, and nonsensical that it created the disorienting impression that I had dozed off at intervals, missing pertinent plot points. (I hadn't.)

5. This is a musical that clocks in at only 90 minutes. So why did it feel as long as Barry Lyndon?

6. Did my feeling so lousy at the time ultimately influence my first impression of The Apple? Yes. Was The Apple still pretty lousy without any help from me? Oh, most definitely. 

What's it all about, Alphie?
I hope you like George Gilmour's expression here 'cause it's the only one he's got 

By rights, my flu-viewing experience should have ended my having anything more to do with The Apple. And it was. That is until Christmas 2019 saw the release of a film that threatened to unseat The Apple as The Worst Musical Ever Made: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. 

The critical drubbing those CGI kitties received got me thinking of how it had been 15 years since I last saw The Apple, igniting the nagging question of whether...given how badly I felt...I had really seen the film at all. So, with the added inducement of a recent Blu-ray release, I decided to give The Apple one more try.

I have to admit, it was a considerably better experience. 

The passing of 40 years has been kinder to The Apple than perhaps it deserves. Of course, it’s just as silly as ever, but much of what I once found annoying has been softened through the distancing filter of time. 

I still think the music is pretty terrible, but the songs “BIM,” “Showbizness,” and especially “Speed” actually make me smile (OK, laugh out loud). They may be tacky, but they are also a lot of fun. In fact, the first half of The Apple is actually rather enjoyable. Unfortunately, the second half is bogged down by one too many lugubrious ballads and that weird evangelical turn the story takes.

The musical number "Coming," staged as Pandi's choreographed date-rape of a drugged Alphie,
is not only hilariously crass but takes bad taste to Springtime for Hitler levels

None of the performances gave me a headache the way they did the first time around, although from the start, I thought Grace Kennedy was a little too good for this film (her discomfort in that "Coming" number is palpable) and would have made a fantastic Lucy in the Sky in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band---a case of going from the frying pan into the fire, I know. And I discovered it's really not possible to dislike Catherine Mary Stewart, coming across as she does like a spunky, well-intentioned understudy shoved at the last moment into the star role.

What emerged clearer on second viewing is just how good Vladek Sheybal is. Playing a character saddled with a name no two individuals in the film ever pronounce the same way twice, Sheybal is the only actor to hit the right over-the-top tone without the effort showing. He reminded me of Karen Black when she began appearing in all those low-rent horror movies. She "got" and understood the weird...she didn't need to strike attitudes.

Vladek Sheybal appeared in the films Casino Royale From Russia With Love,
and Ken Russell's Women in Love and The Boy Friend

I enjoyed The Apple more on the second viewing, but finding out that I don't loathe the film isn't the same as saying that I actually like it. I'm afraid I still don't.
And just why that is, boils down to this: I wouldn't like a John Waters movie in which Donny and Marie triumphed over Divine and Mink Stole. Nor would I like an Auntie Mame in which the Aryans from Darian scare away the free-thinking bohemians.

Playing Alphie's cliche-a-minute Jewish landlady, Miriam Margolyes' character doesn't
have a name, but her performance is so full of ham she should be labeled not kosher

I like my cult movies subversive. Mainstream films always have people who look like Bibi and Alphie triumphing over the forces of evil (i.e., anyone who doesn't look like Bibi and Alphie). What's great about underground films is their anarchic attack on the status quo; they are movies that celebrate the misfits.

They advocate for the outsiders, for the socially shunned, and for the ones society has branded "different" or "strange." In these films, the conformity power balance is upended, and the underdogs of the world...those who don't fit into heteronormative boxes and non-inclusive social structures...are celebrated for their being true to themselves and for their uniqueness.

In The Apple, Alphie's rejection of Boogalow's world feels as much rooted in homophobia and diversity fear as in professional distrust. When I watch Rocky Horror, I relate to Dr. Frank N. Furter and his "unconventional conventionists," not Brad and Janet (who, even as the vapid hero and heroine, are still written with more complexity than Alphie and Bibi).

The Age of Aquarius
Menahem Golan takes a page out of An American Hippie in Israel (1972)

The Apple, for all its visual outrageousness and rock & roll posturing, has always struck me as being staunchly middle-of-the-road and conformist in its worldview. The narrative is anti-fascist, anti-corporate, and anti-capitalist, to be sure. But it never sat well with me how the film subtextually aligns all the interesting, queer, and iconoclastic people in The Apple with negatives (degeneracy, depravity, evil, fascism), while the hetero, white, white-bread hero and heroine are the only symbols of innocence and good.
Much in the way Can't Stop the Music has never been an all-time cult fave for me because of the self-repudiation inherent in its closeted take on The Village People, The Apple is anti-rock and roll (which everybody knows is the great liberator of all souls!) and celebrates conventional blandness too much for my taste.   

Apparently, Hell is a lot like Chippendales on a Friday Night

BONUS MATERIAL

Before they were Dandi & Pandi, Allan Love (he got the "L" out before the film) and Grace Kennedy had professional recording careers. Love, who was most recently in the restaurant business, can be seen in a 1978 musical video HERE. Kennedy, who had her own BBC variety show for several years, pays homage to that other 1980 musical flop Can't Stop the Music HERE. 

Before he was Alphie, Scottish singer George Gilmour (center) fronted the band The Bo-Weavles.

Ray Shell went on to have an extensive career in theater. Seen here (in considerably less makeup than Shake) he originated the role of Rusty in the 1984 London production of Starlight Express. He's also a producer, director, and author (among others, a book on director Spike Lee).

The Apple's lyricist George S. Clinton (l.) and composer Kobi Recht (r.) appear throughout the film as different characters. Co-lyricist Iris Recht appears as the receptionist in the "Showbizness" number.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2020