ORDINARY PEOPLE 1980

"Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  - Tolstoy

Ordinary People won the 1981 Best Picture Oscar against Raging Bull, The Elephant Man, Tess, and Coal Miner's Daughter. While hindsight and time have confirmed my personal opinion that Martin Scorsese’s searing and ambitious Raging Bull was the more deserving prize recipient that year, I must assert that in saying this, I am in no way diminishing or discounting the brilliance that is Ordinary People. It's an easy film to dramatically discredit due to its essentially conventional structure and familiar domestic themes. And it's an easy film to creatively overlook because it lacks both the cinematic bravura and operatic scope of Scorsese’s masterpiece. But, when leaving these comparisons aside, director Robert Redford's Ordinary People has always struck me as one of the most emotionally eloquent and evocative domestic dramas I've ever seen.

The passion of Scorsese's beautifully rendered biographical character study may move me aesthetically, and I'm aware that part of me responds most strongly to it (as I do with Stanley Kubrick's films) on a largely cerebral level--I'm just so impressed with its filmmaking craft. But to this day, of all the movies nominated that year, I still find Ordinary People to be the most deeply affecting of the lot. Its poignance speaks to me in ways that perhaps have little to do with art, but everything to do with its compassionate point of view and my enduring fondness for motion pictures that explore the human condition.

As the years go by, I come to appreciate Ordinary People’s simple, straightforward approach more and more, for its look feels less like the absence of style in a first-time director than a deliberate attempt on Redford’s part to use the film's crisp, conventional look as a commentary on the role conformity and the illusion of appearances play in the world these people inhabit. A means of training the focus on what’s most important to the story: repression and the inability of its characters to understand and express feelings that fall beyond the scope of coping mechanisms of structure, order, and self-control.

Mary Tyler Moore as Beth Jarrett

Donald Sutherland as Calvin Jarrett

Timothy Hutton as Conrad Jarrett

Judd Hirsch as Dr. Tyrone C. Berger

Elizabeth McGovern as Jeannine Pratt

Dinah Manoff as Karen Alrich

Ordinary People tells the story of the Jarretts, an upper-middle-class family living in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, an affluent neighborhood of spacious homes, manicured lawns, and people skilled in the art of emotional repression. Fittingly, the film opens with a montage of tranquil, postcard-perfect images of this tony residential community, for in this beige-colored, WASP enclave, appearances seem to do all the talking. Most vociferously, these meticulously kept-up appearances speak of status and wealth, but they're also an avowal of the belief that if everything looks right, it must then certainly be right.
From order comes security, and security must, therefore, bring happiness. The unexpected is kept at bay. Everyone is safe. Lives are happy. All is as it should be, and there is no mess—except for in the Jarrett household, where, bit by bit, their lives are slowly coming apart.

Keeping Up Appearances

Looking at them from the outside, one would assume the Jarretts haven’t a problem in the world. Genial, easygoing Calvin is a successful tax attorney; elegant, poised Beth, a mother and housewife, is an avid golfer and paragon of perfectionism; and 17-year-old Conrad…he’s just been released from a mental hospital after having tried to kill himself.

You see, Buck Jarrett, eldest son, star athlete, and all-around Golden Boy, drowned in a boating accident a little over a year ago, and the emotional fallout of the tragedy (or more precisely, the lack of it) has left a huge fissure in the Jarrett’s façade of have-it-all normalcy.
The loss of the older brother he looked up to causes Conrad to suffer a nervous breakdown born of survivor's guilt and from the feeling that, in the eyes of his parents, he'll never measure up enough to compensate for the void. Beth, who one senses blames Conrad for his brother’s death, has virtually shut him out of her life. Unable to display affection and withholding approval, she thinks that Conrad’s suicide attempt was a deliberate act of revenge directed at her (the deed left the image-conscious Beth having to weather both the stigma of having an institutionalized son and the humiliation of others knowing that all is far from orderly in the Jarrett household).

Calvin, stuck in the role of conciliator, drinks a bit too much and tends to turn a blind eye to what he perhaps knows/fears to be true between Beth and Conrad. In his earnest efforts to make everything nice, he too, lives in a state of denial about his feelings.

Recovering from shock therapy, left behind a grade for his months-long stay at a mental hospital,
Conrad feels the pressure of others wanting things to return to "normal" as quickly as possible

In chronicling Conrad’s journey toward forgiveness (himself and his mother) Ordinary People’s look at the dysfunction within a by-all-appearances functional family covers little of what I’d call new ground. Certainly not after all those ’60 post-Graduate films eviscerating the middle class for their false values, the wave of Vietnam-era ‘70s films and TV movies devoted to cultural soul-searching, or the 1973 PBS documentary An American Family (television's first reality show), which regaled us with the spectacle of the disintegration of a quintessential WASP family from the comfort of our living rooms.

But where Robert Redford succeeds in making Ordinary People an uncommonly perceptive look at a familiar topic is how his direction displays an insider's insight into this world and the people who inhabit it. There are none of the cliché, easy-target jibes at the upper-middle-class typical of the "domestic disintegration" genre. In its place is an intimate familiarity with the WASP rituals of suppression (few interactions occur outside of the formalized: meals, cocktail parties, golf games, and "keeping busy" are the cure-all panacea), empathy for the adult characters, and compassion for the adolescents.

The "French Toast scene" is one of my favorites. It features a father who tries too hard, a son who feels too much, and a mother who expresses her feelings in the only way she knows how: through the dutiful carrying out of household rituals. The tension is as thick as maple syrup.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Ordinary People was a critical and commercial success upon release, its few detractors mostly citing it as perhaps a little too ordinary in its approach for its own good. A solemn, pedigreed, adult drama about important issues, Ordinary People is the kind of film studios once touted as a “prestige picture,” and critics would label “Oscar bait” (Indeed, it was nominated for six Oscars, winning four: Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, and Adapted Screenplay.)

Almost too refined and tasteful for the messiness of its subject matter, Ordinary People’s family-in-crisis themes, relaxed, naturalistic performances, and distinct lack of showy, cinematic tricks (a welcome rarity from a first-time director) still have many feeling that Redford’s film is little more than a superior movie-of-the-week. 

But to me, what Ordinary People lacks in visual distinction (not entirely fair, John Bailey’s cinematography, evoking the chill and melancholy beauty of autumn in the Midwest, is remarkably expressive), it makes up for in keeping the viewer emotionally rapt in the Jarretts' domestic free-fall. Ordinary People’s greatest strength has always been its characters, the tenuous structure of their relationships, and the depth of emotional authenticity the film’s remarkable cast brings to Alvin Sargent’s splendid screenplay (from Judith Guest’s 1976 novel).

The entire cast of Ordinary People is extraordinary, but Mary Tyler Moore wasn't fucking around. She brings it like gangbusters in her portrayal of Beth, inhabiting the character in a way that leaves you feeling her role in the film is larger than it actually is. Every one of her scenes is virtuoso, but here are my favorites:

"Give her the goddamn camera!"
Never has Mary Tyler Moore's ready smile been used to better knots-in-the-stomach effect

"Mothers don't hate their sons!"
After so much politeness, Moore & Sutherland finally squaring off  is electrifying

A dog named Pippin
This is an absolutely brilliantly played and written scene (watch Moore's shift in expressions). It's like a door being cracked open, only to be slammed shut. Two people trying to connect and not being able to. It breaks my heart every time.

The Hug
On a scale of emotional power, this reverberated through the theater like the chest-busting scene in Alien. I swear, the entire theater seemed to gasp and break into LOUD sobs all at once

PERFORMANCES
Dating back to the first time I ever saw Rebel Without a Cause on TV, I've seldom liked how teenagers have been written or portrayed on screen (except in low-budget '50s and '60s rock & roll musicals). They always seem to have a little too much autonomy, and the graceful, perfect actors playing them too often look like they're play-acting at youthful gawkiness and insecurity. Timothy Hutton turns in an exceptional performance simply by giving the impression he's not "playing" at anything...he's being. He comes across as genuine and age-appropriately hamstrung by his emotional confusion, his character's anguish made all the more heartbreaking because he also comes across as such a sweet, sensitive kid.

Hutton works a kind of miracle with Conrad, granting us a portrait of a tortured youth that manages to sidestep the usual problematic “troubled teen” clichés that so often come across as self-pitying and self-indulgent. Hutton was just 19 at the time, yet there’s nothing callow in how perceptively he conveys the feelings of a young man grappling with grief and self-recrimination. Given that this is the young actor's first major film role (for which he won an Oscar in the bargain), the intensity of feeling Hutton brings to his character is perhaps too-easily attributed to his having lost his real-life father just four months prior to filming (actor Jim Hutton succumbed to liver cancer at age 45); but I think it's just a case of a very talented actor meeting with the perfect role.

Adam Baldwin, Hutton, Carl DiTomasso, Fredric Lehne

As the '80s ushered in the era of the insufferable teenager—interchangeable slasher victims or indistinguishable coming-of-age horndogs—Ordinary People's realistic adolescents gently broke from tradition. Frederic Lehne plays a high school jock actually capable of showing compassion; Dinah Manoff, as Conrad's friend from the mental hospital, struggles to keep depression at bay through strained positivity; and most appealingly of all, Elizabeth McGovern (also making her film debut) as a classmate with whom Conrad shares a mutual crush.  McGovern, who has the quirky, natural charm of a young Paula Prentiss (a frequent Jim Hutton co-star), manages to rescue her character, through sheer force of originality, from being a plot-functional "dream girl" who exists solely to guide Conrad back into the world of feelings.

The charming naturalness of Hutton and McGovern adds poignance to their scenes

Both Redford and Moore have stated that the character of Beth and her inability to display affection reminded them of the non-relationship each had with their respective emotionally-remote, perfectionist fathers. I grew up at a time when, via TV shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, the patriarchal ideal defined the perfect family. That’s why Ordinary People’s fence-straddling, somewhat ineffectual, but well-intentioned Calvin Jarrett came as such a welcome surprise to me; at last: a divergence from the all-knowing authoritarian father figure of pop-culture propaganda.

Taking on the kind of peace-keeping, empathetic role typically afforded the long-suffering wife in these sorts of domestic dramas, Donald Sutherland—a personal favorite and the only major cast member to fail to receive an Oscar nod—gives an understated performance (Redford initially wanted him for the psychiatrist) whose nuances are all too easy to overlook. An actor most eloquent in his silences (Sutherland’s eyes tend to be more expressive than his face) is at a distinct disadvantage in a film full of so many showier performances; but Calvin’s restrained gentleness has the much-needed effect of humanizing Beth (some part of her must have appreciated his vulnerability) and of making Conrad’s estrangement less torturous, for it's clear he has at least one person in the household in his corner.

Had the Canadian Donald Sutherland been cast in the role of psychiatrist as Redford originally envisioned, critics would have lost the opportunity to project culturally stereotypical significance to Oscar-nominee Judd Hirsch's Jewishness; aka the trope about the "expressive" ethnic character helping the uptight white character to open up. 

“Beth was the character he [Redford] most cared about, and he wanted her to be portrayed with sensitivity. It was she who drew him to the project”  - Mary Tyler Moore

What drew me to Ordinary People was Mary Tyler Moore. I was sitting in a movie theater sometime during the summer of 1980 when I saw the trailer for Ordinary People for the first time. If you’ve never seen it, it’s one of those artfully modulated 2½ minute gems that builds in intensity until the fade-out has everyone in the theater murmuring in excitement. Like most everybody else in America at the time, I was still in the throes of Mary Richards withdrawal. The Mary Tyler Moore Show had ended in 1977, but Moore had been a consistent, cheery staple of television since The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered in 1961, so, even with reruns to salve the pain, by 1980 it still wasn’t easy living in a world without Mary.

I had no advance awareness of Ordinary People, so when Mary Tyler Moore appeared in the trailer behaving in a very un-Mary-like manner, I (and many others in the theater) let out an audible gasp. By the time the trailer was over I was aware of having been gripped by the same excitement I felt when back in 1974 I first read Ann-Margret was to appear in a Ken Russell film (Tommy); or in 1979, when the news came out about Olivia Newton-John, the squeaky-clean queen of soft rock, collaborating with British rockers Electric Light Orchestra on a little ditty called Xanadu. The potential for something unpredictably brilliant is always linked to a star going counter to their image and being cast against-type; so, when Ordinary People opened on Friday, September 19th, I happily stood in line to see it. I wasn’t disappointed. 

Ordinary People is unique in its depiction of a mother as a complex, conflicted individual of depth who, inconsistent with the maternal instinct myth, refuses (is unable?) to assume the traditional familial role of nurturer and healer.

Giving everyone involved in this film their due and not taking a single thing away from a single performance, it nevertheless remains my emphatic assertion that whatever heights Ordinary People soars to—as either motion picture or human drama—are reached on the wings of Mary Tyler Moore’s performance. She’s better than good here. Her performance emanates from a place of truth that serves as a tether wrenching Ordinary People back to reality every time it appears to veer into soap opera or Lifetime movie territory. I find her to be absolutely astounding.

And not for one moment do I pretend to dissociate my reaction to the character of Beth from my personal response to Moore in the role. It’s precisely my inability to fully wrest my awareness of Moore’s endurably likable TV persona from Beth’s rigidity that gives the performance its power. The incongruity of Moore’s quick-to-smile façade masking such groundswells of anger and stony reserve produces in me the exact reaction I imagine Beth’s country club friends would have were they ever catch a glimpse of what lies behind her perfect life of order. 

Everyone from Ann-Margret to Lee Remick was considered
 for the role Moore called "The Holy Grail of my career."

Although it’s heartbreaking to see the degree to which Beth’s steely reserve and need to keep up appearances hurts her family, Moore makes Beth’s defiant defense of her own fiercely guarded vulnerability a thing of icy beauty. You can see the pain, you can see the inner struggle, you can even see what she is most fearful of having to confront by letting down her guard (her sense of being a failure at something that seems very, very important to her--achieving perfection); but just as clearly you can see that she can’t help herself. Like everyone else, she too, is a victim of grief, her coping mechanisms as imprinted on her character as her name on a Marshall Field’s credit card.

Much in the manner that The Graduate's Mrs. Robinson is set up to be that story's villain, yet emerges its most sympathetic character; Beth, in the hands of Mary Tyler Moore, while never quite sympathetic, is so powerless, yet so resolute and repressed, she becomes a tragic figure.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

In these days of manufactured social media self-presentation, Photoshop perfectionism, and smartphone photo filters that turn their subjects into pore-free mannequins, a movie about the folly of keeping up appearances and the impossible pursuit of flawless “perfection” could perhaps not be more relevant.

And although Ordinary People is one of the whitest movies ever made, I’ve always been able to identify with it because the image-conscious middle-class world it dramatizes is not at all different from my own childhood growing up as one of the few Black families in an all-white neighborhood.

Everything in its Place

In the assimilationist household I grew up in, upward mobility meant the strict adherence to respectability politics. Under scrutiny whether we were shopping, playing outside, or just emptying the garbage, our family had to be a model of everything white America didn’t expect or want us to be. Black excellence (via perfectionism and achievement) was present in everything from how we kept up our house to how we dressed for school. Although we were a household of five (two older sisters had already married and moved out) and under a great deal of social pressure, we rarely spoke of these matters to one another because, by necessity, the needs and problems of the individual were sublimated to the goals of the family in particular, civil rights and the advancement of all of black America in general.
And let's not forget that during all this, I, as the only boy in the family and gay to boot, instinctively lapsed into "The Best Little Boy in the World" mode; neat, well-mannered, drug-free, straight-A student...all so that I'd never give my parents a moment's worry, ensuring that the pesky little topic of "gay" would never come up. 

No wonder I so identified with all that guilt Conrad carried around!

Were it not for my mother going through EST training in the early ‘70s (after which, talking about EVERYTHING became the household standard, resulting in even my conservative dad becoming alarmingly liberal), I think we could have wound up like the Jarretts.

One of the themes of Ordinary People is that not all breaks are clean, and not everything can be put back together again. But one of life's gifts granted to us as people is that we have this amazing capacity to endure and move on. Like the Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet that opens Judith Guest's novel reminds us:

What a shining animal is man,

Who knows, when pain subsides, that is not that

For worse than that must follow yet can write

Music, can laugh, play tennis, even plan. 

BONUS MATERIAL

The cast of Ordinary People reunited for Vanity Fair in 2011. Photo by Mark Seliger

Ordinary People theatrical trailer

click to enlarge

Ordinary People was released Friday, September 26, 1980 at the Bruin Theater in Westwood, CA

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2018

DIE! DIE! MY DARLING! 1965

“Every play you send me is about a fiend! If I don’t murder somebody, I’m just about to. And if they are not after me, I’m after them. I tell you I cannot stand it any longer! Don’t you think I’m human? Don’t you think I’m ever helpless?”

Tallulah Bankhead playing a parody of herself (her full-time career by this point) in the 1953 film, Main Street to Broadway. Her penultimate film before Die! Die! My Darling!

Although I don’t recall now which program I saw initially, my first exposure to that legend of the American theater known as “The Alabama Foghorn”—Miss Tallulah Bankhead—was either when she portrayed the villainous Black Widow on TV’s Batman, or when she camped her way through a large-as-real-life impersonation of herself on reruns of The Celebrity Next Door episode of The Lucy & Desi Comedy Hour. The time was 1967, I was ten-years-old, and in both instances, what stands out strongest in my memory is that I’d never seen anything quite like her.

A prodigious personality who all but dared you to watch anyone else, Tallulah Bankhead didn’t just occupy space onscreen; she filled it. Her one-of-a-kind persona fairly overwhelming the senses of sight and sound. There was that trademark, thick mane of glamorous, movie-star hair; her broad range of almost-cartoonish facial expressions and reaction takes; the bold extravagance of her scene-stealing flamboyance of her gestures. But of course, Bankhead's chief distinction was her voice. That famous basso-profundo, bourbon-&-cigarettes drawl which eventually grew so slurred, just trying to decode her dialog became part of the fun.

Even at a time when distinctive, impersonation-worthy celebrities were in abundance (Garland, Merman, Hepburn, Liberace, etc.), Bankhead was still a heady dose of drag-queen bearing and outsize star quality.

Bankhead as Regina Giddens in the original 1939 Broadway production of The Little Foxes

As it would be several years before I’d see Bankhead playing it more or less straight in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), and even more before the internet made possible the availability of her 1954 TV adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; for the longest time the exaggerated, panderingly self-parodic Tallulah Bankhead was the only Tallulah Bankhead I knew. A perception made indelible by the time Die! Die! My Darling!—Britain-based Hammer Films’ 1965 entry in the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? / Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte psycho-biddy sweepstakes—began making the rounds on late-night TV.

Tallulah Bankhead as Mrs. Trefoile

Stefanie Powers as Patricia Carroll

Peter Vaughn as Harry

Yootha Joyce as Anna

Donald Sutherland as Joseph

Maurice Kaufmann as Alan Glentower

Adapted from the 1961 novel Nightmare by Elizabeth Linington (under the pseudonym, Anne Blaisdell), Die! Die! My Darling! is, as its UK title Fanatic, suggests, something of the flip side to Hitchcock’s Psycho. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s a movie that takes on Psycho’s Oedipal conundrum from the perspective of Norman Bates’ mother.

A pre-The Girl from UNCLE Stefanie Powers stars as Patricia Carroll, an American of unspecified profession visiting London with her British fiancé, Alan (Maurice Kaufmann), who’s a TV producer of some sort. Although essentially on a pre-wedding holiday together, Patricia (who, perhaps in the spirit of tourist bonhomie and “When in Rome” kinship, frequently lapses into a British accent) abandons her fiancé and motors to the countryside in an effort to achieve whatever the '60s word for closure is with the mother of her deceased ex-fiancé, Stephen.

Tallulah Bankhead is, of course, Stephen’s grieving mother, one Mrs. Trefoile, a devoutly religious eccentric living in ascetic seclusion in a somewhat dilapidated Gothic-Revival country house far away from telephones, neighbors, or anything else that might come to prove beneficial to an individual held captive. The widow Trefoile shares her home with an imposing, rather grim, lifesize portrait of her late husband in full military regalia; innumerable shrines to her departed son (including, it would seem, his ghost); and a cowed and cowering household staff she keeps at her bellowing beck and call.
The staff, a vaguely sinister-looking trio, each member appearing to have stepped right out of a Charles Addams cartoon, consists of Harry (Peter Vaughn), the lecherous, eternally skulking handyman; Anna, his compliant, strapping wife (Yootha Joyce); and the lumbering, simpleminded groundskeeper, Lurch…I mean, Joseph (Donald Sutherland). 

Let Us Prey

The initial meet and greet scenes between Patricia and Mrs. Trefoile are played for dark comedy and uneasy culture-clash laughs, the old woman’s despotic hospitality and strict religious adherence—no mirrors, makeup, or physical adornments of any kind—presented as whimsical eccentricity. But it isn't long before it becomes obvious that Mrs. Tefoile's pious exterior masks a pathological religious fanaticism broaching no leniency in matters perceived sinful or morally transgressive. In addition, Mrs. Trefoile’s devotion to her late son reveals a smothering maternal attachment rivaling that of Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. 

It seems Mrs. Trefoile blames Patricia for her son’s abandonment and premature demise, and also sees the once-betrothed bride as her son’s rightful, eternal wife in the eyes of God. Confident in the belief that her son died a virgin (“So much more beloved by the almighty"), Mrs. Trefoile takes it upon herself to “cleanse” the soul of the deep-in-error Patricia by holding her captive, and, in true Christian tradition, induce her spiritual redemption though means of torture, abuse, and waving firearms about.

Although never seen, the presence of the much-discussed Stephen Trefoile is keenly felt throughout.
The too-pretty face staring out from the many portraits and paintings 
on first viewing had me anticipating a third act revelation that Stephen was gay.

Die! Die! My Darling! is an amusingly outré damsel in distress melodrama whose potential as an unsettling exercise in Gothic grotesquery is consistently undermined by Hammer Films’ characteristic insistence on giving the material its customary Vincent Price-style, tongue-in-cheek/ high-camp horror treatment. Indeed, part of what contributes to Die! Die! My Darling! eliciting more giggles than gasps is how there is rarely a moment in the film where one feels the cast, director Silvio Narizzano (Georgy Girl), screenwriter Richard Matheson (Trilogy of Terror), and composer Wilfred Josephs are all working in concert. No two people are making the same film at the same time.

Happily, the pitfalls of repetition that usually bedevil films in the cat-and-mouse genre (the wittily literal-minded title sequence features a demonic green cat in pursuit of a fuzzy pink mouse) are largely absent in Die! Die! My Darling! thanks to the appealing performances of the lead players and the dominant role afforded the female characters.
I generally tend to find movies about men holding women captive to be too laboriously misogynist in their execution to inspire anything other than indifference or impatience on my part (I disliked William Wyler’s masterly The Collector [1965] as intensely as I did the infinitely inferior Tattoo [1981] and Boxing Helena [1993]). But when captive and captor are of the same sex, the sight of a loony bible-thumper and her butch maid taking the starch out of a genteel sophisticate proves not only a lot less problematic, but said spectacle is substantially sillier and more entertaining than it has any right to be. 

Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves

Had Die! Die! My Darling! been released in the US under its UK title, Fanatic, perhaps one could entertain the idea of a serious-minded thriller about a mentally unbalanced religious fanatic enacting revenge on the woman she deems responsible for her son’s death. After all, films like The Haunting, Psycho, The Innocents, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and the aforementioned Suddenly Last Summer have shown that bizarre themes don’t automatically lend themselves to the exploitation treatment. However, a title like Die! Die! My Darling! primes you for one thing and one thing only: Craptacular entertainment. Thus, with the horror genre bar set roughly around ankle height, and tongue lodged firmly in cheek, Bankhead & Co. head off to Camp Hammer.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Considered to be the first color film in the Horror Hag genre, Die! Die! My Darling! is a straightforward, if tonally at-odds-with-itself, exercise in funhouse terror. Self-aware to the point of self-parody, Die! Die! My Darling!, in its attempt to cash in on the '60s trend of casting aging leading ladies of the silver screen as human gargoyles; dusts off every cliché in the damsel-in-distress book and employs them with the dutiful compliance to format as a child with a paint-by-numbers set.

After an efficient, exposition-filled opening sequence, Die! Die! My Darling! quickly gets down to the business of clocking up as many genre cliché’s as its 97-minute running time will allow. First, there’s the lovely and refined Stefanie Powers as the victim/heroine, embodying just the right balance of resourcefulness and dumb-as-a-doornail stupidity necessary to the genre. Playing a strong-willed, independent-minded character, her mode of dress, makeup, and coiffure are so highlighted by the film that we know right off the bat that the film will soon ask us to revel (a la Tippi Hedren in The Birds) in her ultimate humbling and degradation. Fans of glamorous suffering are certain to enjoy monitoring the effect prolonged captivity and abuse have on Powers’ pouffy ’60s hairdo and tastefully natural makeup.

Stefanie Powers, Seized By Panic Upon Discovering 
She's Been Forcefully Imprisoned Without Any Moisturizer

Next in line, appearing in what Hammer Films at this point might as well have labeled "The Vincent Price Role," is the absolutely splendid Tallulah Bankhead. Splendid not because her performance is especially nuanced, but because, for the material at hand, she's 100% on the money. Like Price, Bankhead has the gift of deliberate excess; she pitches her Mrs. Trefoile forcefully and hammily over-the-top, yet it lands precisely at the level of serio-comic histrionics a chunk of chiller-diller cheese like this calls for.

Tallulah Bankhead, who once said to a director, "Don't talk to me about camp, dahling, I invented it!" gives a terrifically raw and epically theatrical performance in Die! Die! My Darling!  Her delivery and facial expressions alone being worth the price of admission. If you've ever wondered what it would look like for a human being to react in the pop-eyed, exaggerated manner of a Tex Avery cartoon character, just get a load of La Bankhead's reaction in the scene where Powers enters the room wearing a scarlet red sweater. She's pure camp cinema gold!

"The Devil's Entertainment!"
Legendary hedonist Bankhead is cast as a former stage actress saved from a life of sin by religion.
The in-joke irony was not lost on audiences

PERFORMANCES

Had director Silvio Narizzano been granted his wish of casting British stage actress Flora Robson (Black Narcissus) in the role of Mrs. Trefoile, Die! Die! My Darling! would have been a very different film indeed. A director from television making his first feature film, the openly-gay Narizzano had no interest in turning his debut effort into a flaming camp-fest, but Bankheads's attachment to the project made it a fait accompli. Narizzano has gone on record as not being very fond of Bankhead’s performance here (not surprisingly, the actress was intoxicated a great deal of the time) and for finding the hyperactive musical score more appropriate to a cartoon than a suspense thriller. 

Similar Themes - Similar Posters

As psychological thrillers go, Die! Die! My Darling! suffers a bit from having an atmosphere that's neither afoot nor horseback. It’s not sufficiently committed to the genuinely dramatic potential of its premise, nor is it truly willing to just go for broke and be the full-on black comedy self-sendup it keeps flirting with. For a sense of what Die! Die! My Darling! could have been had they played it straight, check out the terrific 1972 Patty Duke thriller You'll Like My Mother. Stabbing suspense! Shear shock!

Personally, I think Bankhead totally slays as Mrs. Trefoile (no pun intended). Sure, she's camp as all getout, but I don't find her performance to be any more overcooked than say, Al Pacino in Scarface or Jack Nicholson in The Shining. In fact, she has quite a few moments where she's genuinely quite affecting (her reading of the line, "This was his room," while showing Patricia the house is heartbreaking). I relish every minute she's onscreen.
Meanwhile, the likable and always appealing Stefanie Powers—a Columbia Pictures contract player at the time and assigned to the film—relies a bit too heavily on "indicating" her emotions. When in peril, her eyes widen, her mouth falls agape, she even trembles...but I never believe for a minute she's ever in the throes of any kind of anguish.
After reading her memoirs, in which she comes across as smart and self-aware, I wonder if she simply knew exactly what kind of film she was making and merely played to the genre.

Harry & Anna
Game of Thrones' Peter Vaughn and the late Yootha Joyce are first-rate as the bickering couple drawn into Mrs. Trefoile's plot. Bankhead's oft-repeated baritone bellow,  "ANNA!" is a thing of beauty.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Hammer Films are known for their low-budget extravagance and overripe Gothic style. Die! Die! My Darling! is no exception.

This Psycho-inspired scene makes stylized, vivid use of color

The dramatic visual compositions of cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson (Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,  A Little Night Music) are often at odds with the film's overly-jaunty musical score.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What is the whole Grand Dame Guignol genre but an amplification of the movie industry’s (society’s?) fear & loathing of women no longer young and desirable? Is the popularity and proliferation of  “Hagsploitation” films in '60s directly attributable to the boxoffice clout of the youth market—a generation of moviegoers disdainful and distrustful of the elderly? Can the genre’s deep-rooted fear of women, specifically those perceived as threatening due to an absence of male-defined role identification (the villains in these films are always single, widowed, divorced, or spinsters), be traced to that gynophobic film noir archetype, the femme fatale? 

I daresay that even my own lazy signifier, camp, when attributed to these films and their stars, betrays a somewhat dismissive attitude toward the depiction of female aggression. 

I don’t know if the genre began with Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in 1950s Sunset Boulevard (“There’s nothing tragic about turning fifty. Unless you’re trying to be twenty-five!”), a film that subtly exploited Gloria Swanson’s age and real-life status as a silent movie queen. But like that film, Die! Die! My Darling! relies, at least in part, on getting subliminal mileage out of the public’s awareness of Tallulah Bankhead’s fading theatrical renown and visible decline.
The horror genre has never been particularly kind to women anyway, but if one can extract a positive out of this curiously popular subgenre, it's that it provided some marvelously juicy lead roles to many actresses who'd otherwise be relegated to the sidelines in mainstream fare. (My mind goes to that great femme fatale of the '40s, Jane Greer, abandoned to a nondescript "mom" role in 1965's Billie.)

In a world of Tallulah Bankhead imitators (Lucille Ball on her TV show, Bette Davis in All About Eve, and my favorite, Roddy McDowall in Evil Under the Sun), Tallulah Bankhead was still the best Tallulah Bankhead impersonator around. Which is precisely why I can enjoy her work in Die! Die! My Darling! without a trace of pity or sense that she is being exploited. I can’t help but take my hat off to the actress, plagued as she was by addictions and fears, coming back to films after so many years and still able to wipe everybody else off the screen. She was camp, she was over-the-top, but she was her own creation…one of the first genuine divas, and a true original.

Although she did voice work for a stop-animation children's film in 1966, Die! Die! My Darling! was Tallulah Bankhead's final feature film appearance. She died in 1968 at the age of 66.

BONUS MATERIAL

Looped

In 2013, Stefanie Powers, stepping in for an ailing Valerie Harper, portrayed Tallulah Bankhead in Looped. A Broadway play based on the real-life events surrounding an inebriated Bankhead being called in to loop a line of dialogue for Die! Die! My Darling!

The single line of dialogue:“And Patricia, as I was telling you, even though that deluded rector has in literal effect closed the church to me, I have, as you’ll note, tried to maintain proper service to the Lord in my own home." - allegedly took eight hours to record.

Bankhead's triumphant return to London in August of 1964 to begin filming on Die! Die! My Darling! hit a literal snag when (according to Powers) the actress's foot caught on the lip of a stair at the entrance to The Ritz Hotel with cameras present to capture the event. Of course, the press had a field day, resulting in the insecure Bankhead developing an instant case of laryngitis.

Unless it's been removed, somewhere online is a marvelous video of Stefanie Powers speaking at a screening of Die! Die! My Darling! She relates many amusing anecdotes about Bankhead and the making of the film. For instance, Bankhead and Powers developed a friendship while making the movie, and all during the filming and for years after, Bankhead referred to Powers exclusively by her screen name, Patricia. 

Tallulah takes a trip to The Automat  1957

UK Quad Poster with Original Title 

Die! Die! My Darling! opened in Los Angeles 

on Wednesday, June, 16, 1965 at the Pix Theater on Hollywood Blvd. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015