HOT SPELL 1958

What would Hollywood do without the South as the all-purpose, go-to metaphor for all things hot, steamy, and neurotic during the sexually and emotionally repressed America of the 1950s?Hollywood, pandering to post-war propaganda intended to reassure the nation of a return to prosperity and stability, consistently promoted the image of the Midwest and middle-class suburbs as exemplars of familial “normalcy.” To this end, metropolitan cities were represented as cold and impersonal sin-bins, rife with crime and corruption; while the South – where mossy oak trees and people’s accents drooped in languid surrender to the oppressive heat – was a veritable pressure cooker of stifled passions. No wonder the Southern Gothic (a film genre dear to my heart) came to embody the existential frustration, spiritual discontent, and sexual dissatisfaction of an entire nation.

Between 1958 and 1959, Hollywood released no fewer than six southern-fried movie melodramas: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Long Hot Summer, God’s Little Acre, Suddenly Last Summer, The Sound and the Fury, and the focus of this essay, author Lonnie Coleman’s (Beulah Land) little-known but no-less overheated domestic drama, Hot Spell. 

Hot Spell is based on Coleman’s unproduced 1951 play Next of Kin (which was subsequently turned into a novel when the film was released). It's directed by Daniel Mann (Come Back, Little Sheba) from a screenplay by James Poe (Summer & Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Considering its cast and pedigree, I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of this film, let alone seen it, until relatively recently. 

Hot Spell’s theatrical roots are manifest in the size of its cast (it’s basically a four-character story), the talkiness of its script, and the simplicity of its plot. In the sweltering heat of the eternal summer that is the mainstay of all good Southern Gothics (where a glass of sweet tea is never far from reach), long-suppressed tensions threaten to rupture the gossamer-thin fabric of delusion holding a small New Orleans family together. As frustrations rise to the surface, carefully constructed illusions begin to crack and blister like paint in the scorching sun.

Shirley Booth as Alma Duval

Anthony Quinn as John Henry "Jack" Duval

Shirley MacLaine as Virginia Duval

Earl Holliman as John Henry "Buddy" Duval, Jr.

Clint Kimbrough as Billy Duval

When the film opens, matronly housewife Alma Duval (Booth) is all aflutter over the 45^th birthday party she’s planning for husband Jack (Quinn); a seductively "wild" Cajun whose restless nature she's found – after 25 years of marriage – impossible to fully domesticate. As we observe her nervous attempts to orchestrate (manipulate?) every conceivable variable to assure a favorable outcome for her efforts, Alma’s fervent preparations betray an air of desperation more than celebration.

Armed with the birthday presents she herself purchased for her adult children to give to their father, Alma visits each at their workplace, dispensing behavioral directives and cheery dialogue prompts with every pre-wrapped gift. Perhaps too metaphorically (not for a fan of heavy-handed '50s Freudianism like myself), each child embodies contrasting, narratively-pertinent character traits, and have jobs reflective of their personalities.

Eldest son Buddy (Holliman), all self-seriousness and ambition, works at the family employment agency. Recently out of the army, Buddy is headstrong and restless to make a way for himself in the world. Daddy’s-girl and middle-child Virginia (MacLaine), works at the local 5¢ &10¢ and spends her time lost in fanciful daydreams about her new summer suitor, a pragmatic pre-med student (Warren Stevens). Surrounded all day by valentines, flowers, and perfumes, Virginia is a dreamy romantic. Youngest son, Billy (Kimbrough), is a bookish, sensitive type (coded: gay) who works in a library, and too-keenly feels the tension behind all that remains unspoken in the Duval household. His survival tactic is to escape; first into books, then by going so far as to enlist in the Air Force.

Alma, who refuses to see her offspring as anything but children, charges into these workplace sanctuaries, as heedless of their discomfort as their in-vain efforts to dissuade her from making a big deal out of an event they all know their vain father hardly looks upon as cause for celebration (no one, least of all Jack himself, even remembers the birthday).  It’s Alma’s wish (passive-aggressive insistence, actually) that everyone live the same lie she clings to: to ignore the open-secret of Jack’s mid-life crisis affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and just carry on as  if they are still (if indeed they ever were) one big, happy family.

An absorbing drama that benefits significantly from the top-notch performances of its cast, Hot Spell, with its over-familiar central conflict, falls prey to a fate similar to that which befell The Stripper (1963), the screen adaptation of William Inge’s A Loss of Roses; which is to say Hot Spell, in lacking a certain psychological profundity and depth of characterization, feels more like a Playhouse 90 television production than a feature film. But in spite of much of it feeling as though it were culled from earlier, similar sources (most in the Shirley Booth oeuvre) Hot Spell does provide a fairly moving examination of the what the inexorable passing of time portends to a family fighting hard to evade the inevitabilities of growing up, growing older, and growing apart.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The fact that I come from a large Catholic family that never spoke about our emotions (until the 70s when my mother went through EST, after which we spoke of little else) is perhaps the main reasons I love movies like Hot Spell. Call it fantasy projection, but domestic dramas wherein suppressed hostilities and resentments erupt into biliously confrontational exchanges that ultimately prove to be liberatingly cathartic are a favorite of mine. Double if it takes place in the South of the '50s and '60s.

While no one in Hot Spell adopts a Southern accent, and it doesn’t take place in Kansas, the film nevertheless has the stamp of Tennessee Williams and William Inge all over it. 

The Two Shirleys
MacLaine and Booth appeared in The Matchmaker this same year

As is the custom of the genre, Hot Spell is centered around a social event. An event or occasion necessitating the close-knit interaction of characters (usually under circumstances forcing a display of false emotion or sentiment). Hot Spell’s pivotal birthday party, the catalyst for the film’s domestic upheaval, is largely ironic in function, being that a celebration of growing older is particularly ill-suited for Jack and Alma Duval; a couple deeply invested in living in the past.

In a deluded effort to reclaim his lost, wild youth, Jack imbues a thoroughly common extramarital physical attraction with all the romantic gravitas of true love reborn. Alma, no less delusional, lives in an aspic world frozen in time. Feeling acutely the impending loss of her family, Alma pins all her hopes on a longed-for return to the town of New Paris – a state of mind as much as geographical location – idealized in her memory as the place where everyone was happiest.

Come Back, Little New Paris

Caught in the middle: the children (their main offense being their failure to remain so), nurtured as infants to fill a void, weaned in adulthood to be the guardians of their parent’s illusions. There’s more than enough culpability, regret, and incriminations to go around as the Duvals of New Orleans endeavor to weather their personal hot spell of discontent.

Running at a brisk 86 minutes, Hot Spell may be Southern Gothic-lite, but it’s like a Greatest Hits collection of all I hold near about that obsolete film genre.  

Running Wild
Anthony Quinn was already a two-time Oscar winner when he appeared in Hot Spell.
Here with actress Valerie Allen as Ruby, Quinn's restless character longs for a new life in
Florida, "Land of Eternal Youth"

PERFORMANCES

For those keeping score, this was Booth’s second onscreen swipe at playing a dowdy, once-beautiful housewife delusionally fixated on the past. Perhaps it was an intentional move on Booth’s part to revisit a character almost identical to the one she played in 1952s Come Back, Little Sheba (and won an Oscar for), but the effect created is déjà vu to distraction.

Shirley Booth is a remarkable actress and her performance here ranks among her best. She IS the entire film, as far as I’m concerned, and the nuances of vulnerability she brings to the role (along with a hint of the subtle manipulative strength unique to the very weak) is a tour de force. She single-handedly keeps the film from sinking into a mire of clichés. But I’d be lying if I said that much of it feels like I’d seen it all before. It’s like later career Maggie Smith; she’ always excellent, but she’s always the same. 

Oscar-winner Eileen Heckart (The Bad Seed) steals every scene as Alma's best friend, Fan. The hilarious sequence where she gives Alma lessons in being a Modern Woman is a worth-the-price-of-admission classic.

Fan: "Well what's he gonna say the first time you fish out a cigarette and light up?"
Alma; "He's gonna say, 'Alma, have you gone crazy?'"
Fan: "Yeah, well when he does you just take a drag on the cigarette, blow the smoke in his face and say, 'What's it to ya, lover?'"

1958 was a banner year for Shirley MacLaine, appearing in Hot Spell, Some Came Running (for which she won an Oscar nomination), and the delightful The Matchmaker. As the lovesick daughter, MacLaine isn’t called upon to do anything here that Elinor Donahue didn’t do on TV every week in Father Knows Best, but her easygoing, natural appeal is a major asset to a film as dramatically stagy as Hot Spell. 

Things heat up between Virginia and Wyatt (Warren Stevens) 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that the same breast-fixated/blonde bombshell era that produced Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, also found room to appreciate the matronly charms of actresses like Shirley Booth and Geraldine Page. These actresses may not have been the pin-up type, but they played middle-aged women who were still afforded passions, sex drives, and depth. While most of Hollywood was falling over itself looking for the next fetishized male fantasy sex symbol, gay writers like Inge, Williams, and Coleman were creating dimensional roles for real women. 

The often unglamorous women Shirley Booth portrayed were nevertheless
granted a sexuality and impassioned emotional life

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Wasn’t it Margo Channing who said, “I detest cheap sentiment”? Well, normally I do, too, but something about Hot Spell always gets the waterworks going come fade-out. That something is Shirley Booth and the breadth of emotions she brings to her almost stock character. It’s a memorable (albeit familiar) performance in a movie that’s far more enjoyable than it should be. A credit to the cast, to be sure.

I don’t know if Hot Spell is available on DVD yet, but it crops up on TCM from time to time and is definitely worth a watch. It’s not likely to make anyone forget Come Back Little Sheba or invite comparisons to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but it is a fine example of a once-popular dramatic genre, that (based on recent posts for The Stripper, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) I can’t seem to get enough of. 

"I guess the hot spell's over."

BONUS MATERIAL

 Hot Spell: Margaret Whiting sings this promotional song for the film. Written by Burt Bacharach /Mack David.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE 1967

“Now, as then, teachers are overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated.”

 Up the Down Staircase author Bel Kaufman. 2012

Although I lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco at the time, my strongest memory of June and July of 1967 isn’t related to the human “Be-In” that was The Summer of Love (as I was only 10 years old at the time, in contrast to the timbre of the times, my entire existence actually depended on trusting people over 30). Instead, it relates to the fact that it was the summer vacation that I spent almost entirely in school. Not actual summer school, mind you, but as a visitor to the classes of Mr. Mark Thackeray and Miss Sylvia Barrett.

Vaguely evoking the "dueling Harlows" of 1965, in the summer of 1967, two films starring Academy Award-winners cast as idealistic high school teachers facing hoards of unruly teens in “problem area” inner-city high schools were released within weeks of one another. To Sir, with Love and Up the Down Staircase came out in June and July, respectively, and I spent many hours in dark theaters that summer. An honorary high-schooler in a virtual classroom, receiving a first-rate education in life lessons and human compassion from two of the most inspiring fictional teachers ever culled from best-selling, semi-autobiographical sources. 

Sandy Dennis as Sylvia Barrett

Patrick Bedford as Paul Barringer

Ellen O'Mara as Alice Blake

Jeff Howard as Joe Ferone 

In an earlier essay on Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), I  commented on the psychological soundness of De Palma limiting the scope of Carrie’s destruction exclusively to that of her school (as opposed to the entire town, as it is in the novel), for the simple reason that to the average adolescent and teenager, school IS their world. 

This was certainly true for me. Back when school comprised the totality of my outside-the-home activity and influenced whatever social perceptions a ten-year-old child can claim, this narrow scope of experience led to my favoring television shows in which schools and classrooms played a regular part. The television programs I grew up watching were Leave it to Beaver, Dennis the Menace, The Andy Griffith Show, Father Knows Best, Our Miss Brooks, Dobie Gillis, and Room 222. The Saturday afternoon movies and Late Show movies I enjoyed most were those reactionary 1950s “high school juvenile delinquency” movies like High School Confidential, High School Caesar, The Cool & the Crazy, and High School Hellcats.

Ruth White as Beatrice Schacter

And even if these all-white, staunchly middle-class, sanitized exemplars of Eisenhower-era values were more social propaganda than any kind of recognizable reality to me, in their classroom archetypes (teacher’s pet, class clown, bully, tattletale) and basic school-system templates (teachers, principal, classrooms, assembly halls); just enough discernible truth was able to seep through in these movies and TV shows for me to feel as though the world I occupied--seven hours a day, five days a week--was validated through representation.
Having attended primarily Catholic schools with nuns as teachers, one of my all-time favorite high-school movies is 1966s The Trouble with Angels. But, alas, none of the nuns I came into contact with were quite as even-tempered as Rosalind Russell’s Mother Superior.

Both To Sir, with Love and Up the Down Staircase were mainstream reboots of the somewhat dormant high school juvenile delinquency film (which, during the early '60s, had been mainly supplanted by the motorcycle gang/beach party genre), their near-simultaneous release in the summer of 1967 coinciding with Hollywood's reawakened interest in the boxoffice clout of the young. No longer a strictly Drive-In exploitation market, youth-centric movies were now served with a healthy dose of social relevancy.

To Sir, with Love (a cross between that 1961 British rarity, Spare the Rod, and 1955s Blackboard Jungle) benefited from the heavy radio airplay of its ubiquitous title song; its simplified, feel-good, Civil Rights Movement topicality; and the above-the-title participation of megastar Sidney Poitier (Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? came out later that year). In this film, Poitier was essentially taking on a role similar to that of Glenn Ford's in Blackboard Jungle– the great-granddaddy of all high school juvenile delinquency films in which Poitier was cast (for the first and last time) as a disagreeable tough. 
Up the Down Staircase, on the other hand, promoted itself mainly on the strength and popularity of Bel Kaufman's terrific bestselling book—an epistolary novel consisting of notes, directives, and letters (not unlike Bob Randall's novel for the Lauren Bacall film, The Fan)—and in the casting of Sandy Dennis, the Oscar-winning breakout star of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in her first starring role.

When I, at last, got the opportunity to see both films, I was surprised and relieved to find that each, while covering roughly the same territory (teacher idealism vs. public school reality), did so from very different perspectives: To Sir, with Love taking the more socially-conscious angle of students learning life lessons about accountability and human interdependence; Up the Down Staircase satirically pitting the personal and professional challenges of being a teacher against the obstacles of administrative boondoggling and student apathy. 

Both films get a big gold star from me and rate high on my list of all-time favorite movies about teachers and teaching - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie occupying the top spot. But over time To Sir, With Love, a film I'd initially favored, has begun to feel more quaint and sweetly naive (in spite of the warm, fuzzy feelings these movies invoke in me, I’m not one to disavow claims that neither film fully succeeds in sidestepping the clichéd racial tropes of the well-intentioned Hollywood movie: the black saint/the white savior.), while Up the Down Staircase, a film that once felt too easygoing, has grown in emotional richness for me.

Mean Streets

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’ve neglected going into the plot of Up the Down Staircase because, as an example of the idealistic inner-city schoolteacher genre, it’s one of those films (like the manic pixie dream girl rom-com or renegade cop drama) whose genre classification serves as a roadmap for its narrative. In Up the Down Staircase, the seriocomic adventures of neophyte English teacher Sylvia Barrett (Dennis) as she grapples with the undisciplined, underserved students and battle-fatigued, red-tape deluged staff of New York’s fictional Calvin Coolidge High, follows a preset, genre-standardized dramatic arc of idealism/disillusionment/renewal - as inexorably and unwaveringly as a NY subway train speeding along the tracks.
What saves Up the Down Staircase from being just another high-minded lecture on “What’s wrong with our schools” is its light touch and sense of realism. It’s most definitely a film with points to make. But thanks to a zippy pace, a great deal of authentic school atmosphere (captured frequently with a hand-held camera,) and the compelling performances director Robert Mulligan (Inside Daisy Clover) elicits from his sizable cast of young unknowns, the film makes its points gently and with a great deal of sensitivity.

Jose Rodriguez as Jose Rodriguez 
If there's any one character in this movie that comes closest
to capturing what I was like as an adolescent, it's this guy

During the self-serious '60s, Up the Down Staircase’s cutesy score, pat characters (Dennis has at least one of each standard-issue troubled youth “types” in her class), and then-uncommon mix of comedy and drama, had the effect of making the film appear insubstantial and mawkish. However, what perhaps looked facile to me in 1967 comes across as measured and delicate today.

Up the Down Staircase benefits from a documentarian's eye for detail (this scene brings back to me the unforgettable smell of mimeograph ink and the oily texture of the paper). It also has a good eye for capturing the absurdist contradictions typical to the day-to-day operation of a school: the incessant bells, the garbled intercom announcements, the endless forms, and the mindless rules 

Instead of a socially naïve, politically heavy-handed drama trapped eternally in the time-warp of the issues of the late 1960s, Up the Down Staircase in focusing on a dedicated teacher’s frustration at being hindered from doing her job by distractions, both disciplinary and administrative, achieves a kind of timeless poignancy as a character drama. In some of the most economical filmmaking outside of an Altman movie, we come to know and care a great deal about both the kids and the teaching staff. Without really knowing how, you find yourself becoming involved in what is happening with a particular student, and, come the film's conclusion, you're likely to wonder if the story arc of your specific favorite will have a happy ending or be (realistically) left unresolved. 

The always-welcome Eileen Heckart as Henrietta Pastorfield

What's undoubtedly surprising is that the problems facing these '60s teens are really no different from what you'd hear kids talking (texting?) about today. The same goes for the complaints of the teaching staff and the burdens placed on the school system. And, true to the era (in the New Hollywood, happy endings were out), Up the Down Staircase doesn’t neatly solve or wrap up all of its dilemmas; it ends fittingly and without much fanfare…a few heartbreaking failures, a few quiet victories.


PERFORMANCES

It's always puzzled me why critics have always singled Sandy Dennis out for her acting mannerisms. I'm not saying she doesn't have them, but next to the twitchy gimmicks and facial contortions of Marlon Brando and James Dean, Dennis is practically a Sphinx. In a film like Up the Down Staircase, one with a large cast of characters required to establish their personalities quickly, a director does well to cast actors capable of exuding a distinctive, idiosyncratic individuality: something Ms. Dennis possesses in abundance. Portraying perhaps the least-neurotic character of her screen career, Dennis displays a great deal of sympathetic charm, allowing her trademark hesitancy and fragility to give overqualified first-year teacher, Sylvia Barrett, a vulnerable “otherness” that appropriately sets her apart and makes believable her soft-hearted compassion for her students. She's one of my favorite actresses, and here she gives a nicely understated performance.

Theater legend Vinette Carroll as Mrs. Lewes
Actress, playwright, and Tony-nominated director (she was the first black woman to direct a play on Broadway) Vinette Carroll's brief scene is one of the film's highlights. A genuine Oscar-nomination-worthy turn by a great actress with too few screen credits 

At the time of its release, Up the Down Staircase garnered a lot of publicity for casting real New York high school students in significant roles and as extras (who, by the way, in their low-income modes of dress, still look positively dapper compared to kid's styles today). And indeed, the youthful, diverse faces in Up the Down Staircase are a welcome improvement on the callow blandness of those teens one sees on Disney Channel, the AARP-adjacent adolescents in movies like Grease. Director Mulligan uses the inexperience of his cast members to get raw, suitably awkward performances that are not only a boon to the realistic feel of the film, but are surprisingly moving in their naturalness. Newcomer Ellen O'Mara is especially good (the scene where her lovesick character is politely excoriated by the object of her affections is more brutal than most horror films), as is the terminally shy Jose Rodriguez, and the brooding, hard-to-reach Jeff Howard.

Special mention must be made of Dennis' very teacher-like wardrobe for the film. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Films shot on location in New York usually benefit from the wealth of theater-trained actors at their disposal, and Up the Down Staircase is no exception. From Frances Sternhagen as the librarian who cares a bit too deeply about her books, to Jean Stapleton as the over-efficient office secretary who practically runs the school single-handedly, Up the Down Staircase boasts an impressive and colorful supporting cast. In addition, the film is chock-full of the early-career appearances by many actors who went on to become familiar TV faces in the '70s.  

All in The Family's Jean Stapleton as Sadie Finch

The Dukes of Hazzard's Sorrell Booke (l.) as Dr. Samuel Bester, Roy Poole as J.J. McHabe

Florence Stanley as Ellen Friedenberg (played Abe Vigoda's wife on the 70s TV series Fish)

Good Times' Esther Rolle appears as an unnamed teacher

Although rarely cited in film sources, that's Liz Torres
(The John Larroquette Show) making her film debut

Harold and Maude's Bud Cort, also making his film debut

That's Bel Kaufman, author of Up the Down Staircase, making a well-placed cameo

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

They don’t call Hollywood the dream machine for nothing. Only Hollywood could make us all believe we really value teachers. Up the Down Staircase is a veritable valentine to the teaching profession. It dramatizes the state of intellectual crisis so many kids find themselves in, and it sheds light on the potential of dedicated, caring teachers to guide and shape young lives.

It certainly must be an idea we like, because Hollywood hands us the same fable every few years under a different title. Call it Dangerous Minds, Conrack, Dead Poets Society, or Stand and Deliver; the message is always the same: our young people are the answers to a better tomorrow, and our teachers hold the keys to unlocking their minds and spirits.

Sandy Dennis plays the kind of schoolteacher we all wish we had
(and perhaps a lucky few did!)

Sounds good in theory, and it certainly makes for lovely, weepy movies that make us proud of our teachers, proud of our education system, and proud of ourselves. 

But what do we do in real life? We pay teachers next to nothing, refuse to pay taxes for school funding, and actively support cutting programs and services devoted to helping “our” children develop into well-rounded, functioning individuals. And because we love our guns so much, we also contribute to helping to make our schools about as safe as a war zone. Of late, we've adopted a political culture of staunch anti-intellectualism that is frightening as it is disturbing. It’s embarrassing to contemplate and makes little sense until one stops to consider we’re also a culture that loves movies about brotherhood and racial harmony.

Lucky for us, movies like Up the Down Staircase are there to also remind and reassure us that good teachers are so dedicated, they'll continue to be devoted to educating our nation's youth...whether they actively get our support or not.

Bucking the System

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014

BURNT OFFERINGS 1976

I’m not sure what a sociologist would make of it, but the '70s (that post- hippie “Me” decade of Watergate, the energy crisis, and the close of the Vietnam War) seems to have spawned more than its share of movies and novels about malevolent domiciles. The Amityville Horror (1979), The Sentinel (1977), and The Shining (1980) are all films based on popular '70s horror-fiction novels that sought to update the traditional haunted house story.

Burnt Offerings, Robert Marasco’s 1973 novel chronicling the gradual dissolution and ultimate destruction of a family after they take up temporary residence in a large house possessed of a deadly supernatural force, predates Stephen King’s similarly-themed The Shining by four years. I read Burnt Offerings back in 1975, as soon as I’d heard that it was to be adapted into a motion picture reuniting Karen Black with Dan Curtis, the director of the popular TV-movie, Trilogy of Terror (1975).

"There's no such thing as fun for the whole family" - Jerry Seinfeld

The involvement of Dan Curtis—the man behind the long-running Gothic TV soap-opera Dark Shadows, and a TV-based director/producer who never met a horror-cliché he didn’t like—was considerably less promising to me than the possibilities presented by the top-drawer cast assembled (always such a rarity in horror films). Karen Black, red-hot at the time, was cast as the wife; Ken Russell alumni Oliver Reed, fresh from the success of Tommy (1975), was the husband, and veteran star Bette Davis was rescued from TV-movie hell to bring her What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? / Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte scream-queen gravitas to the small role of Aunt Elizabeth. Rounding out the intriguing cast were Oscar-winner Eileen Heckart and indefatigable hambone Burgess Meredith as the eccentric owners of the parasitic (vampiric?) summer rental at the center of the story.

Karen Black as Marian Rolf

Oliver Reed as Benjamin Rolf

Bette Davis as Aunt Elizabeth

Lee H. Montgomery as Davy Rolf

Eileen Heckart as Roz Allardyce

Burgess Meredith as Arnold Allardyce

On its release, I was happy to find Burnt Offerings to be a serious-minded, slavishly faithful adaptation of the book (with the exception of a more cinematic, crowd-pleasing ending) that avoided the usual post-Exorcist bombast and instead concentrated on mood and atmosphere. It's one of those rare films that can give you a good, solid scare when you watch it alone, yet provide plenty of unintentional laughs when you watch it with friends. Contemporary audiences are likely to find the film predictable, slow, over-reliant on tried-and-true clichés (there should be a moratorium on rainstorms in haunted house movies), and hampered by the kind of empty ambiguity that often signals poor storytelling. But those who saw Burnt Offerings when they were very young (the film was rated PG) or before The Shining and the Amityville series drove the genre into redundancy, tend to recall the film with the most fondness today.

The Face That Launched a Thousand Bad Dreams 

Few knew the name of the ghoulishly grinning chauffeur (Anthony James) but no one ever forgot the face. 

A film critic once compared the horror genre to pornography (a '70s film critic...long before the genre's decline and the arrival of those wretched "torture porn" movies) making the point that no matter the flaws, porn films work if you find them exciting, and horror films work if they are scary. Is Burnt Offerings scary? Had I seen it as a ten-year-old, I would say most emphatically yes. Seeing it as an adult, I can't say it scared me so much as it entertained me in a way that encouraged my suspension of disbelief to just sit back and have fun with it all. Perhaps it's due to Curtis having developed his "style" from years working in television,  but the PG-rated Burnt Offerings feels less like a feature film and more like an expanded episode of the TV show Night Gallery (a program Curtis criticized for its poor writing). Burnt Offerings is more a well-told mood piece than a good scary movie. (Perhaps the scariest and most unsettling thing is how this family considers it a "vacation" to spend their entire summer working harder than most people do all year. Even before the house starts acting up, all they do is clean!) However, ask someone who saw Burnt Offerings as a kid and they'll tell you it was the scariest film they ever saw...the stuff of nightmares.

Karen Black discovers that a long-neglected greenhouse has blossomed overnight

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of my favorite things about Modern Gothic is when the horror is portrayed as an external manifestation of some form of inner turmoil in the characters. As in The Shining (and more successfully, if in a slightly different vein, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby), Burnt Offerings nicely grafts familial dysfunction onto the conventions of the haunted house genre to create an eerie sense of tension both supernatural and psychological. When one really watches how the Rolf family interacts, it's easy to imagine that perhaps the "right people" the Allardyces seek for the house are ones living under a pressure cooker of repressed frustrations and barely constrained hostilities.

From the very first moments we meet the Rolfs, one gets a sense that all is not exactly well with this family. Pragmatic Ben and over-ardent Marian don’t really EVER see eye to eye before things begin to rapidly go awry between them. What is made explicit in the book (her domestic dissatisfaction, his creeping fear of mental illness) is only hinted at in the film, but the keen performances by Oliver Reed and Karen Black shore up the sense that the house doesn't really change these people, it merely amplifies that which is already there.

Unseen Terror

PERFORMANCES

Always one of my favorites, screen legend Karen Black may not have been able to sustain the kind of career she once had at the peak of her '70s popularity (the partial blame for which she subtly lays at the feet of Burnt Offerings director Dan Curtis in the comically discombobulated DVD commentary for this film), but there are few actresses who can boast of having starred or appeared in as many films that have gone on to attain classic or cult status.

Black’s boom years were 1974 to 1976, a period in which it was near-impossible to avoid her on the big screen or television (her performance of Big Mama Thornton's “Hound Dog” on The Tonight Show is burned in my brain to this day).  The uniquely glamorous, off-beat, unofficial face of The New Hollywood, the ubiquitous Karen Black appeared in a staggering 10 feature films and TV-movies in these three years, among them, some of the biggest and most high-profile releases of the era: The Great Gatsby (1974), The Day of the Locust (1975), Nashville (1975), and Family Plot (1976). And of course, one cannot forget Airport 1975, a film so iconically silly that the line of dialogue “The Stewardess is Flying the Plane!” was made into the title of a book about films of the 1970s.

Bring on the Crazy
The eminently watchable Karen Black is the main reason I love this film. Even when her performance veers into the eccentric (and let's face it, they always do), she is so obviously coming from a perceived place of truth for her character that she wins you over through sheer conviction.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The central gimmick of Burnt Offerings is that the house renews and repairs itself with every injury, drop of blood, or instance of physical or spiritual decline it can extract from its inhabitants. Dan Curtis’ television-trained penchant for close-ups and tight framing robs the film of the kind of visual scope necessary to make the scenes of spontaneous regeneration really pay off, but his claustrophobic eye is well suited to building a sense of dread out of a million little isolated details. Not all of them followed through with or given a payoff.

A history of violence is suggested by the discovery of a vintage pair of eyeglasses with a discomforting hole through the center of one lens.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm

Oliver Reed reacts to discovering all the clocks in the house have miraculously wound themselves

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Because I so enjoy a good scare at the movies, I’m almost ridiculously willing to suspend my disbelief if it better ensures a solid payoff at the conclusion. On that point Burnt Offerings delivers mightily; it has a great final act. But a movie has to work with me. I can accept the most outlandish plot machinations if a character's actions and motivations follow even a marginally identifiable pattern of a recognizable human behavior. As soon as characters go off doing patently stupid things just to advance the plot, well, then you lose me. 

To its credit, Burnt Offerings plays it smart most of the time. For example: to better counterbalance the swift susceptibility of the Karen Black character (who is sympathetic, if ultimately hard to relate to) and get the plot moving despite everything about the initial setup screaming, “Don’t rent that house!”, Oliver Reed’s dialog mostly has him giving voice to every doubt the audience is thinking. This is a great device that subtly pulls you in with presuming that if a character at least acknowledges something smells fishy, you're more likely to stick it out when they inevitably start disregarding common sense and doing all the wrong things.

Slightly annoying son Davy proves to be something of a disaster divining rod when it comes to who's to be the target of several "attacks" by the house in its attempts to destroy the Rolf family

Burnt Offerings is not a great horror film, but it's a good one that I enjoy rewatching a great deal. Not scary so much as eerie, Burnt Offerings plays like a supernatural parable on the risks of being controlled by one's possessions. Anyone who's ever owned a car, a home, or property can relate to feeling at times as if repairs, taxes, upkeep...the whole desire to acquire things.... can easily dominate one's life. That one is living one's life at the will and behest of the things we sought to possess, but which ultimately come to possess us.

The mysterious photograph collection of vaguely startled looking people 

The Dunsmuir Estate in the Oakland Hills (near my parent's house!) was used for the Allardyce mansion. It looks considerably less creepy now.

BONUS MATERIAL

Oh, and as for my Karen Black obsession: in spite of her having filmed Burnt Offerings near my family's house in Oakland, and the previous year filming Hitchcock's Family Plot in San Francisco where I attended college, I never once made the effort to catch sight of her on location. Thirty years later, in Los Angeles in 2007, I finally had the opportunity to meet the object of my teen fascination when I went to see her in her self-penned musical play Missouri Waltz. When it came time for the post-performance meet and greet in the lobby, she was a real sweetheart, and I was near speechless. But boy, you should have seen her face when someone held out a poster of The Day of the Locust for her to sign (not her favorite movie), it was like one of those looks she shoots Oliver Reed when she has to rescue him from the attacking vines!

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2012