WINDOWS 1980

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Therefore, many crucial

plot points are revealed and referenced for the purpose of analysis. 

“Dying is easy. Playing a lesbian is hard.”  

Fictional actress Debbie Gilchrist, co-star of Home for Purim in Christopher Guests’ For Your Consideration (2006)

I really love suspense thrillers, but good ones are extremely hard to come by. Far too often pretenders to the title come up short on both suspense and thrills because of predictable plotlines and a near-devout adherence to the structural conventions of the genre. A common pitfall suggesting one too many How to Write a Winning Screenplay workshops offering a downloadable “Surefire Suspense Thriller” PDF template upon enrollment.

Granted, not many directors understand storytelling, the language of cinema, or the rudiments of building suspense as keenly as Alfred Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Roman Polanski, or Claude Chabrol. But one always harbors the hope that should a filmmaker endeavor to try their hand at the genre, they do so with some understanding of the fundamentals. Without such a foundation the alternative is invariably a suspense thriller that trades mystery and plot twists for contrivance, coincidence, and implausibilities.

One movie to chart rather high on the contrivance, coincidence, and implausibility meter is the notorious 1980 psychological thriller Windows. A dark and distasteful example of the “What the hell were they thinking?” school of cinema I so associate with the ‘70s (which is actually when the film was in development).

Windows is a movie of firsts and lasts: Windows is the first and last film to be directed by famed cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather, Annie Hall); It’s the first & last screenplay to be written by one Barry Siegel (not to be confused with the Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times journalist). It's the last major motion picture to feature up-and-coming The Godfather/Rocky alumna Talia Shire in a lead role; Windows being the three-strikes-you’re-out, last-straw flop that followed on the heels of the underperforming features Old Boyfriends (1979) and Prophecy (1979). Finally, Windows has the dubious distinction of being the first film to be released in 1980 (January 18th), but, seeing as it was pulled from theaters almost immediately after the near-unanimous critical drubbing it received, it's a good guess Windows also wound up as the last entry in 1980's year-end boxoffice tallies.

Talia Shire as Emily Hollander

Elizabeth Ashley as Andrea Glassen

Joe Cortese as Detective Bob Luffrono

Shy, stammering Emily Hollander (Shire) works in some mysterious capacity at the very picturesque Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Though we never find out exactly what she does there, we do learn that her co-worker is her husband and that they are soon to be divorced. Where Emily lives is picturesque too, her apartment being in a quaint Brooklyn Heights brownstone huddled, troll-like, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. She shares this tiny apartment with a cat, a closet full of look-alike outfits, and several volumes of books devoted to the subject of stuttering. We're left to do what we will with all this visual backstory, for the film refuses to disclose anything which might provide a clue as to why she's so timorous or why her fashion sense runs to Italian Tzniut.

We know Emily regularly sees a therapist and that she struggles with a stutter.
What we never find out is why Emily, like Olive Oyl, has a closet full of the exact same outfit.

Returning home one evening after work, Emily is assaulted in her apartment by a man wielding a switchblade and a mini tape recorder. In a very difficult-to-watch scene, Emily is terrorized and sexually humiliated (not raped, as many critics thought at the time) by her assailant, her frightened pleas recorded for some kind of perv posterity. This roughly 2½ minute sequence feels like it goes on for an eternity. And as you sit there squirming in your seat, wishing maybe Rocky Balboa would show up to kick some ass, somewhere in the back of your mind you’ve arrived at a concrete certainty: you’re certain that nothing that follows in this film (that’s now only 8-minutes old) will ever—no matter how masterfully done—justify this scene.

Physically unharmed but emotionally shattered, Emily reports the assault to a sensitive Italian police detective named Bob (cow-eyed Joe Cortese), but is understandably reluctant to go into details. Enter husky-voiced, over-solicitous neighbor and friend Andrea Glassen (Elizabeth Ashley), an affluent poet whose obscenely large and equally picturesque apartment in the same building suggests Emily is perhaps renting her closet. (Truth be told, Andrea may inhabit the same apartment building or live several miles away. For all the time invested in providing painterly images of New York, Windows takes a rather relaxed attitude when it comes to establishing location and proximity.) 

While the traumatized Emily sits silently grappling with her feelings, Andrea spends her time shooting officer Bob lots of stony glances until either futility or boredom causes him to leave. In a refreshing departure from the usual suspense thriller gambit which contrives for a terrorized protagonist to remain living at the scene of the crime in order to better facilitate encore visits from the assailant, Windows has Emily hightailing out of her apartment the very next day and moving into a picturesque (what else?) Bridge Tower apartment across the river. A place with a spectacular view, ginormous picture windows, and a convenient shortage of drapes.

Now, Windows is a curiosity for any number of reasons, but the core of its strangeness lies in what transpires at this juncture. Just when it seems as though the stage has been set for the suspense part of this low-thrill thriller to kick in (vulnerable heroine, potential love-interest/hero, motiveless assailant, suspicious characters), the film just up and reveals the identity and motive of the villain. Mind you, this is 25-minutes in. Suspense obliterated, this leaves us with roughly 60-minutes of resolution. 
(You’ve been warned, spoilers to follow.)

It seems Andrea is a lesbian pathologically and psychotically in love with Emily. Andrea's romantic scheme to win her lady love is to hire a cab driver to sexually assault Emily in the hope that the trauma will: (1) turn Emily off men for good, (2) send Emily rushing into her arms for protection and comfort, sparking a love/gratitude romance (3) all of the above. (How the hell did Andrea find a sicko for such a job, by looking through the Yellow Pages?) 

*Note to straight screenwriters creating gay characters: “That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.”

Windows is the last film appearance of Oscar-nominated Funny Girl co-star Kay Medford.
She portrays kind but apprehensive neighbor Ida Marx. Ida & Emily share a similar fashion sense

Once Emily moves away and begins a hesitant and intensely dull love affair with Detective Bob, Andrea secures herself a loft directly across the river from Emily's apartment and (relying heavily on Emily never purchasing blinds) watches the object of her affections through a telescope while getting off to the tape-recorded cries and moans of Emily’s assault. Fun gal, that Andrea. 

With the “whodunit” out of the way, you'd think Windows would devote its time to exploring motive—a valid concern given that we're shown precious little about Emily to warrant interest, let alone obsession—but instead, the film opts for atmosphere over content. The characters may remain vague and ill-defined, but New York has never looked as picturesque and moody (by now you've gathered that "picturesque" is the film's defining dramatic motif).
To remind us that we're watching a thriller, Windows throws in a couple of off-screen murders and a scene of Emily discovering something unpleasant in her freezer wedged between the broccoli spears and Cool Whip. But for the most part, suspense is limited to wondering just how Nutso-Bismol Andrea is going to go before the inevitable showdown. A showdown brought about by the screenwriter having the characters do the absolute dumbest things possible at the absolute perfect time.

"Hello, Police? I just happened to catch a cab driven by the man who assaulted me...what should I do?"
"Get back in the cab and have him drive you to the police station."
"Oh, OK...will do!"

The arch dialogue may be mine, but I swear, this actually happens in the film!

Although falling woefully short of the mark by comparison, the movie Windows most obviously attempts to replicate is Alan J. Pakula’s masterpiece of paranoid urban dread Klute (1971),  a suspense thriller in which Gordon Willis’ evocative painting-with-shadows cinematography is used for more than creating pretty pictures. Like Windows, Klute’s mise en scène is New York as a claustrophobically alienating city devoid of intimacy, and at the center, there's a tentative romance between a detective and a woman terrorized by a would-be assailant equally fond of tape recorders. But that's where the similarities end. 

Klute revitalized the standard detective thriller through its subjective visual style and character-study approach to its protagonists. Windows’ screenplay feels like it’s either a few story meetings short of a completed idea or the victim of a lot of editing. Behind the tired "scheming lesbian" trope, you have a pretty harrowing crime. One committed by proxy, yet. But nothing in the way the film unfolds aligns the bizarre nature of its premise with what appears to be a desire to say something about alienation, identity, and the inarticulate human struggle to connect.

Andrea's therapist (Michael Lipton) questions her about the authenticity of her love for Emily
"Have you said how you feel?"
"I will. I...I mean, I can't yet...but I will."

With Emily, there’s her stutter, her inability to make her feelings known to her ex-husband, and the noncommunicative wariness of her new neighbors. The tape recorder used during Emily's assault reinforces this "vocal" theme, as does the assailant centering his knife threats in the region of her mouth and throat. As for Andrea, she has trouble communicating with her therapist, expresses herself emotionally only through poetry, engages in voyeurism and ecouteurism (sexual arousal by listening), and clearly has a problem landing a date. 

Add to this the echoing visual motifs of windows, glass, lenses, reflective surfaces, and the themes of watching and being watched, and you're bound to feel certain that  Windows has a distinct point to make about it all. Yet it never materializes. Windows is a classic example of all style and no content. So much obvious care and thought have been given to how the film looks and the ways windows can be literally and figuratively worked into the narrative. But it's the narrative itself that feels the flimsiest and least thought-out. By the time Windows limps to its conclusion, it actually comes as something of a surprise that all this curated weirdness has failed to add up to anything substantive.

Every move you make, every step you take, I'll be watching you
The hit song by The Police was released in 1983, but it fits Windows to a T

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
 As tends to be Hollywood's irresponsible wont, when it "discovers" gay people, it can only think to feature them in mainstream movies in the most sensational, exploitative ways possible. That's why 1980 saw the controversial release of two movies featuring violently psychopathic gay characters within one month of each other. January brought the psychotic lesbian of Windows, while William Friedkin's Cruising, slated for February release, granted us another film featuring a homicidal homosexual. Although Windows garnered its share of controversial press, advance word-of-mouth about the film was so poor that picketers didn't even bother to show up when I saw it on opening night.
I remember being less concerned about the controversy than I was overwhelmed at the prospect of what I was about to see. Anticipation was at an all-time high for I had worked myself into a frenzy thinking that Windows was going to be as scary as Klute, gritty as Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and as stylish as Eyes of Laura Mars. I had thoroughly convinced myself that this was going to be something really special. Advance word-of-mouth be damned.

Did Windows measure up to my expectations? Well, I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it. Indeed, I sat through it twice. But it wasn't because it was such a great thriller; I was riveted to my seat by the sheer weirdness of it all. It reminded me of that scene in Young Frankenstein when Igor drops the genius brain resulting in an abnormal brain ("Abby someone...Abby Normal") being inserted into the monster by mistake. Windows feels like the studio assembled an A-list cast and crew, sunk a lot of money into the budget, but at the last minute somebody slipped in a script for a low-rent, mid-'70s, grindhouse rapesploitation flick.

The one-two punch of Cruising and Windows appeared to be a harbinger of the decade to come. A time when Hollywood seemed primed to trade one dehumanizing, negative stereotype (the scary urban African-American of the Dirty Harry-'70s) for another (the homosexual as degenerate predator and killer) for the sake of a sensationalist buck. To put such offensiveness into context, it was bad enough that this unimaginative wave of cliche felt like a conservative negation of the pro-sex, gay-liberation vibe of the sexual revolution of the previous decade; but in so associating homosexuality with death, the timing couldn't have been worse, what with the specter of AIDS looming on the horizon of 1981. Inclusion certainly involves gay characters being allowed to be the heavy in movies, but the larger issue is one of proportion; with so few depictions of gay characters onscreen at all,
there is something inherently problematic with narratives that cast gays (traditionally the targets of bullying and violence at the hands of heterosexuals in real life), as agents of homicidal threat to victimized straights.

As the '70s came to a close, gay characters in films were still largely depicted in either comic or derogatory terms, so the gay community was right to protest this rare instance in which two major films with large roles for gay characters depicted both as pitiable psychopaths. Windows was so widely panned and dismissed that I honestly don't think it was still in theaters by the time Cruising opened just four weeks later on February 18^th.

For me, the distancing of time has made Windows considerably less sensational, and in turn, the character of Andrea far less offensive...largely because she's so sketchily drawn she's less a human being than a plot contrivance.

The film's windows/lenses motif is carried over to Andrea's Brobdingnagian eyewear

PERFORMANCES

Years after having made the Windows, director Gordon Willis expressed regret at having made the film, calling it a mistake. One big mistake I can attest to is the decision to have Talia Shire more or less play the character of Emily as a "greatest hits" reprise of her Oscar-nominated performance in Rocky. Shire’s Emily is a veritable portfolio of self-conscious gestures, downcast eyes, halting whispers, and fleeting half-smiles tucked into a knit hat. As much as I like Talia Shire (and I like her a great deal) her Xerox performance here had me feeling, at least the first twenty minutes or so, that Windows was the darkest, most surreal Rocky sequel ever made.

I think the cautious romance between Emily and Detective Bob is supposed to be touching,
but at times they seem like they're mere moments from pledging a suicide pact 

I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Ashley, but it surprises me to think that outside of a TV movie or two, I've only seen her in this, Coma, and Ship of Fools. She has an intensity that makes her always interesting to watch, plus a kind of Susan Hayward propensity for overacting that challenges the believability of her characterizations. Playing a can't-win role, Ashley is really not that bad. Short of resorting to that "unblinking stare" thing that movie lesbians have been doing since Candice Bergen trained her gaze on Joanna Pettet in The Group, her stereotypically written role is mercifully devoid of grand "I'm a lesbian!" acting indicators. The screenplay does her no favors in the final scenes (where she's left to go right over the top without a net), but she definitely has her moments and her performance looks better to me now than it did in 1980.

"Why don't you ever smile? You almost never do."
I think Elizabeth Ashley is very good in her moments with her therapist, as well as in this scene near the end where an opportunity is missed for Emily and Andrea to interact in a manner this is not just advance/retreat. Had the screenwriter seen Andrea as a flesh and blood person instead of just a gimmicky villain, perhaps he would have found a way to make this meeting between two women- emotionally damaged in vastly different ways -represent something deeper than a genre payoff.

Although Windows has an impressive pedigree and the odd cult cachet of being a film few people have liked, heard about, or seen; it's not, for me anyway, an undiscovered classic. What it does have is the stamp of being a visually stylish '70s-into-the-'80s curio which manages to be, by turns, both engrossing and off-putting.


BONUS MATERIAL

In 2007 Talia Shire appeared in a series of commercials for GEICO.com in which she portrayed a therapist to one of those cavemen that were so popular for 15-minutes back in the day—even getting their own ill-advised short-lived sitcom.  Shire playing the silliness absolutely straight is really rather marvelous.
Commercial #1
Commercial #2
Commercial #3

Paperback tie-in novels adapted from screenplays were once a popular part of movie marketing. The novelization of Barry Siegel's screenplay for Windows was written by H.B. Gilmour. Gilmour carved out quite a career novelizing screenplays, a few of her many other paperback adaptations being: Saturday Night Fever, All That Jazz, and Eyes of Laura Mars

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Gordon Willis died in 2014 at the age of 82. This autograph is from 1984 when I was a dance extra in the awful John Travolta/Jamie Lee Curtis aerobics movie Perfect (1985), for which Willis served as cinematographer. Some of his other more distinguished films are: Annie Hall, All the President's Men, The Parallax View, Pennies from Heaven. Considered one of the most influential cinematographers of the '70s, he was nominated only twice (Zelig, The Godfather III), and was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2010.

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2017

COMA 1978

Like counting the rings of a tree, there will likely come a day when a person’s age can be calculated by the number of films released in that individual’s lifetime that have fallen prey to the dreaded remake. Of course, such calculations would be mathematically calibrated to allow for the increased percentage numbers afforded genre films (Carrie, The Shining, The Stepford Wives, Psycho, et.al,) obviously Hollywood’s favored source for idea-harvesting.

This iconic image of coma patients eerily suspended by wires was used extensively in the promotion of the 1978 film. Today what I find most shocking about this photo is how impossibly fit all the patients are. It's like they're harvesting the organs of the US Olympic Team.

Coma, one of my favorite '70s thrillers, has recently been given the TV miniseries treatment. And while I wish it luck (ever the bullheaded traditionalist, I didn’t watch it and don’t plan to), seriously…can any remake ever hope to replicate in any dramatically meaningful way, that transcendent feminist moment in American cinema when heroine Geneviève Bujold doffed her wedged espadrilles and pantyhose before crawling through the bowels of Boston Memorial Hospital in search of the cause of all those suspicious coma cases? After years of women in thrillers and horror films falling victim to their feminine finery (running in heels and twisting an ankle being the genre standard), this small act of practicality was such a revolutionary repudiation of a sexist genre cliché that on the opening weekend screening of Coma I attended back in February of 1978, the audience I saw it with actually broke into applause!

Genevieve Bujold as Dr. Susan Wheeler

Michael Douglas as Dr. Mark Bellows

Richard Widmark as Dr. Harris - Chief of Surgery

Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Emerson

Rip Torn as Dr. George

Lois Chiles as Nancy Greenly

Tom Selleck as Sean Murphy

Ed Harris as Pathology Resident #2 (film debut!)

The plot of Coma, like many a good thriller, is marvelously simple: at prestigious Boston Memorial Hospital a higher-than-normal percentage of routine surgery patients are ending up in irreversible comas. Resident surgeon Dr. Susan Wheeler (Bujold) grows suspicious after both her best friend and a recently admitted healthy male patient both slip into comas following routine surgeries. Yet no one else at the hospital seems to share her concern. What follows is a paranoid suspense thriller that plays on our basic fears of hospitals and our vulnerability in the face of the sometimes callously impersonal medical profession.

The post-Watergate years may have been depressing as hell, but all that resultant disillusionment and cynicism was a bonanza for the suspense thriller genre. The pervading sense of skepticism and uncertainty that was the cultural by-product of such a large-scale political betrayal fueled and found catharsis in a great many fascinating films of the '70s. We had thrillers about conspiracy theories  –  The Parallax View (1974); morally confused private eyes – Night Moves (1975); and personal privacy paranoia  – The Conversation (1974). Coma remains one of my personal favorites because it ratchets up the tension of the conspiracy theory thriller by combining it with the combative feminist-era sexual politics of The Stepford Wives.

Dr. Wheeler's run-ins with the hospital's patronizing male staff can be viewed as a larger commentary on society's vulnerability to patriarchal institutions which would assume to know what's better for us than we do ourselves 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and Klute rank high on my list of unforgettable thrillers because each is a genre film (horror film, suspense thriller, crime mystery) that seizes upon an element of the cultural zeitgeist to create something marvelously new and chilling out the rote and familiar. The medical thriller at the center of Coma is intriguing enough (are patients deliberately being put into comas, and if so, why?), but the paranoia is amplified by having the usual disbelieved protagonist be a woman doctor in a field where women number in the minority and their concerns dismissed by patronizing superiors. 

The Men's Club
Coma uses institutionalized sexism as fodder for a marvelously engrossing paranoid thriller

The day-to-day condescension Geneviève Bujold’s Dr. Wheeler faces from her male co-workers takes on an increasingly ominous air when her growing anxiety and rational concern that something nefarious is afoot at Boston Memorial is met with “Don’t bother your pretty little head about it” disregard from her superiors. Especially the creepily paternal Chief of Surgery (Richard Widmark), who treats a serious professional discussion with Dr. Wheeler as if he's Andy Hardy's father, asked to give a heart-to-heart.

It’s established early on in the scenes between Dr. Wheeler and her professionally ambitious boyfriend, Dr. Mark Bellows (Douglas) that she is hypersensitive to the sexism and lack of respect she's expected to just accept as part of the price of working in semi-hostile, all-male environment of professional medicine. The film makes a point of showing us scenes where the in-hospital workplace talk is full of men making casually demeaning comments to or about women. 

If Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives gave us a paranoid thriller born of male anxiety about feminism, Coma takes the female perspective and devises a thriller in which female alienation from a male-dominated world inspires self-reliance and resourcefulness.

Much like in Rosemary's Baby when Rosemary’s pregnancy itself is diagnosed (by men) as being the source of her paranoia about her neighbors; Dr. Wheeler’s feminism and relationship troubles are viewed as being part of her perceived-as-hysterical suspicions about the male staff at her hospital. As her frustration mounts from not being able to convince anyone at the hospital that there is something to be concerned about, reactions from the male staff (she seems to be the only woman doctor there) range from flat out dismissals to bristling at the audacity of a woman daring to challenge the knowledge and authority of men. It's a wonderful add-on device that lends to Coma a subtext that fuels paranoia with extra layers of workplace frustration born of women not being taken seriously in male-dominated spaces. 

The best paranoid thrillers have a way of making the ordinary look really creepy

PERFORMANCES

I had the grave misfortune of having my first-ever exposure to Geneviève Bujold occur with the movie Earthquake (1975); a film whose most terrifying image was that of the lovely French-Canadian actress canoodling with the Skeletor-like countenance of Charlton Heston. In the ensuing years, I’ve enjoyed her performances in several notable films (1988's Dead Ringers is a must-see), but I guess I have a special place in my heart for Coma. As her first real starring solo venture, I thought it was to be the film that launched her to stardom. As I’ve said in a previous post, Bujold represented to me the direction I thought films were going to take in terms of motion picture leading ladies in the '70s. She was quirky, radiated intelligence, and embodied a non-traditional beauty coupled with remarkable acting skills. As the '80s fate of Debra Winger attested, Hollywood still preferred their leading ladies vapid and pliable, so the promise of Bujold was never realized (at least to my satisfaction).

In a nice reversal of the "supportive partner" role usually allocated to women in motion picture thrillers, Michael Douglas, fresh off of several years on the TV series The Streets of San Francisco, plays Bujold's allocated-to-the-sidelines boyfriend. 

Still, Bujold is terrific here, spunky and sharp with that great throaty voice of hers and those darkly intelligent, inquisitive eyes. She adds so much dimension to her role that she keeps character and motivation at the forefront, preventing Coma from becoming mired in its medical thriller plot. Unlike the kind of actress usually cast in roles like this (I call your attention to Lesley-Anne Downs’ implausible Egyptologist in Sphinx, another film based on a Robin Cook novel) Bujold is actually believable as a physician and is not required to scream every 15 minutes.

At the Ballet
Fans of A Chorus Line might recognize the short-haired brunette at the front of Bujold's embarrassingly cheesy dance exercise class as Kay Cole, the original Broadway production's "Maggie." By odd coincidence, Coma co-star Michael Douglas would go on to star in the woefully misguided 1985 film adaptation.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Unable to convince anyone of her suspicions, Dr. Wheeler's quest takes her to the architecturally foreboding Jefferson Institute. The scenes taking place at this futuristic chronic care facility (whose actual purpose I won't reveal here) are Coma's big set-pieces, and they really don't disappoint. A concrete and steel variation on the typical thriller haunted house, the Jefferson Institute scenes are notable not only for the poetic-nightmare images of roomfuls of bodies suspended in techno limbo, but also for the unforgettably bizarre performance of Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Emerson, the Institute's equivalent of a gargoyle at the gate. 

By Coma's midpoint, when the film's well-established atmosphere of tension is just about sunk by an interminable "romantic weekend" montage, Ms. Ashley appears and reboots the film back into high gear. Her introductory scene with Bujold is a classic that I remember had the audience laughing in a way that brought them even more into the film. You want to know if she's a real person or a robot. As the unblinking and inscrutable head of the Institute, Ashley carves an indelible impression and is one of my favorite characters in the film.

The Jefferson Institute
Coma knows that in real life, a large, impersonal medical building
like this is far more terrifying than any Gothic castle.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

No matter how clever the plot, a suspense thriller has to have thrills. Coma mines the already fertile creep-out atmosphere of hospitals for all its worth. It does so by allowing us to witness (to great effect, I might say) the day-to-day casualness with which doctors, nurses, and anesthesiologists regard that which is unnervingly life-and-death to us patients. If there is a level at which Coma scores its biggest points as a thriller, it's in giving the audience the impression that hospitals regard patients as a mechanic would a car on a lift; a bunch of billable parts in need of fixing. 

"You'll be getting a bill from each of us in the mail."

And then, of course, Coma has plenty of the good, old-fashioned kind of thrills too.

Remakes get a bad rap, but for every totally pointless rehash of a classic (Straw Dogs), there's a film like 1978's marvelous Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a retread that's really a re-imagining. I'm not sure what the remake of Coma will seize upon as a justification for its existence (the feminist subtext - which to my way of thinking is more relevant than ever - might be perceived as being dated), but unless it devotes itself to correcting some of this film's flaws (a few loose narrative threads, that mysterious hired killer), I think I'll stick to this imperfect but ever-so-satisfying relic from a time when even genre films felt that it was also important to comment on the world we live in.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

In 1982 I had the opportunity to see Elizabeth Ashley co-star on Broadway with Geraldine Page and Carrie Fisher in the play,  Agnes of God. As one might imagine, the experience was electrifying. Although very faded, Ashley's signature is on the bottom of the Playbill above.

To read more about Coma:
Another informative and fun post on "Coma" at Poseidon's Underworld

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2008 - 2012