CHINATOWN 1974

"Mrs. Mulwray, I think you're hiding something."

Whether for the prestige, visual opulence, short-hand history, or easy-access sentimentality, period films and costume dramas have always been a Hollywood staple and a vital part of movie storytelling. But in the 1970s, the need for some kind of collective breather from the relentless tensions of the “Now” (i.e., Vietnam War, Watergate, impeachment, oil crisis, inflation) produced a market-surge interest in movies set in the “Then.” Particularly the then of the 1920s and 1930s.

Some of these films were escapist homages to retro genres (At Long Last Love -1975). Some were style-fetish showcases devoted to the detailed reconstruction of the fashions, furnishings, and décor of the era (The Great Gatsby -1974). And some were trenchant exercises in ‘70s disillusionment whose nihilist themes were tempered by the distancing device of taking place in America's recent past (The Day of the Locust -1975). Roman Polanski’s Chinatown managed to be all three.

Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes

Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Cross Mulwray

John Huston as Noah Cross

The collaborative effort of the members of the “New Hollywood” Boys Club: producer Robert Evans (The Godfather, Marathon Man), screenwriter Robert Towne (Shampoo, The Last Detail), and director Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth), Chinatown had a bumpy, three-year journey to the screen (covered in deliciously intricate detail in Sam Wesson’s book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last years of Hollywood). But when Chinatown premiered in theaters in the summer of 1974, the many arguments, rewrites, firings, walkouts, and endless weeks of tinkering proved not only to be more than worth the effort, but stood as evidence of the degree of care and artistry that went into fashioning a film that many today regard as a modern masterpiece of American cinema. 

Love the composition of this shot. Even the body language of the characters is perfect

Hardly considered the sure-fire success its current reputation would suggest, Chinatown struggled through disastrous previews and a difficulty generating pre-release interest in a 1974 movie marketplace dominated by the twin publicity blitzkriegs of Lucille Ball's ill-conceived Mame and Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby. Three-time Oscar nominee Jack Nicholson (his most recent being a Best Actor nod for 1973's The Last Detail) was hot at the time, but there existed considerable doubt among many as to how he would come across in this, his first stab at a leading man glamour role. 

Meanwhile, Faye Dunaway's post-Bonnie and Clyde screen output had proved erratic at best, with her The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) golden girl patina coming perilously close to tarnishing after a string of arty flops and effective but unfruitful supporting roles. Then there was Roman Polanski...with his days as New Hollywood's European wunderkind a matter of history and coming fresh off two back-to-back boxoffice bombs (Macbeth -1971 and What? -1972), his name carried about it an aura of fall-from-grace tragedy (the Manson murders) in a town ruled by superstition.

Darrell Zwerling as Hollis Mulwray

Further contributing to the uncertainty surrounding the film's reception was the fact that a quick recounting of Chinatown's plot-- "A private eye in 1937 Los Angeles investigates a mystery involving a real estate swindle and the city's water rights!" --didn't exactly set the pulse racing. 

But what Chinatown had going for it was that it was an original. Not an adaptation of a previously-produced novel, film, or theatrical production. As '70s movies became more formulaically bloated (The Way We Were -1973) and market-driven slick (The Sting - 1973), Chinatown's creative integrity vs its dubious box-office prospects felt like a throwback to Hollywood's very recent past. Back to the start of the decade when difficult-to-categorize films like Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and Five Easy Pieces (1970) were being made because they were stories the filmmakers wanted to tell, not because they were sure-fire blockbuster material.

The first time I saw Chinatown, it had me in its hip pocket the minute those stylish opening titles appeared to the accompaniment of Jerry Goldsmith's mysteriously forlorn theme music. And though the film had an alluringly old-fashioned sound and succeeded in creating a vision of a past that felt lived-in, not decorative, Chinatown somehow managed to sidestep things that might have made it feel imitative or as paying affectionate homage to another movie…Chinatown looked and felt like the genuine article.

It didn't seem quite possible that Polanski and Co. had managed to make a film that worked magnificently as a mystery (the particulars of the twisty plot--murder, political swindling, family secrets ---are not exactly easy-to-follow on first viewing); achieved a kind of visual poetry (the movie looks swelteringly hot! How did they do that?), and was propelled by the emotional connection of compelling characters whose fates you came to care about (the performances are uniformly first-rate...right across the board). 

Chinatown, in both style and execution, is a jet-black neo-noir that realizes--with a persuasive canniness I still can't quite put my finger on--both Robert Towne's goal of writing a story in the tradition of Raymond Chandler Dashiell Hammett, and Roman Polanski's desire to create: “A film about the ‘30s seen through the camera eye of the ‘70s.” 

Chinatown gets everything right. In creating the slightly artificial authenticity of Los Angeles in the '30s, Polanski nailed it when he observed "People know this time because of the movies, not because of what was real."

Given a contemporary sheen thanks to its widescreen Panavision color photography that "feels" like B&W, Chinatown evokes the classic detective movies of the past via its keen eye for period detail and avoidance of so many of the nostalgia-craze movie gimmicks of the time: no diffused lighting, no voiceover narration, no self-conscious “period” jargon, and no knowing winks to the audience. And here's a bonus...the actors actually look comfortable and convincing in their period clothes! (For the alternative, aka, kids playing dress-up, see Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby - 2013 or  Mank - 2020). 

The result is a movie that's as satisfying as a genre entertainment as it is a dark and existentially layered contemplation on corruption, the destruction of innocence, and, as per Towne, "The futility of good intentions."

Chinatown provides many memorable "goosebump moments," this scene being one of my favorites. I absolutely love Dunaway's delivery and the struck look in Nicholson's eyes when Evelyn asks about the mystery woman in Jake's past. As we'll discover, Evelyn & Jake are two people united by the things they're trying to forget.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

One of the main reasons Chinatown made such an impression on me is that it was the very first noirish private eye movie I ever saw. 

In 1971 LIFE magazine devoted its February cover to America’s burgeoning nostalgia craze, and by 1974, everything from fashion to music reflected the nation’s fascination with life enjoyed in the rear-view. The summer of 1974 saw San Francisco movie theaters so overflowing with retro fare, it took considerable effort to find a film set in the present day: Chinatown, The Great Gatsby, The Lords of Flatbush, That’s Entertainment!, Mame, The Three Musketeers, Daisy Miller, Thomasine and Bushrod, Blazing Saddles, Jeremiah Johnson, Huckleberry Finn (of all things), and Our Time (a little-seen coming-of-age movie set in the ‘50s that opened at the Alhambra during the summer I worked there as an usher). 

The Two Mrs. Mulwrays
Diane Ladd as Ida Sessions. There is a subtle wit to Ladd's performance as the prostitute/movie bit player hired to impersonate Evelyn Mulwray. Miss Session's attempt to affect an air of moneyed aristocracy hints at her lack of success as an actress.

When Chinatown came out I was a 16-year-old movie buff with a passion for contemporary films almost to the exclusion of all else. Back then, my appreciation for classic movies was largely academic and aesthetic (i.e., I enjoyed reading about them and decorated the walls of my bedroom with posters of Marilyn Monroe, Glark Gable, and WC Fields), not practical. Which meant I hadn’t yet seen The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, or any of those classics on The Late Show about hard-boiled detectives and dangerous women. At sixteen I was much too in thrall of the then taboo-shattering adult themes and newfound unrestricted nudity, sex, & violence of ‘70s films to ever find the Production Code coyness of old movies to be of much interest. That is, except for musicals. Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend (1971) ignited my love for old MGM musicals and the films of Busby Berekely, but that’s pretty much where my interest in “Golden Age" Hollywood films began and ended. 

The latter point, my love of musicals, goes to plain why, when That’s Entertainment! and Chinatown both opened on the same day in San Francisco (Wednesday, June 26th), I opted for That’s Entertainment!. An option I exercised for two more weekends before getting around to seeing Chinatown.

Roman Polanski as Man with Knife

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Maybe it’s the Blu-ray talking, but I’m obsessed with what a fabulous-looking movie Chinatown is. The Oscar-nominated team of cinematographer John A. Alonzo, production designer Richard Sylbert, and art director W. Stewart Campbell give Chinatown an atmospheric sheen that is often breathtaking in its evocation of sun-baked Los Angles in the late ‘30s. 

But despite the obvious care and expense lavished on every frame, Chinatown's distinction is that it is a period film that has no interest in romanticizing the past. With traditionally swept-under-the-nostalgia-carpet realities like racism and classist privilege flowing like an undercurrent in a narrative propelled by graft, collusion, murder, and incest; Chinatown’s surface sheen creates a dichotomy that challenges the dreamy ideals one associates with old movies. Cynicism has always been a part of the detective movie genre, but no matter how nihilist the theme, by fade-out, the requisite virtues of honor, heroism, and the triumph of good had to be reinstalled. Chinatown, however, ends with a punch to the gut and the ground knocked out from under us.

Me in 1974:  "Wow, even in so-called simpler times, rich people were greedy and corrupt!"
Me in 2021: "Wow, this movie is almost 50 years old and the rich are still as corrupt and greedy as ever!"

PERFORMANCES

Robert Towne wrote the character of J. J. Gittes with pal Jack Nicholson in mind, so the star-making role of the principled private eye with a taste for Florsheim shoes and words like “métier” fits the actor as perfectly as one of Jake’s tailored suits. This is my favorite of all Nicholson’s performances and arguably his last real immersion in character before entering the “Wink-wink, it’s me! Jack Nicholson!” phase of his career. The entire film is from his perspective...Chinatown is Jake’s journey. But its mystery, tragedy, and heart (and my favorite character) is Evelyn Mulwray.

Jane Fonda in Julia (1977) - Even Robert Towne had Fonda in mind when he wrote Chinatown

Both Robert Evans and Roman Polanski have made it known that Jane Fonda was their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice for the role of Evelyn Mulwray. But when Fonda declined (something the actress denies), Chinatown gained Faye Dunaway…the jewel in Chinatown’s crown and the only ‘70s actress in my eyes to possess the combined intensity, inscrutability, aristocratic bearing, neurotic edge, old-fashioned movie star glamour, and grown-woman gravitas required to bring Evelyn Mulwray to life as something more than just another vaguely-drawn film noir femme fatale cliché. 

As Chinatown’s woman of mystery (she who must not be known until Act III), Evelyn Mulwrays’s impact has to be visual. A guarded woman who’s erected an immaculate façade to conceal just how badly she’s damaged, Evelyn intrigues because she is not at all what she seems. So defining a character trait is Evelyn’s appearance that when the film starts to peel away the layers of Evelyn’s very literal “mask” of makeup as her vulnerability is exposed, those moments achieve a poignancy that makes the film's tragic denouement all the more devastating. Faye Dunaway captures all this magnificently, but is seldom given credit.

Journalists applauded Polanski's time-consuming multiple takes and Towne's glacially slow writing pace as examples of their artistic perfectionism. Meanwhile, Dunaway's painstaking commitment to her character's obsession with appearance was dismissed as prima donna "difficulty" and made her behind-the-scenes clashes the only things people talk about when speaking of her contribution to Chinatown. Despite his early reservations, in the end, Robert Evans came to praise Dunaway's performance to the skies, albeit in his usual self-congratulatory way: "Dunaway's singular mystery on the screen was among the best casting choices of my career!"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

There are a great many '70s films that I love in spite of (or because of) their flaws. But only a few I'd call perfect. Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977) gets my vote for being a wholly perfect film, so does Ken Russell's Women in Love (actually a 1969 film, but I'm cutting myself some slack because it wasn't released in SF until 1970), and most definitely, Chinatown qualifies. 

And by perfect, I don't mean an absence of technical goofs or anachronism errors... it's more the feeling of everything fitting so well together that you can't imagine anything being improved upon. The feeling that a story has been told in precisely the manner the filmmakers wanted to tell it. In the case of Chinatown, everything falls into place so ideally, from the cast, to the music, to the dialogue, to the score...watching it becomes an immersive, deeply satisfying experience that engages on so many levels. I never tire of revisiting it, and the film seems boundless in offering new things to discover even after all this time. But best of all, it still manages to move me. 

I'm no longer as totally destroyed by it as I was when I was 16, but at age 63, this masterwork of cinema persists in giving me waterworks every single time.   

Thankfully, films are frozen in time. People, alas, are not. In 1974, audiences drew subconscious parallels between the dogged tragedies of Roman Polanski's personal life and the cursed fate of J.J. Gittes. Today, I'm afraid the parallels linking Polanski and Noah Cross fairly hit one over the head.

Clip from "Chinatown" (1974)

BONUS MATERIAL

Actor Paul Jenkins, who plays Policeman #1 in Chinatown (1974), made his film debut as a policeman in Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968).

Chinatown was planned as the first film in a trilogy. A plan that ground to a halt after the weak boxoffice performance of the second entry, The Two Jakes (1990). Set in 1948, the Jack Nicholson-directed sequel sorely misses Polanski's gift for cinematic storytelling and gets my vote for film most likely to convince you that Chinatown didn't need a sequel in the first place. Still, I did get a kick out of seeing these actors from the original return. 

Poster art by Jim Pearsall 

Chinatown was a summer release, opening on Wednesday, June 26, 1974, at San Francisco's Coronet Theater (which had just hosted The Great Gatsby for 11 weeks). I fell in love with the movie poster the instant I saw it, purchasing it a full month before seeing the film. The artwork captures just the right tone of nostalgia, the shadowy figure of the hatted and pinstriped Nicholson leaving no doubt as to the film's noirish roots, the dreamy image of Dunaway's face framed by the trails of cigarette smoke. the essence of romantic longing. 

The water motif is worked in with the wave crashing against Nicholson's sleeve, it being one of several elements of the poster that refuse to stay within the boundaries of the frame. From the lettering to the heat-glare effect of the coloring, everything about this poster is just perfect.  

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021

BOOK REVIEW: The Mommie Dearest Diary

The Mommie Dearest Diary: Carol Ann Tells All   by Rutanya Alda

For worshipers of the enduring camp classic Mommie Dearest (and that’s pretty much all of us, am I right?), actor Rutanya Alda has, for the last couple of years, been something of a battle-scarred, in-the-trenches, cult-film missionary doing the Lord’s work. The Lord, in this case, being the Great God of Inadvertent Camp. Ms. Alda’s sacred trust: to preserve the legacy and answer the gay community’s clarion call (and make no mistake, the LGBTQ community is solely responsible for Mommie Dearest not disappearing into oblivion) of “What were they thinking?”

As cult film fans and connoisseurs of delectable camp already know, Rutanya Alda portrays Joan Crawford’s loyal, long-suffering, rapidly-aging secretary, Carol Ann, in Mommie Dearest. This now-iconic role in the famously misguided 1981 biopic which contributed significantly (some might say exclusively) to derailing the A-list career of Oscar-winning Faye Dunaway.

Rutanya Alda as Carol Ann in Mommie Dearest

Alda’s own nearly 50-year career in films encompasses everything from being Mia Farrow’s stand-in in Rosemary’s Baby (and the voice of Dr. Hill’s answering service in that memorably tense phone booth scene); doubling for Barbra Streisand in Hello, Dolly! (and playing the townsperson dressed in Judy Garland's tasseled frock from Meet Me in St. Louis); to co-starring opposite Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. But unlike Dunaway and almost everyone else associated with Mommie Dearest, Alda is actually happy and proud to have been a part of a film once regarded as one of Hollywood’s biggest embarrassments, now a bona fide cult classic. She even accepts (with considerable grace and good humor) the fact that, in spite of having more than 50 films to her credit, to a great many individuals she is, and always will be, Carol Ann.

Alda’s current status as the unofficial spokesperson for all things Mommie Dearest began in 2013 when she was the guest of honor at a special Mother’s Day screening at San Francisco’s Castro Theater. There she regaled the SRO audience with hilarious “Lived to tell the tale!” anecdotes about the making of Mommie Dearest: a major serious-minded motion picture upon which many hopes and investments were pinned, held hostage and kept under siege by the demands and off-the-rails ego of its star.

Mommie Dearest opened in Los Angeles on Friday, September 25, 1981

Conceived as a serious dramatic adaptation of Christina Crawford's 1978 bombshell of a tell-all memoir (Dunaway was certain she'd get an Oscar nomination), Mommie Dearest somehow became a quotable high camp comedy by the time it hit the theaters. Every highly-anticipated film that flops engenders a certain level of curiosity (Mommie Dearest was a critical flop, but made lots of money for Paramount ...albeit for all the wrong reasons), but the swift and total reversal of Mommie Dearest's fortunes created a great deal of curiosity among fans as to how so many things could go wrong so extravagantly. Alas, nobody was talking. Considerable blame was placed on the screenplay, but the lion's share of the shame spotlight fell on Faye Dunaway and her fiercely committed, brazenly unsubtle performance.

With Dunaway and the rest of the film's cast and crew reluctant to even acknowledge their participation in the project, details about what went into the making of one of the screen's most delectable disasters have largely been nil.
That is, until Carol Ann finally broke her silence.

Carol Ann appeared to be on an accelerated aging program. The book explains why

Culled from the personal diary Alda kept throughout the entire ordeal…I mean, filming of Mommie Dearest, these deliciously dishy stories, related with chummy, “Can we talk?” candor,  were the first behind-the-scenes accounts ever to emerge from beneath the cone of silence that seemed to envelope Mommie Dearest after its critically disastrous release. Needless to say, the audience lapped up every gossipy detail.

 As Ms. Alda began making the reading of excerpts from her diary a regular part of her personal appearances celebrating Mommie Dearest, the outpour of interest from fans convinced her to publish them in book form.

Rutanya Alda’s The Mommie Dearest Diary: Carol Ann Tells All was published September 18, 2015 (just a few days shy of the 34^th anniversary of the film's Los Angeles release date of September 25, 1981).
Although I was chomping at the bit to read Alda’s memoir hot off the presses, I nevertheless bided my time and had my prayers answered when I received the book for Christmas. By December 26^th  I’d finished it. Not because the book is so brief (it’s a slim 166 pages) but because it’s that much fun to read. To use a cliché that I’m sure has been overworked in every review of The Mommie Dearest Diary to date, I genuinely found it difficult to put it down.

The Deer Hunter
Rutanya Alda played Angela, the pregnant bride in Michael Ciimino's 1978 film.
Here she's seen with (l. to r.) Christopher Walken, John Savage, and Meryl Streep

Being a smart woman who knows her audience, Rutanya Alda uses the first third of the book to supply us with only the briefest of personal and professional bio material before getting down to the good stuff. (Biggest personal epiphany: Rutanya Alda is NOT, as I'd always assumed, related to Alan!) Happily, this section proves surprisingly crammed with “good stuff” as well, for once the Latvian-born immigrant embarks on a career as an actress, we’re treated to stories about Alda’s early encounters with the likes of Brian De Palma, Joan Crawford, Robert Altman, Barbra Streisand, and even pre-Mommie Dearest Faye Dunaway. The cumulative effect is the desire for Ms. Alda to later write a more comprehensive autobiography, the span of her career, and the many great directors and actors she’s worked with (and slept with), providing a ‘70s enthusiast like me with a vivid glimpse into the New Hollywood as it morphed into Blockbusterland.

Mommie Dearest opened in September, but by mid-October, Paramount realized audiences weren't taking their drama seriously. The studio tried to capitalize on the film's growing reputation as a camp cult classic by posting this newspaper ad. The ad was removed after the late producer, Frank Yablans, filed a $10 million lawsuit (a move he later said he regretted, given the unstoppable nature of the cult and the lasting— and profitable—legacy that the cult ultimately gave his film).

The actual Mommie Dearest diary begins with Faye’s audition for director Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife, Last Summer) in December 1980 and ends on the last day of filming, April 1981. In between, movie fans are given a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the hurry-up-and-wait world of filmmaking. And Mommie Dearest fans at last get to find out if there was anything going on behind the scenes that could possibly explain—or excuse—what wound up on the screen.

What we discover is that Dunaway's dedication to her work was complete, if not a tad myopic. Her understandable yet all-encompassing self-concern doesn’t quite align with the image Hollywood likes to present of itself (especially during Award Season) as a collaborative community of artists working together and supporting one another.

For her part, Alda, dealing with a rocky marriage and her husband's drug addiction, struggles to be a team player on the set. She keeps quiet as the size of her part is systematically whittled down by a star who envisions the film more as a one-woman show, all while under constant pressure (and repeated warnings) to keep making herself plainer and plainer so as not to distract or draw attention away from Dunaway.

Since the diary was never intended for publication and used primarily as a meditative tool while the author sought to navigate both her troubled marriage and the challenging shoot, there’s a take-no-prisoners directness to Alda’s writing that makes The Mommie Dearest Diary something of a quidnunc’s wet dream. Nobody is spared (including Alda herself), and she leaves it to the reader to decide whether a bit of gossip is big or too small…she just reveals everything (which is precisely what one seeks in a tell-all, but so seldom ever gets). In addition, she's also very fair-handed. Dunaway is revealed to be quite gracious and accommodating—when she wants to be.

It's a wonderful read for fans of moviemaking in general (the minutia of per diems, soundstage etiquette, and glimpses of LA in the '80s are a treat [Filmex!]), but a truly marvelous companion piece for fans of Mommie Dearest. In fact, the biggest compliment I can bestow upon The Mommie Dearest Diary is that it reads just like the kind of commentary I wish accompanied the DVD. Should yet another special edition DVD be released, perhaps with a few of the many sequences shot and later excised for time, I hope they enlist Rutanya Alda for the commentary.

Dunaway got future husband, photographer Terry O'Neill, a producer's credit

I don't want to spoil anyone's fun by revealing anything more about the book, so here's a glimpse of some of the things you'll find out, some of the questions that will be answered, and a few tips on what to keep a lookout for:

I'll Be There For You - Except When It's Time To Feed You Lines For Your Closeup

What is the "Clear Away Club" and Who Were its Members?

The Hospital Scene: Whose Line Is It, Anyway?

Did Carol Ann Skip The Wedding?

Who Designed This Dress? Don't Axe!

Crawford gives hardworking Carol Ann an Opportunity to Put Her Feet Up

Dunaway and O'Neill Play "I 've Got A Secret"

(S)he Who Gets Slapped...three times, yet

Tonight's Episode: "Shear Dedication" or "Hacking at Hobel"

If you pick up The Mommie Dearest Diary: Carol Ann Tells All expecting the kind of dirt to make your hair stand on end, you're likely to be disappointed ( you won't discover anything you don't likely already suspect about La Dunaway, but it's fascinating having it confirmed!).

But if you're like me, a Mommie Dearest fan who has always marveled at the phenomenon of serious-minded films (like Valley of the Dolls, The Oscar) going so grievously astray they transmogrify into something nobody involved could have ever foreseen; then The Mommie Dearest Diary provides some eye-opening insight into the world of high-stakes Hollywood filmmaking.

A world where everybody starts out wanting to do something meaningful, only to wind up compromising, placating egos, cutting corners, and ultimately counting the days waiting for the whole thing to be over.

The Mommie Dearest Diary: Carol Ann Tells All 

Paperback

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

BONUS MATERIAL
Read my essay on Mommie Dearest HERE

See Rutanya Alda read her Mommie Dearest Diary at The Castro Theater in S.F. HERE

Read more about Mommie Dearest Diary at Angelman's Place 

"Now imagine you're delivering your 'don't fuck with me fellahs' line straight to the last row of the balcony...."
Faye Dunaway plays nice and lets Frank Perry have his turn directing Mommie Dearest

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD 1970

I've a feeling an individual can easily gauge what his or her overall response to this film is likely to be simply based upon how one reacts to its title. If Puzzle of a Downfall Child strikes you as a potentially profound, enigmatically poetic title conjuring up images of Paradise Lost and existential disillusion, you’re likely to fall in love with this long-considered-lost exemplar of European-influenced, '70s “personal statement” cinema. On the other hand, if the title reeks of self-serious pretentiousness and needlessly arty ambiguity…well, little about the film itself is likely to alter that perception.

Me, I fall a little into both camps. For one, I've always been crazy about the title. Perhaps that's because I was 13 years old when the movie came out and the title sounded just gloomily cryptic enough to appeal to my adolescent taste for high-flown self-dramatization. (In an interview, director Jerry Schatzberg has stated that the title alludes to a plot element involving an abortion that was deleted in an early draft of the screenplay.) I adore Puzzle of a Downfall Child for its introspective examination of the elusiveness of happiness and the human desire to connect in the face of reality-distorting conceptions of image, sexuality, self-worth, and success. In the telling, few of the film’s insights are very acute, but there’s a psychological authenticity to the screenplay and performances which significantly mitigate the sometimes arthouse excesses of the film’s visual style.

Which leads to camp #2. As much as I love Puzzle of a Downfall Child and believe it to be both a beautiful and moving film, I’m the first to admit that at times it can feel like a parody of a '70s art film. The debut effort of photographer turned-director Jerry Schatzberg, Puzzle of a Downfall Child falls prey to the minor sin of over-determined significance. There’s a kind of naïve foolhardiness to be found in acts of absolute sincerity, and if Puzzle of a Downfall Child suffers from anything, it’s from a heartfelt conviction it is saying something “important” about the human condition. To some, such ponderousness can come off as pretentious, humorless, or just plain exasperating. But me, I’ll take a self-serious film that tries to be about something over today’s cynical, eye-on-the-boxoffice, market-research product any day.

Faye Dunaway as Lou Andreas Sand

Barry Primus as Aaron Reinhardt

Viveca Lindfors as Pauline Galba

Roy Scheider as Mark 

Faye Dunaway plays Lou Andreas Sand (nee Emily Mercine), an emotionally fragile former high-fashion model who has retreated to a solitary beach house on Fire Island following a crippling nervous breakdown. Visited by long-time photographer friend and former lover Aaron Reinhardt (Barry Primus), Lou recounts her troubled life in a taped conversation Reinhardt hopes to fashion into a film. With her life revealed in flashbacks that come at us in stylized and realistic non-linear stretches devoid of obvious hints as to their veracity as memory, fantasy or both; Lou reveals herself to be the most unreliable of narrators. Yet the tone of these mental images, playing out like scrapbook pages torn from an album and reassembled, expose the truth of the woman, if not always the truth of the events themselves. It's a fascinating narrative path made all the more so due to Puzzle of a Downfall Child being a film constructed in much the same manner. That the movie creates for us a sense that we are watching just the sort of film Primus' character is likely to assemble from his talks with Lou is just one more piece of Puzzle of a Downfall Child 's continually self-referential puzzle. 

Two magazine covers photographed by Jerry Schatzberg
Left: Anne St.Marie -1956 / Right: Faye Dunaway - 1968

Director Jerry Schatzberg, who had worked for more than 20 years as a photographer for magazines like Vogue, Esquire, and McCall's, based Puzzle of a Downfall Child on taped interviews he conducted with one of his favorite subjects, 1950s supermodel Anne St. Marie. St.Marie, like her film counterpart, retired from modeling after suffering a nervous breakdown. To further the whole wormhole effect of this enterprise, Schatzberg, who was rumored to have had an affair with St. Marie (as does his screen doppelganger, photographer Aaron Reinhardt with Dunaway's Lou Andreas Sand) in real life photographed Dunaway for many fashion magazines, and for a time the two were engaged to be married. Their relationship had already dissolved before Puzzle of a Downfall Child went before the cameras.

"If one can't keep some friends somewhere, then something is really wrong."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I think perhaps my favorite thing about Puzzle of a Downfall Child is that it combines two of my favorite film genres: the '70s trying-to-find-oneself character drama and the '40s suffering-in-mink women’s weepie. How perfect is that? When I first saw this film, Faye Dunaway’s too-sensitive-for-this-world fashion model was an oasis of estrogen ennui in the testosterone-leaden desert of male-centric '70s films romanticizing male identity crises and masculine existential moments of reckoning. To my taste, there was a decided oversupply of movies featuring the likes of Jack Nicholson, George Segal, Richard Benjamin, or Elliot Gould grappling with the meaning of life, while an uncomprehending female (usually a sweet-natured dumbbell, and almost always played by Karen Black) stood around on the sidelines. Aside from the vastly inferior (by comparison) Jacqueline Bisset drama, The Grasshopper (1969), Puzzle of a Downfall Child was one of the few films from this era to grant a female character an equivalent navel-gazing opportunity.

To update Easy Rider's famous tagline, Puzzle of a Downfall Child could have been subtitled: "A woman went looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere."

To its credit, Puzzle of a Downfall Child tries to find the common thread of humanity in the privileged-class despair of Lou Andreas Sand. And as embodied by Dunaway and captured by Schatzberg’s loving camera lens (actually cinematographer Alex Holender of Midnight Cowboy), Lou may never look less than exquisite (even when in the throes of a foaming-at-the-mouth nervous breakdown), but her pain is recognizable and real.

Have you ever seen an old detective movie or TV show and marveled at the perversity of (male) cops and reporters at a murder scene going on and on about how beautiful or desirable a female corpse was? I can't count the number of films I've seen where men stand over a dead woman's body lamenting the "waste" of a beautiful woman and how particularly tragic it is that said woman, so pretty or sexy in life, is now dead. It’s like there’s this overriding mentality that a woman’s looks and physical appeal matter even in death. Or worse, that one can be too beautiful to die...as if the loss of life is sad, but the tragedy is compounded if the corpse is a looker. 

Beauty: Fetishism and Objectification

Puzzle of a Downfall Child sensitively addresses the high value we, as a culture, place on beauty, and the price exacted on those who fall prey to it. In placing this character drama in the appearance-fixated world of fashion photography, Schatzberg and screenwriter Carole Eastman take an insightful look at a woman whose entire existence and sense of self-worth is tethered to her beauty. Whose need to please and always be seen as desirable under the male gaze is both a desperate, deep-seated search for approval and a profound denial of self. The film's definitive narrative thread calls attention to the pervasiveness of male exploitation and the vulnerability/susceptibility of the female form.

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Troubled Catholic Schoolgirl Emily Mercine attempts to lose herself by adopting a pretentious name (perhaps borrowed from Nietzschean psychoanalyst Lou Andreas Salome) and engaging in casual sex with father-figure strangers. Like a character out of Damon Runyon, Lou Andreas Sand speaks in a mannered style, totally devoid of contractions, and compulsively reimagines past events to protect her fragile self-image.

PERFORMANCES

Faye Dunaway’s participation was instrumental in getting Puzzle of a Downfall Child to the screen, and her passion for the project is evident in every frame. And it’s a good thing too, because to the best of my recollection, there isn't a single scene in which she does not appear. Mind you, I'm not complaining, for much in the manner that Liza Minnelli is so good in Cabaret that she makes you forget “Liza Minnelli: The Home Shopping Network Years”; Faye Dunaway so thoroughly blows me away in Puzzle of a Downfall Child that I'm reminded of everything her career promised before the whole Mommie Dearest / voicemail meltdown thing. One of my favorite but most problematic actresses (you have to have a taste for her mannerisms), Dunaway has every reason to be very proud of her work in this. After Bonnie & Clyde, Puzzle of a Downfall Child ranks as my all-time favorite Dunaway film. She is phenomenal in it.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I tell everyone, even if you don't have the patience for the entire film, just watch the first 15 minutes. The sequence chronicling Dunaway as a fledgling model navigating the battlefield of her first fashion shoot is cinema gold. Shot with an eye for detail only possible from knowing this world very well, Schatzberg peels back the illusions we hold in our America's Next Top Model preoccupation with the fashion industry and reveals the dehumanizing reality. Sure it's satirical, sure it's depicted from the overwrought perspective of the heroine; but from the performances, the dialogue (tellingly, Lou's voiceover describes the men on the set all looking at her as if they were sex maniacs. The visuals reveal her to have been largely ignored), and the stylish cinematography, this sequence is a great example of MY kind of moviemaking.

Dunaway reacts (I'll say) to being required to share her close-up with a live falcon. This terrifying sequence recalls actress Tippi Hedren's accounts of working with Hitchcock on The Birds.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

One of the good things about viewing an old film (and at 43 years old, Puzzle of a Downfall Child definitely qualifies) is that one gets to watch it in an environment entirely different from that in which it was created. Puzzle of a Downfall Child bombed in part because it came at a time when audiences were wearying of the glut of European-influenced, tarnished American Dream films that filled theaters after the breakthrough year of 1967. When viewed from the comic-book/3-D/blockbuster perspective of today, the film looks nothing short of miraculous.

Throughout her modeling career, Lou Andrea Sand compiled a list of photographers she refuses to ever work with again due to their abusive behavior. Boldly written in red on this list is the name of the film's director, Jerry Schatzberg. In her memoir, Looking for Gatsby, Faye Dunaway explains that this was an improvisational impulse on her part, born of a particularly difficult time the director gave her after actor Marcello Mastroianni (the man she left her fiancé, Schatzberg, for) visited her on the set. Schatzberg liked the touch and kept it in the film.

As a culture, we’re guilty of attributing great profundity to the existential midlife traumas of male characters in films, while women undergoing the same are dismissed as merely neurotic. (I don’t know where I read it, but someone once observed that The Graduate missed the boat in focusing on the petulant Benjamin Braddock when the film's most compelling story and most interesting character was Mrs. Robinson and her midlife dissatisfaction.) It’s difficult not to think this subtle double standard played into the critical response to Puzzle of a Downfall Child, but as good as the film is (and I think it’s a really excellent film), there’s no ignoring that it falls into the usual traps that beset movies that ask us to feel sorry for the beautiful people.

Film is a storytelling medium and all manner of human experience should be explored. But films like Puzzle of a Downfall Child seem to forget why movies exist and who attends them. No matter how masterful the film, it’s difficult to ask an audience to listen to a woman as breathtakingly beautiful as Faye Dunaway complaining about how unhappy she is in her (perceived glamorous) job as a fashion model, and how empty she finds her life (after amassing enough wealth to live in financially independent solitude in a spacious beach house). 

We all know that the rich and beautiful can suffer as much as the rest of us, but any film that attempts to dramatize a shared humanity with people whose lives offer far more options than those of the average person has to walk a precarious tightrope. If the world is too glossy, the people too lacquered, it can actually end up glamorizing that which it's trying to vilify. Ultimately sending a message similar to the one expressed by those cops in the old movies bemoaning the fact that certain people are  just “Too beautiful to suffer, too lovely to die.”

As of this writing, The DVD of Puzzle of a Downfall Child is currently only available in France (released Feb. 2012), but every year more and more obscure films are getting "made to order" releases, hopefully this will be one of them.

So, whether you take the film to your heart (as I did), or wish to wallow in its camptastic splendor  (Puzzle of a Downfall Child is an exquisite, sumptuous-looking film that has a scene involving a toilet that is sure to send Mommie Dearest fans into wild ecstatics), this artifact from the days when movies sought to do more than make Variety's Top Ten weekend boxoffice list, has a little of something for everybody.

No matter how you prefer your Dunaway, overdone and theatrical or touching and deeply affecting, Puzzle of a Downfall Child is a lost miracle of a film that is worth taking the time to discover (or rediscover).

"One only breaks oneself apart in order to put oneself back together again...better."

To view some of Jerry Schatzberg's magnificent photographs, visit his website HERE

Faye Dunaway and Clark Burckhalter in a clip from "Puzzle of a Downfall Child" (1970)

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013