A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY 1968

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of movie marketing knows that any film calling itself A Quiet Place in the Country is certain to be set in a country locale that’s anything but. And by the same token, anyone remotely familiar with the works of Elio Petri—the Italian director/screenwriter of that Haute futuristic fantasm The Tenth Victim (1965) and the 1970 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner winner for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion—knows that any movie made by this unsung post-neorealist auteur is bound to be a barbed political allegory distinguished, in no small part, by a strikingly idiosyncratic visual style and a dynamic musical score.

Both presuppositions are realized to mind-blowing effect in A Quiet Place in the Country, an offbeat, exhilarating puzzle of a film that has a lot to say about man, muses, money, and madness. And it does so while oozing irresistible ‘60s-era inscrutability from every artfully-composed frame.

In this sequence, one of several punctuated by imagery alluding to contemporary and classic works of art, a faded beauty in a decaying villa (top r.) assumes a pose reminiscent of Jean-Louis David's 1800 Neoclassical portrait Madame Recamier (top l.). As the figure draws closer, the woman transforms into Rene Magritte's 1951 surreal parody, Perspective: Madame Recamier by David (bottom l.)

A Quiet Place in the Country is a Giallo-hued psychological thriller about the artist as outsider. A study in the creative alienation that charts one man's slow descent into madness as he wages war with inner demons and suppressed obsessions. In fashioning his subjectively fractured, paranoid vision of the world of art, Elio Petri takes simultaneous aim at consumerist culture and the moral decay that lies at its core. Specifically, the dehumanizing effects of the market-mandated practice of harnessing and harvesting creativity and artistic expression for the sake of profit.

A film that intriguingly combines diverse elements of style and genre, the tone of A Quiet Place in the Country shifts eerily--and joltingly--from dreamlike to nightmarish in service of a narrative that’s part murder mystery, part obsessive love story, and part horror film.

Vanessa Redgrave as Flavia

Franco Nero as Leonardo Ferri

Franco Nero is Leonardo Ferri, an abstract expressionist artist living in Milan. An artist whose success is both a source of guilt (he's the one who sets the exorbitant prices charged for his paintings), and resentment (he runs himself ragged filling arbitrary gallery quotas that only feed his belief that success has turned his art into merchandise--just another collectible consumer commodity). Stricken with an acute case of creative stasis and trapped within a kind of existential inertia, he fears that his methods of creation--a spontaneous, gestural, “action painting” technique---are becoming obsolete in the high-volume Pop Art world of mixed media and mechanical reproduction.
A modern artist pitted against modernism, everything about his work has grown too “too” for the contemporary marketplace: his prices too high, his methods too slow, his canvases too large, and his art too impenetrable.

Normative Dualism
The mental and physical in the creative process

With his two-month creative dry spell threatening to turn into three, stress and isolation take an ever-increasing toll on Leonardo's mind and psyche. Most provocatively, in serving to escalate his already conflicted feelings for Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave), his married lover who also just happens to be his agent.

The cool pragmatist to Leonardo’s exposed-nerve fantasist, Flavia—who has him on an allowance, keeps tabs on his work output, and is forever scribbling down figures in ledgers—loves him, but is shrewdly accepting of his paranoid distrust and need to cast her as the villain in their relationship. Flavia: (catching sight of him eyeing a weighty object d’art in his apartment): "Darling, Leonardo…you can’t kill me with that, it’s just a big paper clip.”

The ambiguity of perception figures significantly in how A Quiet Place in the Country builds suspense and consistently keeps the viewer on unsteady ground. Early in the film, Leonardo is depicted as the bound, passive, sex-object exploited both physically and creatively by the materialistic Flavia. The ready assumption is that we're seeing Leonardo's perception of the dynamics of their relationship. Later in the film, this scene is mirrored in a way that casts it in an entirely different light.

Owing at least part of his artist’s block to the challenge of trying to create meaningful work in the face of society’s capitalism-fed, art-as-consumer-goods ethos (he’s seen reading Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), Leonardo seizes upon the reasoned notion that the only way to get his inspiration mojo working again is to move away from the distractions of the city to a place of isolation and quiet where he can be at one with his thoughts.

Fate seems to oblige all too readily by placing in his path a remote, deteriorating villa that fairly beckons to him from the road. Although its condition is rundown and locals whisper about it being haunted by the ghost of a beautiful Countess who died there 40 years ago; the villa is nevertheless a secluded, bucolic spot offering Leonardo everything he’s looking for. And quite a bit of what he'll forever wish he'd never found.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

A Quiet Place in the Country is a sociopolitical, psychosexual haunted house movie that always feels a hairsbreadth away from submerging itself in its own late- ‘60s stylization. A thinking-person’s Giallo that incorporates all the familiar tropes of the genre (murder mystery, amateur sleuthing, graphic violence, eroticism, red herrings, etc.), its chief deviation from tradition—and key determiner as to whether or not this film will be your cup of tea—is its commitment to preserving the twitchy schizophrenic perspective of its abstract artist protagonist. Something achieved by presenting its rather straightforward story in as arty, willfully cryptic a manner as it can get away with without having to identify itself as avant-garde experimental cinema. It’s not that A Quiet Place in the Country doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end, it’s just they’re arranged in a different order. 

Fragmented Fantasy
A Quiet Place in the Country is a reworking of Oliver Onions' 1911 masterwork of supernatural fiction The Beckoning Fair One.  The story of a man consumed by his obsession with a seductive, potentially malevolent ghost.

But for me, the style IS the story of A Quiet Place in the Country, a modern gothic tasking the viewer with determining whether a chain of increasingly bizarre events befalling a brooding hero is rooted in the psychological or the paranormal. As obscure and enigmatic as Petri’s images may be (pretentious...sure, heavy-handed...yes, fascinating...always), they credibly convey Leonardo's mental disintegration and heighten identification with the character. Petri's intimate style also poignantly underscore themes in the film interpreting the creative impulse--the need to express oneself and be understood by others--as an outer-directed primal compulsion compensating for the inner-inaccessibility of the unknowable self.

Visual Artist
Estranged from his feelings, Leonardo tries to invoke anything resembling a human response from himself as he flips through slide images of eroticism and violence. Leonardo's unreliable perceptions are dramatized in the film's motif of windows (often barred), kaleidoscopes (distortions), mirrors (fractured and two-sided), peepholes (limited), and camera lenses (at a remove).

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Given my fondness for the hyper-stylized charms of Gialli, it surprises me to think just how late to the party I was in getting around to seeing my first Italian Giallo film as recently as 2016. The film was Lucio Fulci’s extraordinary Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), and it so knocked my socks off that I went from 100% unfamiliarity with the genre to having since added some 40 Giallo titles to my film library.

I’m not sure that I’ve yet reconciled myself to the violence (making me thankful for that fake-looking, poster-paint-red blood they used back in the day), but I never cease to be impressed by how accommodating the genre is to such a broad scope of narrative concepts. There’s room for everything from gumshoes to ghosts under the Gaillo banner.

Idée Fixe 

 Flavia, the realist, and ever the consumer, is preoccupied with wealth. Leonardo, a resuscitated sensualist since moving to the country, is fetishistically bewitched by a yonic scrap of clothing once worn by the woman he thinks is haunting the villa.

As an example of the “arthouse horror” style of Giallo, A Quiet Place in the Country is low on sensationalism, surpassingly high on atmospheric mystery, and takes a cue from its title by trading the gaudy colorfulness I usually associate with the genre, for a kind of baroque naturalism. The very effective result is that supernatural terrors take place in the brightness of day, and hallucinations and spectral visions are made all the more disturbing by being indistinguishable from reality.

Terrified at the prospect of spending the night alone after witnessing a particularly hair-raising
display of ghostly pyrotechnics, Leonardo imposes himself upon his maid and her "brother." 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

It’s been my experience that it’s very rare for a really intriguing horror film or mystery to have a payoff that lives up to its setup. The more disturbing the journey, the greater the chance the Big Reveal will prove anticlimactic. Against all odds, A Quiet Place in the Country ranks as one of those rarities. For me, it was an effectively compelling chiller with a doozy of a surprise ending worthy and fitting of all the with-it weirdness that came before it. 

By large measure, credit is owed to Oliver Onions’ impeccably-structured source novel; longtime Gialli cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller (Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Antonioni’s L’Avventura, and Andy Warhol’s two 3-D horror titles, Dracula / Frankenstein); and a rattle-your-bones improvisational music score by Ennio Morricone and Nuova Consonanza.

Autoerotic
Leonardo Becomes His Own Sex Object

But as a huge fan of the exquisitely elephantine Camelot (1967) I'd be lying if I said that any part of this remarkable film impressed me more than the reteaming of Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero... MY Lady Guenevere and Sir Lancelot (the 2nd of some five films they would come to make together). Playing emotionally enigmatic lovers, both actors inhabit their roles with charismatic ease (Nero's the best I've ever seen him), their real-life sensual chemistry breathing life into the film's hyperventilating eroticism.

What Do The Simple Folk Do?
Though Redgrave appears nude in several scenes, fans of Nero have to content themselves with discreet angles and loincloths. As we now know, he was saving full-frontal for when he turned 75 (The Time of Their Lives - 2017)

A Quiet Place in the Country is genre-faithful as a murder mystery, a Giallo thriller, and a supernatural horror film, but its presentation is perhaps too iconoclast and its appeal too niche for me to recommend it wholeheartedly. Personally, I was absolutely enthralled by the film from the first frame to the last, finding much in what Elio Petri had to say about art and alienation still relevant and echoed in contemporary films like Nocturnal Animals (2016) and Velvet Buzzsaw (2019).

There's a thin membrane separating impulse, instinct, and inspiration. A Quiet Place in the Country suggests the wall distinguishing between passion, obsession, and compulsion is perhaps nonexistent.

BONUS MATERIAL:

A reader (thanks!) brought it to my attention that the source material for A Quiet Place in the Country, Oliver Onions' novella The Fair Beckoning One, was also made into a (stultifyingly pedestrian) episode of the Hammer anthology TV series Journey to the Unknown. Starring Robert Lansing and Gabrielle Drake, the episode was broadcast in December of 1968. Although A Quiet Place in the Country was also made in 1968, it wasn't released in the US until 1970.

The TV version of The Fair Beckoning One

That Redgrave and Nero were considered quite the scandalous pair in their day, now seems rather quaint. The two met in 1966 while making Camelot, lived in sin (gasp!), and had a baby out of wedlock before separating in 1971.  Shocking stuff, that.
What makes their story the stuff of fairy tales is their reuniting after several decades apart, and getting married in 2006. A story made all the more romantic due to countless interviews given by the never-married Nero over the years claiming he would never marry and that Redgrave had been the love of his life. In 2017 the couple danced together on the Italian TV show Strictly Come Dancing (below).

1968                                                        2017

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2020

LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN 1971

Would I pay good money to see a film titled Lizard in a Woman’s Skin? Yes!

Were I a producer, would I invest in a movie called Lizard in a Woman’s Skin? Yes!!

If they gave Oscars for films with the most kick-ass titles ever, would Lizard in a Woman’s Skin win? Yes!!!

As you may have guessed by now, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is one of my all-time favorite titles for a movie...ever. I’m absolutely crazy about it and have been since first seeing a poster ad for the film in the movie section of the San Francisco Chronicle back in October of  ’71. The US release dropped the superfluous “A” from the beginning of the title, making this hallucinatory Italian-French-Spanish co-production sound even more enticingly like a retro, Creature Features programmer. Or one of those nifty ‘50s monster flicks spoofed on MST3K.

It’s such an intriguing title to me. Even now, as I type out the words Lizard in a Woman’s Skin - I’m made aware of having roughly the same reaction to it I had forty-five years ago: “That is one GREAT title!”

Although she doesn't appear in the film, fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may recognize
the model on this poster as Leslie McRea, star of Girl In Gold Boots

Perhaps too much so, I’m afraid. For (irony of ironies) the very provocativeness of the title proved to be precisely the hurdle my parents were unprepared to surmount when, at the ripe old age of thirteen, I (a little too casually) told them that a friend and I were headed downtown to see Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (I also seem to recall a request for bus fare squeezed in there, somewhere). Turning a deaf ear to what I believed was a very reasonable argument on my part: that 13-year-olds were doubtless the age group most likely to be attracted to a title like that - my folks nevertheless laid down the law. The film was R-rated, its ad copy included the word “erotic,” and it was playing on a double bill at one of the seamier grindhouses on Market Street. Case closed.

And since it was an American-International Pictures release (whose films were known in our house as El Cheapo), I couldn’t even fall back on my usual “It might be up for an Oscar!” argument. No, I’m afraid my folks (rightfully) detected the low-brow in my eyes.

So I never got to see Lizard in a Woman’s Skin when it came out, after which it seemed to disappear fairly quickly. So completely, in fact, that I really forgot all about it until it resurfaced earlier this year—in all its pristine, never-before-seen-in-the-US, unedited glory—on Blu-ray. I wasted no time in securing a copy.

Was it worth the wait? Yes!!!!

I would even go so far as to say the film exceeded my expectations, but nobody (except perhaps, Ken Russell) in their right mind expects a movie as deliriously loony as Lizard in a Woman’s Skin.

A hypnotically surreal, psychedelic, totally over-the-top experience, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is a tense suspense thriller with so much going on in the way of sex, graphic violence, and overwrought visual excess...it practically hyperventilates.

Best of all, it’s a film that ultimately lives up to its bluntly ambiguous/subtly sensationalist title! A title that—like those of the best exploitation movies, pulp novels, and tabloid magazine headlines—evokes more than it explains. A quality that can also be said to be one of the chief attributes of this seductively baroque and entertaining thriller.

Florinda Bolkan as Carol Hammond

Jean Sorel as Frank Hammond

Edy Gall as Joan Hammond

Leo Genn as Edmond Brighton

Silvia Monti as Deborah

Stanley Baker as Inspector Corvin

Anita Strindberg as Julia Durer

Alberto de Mendoza as Sgt. Brandon

It boggles my mind that ANYTHING but Lizard in a Woman’s Skin was ever considered for this film, but during production the title alternated between the drab The Cage and the mundane The Trap. For the wide US release, the cryptic Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (which I suspect was retained in metropolitan areas) was jettisoned in favor of the derivative and artless Schizoid. And in some international markets, it was known simply as Carole.

Similarly, depending on where and when one saw the film, its length (edited for sex and violence) and language (dubbing and subtitles differ) varied significantly.

The fully restored version is quite the experience, with Italian director Lucio Fulci creating a Giallo thriller that feels like full-on “Alfred Hitchcock meets Ken Russell with a nod to Russ Meyer.” 

In the tony Belgravia district of London, Carol (Florinda Bolkan), the perpetually guilty-looking daughter of a prominent British barrister and politician (Leo Genn), lives a somewhat emotionally sterile life of aristocratic luxury with her attorney husband (Jean Sorel) and his peevish teenage daughter from a previous marriage (Edy Gaul). Weighing heavily on Carol’s mind and contributing to her severe guilt complex are the sexually feverish recurring dreams she’s been having about her next-door-neighbor (Anita Strindberg); a beautiful, free-love bohemian who hosts loud, drug-fueled orgies which Carol and her family are given an earful of during their formal, deadly-silent dinners.

In Dreams
It's hard to look at Carol's visually stylish dreams (all furs, lingerie, slow-motion,
and wind-blown lesbianism) without wondering if it served as the inspiration for that
memorable Columbus Circle photo shoot sequence in that American Giallo, Eyes of Laura Mars

As Carol’s dreams grow increasingly nightmarish, her psychoanalyst (George Rigaud) reassures her that the contradiction of content (though disapproving and repulsed by the carnal shenanigans of her neighbor in real life; Carol nevertheless dreams of being seduced by her) is merely a manifestation of the conflicted feelings of resentment and repression within her own life (after marrying, Carol suppressed her desire to follow in her father’s legal footsteps), combined with the estrangement she feels from her husband (enhanced by the self-insinuated omnipresence of his gorgeous secretary, Silvia Monti) and aloof stepdaughter.

Unfortunately, just as Carol comes to be convinced that her dreams are merely her subconscious providing her with a healthy outlet for her inner conflicts, her neighbor is found murdered. And in a manner uncannily similar to one of Carol’s bloodier nightmares.

Did Carol suffer a blackout and commit a brutal murder? Is someone familiar with her dreams trying to frame her? Was there an unknown witness to the crime? Is there really someone trying to kill her, or is she imagining it all? And who placed that mysterious phone call?

I can’t remember when I’ve had a better time trying to solve a murder mystery amidst so many false leads, numerous red herrings, and gleeful misdirections. Nor can I remember a detective crime thriller so spectacularly shot or filled with so many gripping moments of suspense and cover-your-eyes horror setpieces. There's never a dull moment in Lizard in a Woman's Skin, and now having seen it, I'm seized by how well-suited a film it is to be promoted with the tagline used for Ken Russell's Tommy in 1975: Your Senses Will Never Be The Same.

Venus in Furs
In one of her dreams, Carol envisions herself trapped in a corridor full of naked couples

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

A 1978 film review citing Faye Dunaway’s Eyes of Laura Mars as an American take on the Italian “Giallo” was the first time I’d ever heard of the film classification. Typically a detective/crime thriller combining elements of exploitation, suspense, horror, sex, and gore—all with a hyper-Technicolor overlay of stylized visuals and dramatic music; Giallo films are relatively new to me (I’ve only seen about four), but of the few I’ve seen, Lizard in a Woman's Skin stands out as something pretty special.

What with that cheesy title I love so much and my history with American-International releases, I came to this film with understandably low expectations. I’d have been more than happy had the film proved to be just an amusingly dated, campy exploitationer full of big hair, ‘70s fashions, and that glaring red poster paint they used for blood in those days. 

And while Lizard in a Woman's Skin indeed features all of the above (to spare!); it also blew me out of the water by being such a surprisingly effective whodunit and a tension-filled suspense thriller. I know “Never a dull moment” is an oft-used cliché, but Lizard in a Woman's Skin seizes upon it like a mantra.

The Age of Aquarius
Mike Kennedy as Hubert and Penny Brown as Jenny
Old London's clash with the hippie counterculture plays a significant role in the film's puzzle

This well-plotted puzzle loaded with suspicious-looking characters locked in questionable relationships and harboring dubious motives, leaves you scant time to catch your breath. Between the gorgeous, color-drenched cinematography (with swooping, subjective camera angles, split screens, dizzying wipes, and jarring jump cuts); over-the-top gore effects; Ennio Morricone’s unsettling music score; and the pitch-perfect performances of the entire cast (everyone looks like they’re up to something), Lizard in a Woman's Skin gives giallo a good name.

You can't really go wrong when a thriller indulges in elaborate costuming and
enormous hairdos while framing the actors in melodramatic soap opera tableau

PERFORMANCES

I learned from the DVD commentary that colorful supporting characters are something of a staple of Giallo films, and on that score Lizard in a Woman's Skin doesn’t disappoint. Stanley Baker as the whistling detective, Jean Sorel as the something-to-hide husband, and especially Leo Genn as Carol’s concerned father, are all top-notch. But for me, the entire film worked exclusively because of the outstanding performance by the beautiful Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan.

Carol's father visits her after she's jailed for a murder she swears she didn't commit

I’ve never seen her in anything before, but I think I’m going to have to search her out. Not only is she stunning in that intelligent, no-nonsense way of so many of my favorite ‘70s actresses (Glenda Jackson & Julie Christie come to mind); but she commands the screen in a tense, tortured performance that reminds me of the best of the Hitchcock heroines (Hitchcock references abound in this film). Like Janet Leigh in Psycho or Kim Novak in Vertigo, Bolkan magically allows a wealth of tortured inner conflicts to play out over a face that is, in the context of the story, trying hard to reveal very little. I don’t know how any actor does that, but Bolkan is actually mesmerizingly good. I suspect her voice is dubbed, making the overall effectiveness of her portrayal even more impressive.

Ersi Pond as busybody neighbor Mrs. Gordon. And Piero Nistri as her...chauffeur

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I tend to have two reactions to grotesque images or bloody violence in real life: 1) If I’m lucky, I can avert my eyes quickly enough before my brain has a chance to formulate a clear (read: lasting) image of what I thereafter tell myself I never saw. 2) My least favorite. I see it briefly, but before I turn away, my eyes perform a rapid zoom and my mind does this kind of “Terminator-vision” thing where far too much detail and information is clocked in a nanosecond. Thus, long after I’ve stopped looking, my mind’s eye is still seeing. 

The cinematography and editing in Lizard in a Woman's Skin recreates both types of reactions, often to disturbing effect.  Lizard in a Woman's Skin has several scenes of gory violence that must have been very shocking for its time (most notably an unpleasant animal vivisection scene that looks quite fake today, but was realistic enough in 1971 to get the producers hauled into court on animal cruelty charges and made to show the prop animals). For me, this is where the limitations of 1971 special effects are a blessing.  

In a Hitchcockian sequence prominently featured in the film's advertising,
Carol is attacked by a room full of bats

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

After now having seen Lizard in a Woman’s Skin twice, I have to say I owe my parents a serious debt of gratitude for sparing me the untold years of nightmares and trauma this thoroughly out-there movie most assuredly would have wreaked upon my young psyche. I’m also thankful to have been able to experience this unique film for the first time in its uncut entirety; probably looking and sounding even better than it did when originally released. 

Even under extreme duress, Carol exhibits a killer sense of '70s style. Her wardrobe is a highlight.

But most of all I’m glad I (re)discovered Lizard in a Woman’s Skin at an age when I’m better able to appreciate what an intelligently-conceived, artfully realized film it is. I've noted countless times in previous posts how much I adore hallucinatory, dreamlike films. So much so that I frequently resort to the term "fever dream" to describe those films of particular visual and emotional intensity. Well, Lizard in a Woman's Skin is all that and a bag of chips.

Exploitation films tend to get a bad rap, but movies like Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness, and now, Lucio Fulci’s Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, remind me that sometimes it's only in the low-rent subgenres of film where truly unconventional directors are allowed to be their freest.

BONUS MATERIAL

Mike Kennedy (aka Mike Kogel) plays a hippie drifter in Lizard in a Woman's Skin and was the lead singer of the '60s pop group Los Bravos.  

1971 Theatrical Trailer (When its title was changed to Schizoid)

1971 Radio Spot

So what does "Lizard in a Woman's Skin" mean? You have to see the movie.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

EYES OF LAURA MARS 1978

There are some movies you fall in love with which seriously call into question your judgment, aesthetics, and sanity. These are the films that fall outside of the easy-to-rationalize pleasures of camp, the above-criticism-snobbery of cult, and the so-subjective-it doesn't-bear-discussion reverence of geek-culture franchises. These are the movies which appeal to you for reasons (in the words of Barbarella's Durand-Durand), "That are beyond all known philosophies."

Eyes of Laura Mars is such a film. A well-crafted, imaginative, suspense thriller whose flaws frequently loom so large that, over time, they start to take on the character of virtues.

Faye Dunaway as Laura Mars

Tommy Lee Jones as Det. John Neville

Rene Auberjonois as Donald Phelps: Laura's Manager

Brad Dourif as Tommy Ludlow: Laura's skeevy driver

Darlanne Fluegel as Lulu - a model

Real-life 70s supermodel Lisa Taylor as Michele - a 70s supermodel

Raul Julia as Michael Reisler: Laura's suspicious-acting ex-husband

Eyes of Laura Mars - you can tell the film is hip because, like a rock band that wants to be taken seriously, it dispenses with the article, "The" at the start - is a romantic thriller about a hotshot New York fashion photographer (Dunaway) whose titular eyes she happens to share with a serial killer. Not literally, like a Manhattan co-op, but psychically, at grievously inconvenient moments throughout her day, Laura Mars literally sees through the eyes of the killer. Targeting her friends and colleagues, the killer implicates the controversially provocative photographer by committing murders in ways that duplicate (inspire? Hmmm...) Laura's own death-fixated, violently erotic fashion layouts.

At its core, Eyes of Laura Mars may be just a another stylishly dressed-up pulp thriller, but BOY is it a pulp thriller that works!

The Eyes of Dunaway & Auberjonois

Movies built around a gimmick, even a clever one, can be problematic. Everything hinges on working the gimmick into the film as quickly and as frequently as possible, often at the expense of a coherent plot. Eyes of Laura Mars teeters on occasion with a screenplay committed to delivering the genre goods as honestly as possible (lots of red herrings, dark rooms, shock cuts, and people popping into frame out of nowhere), but with its tin ear for dialog, luckily it has the good sense not to take itself too seriously.

Faye Dunaway, in the first of many suitable-for-a-drag-queen roles that would soon derail her once-impressive film career, is actually rather good here and is given solid support by a compelling cast of New York actors.

Hunky Detective Tommy Lee Jones shows Dunaway the finer points of firearms while 
showing the audience a little open-shirt beefcake.

However, the film's greatest asset is its setting. Not since Blow Up has the world of fashion photography been used to such irresistible effect. Inspired by a real-life hot-button social issue of the late 70s: the emergence of violent, sadomasochistic imagery in fashion and advertising (specifically the works of Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, & Rebecca Blake), Eyes of Laura Mars makes colorfully dramatic use of the mystique surrounding the fashion industry. All of which creates a credible backdrop for its implausible, "I have an ocular/psychic bond with a serial killer!" gimmick.

  

Released three years before the debut of MTV, Eyes of Laura Mars can be credited or blamed with paving the way for the glut of  80s thrillers which endeavored to hide narrative shortcomings behind an overabundance of visual panache. Many have tried, but few have been able to hit all the high notes that Eyes of Laura Mars does so effortlessly. A stateside version of the Italian "Giallo" thriller, it is at times loopy, obvious, and heavy-handed, but there are still enough surprises to go around and it is never for one second, boring. In fact, it's really a lot of lurid fun.

"OK America, OK world... you are violent. You are pushing all this murder on us, so here it comes right back at you! And we'll use murder to sell deodorant...so that you'll just get bored with murder. Right?"

  

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Not everything one loves about a film is actually up on the screen. Sometimes it's what we associate it with and what memories it evokes. Every time I watch this movie I think of the summer of 1978: the year I turned 21 and moved to Los Angeles on my own. One of my strongest first impressions of the city was the enormous Eyes of Laura Mars billboard on the Sunset Strip.

Not a photo of mine, found on the internet. But that's the billboard!

It was the same iconic Scavullo portrait of Dunaway used in the poster, but the staring eyes were illuminated and flashed on and off 24/7. It could be seen from blocks away and I was just thunderstruck by it. Seriously, it was like some 70's reimagining of The Great Gatsby with me as a bell-bottomed George Wilson mesmerized by the eyes of a female Dr. T.J. Eckleburg staring down from an advertisement.

  

PERFORMANCES

It's not easy being a Faye Dunaway fan. When she's good she's peerless, but unless handled by a particularly watchful director, she's prone to giving overly mannered performances (one recalls Jan Hook's hilariously spot-on Dunaway impersonation on SCTV). Hot off of her Oscar win for Network and in the first role requiring her to truly carry a film, Dunaway falls somewhere in between here.

Laura Mars on falling in love: "I'm completely out of control!"
Words that would come back to haunt Ms. Dunaway three years later on the release of Mommie Dearest.

My absolute favorite performance in the film is given by Darlanne Fluegel, portraying a sweetly ditzy model of the sort I once thought exclusively indigenous to Los Angeles. Hers is a disarmingly smart and funny performance keyed perfectly to the semi-satiric tone the film adopts for the modeling sequences. She is terrific.

Darlanne Fluegel - Pretty in Pink

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Were this thriller comprised solely of fashion shoot sequences and behind-the-scenes footage of Laura Mars at work (in some of the most flamboyantly impractical outfits ever), it would be enough.

Casual Fridays for Laura Mars

Each scene plays out like a little mini-film: kinetic, witty, and bubbling over with an unerringly precise sense of time and place. Unlike laughable sequences in movies like Valley of the Dolls that try to make modeling look glamorous and desirable, Eyes of Laura Mars is not afraid to mine the absurdity.

The elaborate/outrageous photo shoot sequences that are the film's centerpieces pose provocative questions about violent sexual imagery in advertising that Eyes of Laura Mars never satisfactorily address.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As a time capsule vision of late 70s chic, Eyes of Laura Mars is perfection (although the once-daring photos at the center of the plot look almost quaint by today's standards), which only adds to my overall enjoyment of a film that, for all its faults, continues to fascinate and entertain me through repeated viewings. Still, given the relative kinky cleverness of the premise, I might wish that the film's potential was better realized in the script. I don't usually need everything spelled out for me, but it does nag at one to have interesting ideas introduced and never expanded upon.
For example, I'm not sure it's ever explained why/how Laura came to share the killer's "eyes" and what, if anything, it all signified in relation to her photographs. Also, as the film progresses, Laura's attitude towards violence seems to undergo a change and she becomes more squeamish about the glamorized bloodletting she had once defended. Does this mean that her earlier "moral" defense of her work has altered as well?

In the end, perhaps these kind of questions don't ultimately matter in a film so preoccupied with visual style.

What I do know is that Eyes of Laura Mars has been one of my favorite films for the last 33 years.

A statement I proudly make without benefit of excuses, apologies, or rose-colored glasses...just with my eyes wide open.

Copyright © Ken Anderson