WOMEN IN LOVE 1969

As a hormonal pre-teen whose nether regions went all atingle at the sight of Oliver Reed’s Bill Sikes waking up in Shani Wallis' bed in the 1968 kiddie musical Oliver!; no one wanted to see Ken Russell’s adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love more than I. More to the point: no 7^th grader with a wholesale unfamiliarity with either D. H. Lawrence or Ken Russell wanted to see Oliver Reed appearing full-frontal naked in a movie more than I.

But it was not to be.
For although my track record for persuading my mom to grant me permission to see age-inappropriate films on the basis of their “seriousness of content” was one both impressive and fruitful in one so young (my being both a shy and humorless 12-year-old got me into Bonnie & Clyde, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?); little did I know that my hopes for pulling the same stunt with Women in Love would be dashed thanks to my parents having seen the controversial film adaptation of Lawrence’s lesbian-themed novella The Fox (1967) a couple of years before. I was undone by the fact that the advertising campaigns for both The Fox and Women in Love downplayed the highbrow literary origins of these films in favor of stressing the inherently sensationalist virtues contained in their then taboo-shattering display of nudity and sexual frankness.

Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin

Glenda Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen

Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich

Jennie Linden as Ursula Brangwen

Eleanor Bron as Hermione Roddice

That I had been able to wheedle my way into the “Recommended for Mature Audiences” films listed above is largely attributable to the fact that they all pitched themselves as important, self-serious motion pictures commenting on contemporary issues. On the other hand, Women in Love, whose marketing betrayed a perhaps well-founded lack of faith in America’s interest in or familiarity with D.H. Lawrence, banked on the lure of eroticism to offset the stuffy reputation of British imports by choosing to go the exploitation route. Like The Fox before it, which used the promise of female-female sex as its prime publicity hook, Women in Love moved its homoerotic nude wrestling scene front and center as the defining image and focus of its entire marketing campaign.

And while I’m certain all of this paid off handsomely at the boxoffice, closer to home (seeing as it only solidified my mother’s perception of D.H. Lawrence as a high-flown pornographer, and strengthened her resolve to keep me far away from any film bearing his name) that particular marketing strategy ultimately proved disastrous to my private campaign to get a look at Oliver's reed. Roughly nine years passed before Women in Love's rounds at the revival theaters and my suitable chronological age coincided.

The stylish (if not eccentric) mode of dress of the Brangwen sisters not only establishes them as modern, independent-thinking women at odds with their dreary, working-class surroundings, but assert Women in Love's subthemes of internal (emotion and instinct), external (nature and environment), and man-made (industry and art) conflict.

Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen are two emotionally restless sisters whose naturally colorful natures chafe at the drab-grey existence proffered by their working-class status as schoolteachers in the coal-mining town of Beldover in postwar England, 1921. Both women are dreamy loners unable/unwilling to fit in with their surroundings. Both are also, if not exactly looking for love, reluctant to duplicate the domestic desperation of their mother, and therefore curious and receptive to exploring the experience.

Gudrun (Jackson), the youngest, is a self-styled artist and free-spirit sensually attracted to power and passion. (And, it would seem, brutality. In one scene she is shown becoming excited by the sight of Gerald mistreating a horse. In another, stimulated by a story an artist [Loerke] relates about having to beat one of his female models in order for her to sit still for a painting.)

"I would give everything...everything, all you love...for a little companionship and intelligence."
Vladek Sheybal  as Herr Loerke, a homosexual artist (Richard Heffer as his lover) presents Gudrun with a possibility of platonic love

Ursula (Linden), more of a realist and more sensitive than her sister, nevertheless envisions fulfillment as something achievable only through the surrendering of oneself to an idealized vision of one-on-one domesticated bliss. Into these sisters' lives, as though summoned by mutual longing, arrive Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich; best friends of dissimilar emotional temperament who contribute to forming, in their coupling with the sisters, two contrasting yet complementary halves of a cyclical treatise on the conundrum that is passionate love vs. romantic love. The perpetual struggle between the sexes.

Woman in Love #1- Rupert & Ursula's loving relationship is often photographed in nature

Ursula finds romantic kinship—if little in the way of stability—with Rupert (Bates), a school inspector possessed of extravagantly quixotic theories about nature, life and love, all seeming to channel from a nascent awareness of his bisexuality. Meanwhile, Gudrun, perhaps out of want of stimulation or, as Rupert surmises, a lust for passion and greed for self-importance in love, is drawn to Gerald (Reed), the brutish, aristocratic son of the town’s coal industrialist. A shared quest for power, corrosively mixed with a need for both intimacy and independence, makes theirs a passionate, albeit combative, relationship more or less doomed from the start.

Woman in Love #2 - Gudrun & Gerald's doomed relationship is often photographed in dark surroundings

Intruding upon Ursula and Rupert’s self-perpetuating emotionalism and Gudrun and Gerald’s incessant power plays, are: Hermione (Bron), Rupert’s one-time love and the walking embodiment of orchestrated eroticism with none of the heat; and Rupert himself, whose unrequited love for the mulishly impassive Gerald encumbers his relationship with Ursula.

Men in Love - Rupert advances the possibility of an implicit, perfect love shared between two men

Many films have used the entwined relationships of two couples to explore the inconsistent, conflicting complexities of spiritual and physical love (my favorites being Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge and Closer), but Ken Russell’s Women in Love gets to the heart of the matter (so to speak) in a way that is as visually poetic as it is emotionally painful. It's one of the most intelligent and genuinely provocative films about love I've ever seen.

I was in my early 20s the first time I saw Women in Love, and had you asked me, I genuinely would have told you I'd understood it then. But it seems with each passing year, the film reveals itself to be about so much more than I'd initially thought, I'm certain what I'd gleaned from the film at such a young age was but the mere tip of the emotional iceberg Russell presents us with.
Women in Love is one of those rare films that seems to grow smarter in direct proportion to the amount of life experience one chalks up. So it would seem, although you couldn't have convinced me of it at the time, my mom was right in thinking I was too young for this. Not that I wouldn't have loved to have seen Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in the buff, but Women in Love is far too mature in its themes for any of this to have made a whit of sense to me as an adolescent.
Sumptuously filmed, magnificently costumed (by Shirley Russell), and so exceptionally well-acted you can watch it again and again without ever unearthing all the delightful nuances in the actors’ performances, Women in Love is a thoughtful, surprisingly restrained film, and a pleasant departure from the operatic bombast of Russell’s later works.

Gudrun's desire for power and its liberating effects is poetically dramatized in a sequence in which her lyrical dancing tames and eventually overcomes a threatening-looking herd of highland cattle. (Amusingly, a herd which, when photographed from the front, share Gudrun's coloring and haircut.) 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

My favorite thing about Women in Love is how artfully it tackles the unwieldy topic of love. Especially the pain and emotional upheaval born of that overused word never seeming to mean the exact same thing to any two people at any one time. 
Obscured by illusion, distorted by need, thwarted by cowardice; the impulse to love may be innate and instinctual, but it’s also intensely confounding. Ken Russell contrasts images of nature with images of the encroaching industrialism of postwar England to dramatize the natural urges of the characters as being in conflict with their repressed, intellectual notions about love. Ursula, Gudrun, Rupert, and Gerald all do a great deal of thinking and talking about love, but none betray a  trace of genuinely having any idea of what love really is or what they want. 

As suggested by Women in Love's repeated use of the popular song "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," the characters all harbor romantic illusions about love: its potential for fulfillment, its ability to heal wounds, the emotional void it can fill. Conflict arises out of whether or not the grasping need of desire is capable of giving way to the vulnerability and freedom love requires.

Love & Death:  In a pairing shot that many critics of the day thought too heavy-handed (which, of course, meant I absolutely loved it), the drowning death of the film's only romantically idyllic couple (Sharon Gurney & Christopher Gable) is contrasted with Ursula & Rupert's unsatisfying first tryst. A premonition of blighted love, a graphic representation of romantic ideologies at cross purposes; the women's poses can be interpreted as lovingly embracing or greedily clinging to the men, the men, unequivocally adopting gestures of disentanglement.


PERFORMANCES

While Ken Russell's operatic zest and Larry Kramer's graceful screenplay mercifully spare Women in Love from the kind of over-reverential airlessness common in most film adaptations of classic novels, I attribute the lion's share of the credit for the film's vibrancy to the talents of the amazing cast. 

In an era that required so many actresses to play the compliant love interest to counterculture antiheroes, Women in Love was a refreshing change of pace in presenting two women who have a say in what they want from life and love. Personal fave Glenda Jackson (looking quite smart in her blunt, Vidal Sassoon bob) emerged in this film as something of the "New Woman" of '70s cinema.

Blessed with a mellifluous voice and an articulate beauty that radiates strength, intellect, and fleshy sensuality, Jackson is Old Hollywood star quality without the lacquered veneer. Much in the same way I attribute Woody Allen with unearthing Diane Keaton, Ken Russell and Glenda Jackson are a pair forever locked together in my mind. Her performance as Gudrun Brangwen, certainly one of the more complex, emotionally paradoxical characters in literature, is almost wily. Throughout the film she wears the look of a woman in possession of a secret she dares you to find out. The quintessential Ken Russell heroine, Jackson won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, and deservedly rose to stardom on the strength of this film. 

A real scene-stealer whose presence is very much missed when her character is required to recede into the background early on, is the ever-versatile Eleanor Bron as the pretentious Hermione: a potentially ridiculous individual made real and sympathetic by Bron's prodigious talent. Only after I'd read the book did I really come to appreciate the spot-on perfection of the self-enchanted sensual studiousness of Bron's performance.

Women in Love as a costume film/period piece, tightrope walks a space between stagy theatricality and naturalism that few but Russell—with his talent for finding natural locations that look like stage sets for an opera—could pull off. Alan Bates fits the film's romantic setting perfectly (because I find him to be so swoon-inducingly beautiful, I can’t honestly say I've ever been able to really evaluate his performance with much objectivity), and Jennie Linden is effective in the somewhat thankless role of Ursula.

Reed and Jackson bring such smoldering dynamic intensity to their roles that their scenes together always feel slightly dangerous. I can't think of another actress who could appear opposite Reed in a scene and leave you concerned for his safety. I think Reed's Gerald Crich is his finest screen performance. Employing his trademark whispers to great effect, he somehow manages to be brutish, refined, and heartbreakingly vulnerable all at the same time.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Given your average ratio of anticipation to disappointment, it came as no small surprise to discover, after having waited so many years, Women in Love’s fabled nude wrestling scene more than lived up to its reputation. Satisfied with merely being sensually enraptured by the sight of two obscenely sexy actors wrestling in the altogether; I wasn't at all prepared for what a dramatically powerful and daring scene it is. Daring not in its exposure of flesh, but in its exploration of a subtextual, taboo attribute of a great many onscreen male relationships (and, I daresay, many real-life relationships as well).

I'm not sure who said it, but someone once made the keen observation that homophobia in men is not really rooted in a general distaste for male-on-male sexual contact, but rather in the fear of "What if I like it?"
Heterosexual men have established a social order in which they have left themselves few avenues allowing for the expression of male affection. In lieu of this, they have contrived a network of female-excluding, male-bonding rituals so convoluted and complex (sports culture, strip clubs, ass slapping, "bros before hoes" guy codes, homophobic locker room humor, bromance comedies, misogyny masked as promiscuity [the Romeo syndrome], etc.) you sometimes wish they'd just have sex with each other and get it over with. One can't help but feel that the world would be a less aggressive, insecure place if they did.

In Women in Love, Rupert and Gerald's friendship is really the most intimate, passionate, and loving relationship in the film, but Rupert uses words and lofty theories to mask his inability to fully confront his own sexual confusion, while Gerald is too emotionally remote to allow himself to address the issue at all. On the heels of the death of Gerald's sister and following Rupert's less-than-fulfilling consummation of his affair with Ursula, the two friends find themselves at a loss for how to "appropriately" comfort one another. So, as is the wont of repressed heterosexual males the world over, Rupert and Gerald resort to displays of physical aggression as a heterosexual means of expressing homosexual intimacy.

As the friendly combat gives way to a physical exhaustion matching their physical closeness, it's clear to Rupert that Gerald feels "something" akin to his own feelings. But before that ultimate intimacy can be broached, Gerald, in an act of willful misunderstanding, finds it necessary to break off what has been established between them before things have a chance of preceding any further. (Wrestling by firelight, the very natural state of their nudity is made vulgar and shameful by the intrusion of the modern electric light he abruptly switches on.)

As a fan of '70s movies, what makes this sequence particularly compelling for me is how it symbolically evokes the unaddressed subtext in all those post-feminism, male-centric buddy pictures of the decade. Films like Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider—films in which women are shunted off to the sidelines—are all essentially male romances. In each film, women are present, even loved, but there's no getting past the fact that the deepest, most profoundly spiritual love occurs between the male characters. Women in Love's wrestling scene dramatizes the struggle men face when affection for another man is felt, and (at least in this instance), the societal and morality-imposed roles of "friend" are found to be inadequate.

It's an outstandingly courageous sequence whose confrontational frankness wrests Women in Love out of the past and centers it far and above what most mainstream filmmakers are willing to do even today. Who knew? A sequence I only expected to be a feast for the eyes proved to be food for thought as well.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Women in Love was promoted with the tagline—“The relationship between four sensual people is limited: They must find a new way.” And while this might sound more like the tagline for 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, it does at least touch upon the theme of the inadequacy of classically “romantic” notions of love in a modern world, and the need for a kind of sexual evolution.

The Proper Way to Eat a Fig
Almost as scandalous as Women in Love's nudity was the inclusion of a scene (not in the book) where Rupert compares a fig to female genitalia. The words are taken from D.H. Lawrence's 1923 erotic poem, Figs, which can be read in its entirety, HERE

None of the characters in Women in Love are able to fully align what they presuppose about love (nor what is true to their natures) with their present realities. In an earlier post about Mike Nichols’ Closer, I wrote:
“The four protagonists fumble about blindly seeking love without knowing how to return it, demanding love without earning it, and giving love without committing to it.”

The same can be said for the characters in Women in Love. And although more than 70 years separate the creation of the two works (Patrick Marber's play, Closer, was written in 1997, D.H. Lawrence's novel was published in 1920) it intrigues me that after so many years and so much human progress, the basic cosmic riddle that is love remains essentially and eternally unanswered.

Undomesticated
Rupert - "But I wanted a man friend eternal...as you are eternal."
Ursula - "You can't have it because it's impossible."
Rupert - "I don't believe that."

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2014

A TOUCH OF CLASS 1973

A Touch of Class is one of my favorite comedies. But like The Women, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Cactus Flower, or almost anything written by Neil Simon; it’s a comedy I’m only able to still enjoy if I disregard contemporary sensibilities (both comedic and social), and simply allow it to remain a time-piece firmly ensconced within the bubble of the era in which it was made.

Glenda Jackson as Vickie Allessio

George Segal as Steve Blackburn

Director/writer Melvin Frank’s A Touch of Class is a perfectly amiable, very watchable, and, upon occasion, absolutely hilarious, romantic comedy about love and adultery from the era of the sexual revolution. It boasts fine leading performances from then-darlings of the cinema Glenda Jackson and George Segal; a jaunty musical score; crisp, comedy-friendly photography; some nice views of scenic London and Spain; and quite a lot of funny bicker-banter, oil/vinegar chemistry between the two leads.

That being said, it is also a rather ordinary, schticky, sometimes broadly played, middle-brow comedy thoroughly lacking in the kind of wit or distinction that would justify its having won Glenda Jackson her second Best Actress Oscar (and a Golden Globe). Even more mind-boggling...it somehow managed to snag four additional Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, shutting out such (in my opinion, far worthier) possible contenders as: Last Tango in Paris, Paper Moon, The Last Detail, The Way We Were, The Long Goodbye, and Mean Streets.

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs 
A Touch of Class makes explicit its intent to be a frankly comedic update of the coy adultery melodramas of the past by having Steve and Vickie fall to pieces watching David Lean's 1946 film, Brief Encounter on TV. Brief Encounter tells the story of two married people who embark upon an ill-fated love affair.

George Segal is an insurance adjuster, and Glenda Jackson, is a fashion designer (“stealer” as she calls it). Both reside in London, he: 11 years wed with two children, she: three years wed - now divorced, also with two children. After a “cute meet” and several coincidental run-ins, the two embark upon a no-strings-attached affair that gets off to a rocky start, grows passionate, then becomes complicated when lust turns into love. How funny you find Segal’s sitcom-y attempts to lead a double life depends a great deal on how amusing you find the script (serviceable), how charming you find the leads (considerable), and hilarious the concept of ceaseless lying and deception as the cornerstones of familial harmony (not very).

As Glenda Jackson's two children, Edward Kemp and Lisa Vanderpump appear onscreen for about as long as it took for you to read this. George Segal's children fare even worse. A Touch of Class wants us to believe the bond of family (lies being the glue, apparently) triumphs over homewrecking, but George Segal's Steve Blackburn is such an absentee dad, he makes Ryan O'Neal look like Father of the Year. 

The uninitiated, drawn to A Touch of Class by its Academy Award pedigree or Glenda Jackson’s reputation, are apt to come away from it entertained, but undoubtedly bewildered and scratching their heads, wondering what was being put in the water back in 1973 to result in a movie that plays out like an extended episode of Love, American Style being so widely lauded by critics (although Pauline Kael is said to have walked out on it). I confess, upon revisiting this film, it’s a question I even have to ask myself. And this from the guy who, when it was released, saw A Touch of Class more times than he can count, and considered it one of the funniest comedies he’d seen since What’s Up, Doc?.

Part of this may have to do with changing tastes in comedy. For reasons I’m at a loss to explain, some types of comedy are timeless, while others age rather badly. I saw A Touch of Class when I was 16 years old, and my only guess as to why I fell in love with its bed-hopping clichés is that they weren't yet clichés to me. Another explanation for the film’s success, one I fully recall, is that at the time, America was deep in the throes of a brief but passionate infatuation with Glenda Jackson.

Albeit by way of a terrible wig, audiences were pleased to see BBC's Elizabeth R let her hair down

After gaining the attention of American audiences with her Best Actress Oscar win for Women in Love (1969), Jackson was a prolific onscreen presence throughout the decade, going on to appear in many highly acclaimed films: The Music Lovers, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Hedda, The Maids, Mary Queen of Scots, The Romantic Englishwoman, and The Nelson Affair.

She was literally the Meryl Streep of her day. And, much in the way critics and audiences in the '80s longed to see Streep drop her accents and somber façade for lighter fare like Postcards from the Edge or Death Becomes Her; '70s audiences were thrilled to discover that Glenda Jackson, the intense, neurotic heroine of so many Ken Russell melodramas, possessed a real flair for comedy.

George Segal appeared in a staggering number of films, both comedic and dramatic, between 1970s Where's Poppa? and the flop 1979 re-teaming with Glenda Jackson, Lost & Found. Although he played essentially the exact same character in all of his comedies, nobody did bemused fluster better.

My rave recommendation of this film to my partner (followed by his subsequent, “Meh!” reaction) clarified for me that A Touch of Class has, for the first-timer, a couple of things working against it. And from highly unlikely sources, to boot. One is its title. A Touch of Class suggests a witty, sophisticated comedy of the sort that once starred Myrna Loy and William Powell. But as many critics couldn't resist noting at the time, a more apt title for A Touch of Class would be A Touch of Crass, what with the screenplay's over-reliance on profanity and smirky sex jokes for laughs.

Given  how Jackson's character makes reference at one point to author Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, I'm rather inclined to think the film's title A Touch of Class, is used in irony; like Wharton's The Age of Innocence.

Secondly, and this is an odd one, I think it does A Touch of Class no favors that it’s a 1973 Best Picture nominee, and that it stars one of the preeminent actresses of her time in her Academy Award-winning role. Why is this problem? Principally, because it sets the viewer up for a film far superior to the one they’re ultimately given. I truly enjoy this movie a great deal, but even in all my rabid Glenda Jackson fandom there’s no way I consider hers an Oscar-worthy performance, nor this film Best Picture material. I'm convinced my partner's reaction to A Touch of Class would have been far more favorable had he come to it expecting an unexceptional, lightweight, early '70s comedy that's amusing if not laugh-out-loud funny. The latter being rare as hen's teeth today.

Any points A Touch of Class gains in giving Jackson's character a gay male secretary (Michael Elwin, r.), are soon lost by having his every appearance serve as some kind of swishy/homophobic sight gag. (Even Jayne Mansfield would say this apartment is laying on the pink a little heavy.)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What works best in A Touch of Class and what makes it a film I literally never tire of watching, is the marvelous “opposites attract” chemistry between Glenda Jackson and George Segal. And while they don't exactly make us forget Tracy & Hepburn, the two play delightfully antagonistic foils before their romance starts to gel. Jackson's slow, boiling rages so compliment Segal's edgy exasperation that their frequent sparring and bickering scenes crackle with the spark and energy of a well-matched tennis game. Jackson, with her crystal clear diction and mellifluous voice, has it all over Segal for hilariously sarcastic jeremiads, but she doesn't have Segal's gift for physical comedy. George Segal is a joy to watch, and he has the rubbery face (and enormous head) to pull off a veritable lexicon of comic double-takes and reaction shots.

Jackson's flinty British calm contrasts amusingly with Segal's neurotic American excitability 

PERFORMANCES

A Touch of Class is essentially a two-character piece, so it’s great that Jackson and Segal are so enjoyable to watch. That is, inasmuch as Melvin Frank and Jack Rose’s farcical, gag-filled screenplay pauses long enough to give these talented actors enough breathing room to flesh out their characters (Frank and Rose, both in their 60s at the time, got their start writing Bob Hope movies). George Segal coasts a bit on charm alone (and if you don’t find him charming, the blithely immoral character he plays is sure to grate) but Jackson is a revelation. She does wonders with a character not given much more than “typically British” as a personality trait.

If my enjoyment of Breakfast at Tiffany's is ruined every time Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi shows up, so it is with A Touch of Class and the irksome and cloddish "ubiquitous best friend" character played by Paul Sorvino.  Each time he shows up I race for the fast-forward button on my remote.

It amuses me to have read several online reviews that state Glenda Jackson’s character is a feminist. She may very well be, but since no mention is made, expressly or covertly, of Jackson’s Vickie Allessio actually being a feminist, I can only take this to mean that young audiences raised on the female masochists typical of today’s rom-coms (Katherine Heigl, Jennifer Anniston, Drew Barrymore, Sarah Jessica Parker) can only envision smart, articulate women who speak up for themselves, know their own minds, and have their own opinions, as a feminist. If that's the case, I think we could use more romantic comedies populated with feminists.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A Touch of Class is a deliberate throwback to the sex comedies of old with its updated gimmick being the ability to tell the story with the freedoms afforded by the “new permissiveness” of the '70s. While this certainly makes for raunchier language and a less coy approach to the adulterous couplings, it also affords a few awkward moments as the old clashes with the new in unexpected (and sometimes unintentionally funny) ways.

The effortless gravitas Glenda Jackson brings to A Touch of Class significantly compensates for the film's wobbly gender politics which include a rape joke; a homey, constantly cooking mistress; and several cheating husbands but not a single cheating wife.

European films have always been able to combine nudity and comedy, but here in the States, nudity tends to stifle laughter. So, as incongruous as it is for a pair of heated lovers off on an illicit tryst in the free-love '70s, out pop a pair of his and hers pajamas suitable to a Doris Day/ Rock Hudson movie.

Traditional gender roles are adhered to pretty stringently throughout, but every now and then an unexpected curve is thrown, such as in this scene where a squeamish Steve clings to Vickie at a bullfight

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I began this post stating how much more I enjoy A Touch of Class when I don’t try to apply modern sensibilities to what is now a 40-year-old film. Not always an easy thing, but something classic film lovers frequently have to do when faced with outmoded attitudes about sex, race, and gender in otherwise terrific films. I'm not exactly captivated by the idea of a film that depicts serial adultery as just another charming personality quirk in boyish, middle-aged men (in fact, as a gay man denied marriage rights in many states, it galls a bit to think of how films like this tend to undervalue and take for granted such a gift...even if it's just for escapist laughs); but it speaks well of the overall tidy professionalism of A Touch of Class that none of these things really occur to you until after the film is over.

Of course, my chief fondness for this film lies with Glenda Jackson, one of the absolute best of the slew of intelligent, interesting actresses that seemed to flourish in the '70s, only to disappear come the blockbuster 80s. In this, her first motion picture comedy (if one doesn't count a priceless unbilled cameo in Ken Russell's The Boy Friend) she revealed a heretofore untapped comic gift later put to good use in several films, most notably, House Calls (1977), Nasty Habits (1977) and Robert Altman's little-seen, H.E.A.L.T.H. (1980). There isn't a single moment in A Touch of Class where she doesn't dominate the screen with her lively, fully committed performance. And while it'll always be my personal belief that Ellen Burstyn should have won the Oscar that year for The Exorcist, in reality, could ANY acting award granted Glenda Jackson ever be considered undeserved?

Four-time Oscar nominee, two-time winner. When Jackson retired from acting in 1992 to become a Member of Parliament, film lost a true original. A versatile, intriguing, and very classy actress.

*Addendum - After 23-years in Parliament, Glenda Jackson returned to acting at age 79. In 2016 she enjoyed a triumphant return to the stage starring as King Lear at London's Old Vic Theater.


Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

THE MAIDS 1975

Let me tell you a fairy tale. Once upon a time there was a film producer who believed that movies didn’t have to appeal to the lowest common denominator or always chase the fastest buck. (I told you it was a fairy tale.) In all likelihood under the enchantment of some evil sorcerer, this producer was possessed of the radical notion that films could inspire tastes rather than follow trends, and that motion pictures, in spite of being a populace medium, held the potential for the broader exposure of culture and the arts. From such chimerical fancies was born The American Film Theater (AFT): a limited-engagement subscription series of films adapted from great plays. Over the course of a year these films would screen for one or two days only, two performances each (a matinee and an evening show), after which the films would be withdrawn from release (“Forever!” as the ads intoned). And they lived happily ever after.

OK...OK, we all know I’m not literally speaking of a fairy tale—but I might as well be, given the inconceivability of such an artistically altruistic idea even being broached in today’s Hollywood. The producer in question was the late Ely Landau (producer of the acclaimed 1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. documentary- King: A Filmed Record…Montgomery to Memphis), and The AFT, his cinematic vision of a cultural Camelot, lasted but a brief two years (1973 – 1975) , but managed to produce a lasting film legacy of 14 marvelous plays with once-in-a-lifetime casts.

Click to Enlarge

I was in high school in 1974 and remember wanting to buy a subscription to a season of AFT very badly. But as the films were screened on Monday & Tuesday evenings exclusively, the whole “It’s a school night!” issue rendered the entire matter a closed book as far as my parents were concerned. I did, however, have the AFT poster on my bedroom wall and made myself fairly miserable staring at the diverse catalog of filmed plays offered (A Delicate Balance, The Iceman Cometh, Luther, Lost in the Stars), imagining all that I was missing. 

The film I most wanted to see was the adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids; not because I knew anything about Genet, but because two of my all-time fave rave actresses: Glenda Jackson and Susannah York, were playing the leads. Well, it may have taken 29 years, but The Maids has finally been released on DVD, (in fact, the entire AFT collection - Click here for info: AFT on DVD ) and with it, my adolescent patience rewarded, at last.

Glenda Jackson as Solange

Susannah York as Claire

Vivien Merchant as Madame

With America's history so resolutely mired in slavery, institutionalized racism, and rarely acknowledged socioeconomic imperatives (the rich need the poor); we in the U.S. tend to prefer our domestics sentimentalized (think Shirley Booth in TVs Hazel, Alice on The Brady Bunch, Mr. French in Family Affair, or any TV program in which the "Just like one of the family!"message is reiterated). The social inequities of status or income are never addressed unless crouched in the most cloyingly emotional terms (US domestics work for love, not money...at least on TV), and any expressed resentment or hostility toward one's employer is thoroughly out of the question. The only time we Yanks seem able to relax and enjoy a thoughtful, honest depiction of the precarious servant/employer dynamic is when we're able to put an ocean between us, and even then, only when the events are safely ensconced in the past.

Does it interfere with our appreciation of beautiful surroundings, meticulously maintained,
to consider the lives of those who are paid to keep them that way?

Americans may find a film about white employers and black domestics uncomfortable, but few really expect anything else. Indeed, domestic workers of color are such an accepted cultural conceit that an entire film (1987's Maid to Order) was built around the satiric premise of a white family coveting the status symbol that comes from having a white maid (Ally Sheedy). Since the vast majority of major motion pictures produced in America are for and from the perspective of the white gaze; Stateside domestics (being people of color) are rarely given much emotional dimension. Their role is either to reassure and comfort audiences by being the grateful recipients of white largess, or be the non-complaining supporters of the status quo, happy in their lot. 

Because we reserve humanity for white characters, the oppressed class system hierarchy of European aristocracy in things like Downton Abbey, Gosford Park, or Upstairs, Downstairs, are the only environments in which we allow ourselves to listen to the voices of the oppressed from a humanist, non-political perspective. As a country, it seems we find it easier to identify and empathize with the subjugated masses when they're white.  

Although denied by the play's author, Jean Genet, The Maids is popularly believed to have been inspired by the notorious real-life crimes of Lea and Christine Papin; two maids who brutally murdered the wife and daughter of an employer in 1933 France.

If ever there was an artist about whom the words “non-threatening” and “comforting” most definitely do not apply, it is the late, great, poet/novelist/playwright/activist, Jean Genet. His theatrically incendiary play The Maids (written in 1946) and is an acerbic, absurdist treatise on identity and class struggle that plays out like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  and The Killing of Sister George crossed with Harold Pinter’s The Servant.

In the ornately fussy, Louis XV furnished apartments in the aristocratically ritzy Place Vendôme district of France, two embittered live-in domestics work out their hostility toward their mistress (and their own self-frustration for enduring such servitude) by routinely engaging in a ritualized pantomime whenever she is away. Alternately taking on the roles of employer and servant, the maids—Solange (Jackson) and her sister Claire (York)— literally lose themselves in this cathartic ceremony of (self)contempt and emancipation that strives, always unsuccessfully, to culminate in the make-believe murder of Madame.

Truth Games
Madame/Claire: "You only EXIST through me!"

As the film begins, the exaggerated passions of the playacting maids are running at a particularly feverish high, as it appears that their fantasy plotting has begun to take root in the real world. Emboldened by the early morning arrest of Madame’s lover (the result of incriminating letters anonymously mailed to the police by Claire) and invigorated by this small sign of efficaciousness in lives of servile invisibility; the maids determine on this day to make actual, the much dreamed-about, never consummated, death of their beloved/detested Madame.  

Claire: "Now I will order the world about!"

   

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Though not overtly fond of Theater of the Absurd, I do have a penchant for the manner in which art can thrust to the forefront that which is rarely spoken of and scarcely acknowledged about the human condition. Like so many of my favorite films (Robert Altman’s 3 Women, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan), The Maids is about masks, role-playing, and the flexible quality of identity. We each wear masks and play various roles throughout our lives. Often with such regularity and acuity that it can become difficult to remember just what it was the original mask was meant to conceal. Meanwhile the shifting power plays in our day-to-day lives and relationships only serve to reinforce the ever-alternating positions of supplicant and master we find ourselves in. The Maids cleverly uses the banal protocols of domestic servitude (where the feelings of contempt/gratitude/anguish ambiguously co-mingle) to dramatize the interdependent manner in which the way we are perceived by others can come to define the very selfsame ways we see and regard ourselves.

Solange: "When slaves love each other it's not love."
Claire: "No, but it's just as serious."

PERFORMANCES

The '70s was the era of the male "buddy picture," yet, paradoxically, it was also a time (albeit, short-lived) when interesting actors like Glenda Jackson and Susannah York could land major roles in fascinating projects like this. Certainly a film with an all-female cast (Madame's lover is briefly, wordlessly seen) is notable in any era, but because the '70s boasted such a remarkable breed of versatile, intelligent, and unique actresses (Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, Genevieve Bujold, Shelley Duvall), I'm especially thrilled that two of my favorites were paired in a feature. 

Playing sisters of different temperament (and I gather, intelligence) both Jackson and Susannah infuse their complex characters with considerable emotional depth, making palpable the pain behind the often high-flown language. Jackson is dynamic, as always, but the late Susannah York, with her despairingly throaty voice and wounded eyes is even better than she was in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

 Vivien Merchant (Alfie, Fenzy) manages to capture the conflicting characteristics of dominance, condescension, and vulnerability in the theatrically self-dramatizing character of Madame 

  

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

For all its perception, perhaps what’s most brilliant and surprising about The Maids is how terribly enjoyable it is. As a fan of bitchy repartee, I love the film’s near-poetic verbal battles of hurled invectives and raging hostilities. I also take great pleasure in how the film veers, with unexpected bite, into dark comedy. But what I most thoroughly enjoy and what brings me back to The Maids again and again is the finely-honed suspense and dramatic tension which propels the plot along its barely-tethered-to-reality course. There’s a considerable amount of anxiety mined from the current of madness and potential for violence that runs beneath the central conflict of The Maids.

"Naturally, maids are guilty, when madames are innocent."
As the predicament of the maids grows ever perilous, we find ourselves drawn into the paranoia of inanimate objects conspiring to betray them. It is a fact of a maid's day-to-day existence that the dust on the mantle and the unpolished mirror will stand as silent accusers of a job incomplete. When conspiring to kill one's employer, how many small details can be similarly neglected?

Class Distinctions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

There are so many ways for The Maids to be interpreted, so many levels upon which it works, it’s like watching a new film every time you come back to it. An intelligent, eccentric film, I can’t imagine it being to everyone’s taste (the intentional theatricality of the language and performances can prove distancing, if not confounding); but it is one of those films which rewards each visit with even more information and overlooked details. Both in performance and theme. I think it’s an absolutely brilliant, moving work made surprising accessible by the combined efforts of everyone involved in this film adaptation...chiefly the outstanding performances of Glenda Jackson and Susannah York. 

"The revenger is always born of the maids."

Playwright of The Maids, Jean Genet, passed away in 1986. A fascinating artist with an even more fascinating life, this is one of my favorites of his many quotable quotes:
"I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green."

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Signature of Susannah York received at a 2005 performance of her one-woman show, The Loves of Shakespeare's Women

Copyright © Ken Anderson