CACTUS FLOWER 1969

When I think back to that time in the late '60s when Old Hollywood (all overlit studio sets, name stars, and formulaic genres) begrudgingly made way for New Hollywood (auteurism, non-linear storytelling, social relevance), it's easy for me to forget how gradual and awkward a transitional period it was. Film history books can make it seem as though on a Monday, Hollywood was churning out studio-bound product like Harlow and The Glass Bottom Boat, and by Friday, youthquake script-flippers like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde were before the cameras. Closer to the truth is that the old guard was very slow in passing the torch to the younger generation, and the strain showed in several of the films made during this tricky period of adjustment.   

Mrs. Dickinson admires her metaphor 
"Some flowers blossom late, but they're the kind that lasts the longest"

During what could be called the movie industry's "Last Gasp" phase—a period wedged uneasily between the studio system excesses of the late-'60s and the emergence of the American New Wave of the early-'70s—Hollywood released a glut of wheezily old-fashioned films it attempted to pass off as "with it" and "now" entertainments that sought to capture the sudden cultural preoccupation with youth.

These woefully middle-class, middle-aged, and formulaically sitcom-y films strove to reflect a youthful perspective while effectively having absolutely no idea of what that actually was. 

The result was the token insertion of self-consciously "hip" templates into the usual middle-of-the-road movie formulas. For example, rock music (which, to the septuagenarian ears running the studios, meant muzak-type stabs at the contemporary sound by veterans like John Williams and Henry Mancini); language and nudity unthinkable during the Hays Code years; aggressively contemporary (and instantly dating) mod costuming and art direction; and the inclusion of at least one cast member under the age of 40.

The Cactus Flower in Bloom

In an effort to stay relevant or simply to stay fed, several stars of Hollywood's Golden Age willingly (if unwittingly) allowed themselves to be depicted as Generation Gap gargoyles in vehicles both ill-suited for and exploitative of their talents. In 1969, both Lana Turner and Jennifer Jones tarnished their images in the youth market mistakes The Big Cube and the has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed Angel, Angel, Down We Go, respectively. The following year, glamour girl Rita Hayworth appeared in a low-budget oddity titled The Naked Zoo, while screen legend Mae West made headlines in the more high-profile (but no less demoralizing) Myra Breckinridge. 

Hollywood's leading men were far from immune to the same screen humiliations, but by and large, the double standard allowing for aging men to still appear as viable romantic leads opposite their much younger co-stars (Cactus Flower, anyone?) served as a considerable, sexist, buffer. 

The creep-out factor of the whopping 25-year age difference between Matthau and Hawn
 is mitigated considerably by Matthau exuding a charm more avuncular than sexual and Hawn exuding the waifish appeal of a mod Betty Boop

What distinguished these late-to-the-party stabs at contemporary relevance was their dogged prioritization of the older perspective. No matter how contemporary the themes were, the worldview presented was middle-aged, the youth angle was mere window-dressing. 

When films took the generational divide seriously, movies like The Arrangement and The Happy Ending were the result. In these films, young people were used as plot devices initiating or solving the mid-life identity crises of the older lead character. When the approach was comedic, the dominant perspective was of the older generation reacting in smarmy, voyeuristic, and smirking ways about the New Permissiveness (a la Prudence and the Pill and The Impossible Years). 

One of the better films to emerge from this cross-generational limbo is 1969s Cactus Flower. And while its perspective is no less mired in the middle-class and the middle-aged (playwright Abe Burrows was 55 when he adapted the 1964 French farce Fleur de Cactus [by Jean-Pierre Grady & Pierre Barillet] for the Broadway stage in 1965), Cactus Flower has a sprightly charm that begs forgiveness for its glaring contrivance.

Due to the popularity of TV's Laugh-In, Goldie Hawn's participation dominated Cactus Flower's publicity campaign and stole some of the thunder of scandal-exiled Ingrid Bergman's return to Hollywood studio cameras after a 20-year absence.  

Indeed, it can be said that Cactus Flower's theatrical roots (heh-heh) are on full display in the artificiality of its simple plot (one would be forgiven for assuming it the work of Neil Simon), and that it at times comes across like an extended Love, American Style episode (whose brightly-lit sitcom look it shares). But thanks to snappy pacing and an appealing cast, it avoids the fate that later befell its similar, gender-switch twin, the labored and tepid 40 Carats (1973). Bergman, Matthau, and Hawn stepping into roles originated onstage by Lauren Bacall (stage debut), Barry Nelson, and Brenda Vaccaro are a shining example of how charismatic and resourceful actors can turn run-of-the-mill dross into comedy gold.

Walter Matthau as Julian Winston

Ingris Bergman as Stephanie Dickinson

Goldie Hawn as Toni Simmons

Jack Weston as Harvey Greenfield

Rick Lenz as Igor Sullivan

Confirmed middle-aged bachelor Julian Winston (Matthau) has managed to keep matrimonial designs out of the head of his much younger girlfriend, Toni (Hawn), by pretending to be the married father of three. When Toni's attempt at suicide (always a rousing way to get a romantic comedy off of the ground) prompts the Park Avenue dentist to propose, Winson asks his devoted nurse Mrs. Dickinson (Bergman) to pose as his wife in order to reassure Toni that she is not a homewrecker, and that the couple's impending divorce is both amicable and mutually desired.

Of course, this being a farce, nothing goes as planned, and all manner of Neil Simon-esque comic complications arise before the not-unexpected, age-appropriate, happy ending fade-out.

For all its attempts to appear current (discotheques, hippies, a "hip" soundtrack of pop tunes arranged by Quincy Jones), Cactus Flower can't disguise its origins in the "tired businessman" era of theater when breezily escapist musicals and plays were concocted for the benefit of NYC businessmen seeking to avoid the rush hour crunch of the trains to the suburbs. 

Dating back as far as 1952's The Seven Year Itch, these shows offered mindless laughs and tame titillation by way of middle-aged wish-fulfillment fantasies envisioning a world populated by bland professional men on the prowl pursued by bevies of beautiful young women who live only to be wed. That marriage is presented as the end-all and be-all symbol of happy-ending bliss has always struck me as positively perverse, given how prominently lying, deception, and serial adultery figure into the courtship rituals of the characters in these so-called sexually sophisticated comedies.

Eve Bruce as Georgia

Everything is fair game for comedy, but as a kid, I always thought romantic comedies from the repressed, sex-equals-sexist '60s were a strange breed. Movies like Under the Yum Yum Tree, The Marriage-Go-Round, Boeing, Boeing, The Guide for the Married Man, and Any Wednesday all gave the sophomoric impression of being sex-obsessed, yet unable to find humor in the topic unless it was the smirking, giggling behind the hand, innuendo-laden type.

These comedies perpetuated an image of romantic courtship as an intricacy of calculated lies and tricks couples played on one another in an effort to avoid and/or hasten a walk down the aisle. If it was a domestic comedy, then the state of matrimony is depicted as a life sentence arrangement wherein the "domesticated" male can't wait to stray, and the clinging female is depicted as an emasculating killjoy.

Vito Scotti as Arturo Sanchez

Cactus Flower is cut from much the same cloth, so I'm surprised as anyone that I like it so much (if you stop to think about the plot for too long, Julian comes off as a cruelly manipulative and selfish character undeserving of either of the ladies vying for him). Betraying its origins in French farce, Cactus Flower has so many characters having affairs out of wedlock, much of it comes off like a pro-adultery infomercial or something. 

Nevertheless, the film wins me over. Maybe it has something to do with the humor (appealingly corny, old-fashioned, and leaning into on-liner delivery patterns) and the "harmless" characters who don't quite come off as human (nothing ever seems as offensive or offputting as it could because droopy Mattahau reminds me of Yogi Bear, and wide-eyed Hawn looks like Tweetie Bird). What I do know is that I find Cactus Flower to be amiable, sweet-natured, laugh-out-loud funny, and an absolute delight… almost in spite of itself.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Say what you want about old Hollywood, but when it was at the top of its game, no one was better at turning out this type of frothy, intricate farce. Cactus Flower has the undistinguished yet delectable visual gloss of a Doris Day movie; a sardonically funny screenplay by Some Like it Hot's I. A. L. Diamond (adapted from Abe Burrows' play); snappy, keep-the-action-moving direction by Gene Saks; and, most advantageously, a cast of newcomers and veterans who skillfully know their way around a punchline.

Julian introduces Toni to his fake wife and her fake lover

The premise of Cactus Flower is silly in the extreme, but it's unlikely anyone could devise a narrative journey I wouldn't want to be taken on by Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, Jack Weston, and Ingrid Bergman. I don't know if it's as obvious on a single viewing, but these four are champs. Weston nails every one of his comic lines, frequently making just his silent reactions hilarious. Hawn is vulnerable in the dramatic scenes (which she steals) and appealing in the comic. Bergman is great with a sardonic line and proves a wonderful foil for Matthau's slouchy charm.  

And Matthau...I don't know that I would like this film as much without him. As I've stated, I think the Julian character is written rather creepily, but thanks to Matthau's likeability and endlessly flexible face (and that magic brow of his), the actor triumphs over the material.

Many directors swear by the art of casting, claiming that the right cast can salvage a weak screenplay. The screenplay for Cactus Flower isn't exactly weak (familiar, perhaps), but the cast is so first-rate that it elevates the material to heights it doesn't always rightfully earn.

My partner posed the provocative notion that back when Hawn was in her 50s, it would have been gimmicky fun to see her in a remake (rethink?) of Cactus Flower with her in the Mattahu role and some upcoming male comedic actor in his 20s take her role. With the switch of one letter, he could even retain her character's name: Tony.   

Trade magazine ad congratulating Goldie Hawn for
her Best Supporting Actress Oscar win

PERFORMANCES

As Goldie Hawn's nomination and win for Cactus Flower is the only Oscar recognition the film received, it's a fact worth mentioning, but as an indication of merit... I'm not so sure. 

Hawn is absolutely wonderful in the role, but in contemplating her win over Susannah York in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Dyan Cannon in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and Catherine Burns in Last Summer, it helps to keep things in perspective. We're talking the Academy Awards here: an organization whose voters can't help factoring in sentiment, likability, inoffensiveness, publicity, and popularity before it gets around to evaluating performance mertit. 

Hawn was the blonde "It" girl of the moment, and I think the public's affection for the bubble-head she portrayed on TV's outrageously popular Laugh-In factored heavily in her win. And apparently, the voting bloc of the Golden Globes felt the same, for Hawn also took that award home. I don't mean to sell Hawn short, for in this, her first major film role (in 1968, she appeared in Disney's creaky musical, The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band ), Hawn radiates genuine star quality and holds her own against veterans Matthau and Bergman in a way that must have been downright astounding to Laugh-In fans. 

With her enormous eyes and Betty Boop voice, it is difficult not to watch Hawn every second. She's so excitingly kinetic a presence she single-handedly blows the cobwebs off of Cactus Flower's sometimes stale bedroom humor. She does a marvelous job with a deceptively difficult role. She has to make Toni sweet and waiflike enough to care about, but strong and resilient enough so that Julian doesn't come off as a total selfish jerk.

Ingrid Bergman is not known for her comedy chops, but she and Matthaur have excellent comic chemistry. I'd read that Dick Van Dyke was one of Cactus Flower's early casting considerations, and while I don't know if Lauren Bacall was ever asked to recreate her stage performance onscreen, Lee Grant was briefly in the running to be cast as the late-blooming leading lady. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Goldie Hawn's character is a clerk in a Greenwich Village record store. The scenes set amongst the shelves of albums (featuring artists like Lou Rawls, The Beatles, Buck Owens, and Petula Clark), 8-track tapes, and walls of psychedelic blacklight posters feel as distant and of another time as any episode of Downton Abbey. They make me feel nostalgic...and old. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Because there's so little about Cactus Flower that reflects the year it was made, it plays better now than it did in 1969. In the year of Woodstock, the Stonewall Riots, Charles Manson, and the Vietnam War, America could certainly use a few laughs, but Cactus Flower's mid-life comedy must have seemed a tad out of touch. 

Today, it's a film that fits snugly into the vague, pop-culture mashup that is the entire decade of the 1960s (on a double-bill, Cactus Flower would not look out-of-date opposite a Doris Day movie like 1963's Move Over, Darling), and feels charmingly corny and just a tiny bit camp (what with references to "love beads" and those lounging hippies outside of Stereo Heaven). But the dialogue makes me laugh, the performances are great fun to watch, and if I don't dwell too long on the whole lying-your-way-to-love subtext, I have a wonderful time watching it. 

This is the rom-com done right.

Clip from "Cactus Flower" (1969)

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

"Ken, see how old and mean you get if you hang around long enough."

The autographed photo is from 1995, when I worked as Matthau's personal trainer (a situation that amused the legendary sloucher no end). I liked him a great deal and found him to be every bit as funny (he told the best dirty jokes!) and sweet as he appears on screen. With all the great anecdotes he shared about working in Hollywood, I'm the one who should have been paying for our sessions. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2025

AUTUMN SONATA 1978

The tragic back-to-back deaths of actress/author Carrie Fisher (December 27, 2016) and her mother, Classic Hollywood movie star Debbie Reynolds (December 28, 2016) offered a poignantly bittersweet, fittingly Hollywood-like end to one of my generation’s most conspicuous and compelling mother and daughter relationships.  

As though following a script co-written by centuries of accomplished mothers and the daughters who sought to emerge from under their shadow, the life trajectory that took Debbie and Carrie from the semi-autobiographical purge of Postcards from the Edge (1990) to the late-in-life mutual admiration evident in the moving documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher & Debbie Reynolds (2016), played out before my eyes like a real-life Fannie Hurst novel.

There may be no relationship as fundamentally complex and formative as that of parent and child. Nor, it would seem, one as inextricably fraught with the potential for misunderstanding, miscommunication, and the inadvertent infliction of crippling psychological wounds. 

When it comes to parenting, our culture, while not wholly forgiving, is inclined to make allowances for the unavailable father. Cast by patriarchy and social gender norms as the breadwinner/head of the household, a father’s physical and emotional absence in the home is rarely called into question if it’s in the service of carrying out his “duty” as husband and father: i.e., being the provider of food and shelter for his family. 

Hollywood is full of notoriously MIA dads (Henry Fonda, Ryan O’Neal, Bing Crosby, Carrie Fisher’s own absentee dad Eddie Fisher), but public scorn fell less along the lines of their not carrying their fair share of the emotional weight of parenting, but more along the lines of morality: the absentee workaholic father, while not ideal, is acceptable; censure is reserved for the philanderer father.

The same leniency has not always been accorded mothers.

Lacking much in our culture that supports, encourages, or even explains the reality of the working mother in terms that are not subtly reprimanding; women with ambitions outside the home are generally held to a higher, more critical standard than men. Women with families still face society’s two-option-only job default setting: motherhood = essential & important; mothers engaged in any professional endeavor beyond the scope of childrearing = nonessential bordering on self-indulgent.
(It's significant to note that this distinction is rooted in race and class, and rarely applied to women of color or the working-class poor.)

Paying little heed to the reasoning that a suppressed, unfulfilled individual of either sex is very likely to make for a pretty toxic parent, our culture rewards ambitious motherhood (e.g., that Octomom nutjob, the celebrity trend of serial adoption, reality TV shows celebrating couples who crank kids out like sausages), while questioning the “maternal instincts” of any mother who has gone on to achieve a level of success in her chosen field of profession.
Consider the fact that successful men are rarely asked if they are afraid their work will lead to the neglect of their children. Family men are expected to have both professional and personal goals; meanwhile, working mothers are forgiven their professional ambitions only if they simultaneously assert (as often and as publicly as possible) that family comes first (Diana Ross, Angelina Jolie, Mia Farrow). 

Perhaps this sexist double standard, unfair as it is persistent, is rooted in the not-wholly-unfounded presumptive tack that views the physical act of motherhood—carrying a baby to term—as the source of a bond unique between mother and child that is incomparable to that of father and child.

But whether its source is cultural, biological, or psychological; the love/hate, push/pull dynamics of mother-daughter relationships have always held a dramatic fascination. One of the most searingly honest and extraordinary explorations into the pain that mothers and daughters can inflict upon one another is Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata.  

Ingrid Bergman as Charlotte Andergast

Liv Ullmann as Eva

Halvar Bjork as Viktor

Lena Nyman as Helena

Autumn Sonata looks at the strained mother-daughter relationship of Charlotte (Bergman), a renowned concert pianist, and timid, soft-spoken Eva (Ullmann), a one-time journalist now living a quiet life in the country with her husband Viktor (Björk), a parish minister. Seven years have elapsed since Charlotte and Eva have seen one another, the time and travel demands of Charlotte’s career still a source of suppressed resentment for the 40-something Eva, who can't help but associate her mother’s success and devotion to her art with agonizing childhood memories of abandonment and neglect.

When Eva learns of the recent death of Leonardo, Charlotte’s lover of 18 years, she invites her mother for an extended visit. Eva’s motives for the invitation, not entirely clear even to herself, ostensibly harbors the hope that perhaps, out of grief or loneliness, her independent, self-reliant mother might, at last, be receptive to the kind of familial intimacy she has clearly spent a lifetime running away from.

Charlotte's arrival makes evident the elemental differences between the two women; the mother’s radiance and vivacity fairly fill the rooms of the tiny vicarage with a life force that can't help but eclipse Eva’s low-key timorousness. Daughter cannot hope to compete, so she retreats into herself. Mother is used to the spotlight, so she has little patience or understanding of anything that falls beyond its glare. Charlotte is pragmatic to Eva’s spiritual; self-centered to Eva’s empathetic; stylish to Eva’s almost studied frumpishness, and forward-gazing to Eva’s tendency to dwell upon and inhabit the past.

Eva surrounds herself with memories of her son Erik who died before his 4th birthday.
Charlotte, busy with her concerts, never met her grandson and was absent at his funeral

Whatever water-under-the-bridge good intentions that might have existed behind Eva’s invitation are scarcely given chance to take root before Eva springs the news to her mother that Helena (Lena Nyman), Eva’s younger, equally-neglected sister who's stricken with a debilitating degenerative disease, is no longer sequestered in a nursing home, but living with her and Viktor. News which doesn’t comfort Charlotte so much as unnerve her, setting in motion a chain of events confirming her suspicions that her designer luggage won't be the only baggage waiting to be unpacked during this fateful visit.

In one drunken night of accusations and confessions, a lifetime’s worth of stockpiled regrets, resentments, and recriminations are brought out into the open. But alas, exposure is not the same as clarity, and under the deluding guise of reconciliation, the child affixes blame, the parent justifies, and each challenges the other’s reality as subjective experience masking itself as truth.
In the end, there exists not merely a separation between Charlotte and Eva, but a chasm. Time has transformed parent and child into two adults. Two strangers who know each other all too well. Two individuals who share the same blood, yet are divided by a shared past each remembers differently.

Autumn Sonata’s alternate title could well be Face the Music, for running like an undercurrent beneath this searing chamber drama about the domineering force of love—the need for it, what happens when we don’t receive it, the lengths we go to reclaim it—is the subtheme of emotional accountability. As insightfully realized by Ingmar Bergman's screenplay and sensitively rendered by cinematographer Sven Nykvist's stunning images, Charlotte and Eva’s mother and child reunion is portrayed as a despairing day of reckoning. A chance to settle old scores and confront the ghosts of the past in the blind hope of embarking on a future.

"Just wait. We all eventually turn into our mothers."
                                        Nocturnal Animals (2016)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

Autumn Sonata's stacked-deck conflict—neglected daughter confronts selfish mother—is thrown a remarkable curve by Ingmar Bergman's employment of a fluid narrative perspective. Inner monologues are heard; Viktor breaks the fourth wall, directly addressing us; flashbacks and intercut action contrast and contradict the spoken word...each of which plays havoc with any attempt on our part to draw pat conclusions regarding the truth of what has transpired between these women.

As the past is resurrected and mother and daughter confront each other with painful disclosures, the role of victim and victimizer shifts in strange and unexpected ways. Amid appeals for forgiveness that are met with blame, and recollections of maltreatment countered with denials, each woman is faced with a troubling dilemma: can a person accept another's account of the past as being true if the very basis of that truth signifies a profound misunderstanding of one another?

One usually has to reach an advanced stage of maturity before realizing that our parents are not flawless beings and are simply human. Like us, they carry the wounds and vulnerabilities of their own upbringing and try to do the best they can with the gifts and limitations nature accords.  If love is imperfect and the past can't be changed, is forgiveness the true sign of our having fully grown up?

There have been a great many films about mother and daughter relationships, most melodramatic, a great many more teetering towards over-sentimentalization. But no matter the form taken: The Joy Luck Club, Gypsy, Terms of Endearment, Imitation of Life, September (the latter, Woody Allen, channeling this very film)—the drama follows a natural familial pattern. A pattern that concerns itself with matters of neglect vs. over-protectiveness and the rebellion/estrangement struggle that inevitably leads to reconciliation. (Joan Crawford's Mildred Pierce being the noir exception to this rule...that Vida WAS a pretty hard article.)
I grew up the only boy among four sisters. Both of our parents worked, our mom, in particular, finding her stride in the '70s after attending EST workshops and landing several promotions in her career working in government in San Francisco. I had my own parental issues with being a latchkey kid at the time (I retreated into movies), but my mom's fought-for and well-earned burst of feminist self-actualization during my high school years were particularly hard on my sisters. Perhaps that's why the unsentimentalized truth of Autumn Sonata resonates so strongly with me. It gets the emotions right from both sides of the argument, offering the bracing insight that some battles end with no victors on either side.

Much in the way that our parents become more recognizably human to us as we grow older, Autumn Sonata is a film that plays very differently to me now than it did back in 1978. At age 21, I wholly identified with Ullmann's character's point of view, today I can't help but appreciate the struggles of Ingrid Bergman's character as well. 

Both women are more alike than they'd like to admit, and as each is a product of a home where maternal love and affection were largely absent, I find that there's something hopeful (if not exactly happy) in the way each has coped. Charlotte, though indeed selfish and remote, has channeled her emotions into her art. Eva, while prone to dwelling on the past, has actually learned how to love (others, if not herself, just yet); and in caring for her disabled sister and late son, seems intent on not repeating her mother's mistakes.

PERFORMANCES 

Autumn Sonata is a film chock full of trivia tidbits. It marks not only Ingrid Bergman’s last feature film (one for which she was nominated for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe) but her only teaming with sound-alike countryman Ingmar Bergman. Bios note that it is also Ingrid’s first Swedish-language film in 11 years; a nifty coincidental turnabout being that she portrayed a pianist in her first major Swedish film (Intermezzo -1936) and plays one again in her final film.
Autumn Sonata marks the 9th of 10 films Liv Ullmann appeared in for Bergman, and their daughter Linn was cast to portray Eva as a child. By all accounts, when it comes to behind-the-scenes collaboration, the two Bergmans didn’t have an easy go of it at first. Ingrid’s outspokenness and studio-trained acting style were quite the departure from the usual “the genius is in” passive compliance from his familiar crew. But whatever difficulties went into the creation of Autumn Sonata prove more than worth the trouble, for Bergman and Ullmann give exceptionally raw performances.

Favorite Scene: Eva listening to Charlotte play Chopin's Prelude No. 2 in A Minor realizes that her mother's art has been the recipient of all the love and attention absent from her childhood 

A common passage in most every tell-all memoir by a celebrity offspring is that moment when the child grasps the extent to which their parent is devoted to their work. It's usually when the child sees the parent give forth with a sensitivity and emotional availability not present in the household. While admiring their artistry, creativity, and passion, the child nevertheless realizes they can never compete and will always come in second (even if marginally) to that magical "something" that gives their parents' life purpose.

Ullmann, coming as no surprise, is first-rate throughout and comes across very much at home in Bergman’s world of exposed faces and bared souls. At once heartbreakingly sympathetic, the next moment bitterly unfair, her Eva feels all the more real and affecting because her pain occasionally crosses the boundaries of reason. Ullmann’s is not an intellectual performance, but one deeply realized and felt.
But it's Ingrid Bergman who brings something altogether fresh to Ingmar Bergman's usual solemn rumination on the puzzle that is the human experience. Always a charismatic and compelling presence onscreen, here Ingrid Bergman plumbs depths I've never seen in her before. Her Charlotte is precisely the charmer she needs to be, the cold narcissist her daughter accuses of being, and the creative artist possible only in people accustomed to living with demons.
Ingrid Bergman is flawlessly unsympathetic and achingly vulnerable. I think it's my favorite of all of her screen performances.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY & REALITY 
A significant part of Autumn Sonata’s impact is the core of emotional verisimilitude running through its characters, dialogue, conflicts, and performances. Textured and nuanced in its ability to convey the heated, paradoxical perspectives of mother and daughter, at times the film feels so real it’s as though the words were taken from the transcripts of a documentary or group therapy session.
This core of truth I speak of is (at least for me) attributable to the incontestable thread of semi-autobiography Autumn Sonata is fused with by way of its cast and creator. At various times in their lives Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, and Ingmar Bergman have each been either the neglected child or the absent parent. The childhoods of both Ingrid and Liv were marred by the deaths of parents when they were very young, while Ingmar spoke often about his sickly youth and abusive father.
As adults, all three had bouts of being less-than-ideal parents. Ingrid’s well-documented affairs and marriages and 5-year estrangement from first daughter, Pia; Ullmann’s self-professed immersion in her work after the out-of-wedlock birth of her daughter with Bergman; and Bergman—5 times married, 9 children from multiple partners—whose work always came first, was perhaps the epitome of the absentee father.

Charlotte's abandoned husband Josef (Erland Josephson) consoles the adolescent Eva

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Back in the '90s, I worked as the personal trainer for the daughters of three different celebrities. One was the struggling actress daughter of an Academy Award-nominated actress from Hollywood's Golden Era. Their relationship was almost identical to that depicted in Postcards from the Edge; strained at best, competitive nonstop. The second was the daughter of a famous Hollywood couple, since divorced. To hear her tell it, her relationship with her mother improved in direct proportion to the ratio of the decline of her mother's career (i.e., her mother had more time for her when her mother suddenly found herself with more time).

The third client, while admitting to being the progeny of "Two raging narcissists" and forever in their shadow, nevertheless found happiness through therapy. Lots of it, from what I understand, but it seemed to be just the trick for enabling her to let go of the unchangeable past and forge a loving relationship with her parents in the here and now.

Testament to Autumn Sonata's honesty and unblinking gaze into the human condition is how, seeing the film again after many years, I still recognize these women. I've met them before in the countless mothers and daughters I've come across in my life. I also recognize myself, I recognize my sisters, and I recognize my own mother.

Clip from "Autumn Sonata" (1978)

Autumn Sonata opened at the Surf Theater in San Francisco
on Wednesday, October 18, 1978

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2017

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS 1974

Rife with spoilers. Those who wish for the mystery to remain a mystery - read no further.

Of the many films made from Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mystery novels, I find 1982s Evil Under the Sun to be the most fun, but 1974s Murder on the Orient Express still heads my list as the most stylish, effective, and downright classiest adaptation of the lot.

Although I have fond memories of the publicity and glowing reviews surrounding its release; recall the weeks of long, serpentine lines queuing up outside San Francisco’s Regency Theater where it played; and I even remember going to a Market Street movie memorabilia shop to purchase the gorgeous Richard Amsel-designed poster (“The Who’s Who in the Whodunit”) which hung on my wall for many years...but for the life of me I can’t figure out why, given my interest, I never got around to seeing this in a theater during its initial release. 

Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot

Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Harriet Belinda Hubbard

Anthony Perkins as Hector McQueen

Jacqueline Bisset as Countess Helena Andrenyi 

My best guess is that it had to do with there just not being enough hours in the day to see all of the great films that came out that year. It was 1974, I was still in high school, working weekends as a movie theater usher, and, as was my practice then and remains so today; when it comes to my own personal moviegoing habits, if I like a film, I invariably want to see it several times. This is all well and good given my particular penchant for rediscovering new things in movies with each viewing, but does tend to limit the amount of time I have left for giving equal time to the titles that make up my ever-growing list of unseen movies. At least not without considerable effort applied on my part.

Distracting my attention from Murder on the Orient Express at the time was all the nostalgia craze pomp and circumstance attending the release of The Great Gatsby, The Godfather Part II, and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. Simultaneously, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder were defining funny for the 1970s with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, while on the serious side, my cineáste
pretentiousness (and height) got me into theaters showing the arthouse pseudo-porn of The Night Porter and Going Places. Adding to this already full schedule, That’s Entertainment, The Phantom of the Paradise, and even the lamentable, Mame were filling the theaters, vying for my musical/comedy attention.

Sean Connery as Colonel Arbuthnot

Vanessa Redgrave as Mary Debenham

Richard Widmark as Samuel Edward Rachett / Cassetti

Ingrid Bergman as Greta Ohlsson

More significantly, Hollywood was in the midst of a HUGE "disaster movie" craze (a genre I was as unaccountably besotted with then as kids today are about those Marvel Comics things), so, what with the star-studded The Towering Inferno, Airport 1975, and Earthquake all being released in the same year—not to mention that star-leaden swashbuckling sequel to another favorite, 1973s The Three Musketeers—I suspect the glow of the stellar cast assembled for Murder on the Orient Express was perhaps not as dazzling to me then as it most assuredly seems now. More's the pity and my loss entirely, for I would love to have seen this delightful movie with an audience, at the height of its popularity.

Sir John Gielgud as Edward Henry Beddoes

Dame Wendy Hiller as Princess Natalia Dragomiroff

Michael York as Count Rudolf Andrenyi

Rachel Roberts as Hildegarde Schmidt

Happily, I did eventually come to see Murder on the Orient Express many years later (on cable TV), and, this being the days before the internet, the vast majority of the details surrounding the film were still unknown to me. In fact, my relative ignorance of the film's particulars and wholesale unfamiliarity with Agatha Christie's 1934 mystery novel in general, resulted in a viewing experience that could be summed up as a textbook case of "ignorance is bliss." I was totally swept up in the mystery, baffled by the clues, puzzled by the circumstances, and thrown by the surplus of suspects. It was bliss.
In hindsight, I can only conjecture that my naif experience of the film must have been in some ways on par with what director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paul Dehn envisioned for audiences when fashioning the project: Murder on the Orient Express felt very much like watching an actual film from the 1930s filtered through the very contemporary sensibilities of the '70s.

Jean-Pierre Cassel as Pierre-Paul Michel

Martin Balsam as Mr. Bianchi

Dennis Quilley as Antonio Foscarelli

Colin Blakely as Cyrus B. Hardman

George Coulouris as Dr. Constantine

Visually sumptuous, superbly-acted, extremely well-written, and highly entertaining; to this day I am amazed at the dexterity with which this particular adaptation is able to tightrope-walk between being a "fun" murder mystery and emotionally-engaging drama. Seeing it again after all these years, it's easy to see how Murder on the Orient Express sparked a renaissance of sorts in movies based on the works of Agatha Christie. But while many of the films that followed were very good, for me, none were able to capture this film's unwavering panache.

Whether it be amateur crime-solver, Miss Marple or the fastidious Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, the drill in an Agatha Christie mystery remains roughly the same (although Poirot travels in much tonier circles than Christie’s small-town spinster): a confined, preferably exotic, locale; a murder; a collection of eccentric/suspicious characters; multiple motives; multiple red herrings; a surprise twist or two; the presence of a canny sleuth to connect all the dots; and finally, the assembling of the suspects for the flashback reenactment of the and the unveiling of the guilty party.

Since the title Murder on the Orient Express, already specifies the what and where; the fun is to be had in discerning the who, why, when, and how.

The who in this case is an individual of nefarious background and cloaked identity, mastermind of a vicious 1930 kidnap/murder of a three-year-old heiress. An act for which this criminal, in having made off with the ransom money and leaving a colleague to take the blame, has never been brought to justice. Now, five years later, in a luxury train trapped in a snowdrift in Yugoslavia, said individual is found dead of multiple stab wounds in a locked compartment.

The victim’s Mafia ties favor criminal vendetta as the most likely solution to the murder, but as is his wont, M. Poirot’s “little gray cells” alert him to the fact that there is something altogether too expedient in the unanimous airtight alibis of his traveling companions: fifteen-odd strangers of diverse background, class, and nationality...each possessing nothing in common...each unknown to either the victim or one another.

The Usual Suspects

As Poirot’s investigation leads to the unearthing of the details surrounding the kidnapping (a tragedy contributing to the deaths of at least four others) and the mysterious connection each passenger has to the event, Murder on the Orient Express establishes itself as the most engaging, suspenseful, and downright effective of the big-screen adaptations of Agatha Christie I've seen.

On first viewing, I recall being very caught up in the mystery of it all and quite unable to figure out “whodunit” until the final, dramatically staged moments of the Big Reveal—a revelation of how and why which surprised me considerably more than I would have thought possible.

I really love everything about Murder on the Orient Express, but I’m especially fond of the significant role conscience, guilt, and the pain of loss play in the narrative. For even more persuasive than the film’s glossy production values and high-caliber performances (a rather amazing feat given their brevity), is its emotional poignancy. Most Agatha Christie movies end on a note of triumphant finality born of justice served and wrongs set right, but Murder on the Orient Express has an ending that always leaves me (softie that I am) with a mild case of sentimental waterworks, due to the fact that it touches – ever so lightly – on the sad reality that justice is a sometimes hollow reward for the loss of loved ones no degree of rightful vengeance will ever bring back.

This melancholy ending to a truly elegant film lends Murder on the Orient Express an air of distinction that places it a mark above the other filmed Poirot mysteries.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Murder on the Orient Express is the perfect, made-to-order film for the '70s cinema enthusiast who’s also a fan of Turner Classic Movies (um…that would be me). Directed by Sidney Lumet (The Wiz, The Group) in a style meant to evoke the look and feel of films made in the 1930s, and given a diffused, nostalgic sheen by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth (Oscar-nominated for this film, Unsworth won the previous year for Cabaret), Murder on the Orient Express, although a British production, is one of the best examples of  Old Hollywood moviemaking to come out of the New Hollywood era.

The Orient Express
The titular star of the film gets a grand sendoff with a sweeping waltz theme that is one of the film's chief goosebump moments. Richard Rodney Bennett's glamorous, Oscar-nominated score is outstanding

On a relatively modest budget (just $1.4 million, if Wikipedia is to be believed), Murder on the Orient Express went on to win 6 Oscar nominations: Finney, Bergman (won), costumes, cinematography, score, screenplay—and became one of the top-grossing films of the year. With no nudity, foul language, or claims to social relevance; in the youth-obsessed '70s, Murder on the Orient Express was one of the few films capable of luring older audiences away from their TV sets. (The equally enthralled younger audiences approached it as something of a “thinking-man’s disaster movie.”)

For me, Murder on the Orient Express was a welcome respite from overlapping dialogue, non-linear storytelling, gritty realism, and the sometimes-fatuous artistic pretentiousness of the cinema auteur. Taking a break from all that '70s navel-gazing, it was a real treat just to be entertained by a filmmaker who knew how to tell a story. Well-written (Paul Dehn’s screenplay is a witty, largely-faithful adaptation that plays fair with its clues), beautifully shot, extremely well-acted, and a great deal of fun to boot, Murder on the Orient Express was a return to escapism in an era preoccupied with confrontation.

Discovery of the Body

PERFORMANCES

Not being such a devotee of Agatha Christie as to have formed an indelible impression of Hercule Poirot in my mind one way or another, I have to say I greatly prefer Albert Finney’s take on the detective over Peter Ustinov, who always came across as so enchanted by his own performance that I found myself distracted. In my essay on the 1970 musical Scrooge, I had this to say about Finney's propensity for characterization: “(he’s) a movie star with the heart of a character actor. Makeup and prosthetics which would swallow up lesser actors only seem to liberate him.” 

Only 37 years old at the time, Finney is near-unrecognizable as the 50-something Poirot, yet under all that makeup and padding is a sharp, focused performance. Seeming to inhabit the character in every minute aspect from body language to vocal inflection, it’s Finney’s darting, curious eyes that best convey the man behind the makeup. With chin forever bowed so as to appear to always be peering at people, take note of how active his eyes are in scenes where he's required to just listen. Those clear, piercing eyes are the true eyes of a master sleuth.

Finney commands the final third of the film with an amazing, eight-page monologue  

The rest of the cast is flawless; Anthony Perkin’s twitchy, mother-fixated Mr. McQueen (!) being a particular favorite of mine in that it almost feels like Perkins is doing a parody of Norman Bates. The regal Lauren Bacall looks to be having a grand old time as the gum-chewing, prototypical Ugly American; Jacqueline Bisset & Michael York are both so gorgeous as to qualify as special effects themselves; and of course, Ingrid Bergman’s scene-stealing Swedish missionary is a delightful bit of acting whether one thinks she deserved that Oscar or not.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Murder on the Orient Express is a film that boasts many stars—that luxurious locomotive and the high marquee-value cast, to be sure—but as far as I’m concerned, the film’s biggest star and MVP is production designer/costume designer tony Walton.

The Oscar-winning designer (for 1980s All That Jazz) is the jack-of-all-trades genius whose talent lent a distinctive visual pizzazz to Mary Poppins, The Boy Friend, Petulia, The Wiz, and many others. His elegant sets and larger-than-life costume designs for Murder on the Orient Express create an irresistibly stylized atmosphere of theatrical glamour.

Movie magic: In real life, the Orient Express would need to add an extra car just to store the hats

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Although many fans of the film consider it to be the one aspect of Murder on the Orient Express they can do without, the opening sequence—a chilling montage detailing the 1930 kidnapping/murder that sets into motion the latter events of the film—is, for me, one of the strongest, most disturbing moments in the film. 

One of the reasons the opening sequence is so effective for me is because the use of newspaper images (all the more terrifying because the eyes never print clearly) brought back scary childhood memories of seeing newspapers reporting the Kennedy assassination, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr, the Manson killings, and the hunt for the Zodiac Killer.

As presented, it’s a dramatic series of events recounted in a random mix of reenactments, newsreel footage, newspaper clippings, and press photographs which proves to be a virtuoso bit of short filmmaking whose choppy, stylized imagery evoke a kind of cinematic equivalent of a ransom note. It's a rousing good start to the movie, and I especially like how it matches, in a kind of cyclical intensity, the film’s penultimate sequence showing how the murder on the Orient Express was carried out.

As Christie’s Miss Marple mystery, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, drew upon the real-life personal tragedy of actress Gene Tierney, the instigating crime in Murder on the Orient Express bears an obvious similarity to the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping case.

A heretofore unaddressed factor contributing to why Murder on the Orient Express ranked so low on my “must-see” list of films in 1974 was my then-limited, not altogether favorable, experience of British crime movies, circa the '30s and '40s. At a time when even the earliest American crime films crackled with tension, the few British films I’d seen struck me as terribly aloof affairs. I was never comfortable with all that British reserve (“Murdered you say? Bit of rotten luck, wot?”), and (wrongly) assumed Murder on the Orient Express would follow suit. 

While it's by no means as stuffy as all that, by the mid-'70s, as American films became bigger, noisier, and in too many instances, dumber (those disaster films), the restraint of Murder on the Orient Express seemed positively invigorating. Clever plot, great dialogue, and a three-act story structure all propped up by beautiful people in fancy clothes in exotic locations…Whaddaya know?...suddenly everything old felt new again.

Clip from "Murder of the Orient Express" 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014