AIRPORT 1970

When I watch a movie like Airport—producer Ross (“I gave the public what they wanted”) Hunter’s arthritically old-fashioned, $10 million, all-star, big screen adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s ubiquitous 1968 bestseller—I’m reminded once again why the late '60s and '70s represent my absolute favorite era in American filmmaking.

The diversity of what was hitting the theaters was astounding. In 1970 alone we saw the release of complex films like Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's arty and experimental Performance, the underground films of Andy Warhol (Trash), big-budget acts of desperation like Myra Breckinridge, documentaries (Woodstock), and the explosion in Black cinema represented by Cotton Comes to Harlem.

There were last-gasp overblown musicals (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), the mainstream gay dramas of The Boys in the Band, sexually subversive comedies like Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Something for Everyone, significant foreign films like Le Boucher and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, forgotten oddities of the Dinah East stripe, Disney’s stuck-in-a-time-warp family films (The Boatniks), and breakout independents like John Avildsen’s Joe. And in the middle of all this, a big, glossy, old-Hollywood gasbag melodrama in the tradition of Grand Hotel meets The V.I.Ps…all in the same year!

"What a dramatic airport!" - Mel Brooks "High Anxiety" (1977)

Looking over the list of films cited above (representing merely the tip of the iceberg of what 1970 produced), I can scarcely get over what a broad array of films were released. As Hollywood blindly stumbled about in a struggle to conduct business as usual while trying to keep in step with changing public tastes, we movie lovers reaped the benefit of their creative identity crisis. 

Being just a kid at the time, I wasn't aware of the severe economic toll Hollywood’s growing pains were taking on the industry. All I knew was that you could look at the entertainment section of a newspaper (back when they could advertise X-rated and G-rated films side by side) and find what then appeared to be a record of the entire spectrum of human experience; all tastes and points of view represented. This broad-scope representation of life is precisely why I fell in love with movies as a youngster, and I had no reason to believe this wasn’t how it was always going to be.

What I'm hoping to achieve in detailing this brief and shining Camelot-esque moment in cinema history, is the granting of a kind of artistic clemency for myself. A nostalgic leniency, if you will, which begs one to take into account how, in my growing up in an atmosphere of democratic tolerance for films of all kinds, I was able to reconcile the glaring inconsistency—not to mention lapse in taste—behind my being 12-years-old and having as my absolute top, top, favorite movies at the time: Rosemary’s Baby, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Midnight Cowboy, …and Airport.

Burt Lancaster as Mel Bakersfeld

Jean Seberg as Tanya Livingston

Dean Martin as Vernon Demerest

Jacqueline Bisset as Gwen Meighen

Miss Helen Hays as Ada Quonsett

George Kennedy as Joe Patroni

Maureen Stapleton as Inez Guerrero

Van Heflin as D.O Guerrero

Dana Wynter as Cindy Bakersfeld

Yes, Airport. A movie whose clichés are piled higher than those snowdrifts disabling a Boeing 707 in the middle of a busy runway. And whose production values, dialogue, characters, and soap opera complications are all so cobwebby and old-fashioned that movie critic Judith Crist was inspired to dub it " The best film of 1944.”

Nevertheless, Airport was THE film to see in 1970, and when I did, I went positively dotty over it. I thought it was one of the most exciting, action-packed, tension-filled movies I'd ever seen. During its initial run, I saw it more times than I care to remember. 

I borrowed my mom's Reader's Digest "condensed" version of the novel (what was that condensed book thing all about, anyway?), then, convinced the abridged version had cut out a lot of then-sought-after smut, I checked out the complete novel from the library and re-read it. I even went out and purchased the soundtrack album...my first!...and wore it out (don't get me started on how off the geek-Richter-scale it is for a 12-year-old's first LP purchase to be Alfred Newman's by-turns spectacularly overcaffeinated /easy listening score for Airport). More frightening still, I played Airport with my toy model of a 747 Delta Airlines passenger jet, reenacting the pivotal disaster by cramming a firecracker into a hole I'd plastic model and lighting it. (Yikes! Let's hear it for the unsupervised play risks of my generation!)

TANYA HAS A HEART-TO-HEART WITH HER FATHER
A weird hallmark of old movies was the often huge age discrepancy between leading men and their onscreen love interests. The beautiful Jean Seberg was just 31 (although made to look like a well-preserved matron thanks to Ross Hunter's Maiden Aunt concept of beauty) to Lancaster's daddyish 56. Angie Dickinson was Ross Hunter's preferred choice for Tanya Livingston, Airport's head of customer relations and mooning love interest of married airport general manager Mel Bakersfeld, but Seberg was the one already under contract to Universal. Lancaster (who was a second choice after Gregory Peck) hated working on the film and there was no love lost between him and Seberg. Their lack of chemistry is palpable. 

What's clearer to me today, as I marvel at the way young movie audiences go ga-ga over things that are simply retreads of retreads, is that what adults in 1970 knew to be lame and hackneyed in Airport was brand new to me.

 I'm not going to say Airport isn't still one of my favorite films, for I watch it often. But I must confess that my enjoyment of it these days is strictly on par with why I repeatedly watch Valley of the Dolls, or The Oscar; which is to say, I can never get my fill when it comes to overripe Hollywood cheese. 

Airport was a huge boxoffice hit and even garnered a whopping 10 Academy Award nominations. But honestly, watching it today, I don't think there are even five consecutive minutes of Airport that don't reduce me to paroxysms of laughter. And try as I might to access the me who once watched this movie unironically, I swear, it feels as though I'm hijacking someone else's memories

GWEN HAS A HEART-TO-HEART WITH HER FATHER
Well, technically speaking, chief stewardess Gwen Meighan is merely dropping the bomb (heh-heh) to her much-married lover, pilot captain Vernon Demerest, that she is pregnant. However, what with the 27-year age spread between Bisset and Martin (she was 25 to his 52) the above caption at least psychologically fits. Incidentally, for all the coy verbiage in this scene, I can't imagine a G-rated film today featuring such a level-headed discussion about abortion without an outcry from the "How do I explain this to my kids?" set.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

As the film that more or less kicked off the '70s “disaster film” craze, and the first and least cartoonish of the four airport-themed films in Universal’s franchise, Airport looks, by way of comparison to the atrocities that followed, much better than it actually is. Its plot: seven, count ‘em, seven romantic and dramatic entanglements duke it out over a seven-hour period at a busy Midwestern airport plagued by blizzards, airport noise bellyachers, and bombers.

At Lincoln International Airport, sexual tension and impending disaster are co-pilots, infidelity (real and the “lusting in my heart” variety) is virtually a job requirement, and when it comes to the way Lincoln International prioritizes customer service, mere personal tragedy and marital discord have to take a seat in coach class. In fact, the heavy doses of "The customer is always right"  and "Service with a smile" airline propaganda in this movie are the things that date Airport the most. 

Is This Any Way To Run An Airline?
This shot featuring an airline serving its customers from a tower of shrimp and a heaping bowl of iced caviar passed without notice in 1970. In 1980. when I saw Airport at a revival theater, it got one of the film's biggest laughs. And for you youngsters, the caption is a reference to a series of popular, oft-parodied National Airline commercials from the '60s in which a flight attendant (Andrea Dromm from the 1966 movie The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming) asked and answered her own rhetorical question: "Is this any way to run an airline? You bet it is!"

I’ve seen Airport far too many times to be able to ascertain whether or not it still holds up as a viable suspense melodrama. But I can attest to it being a near non-stop parade of ugly, stiff-looking fashions culled from acres of drab polyblend synthetics; static, rigidly blocked scenes (the camera must have been nailed to the floor) with actors giving TV movie-level performances, and truly terrible dialogue. For example, old-school he-man Joe Patroni still refers to women as “broads” and “dames.” And while preferable to today’s infatuation with the word “bitch,” I kinda thought that in the '70s atmosphere of  Diary of a Mad Housewife, terms like broad and dame—the Rat Pack notwithstanding—had gone out with Guys and Dolls.  Also, another thing that places Airport squarely in another time and place is, in stark contrast to today’s films, Airport displays a rather quaint interest in the lives of the middle-aged. The median age of the all-star cast reads like an AAR celebrity roster. 

 Actress Virginia Grey (Ross Hunter's "lucky charm") is cast as mom to Lou Wagner, playing her wisenheimer teenage son. That's actor Dick Weston as her skeptical-looking husband 

Airport bears all the earmarks of the kind of traditional studio-system production Hollywood has been turning out for decades. Within a few short years, Airprt most definitely would have been earmarked as a TV movie, but in the transformative era of the early '70s, the movie industry thought--not incorrectly, at least for a time--that this sort of inoffensively wholesome "family" entertainment (you know, adultery, terrorism, adorable stowaways) could serve as counter-programming. The alternative for those moviegoers who still preferred their movies to be images of a world that never was, not a reflection of what it is.  

Director/screenwriter George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street, Teacher's Pet) genuinely fashions a pretty solid (and silly) entertainment from this faithful adaptation of Hailey's exhaustively researched novel, the laughs arising chiefly out of the drop-dead serious manner in which all this nonsense is delivered.

Lloyd Nolan as Head of US Customs, Harry Standish, waxes philosophically on the art
of fraud detection: "First I look in their eyes...then the luggage." Kill me now.

PERFORMANCES
Not counting her dubbed walk-on as Miss Goodthighs in Casino Royale (1967), Airport was my first Jacqueline Bisset movie. And along with being bowled over by her beauty and "Pip pip, cheerio!" British accent, I remember being quite taken with the strength of her character. Gwen Meighen is no Ellen Ripley (Alien), but she was as close as one got to a liberated heroine in those days. Not only does she decide for herself what to do about her unplanned pregnancy, but she's so fearless and take-charge under pressure.
This movie may have been made by a bunch of old men, but they were light years ahead of the curve in giving us a female character who "acts" in the face of danger, rather than shrieks and collapses into hysterics. Universal contract player Katherine Ross was the original choice for the role and was subsequently put on suspension for turning it down (this she turns down, and says yes to The Swarm?). Bisset, having earlier stepped into the Mia Farrow role in Frank Sinatra's The Detective at the last minute, was used to being second-string.

I think my favorite scenes are those in which Bisset behaves more like the kind of flight attendants we've grown accustomed to in modern air travel. She is terrifically authoritative and stern, and I love the reactions of the other passengers...they act as though rudeness hadn't yet been invented. Here, Whit Bissell (I Was a Teenage Werewolf) tries to intercede in Bisset's elder abuse of stowaway Helen Hayes. Meanwhile, hopeful bomb-toter Van Heflin tries to act as if nothing is happening. No matter what you might think of the movie as a whole, this latter segment of Airport is pretty bravura stuff. (The blond pictured between Bisset and Hayes is Pat Priest, the 2nd Marilyn on the hit TV show The Munsters) 

While Bisset continues to dominate the film for me (she's practically the baby in the cast), over the years I've come to grow ever fonder of the laid-back performance of Dean Martin. His popular variety show was still on the air when Airport came out, but I honestly didn't care for him much as a kid. These days I rank him as my all-time favorite male vocalist (my iPod is overflowing with his mellow crooning) and his screen appearances, which I once dismissed as being so casual as to be lazy, have actually aged rather well; coming across as appealingly natural and underplayed compared to the stiff formality of actors like Burt Lancaster.

Irish-descants Maureen Stapleton and Van Heflin perhaps looked like no one's idea of Alex Hailey's Inez and Dominic Guerrero, but they give two of the more compelling performances in the film. But compelling or not, when I was a kid, all I remember about this scene was being so preoccupied with Stapleton filling those sugar dispensers. She's good!

In a film of questionable performances, it's odd that Helen Hayes' (sorry, Miss Helen Hayes') Oscar-winning turn as Ada Quonsett (described in the movie's trailer as "The mind-boggling, huggable perpetual stowaway!" ) is the one character I can barely abide (Kennedy's Joe Patroni runs a close second). Afflicted with a terminal case of the cutes and employing every little old lady cliche devised since the beginning of time, Hayes' is a hammy, vaudeville turn more in tune with a knee-slapping episode of The Andy Griffith Show than a major motion picture. But it's the kind of performance that wins Oscars (see: Margaret Rutherford in 1963's The V.I.Ps). While I like her very much in her scenes with Bisset (she gets slapped, after all), I really wouldn't have minded too much had her character been one of the bomber's casualties. Oh, and in addition, I have to race for the mute button every time she appears onscreen accompanied by her cutesy, cartoon-appropriate theme music. Both Shirley Booth and Claudette Colbert were originally considered for the role but spared themselves the schtick.

OK, the look she's giving this self-medicating nun
(character actress Mary Jackson) is pretty hilarious.

Perhaps this reveals me to be the terrible person I suspect I actually am, but next to Bisset's Gwen Meighan (the character names in this movie just scream "pulp fiction!"), my favorite character in Airport is actually Dana Wynter as Mel's fed-up, socialite wife, Cindy. Even if it's only for the reason that she is so unrelentingly one-note (that note would be: perpetually pissed off) that she's an absolute hoot.

Not only does she begin every conversation at full-throttle harpy, but here's a woman who braves the city's worst blizzard in 30 years (in mink, yet!) just to rip her husband a new asshole. She really should have been running that airport.

Wives don't fare too well in Airport. Perry Mason's Barbara Hale plays Sarah Demerest, the good-natured, long-suffering wife of philandering pilot Dean Martin, and sister to Burt Lancaster.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The passing of time and post-9/11 changes in airline travel have contributed to Airport acquiring a layer of historical entertainment value it didn't have in 1970. Given that Airport has about the same fantasy-to-reality ratio of any glamorous Ross Hunter production, it's doubtful that the commercial airline experience was ever as stylish as presented here. But seeing as the screenplay follows Arthur Hailey's dedication to airline operation accuracy to an almost Dragnet-degree of tedious factoid minutia, I think it gives a fairly close approximation of flying in the days when one could effortlessly sneak in and off of planes carrying homemade bombs and boarding passes in lieu of tickets.

Airport features many familiar TV faces among its cast of passengers, all of whom (according to the Ross Hunter hype machine) were given full character names and backstories for "realism."
1. Happy Day's Marion Ross; 2. Bewitched's Sandra Gould (Gladys Kravitz); 3. Everybody's favorite obnoxious passenger ("Nuts to the man in 21-D") Peter Turgeon; 4. Face-slapping priest Jim Nolan; 5. A familiar face from practically every TV commercial ever made, Fred Holliday.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
In all likelihood, my fascination with Airport was at least in part due to my taking my very first plane trip just a year before, in 1969. It was a flight from California to Maryland to visit my grandmother. I don't recall much about the flight itself other than the in-flight movie was Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, the whole experience was thrilling, and the stewardess gave me a tiny pair of wings to pin to my sweater. I was also given this booklet of color-and-tear postcards which I've somehow managed to hold onto for all these years.

In trying to figure out what it was about Airport that so captured my imagination back in 1970, I think perhaps it's because, among the many scaled-down, low-budget, character-based films rooted in realism that came out in the late '60s and '70s, Airport, in all it's old-fashioned glory, represented something startlingly different. Too young to be familiar with all the cliches and overworked plot devices, Airport was my first real all-star Hollywood blockbuster, and perhaps, like Ross Hunter himself, I was just hungry for a taste of old-fashioned, escapist glamour. And while I wouldn't want a steady diet of it, when in the right mood and proper frame of mind, a bit of harmless fluff like Airport can be very, very satisfying.


THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

"They don't call it the cockpit for nothing, honey!" - an actual line of dialogue from Airport '79
Gary Collins (c.) and Barry Nelson (r.) play second and first officers Cy Jordan and Anson Harris, respectively

This autographed of Barry Nelson was acquired at the stage door of San Francisco's Orpheum Theater in 1977 when he was co-starring with Liza Minnelli in the pre-Broadway tour of the musical, The Act (then titled Shine It On). A very genial guy, if perhaps an unlikely musical comedy leading man.

BONUS MATERIAL
An in-depth, lavishly illustrated article about Edith Head and the costume designs (and hairstyles, aka wigs) in Airport can be found at one of my favorite movie blogs, Poseidon's Underworld

Airport opened on Friday March 20, 1970, at the Pacific Theater in Hollywood

"Remind me to send a thank you note to Mr. Boeing"

Copyright © Ken Anderson      2009  -  2014

CUL-DE-SAC 1966

Ask me the name of my absolute, #1 all-time favorite film director and I’ll say Roman Polanski without hesitation or equivocation. From the time I was old enough to know what a director was, Polanski has always been a filmmaker whose work I both related to and respected. In the trifecta of most-admired directors that form my own personal, sub-Freudian model of personality and attraction: Ken Russell speaks most eloquently to my passionate, sensual tastes; Robert Altman I love for the compassion he reveals in the absurd humor he finds in the human condition; and Polanski, more than any director whose work I enjoy, gives voice and vision to those subtle nightmares that hide out in the darker corners of my psyche. The ones so scary that you either have to laugh or scream.

No One Does It to You Like Roman Polanski

Cul-de-Sac, his 3^rd feature film and a true artifact of the - “Now what was that all about?” - era of college campus cinema of the '60s, is Polanski at his quirky best. And while it's a masterfully shot confirmation of Polanski’s skill as a visual storyteller, actually describing just what kind of film Cul-de-Sac is, is another matter. Take one of those gangster-takes-strangers-hostage American noir thrillers like The Petrified Forest (1936), He Ran All the Way (1951), or The Desperate Hours (1955); cross it with a French nouvelle vague art film about marital discord and the inability to communicate, à la Jean Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963); then top it off with a dose of Theater of the Absurd tragicomedy (the film’s original title, When Katelbach Comes, being an obvious homage to Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, and a less obvious borrowing of the name of an actor from one of Polanski’s early short films) - and you have some idea of what Cul-de-Sac is. Or isn't.

Polanski's trademark skill at utilizing locations as though they are integral characters in the story is atmospherically evoked by the remote 11th-century castle that serves as the fortress/prison in Cul-de-Sac. Situated high atop a craggy hill on the British peninsula of Holy Island, a major plot point has it that the access road to the castle is obliterated twice daily by high tides (a similar device that was used to good effect in the 2012 Daniel Radcliffe thriller, The Woman in Black).

In 1966 neither audiences nor critics were particularly responsive to trying to sort the whole thing out, so Cul-de-Sac’s subsequent failure at the boxoffice threatened to sink Polanski's newfound reputation as quickly as Knife in the Water (1962) and Repulsion (1965) had established it. But in the famous words of John Huston’s Noah Cross in Polanski’s 1974 masterpiece Chinatown: “Politicians, old buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” And indeed, Cul-de-Sac has enjoyed a major revival over the years. Embraced by fans and Polanski himself as one of his best and most cinematic films, it's hailed by contemporary film enthusiasts for many of the very things it was reviled for back in the day.

Donald Pleasance as George

Francoise Dorleac as Teresa

Lionel Stander as Richard (Dickie)

Jack MacGowran as Albert (Albie)

Dickie and Albie, gangsters wounded during a botched “job” of an undisclosed nature, take refuge at the secluded retreat of retired businessman George, and his much younger wife, Teresa. Seeking nothing but a place to hide while awaiting rescue by the mysterious, Mr. Katelbach, the fugitive pair hold the newlyweds hostage, setting off a bizarre chain of power struggles, game-playing, and revelatory disclosures which ultimately lead each character to their personal cul-de-sac.

The brainchild of Roman Polanski and longtime collaborator Gerard Brach (The Tenant, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Tess, Frantic) Cul-de-Sac represents the specific cinematic aesthetics, sensibilities, and humor of the pair. “When we were writing this script, we simply wanted to create a movie that would reflect our taste in cinema,” said Polanski to biographer, Denis Meikle, stressing a point difficult to contest. Similar in tone to many of Polanski’s short films, Cul-de-Sac has the look and feel of an extremely accomplished film-school thesis project and is the nearest Polanski has come to making the kind of '60s New Wave art film he spent a large part of his early career ideologically distancing himself from.

Forsaken by whom? Katelbach? God? Godot?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of the biggest thrills to be had in watching Cul-de-Sac is to once again see a motion picture that demands attentiveness. The economics of filmmaking today (to be profitable, movies have to appeal to as broad a demographic as possible) has resulted in an uptrend in cinematic obviousness. Movies today can’t afford to be misunderstood. Everything is spelled-out, underlined, and explained with such pedantic literalness, a kind of passive, dull-wittedness has replaced active engagement on the part of the moviegoing experience.

(An irksome side effect of this distrust of ambiguity can be seen on Internet movie sites like IMDB. The comment sections of these sites, meant to promote discussion, have been taken over by a combative fanboy/fangirl mentality and a zero-tolerance for differences of opinion, conflicting points of view, or multiple interpretations when it comes to sacred cows…I mean favorite films.)

In one of Cul-de-Sac's many allusions to identity and role-playing, straight-laced George reacts to his sexually mischievous wife dressing him in her peignoir and applying makeup. The gown worn by Pleasence recalls that of Catherine Deneuve (Dorleac's real-life younger sister) in Polanski's Repulsion

Movies that explain every detail do audiences no great service. In fact, I think they rob viewers of a marvelous opportunity to “experience” a film instead of merely trying to “understand” it or figure it out. Cul-de-Sac is a textbook case on how a film can be entertaining, suspenseful, touching, dramatic, and tragic (and at the same time entirely coherent) and still leave considerable aspects of the plot open to individual interpretation.

Things left vague or unexplained in Cul-de-Sac:

George and Teresa’s relationship.

The circumstances behind the dissolution of George’s first marriage to the unseen Agnes.

Why the couple chose to live in such a remote location.

The particulars of what actually brings Dickie and Albie to the castle for shelter.

The interrelationships of the uninvited guests (specifically Jacqueline and Cecil).

The motivation behind almost all of Teresa’s actions.
Katelbach himself.

Confining oneself exclusively to what is disclosed in the film, Cul-de-Sac supports myriad interpretations. And therein lies both its genius and its fun. It’s a film people can talk about afterward, sharing impressions and comparing notes. No two individuals are likely to see Cul-de-Sac in exactly the same way. And beware the literal-minded who insist on one "correct" understanding of the film. These are the kind of folks who can't tell you what they feel about a painting until they've read the museum card.

I'm crazy about the composition of this shot. It kicks off a virtuoso 7-minute sequence shot in one take.

PERFORMANCES

Anyone familiar with Donald Pleasence’s somnambulistic performances in the Halloween horror film franchise will be properly thunderstruck by what an expressive and animated actor he can be in the right role. With his shaved head a burlesque of the hundreds of eggs on display throughout the film (the shaved head was Pleasence's idea and came as a big surprise to control-freak Polanski). Pleasence is all repressed agitation and pent-up passion. His unfocused feverishness (he never quite knows where to channel it, and when he does, it comes out all wrong) is met in equal doses by the icy assurance of Francoise Dorleac. Playing a paradoxical female with plenty of yin and yang to spare, Dorleac is the impulsive catalyst in this combustible mix of characters. Some critics have decried what they see as yet another misogynist Polanski fantasy in the character of Teresa, but I found it interesting that she is portrayed as not only fearless, but also the strongest and most resourceful character in the film. Self-servingly so, perhaps, but better that than one of those helpless, always in need of rescue types that proliferated in movies throughout the '60s and '70s.

Does Teresa feel a kinship with the survivalist gangster, Dickie?

Blacklisted veteran actor Lionel Stander, all gravel-voiced and possessed of old-Hollywood bearing, is an inspired choice for a film that derives a great deal of its tension (and absurdist comedy) from the oil/vinegar chemistry of its characters. He’s like a gangster from an old Warner Bros. movie who somehow got himself teleported into a '60s art film. There's a comical lack of complexity to this man (although there's a lovely moment when he's shown gently looking over the belongings of his friend) as he struggles to get his neurotic hostages to just shut up and do what he says.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A terrific storyteller with a taste for the idiosyncratic, Polanski is unsurpassed in mining the tension and gallows humor to be found in disparate characters forced into interaction under claustrophobic circumstances. As he does explicitly in Carnage, Death and the Maiden, Bitter Moon, and Knife in the Water, and more subtly in Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, and Frantic; Polanski likes to have fun with the idea that anybody actually knows anything about anyone—least of all themselves.

Typical Polanski/absurdist humor: In the midst of a deadly hostage situation...uninvited guests! That's a very young Jacqueline Bisset back there radiating reams of '60s sang-froid behind those shades.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
By all accounts an extremely difficult and unpleasant film to make, Cul-de-Sac was nevertheless a labor of love for Polanski, and that fact, above all, really shines through when watching it. Even without it confirmed (as it is in the Criterion Collection DVD interview with Polanski) one can sense from Cul-de-Sac that it is a film made with little thought given towards commercial concerns, and all energies trained on making the kind of film that inspired Polanski to want to be a filmmaker in the first place. It's a story about character and consequence told almost entirely through image and atmosphere. Pure cinema, as Polanski would call it.

Superficially speaking, Cul-de-Sac is just one spectacular-looking film. Every exquisitely-composed shot bears the stamp of having been labored over and lit to perfection. But it's also a marvelously layered film of the sort that keeps feeding you more information the more you see it. It's in this realm that Polanski's legendarily persnickety nature and eye for detail pays huge dividends, providing a rewarding cinema experience of the kind that grows increasingly rare. For fans of Roman Polanski, Cul-de-Sac is a must-see. What am I saying? It's a must-see for anyone who loves film!

Existential Despair

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

THE GRASSHOPPER 1970

I first saw The Grasshopper in 1979 at Filmex, the now-defunct Los Angeles Film Festival, at a special screening titled "Underrated American Films" (an event that also introduced me to Robert Altman’s masterpiece 3 Women, and was hosted, if memory serves, by Roger Ebert). Seeing The Grasshopper in a packed theater of film enthusiasts was the best possible way to see a film that, when initially released, was sold as an exploitation flick and likely never played to full theaters. I'd been wanting to see this flawed little gem since I first laid eyes on the film's soundtrack album back in 1970. 

Then just 13-years-old, I was drawn to the photo on this bi-fold LP jacket which offered, on the front, an image of star Jacqueline Bisset locked in a passionate embrace with co-star Christopher Stone. On the back, however, was the racy "reveal" of their tryst location being a shower stall. At thirteen this was pretty heady stuff. Coming across it in a record store made it even more of a shock to the senses. 

Looking at the album cover today, I'm surprised how sexy an image it remains given its relative modesty.  Have I mentioned what's on the inside? The actual soundtrack album is very good, featuring songs by Brooklyn Bridge, a pre-"The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" Vicki Lawrence, and that song's composer, Bobby Russell, who was at the time Mr. Vicki Lawrence. 

The Grasshopper is a coming-of-age film with 25-year-old Jacqueline Bisset playing 19. As a rule, I tend not to be overly fond of coming-of-age films, chiefly because so many of them are about men and hinge on but a single narrative theme: the hero wants to get laid. The rest then dissolves into a lot of male wish-fulfillment fantasies leaning heavily on the callowness of youth as an excuse for the screenwriter to indulge in a lot of puerile sexism and misogyny-for-laughs. On the other hand, female coming-of-age films, while considerably rarer and seldom very well-known, tend to be more to my taste because the focus is more often on the emotional lives of the characters. (My absolute faves of this sub-genre are A Taste of Honey -1961 and Smooth Talk - 1985.)

The female perspective is so infrequently explored in films that even one that lists to the side of exploitation strikes me as a welcome change.   

The Grasshopper offers great glimpses of late-'60s Las Vegas 

In attempting to dramatize the aimlessness of late-'60s youth while satirizing the swinging, anything for kicks attitude prevalent at the time, The Grasshopper at times feels like the crasser, less artful American cousin of John Schlesinger’s Darling. But despite the film's unsure directorial footing (TV sitcom director Jerry Paris—best known as the neighbor on The Dick Van Dyke Show—shows no real aptitude for sustained drama. Scenes play out episodically, like they've got built-in commercial breaks) The Grasshopper does succeed in capturing the essence of a particular type of American woman at a particular point in time in our culture. Of course, the “American” woman I speak of is the very British Jacqueline Bisset, serviceably, if unconvincingly, identified as Canadian for the film. (Which is ironic, given that the heroine of the little-known novel upon which this film is freely adapted—The Passing of Evil, by Seance on a Wet Afternoon author Mark McShane—is British, the story taking place in London.)

The Goodbye Girl

The late '60s and early '70s offered dozens of American movies focusing on the heroically romanticized plight of the misunderstood heterosexual white male as he struggled to find his identity in a society in flux and shifting beneath his feet. Black women are perhaps still waiting for their own definitive coming-of-age-films (a good place to start: Ossie Davis’ woefully overlooked 1972 film, Black Girl, or Kasi Lemmons' brilliant Eve's Bayou), but for women in general, The Grasshopper provides a period-relevant (now perhaps dated) portrait of a woman on a quest to find herself. A free spirit inflicted with the kind of existential restlessness usually only afforded male characters in movies. 

Jacqueline Bisset as Christine Adams

Jim Brown as Tommy Marcott

Joseph Cotten as Richard Morgan

Christopher Stone (in his film debut) as Jay Rigney

Corbett Monica (yes, THE Corbett Monica, Ed Sullivan fans) as Danny Raymond

Ed Flanders as Jack Benton

The Grasshopper was promoted with the tagline: “The story of a beautiful girl’s lifetime between the ages of 19 and 22.” And lest one assume the “beautiful” adjective was inserted solely for the purpose of a little sex-bait ad copy; rest assured, The Grasshopper’s Christine is one in a long line of movie heroines whose destinies are shaped as much by their provocative beauty as by their flaws of character. When Valley of the Dolls' Neely O'Hara bitchily comments on how Anne Welles got through life on a pass because of her "Damned classy looks," she is speaking of girls like Bisset's Christine. Girls whose looks open up so many doors for them that not until those looks begin to fade does it begin to dawn how few of those actually led anywhere. 

As the film begins, 19-year-old Christine Adams (Bisset) has dropped out of junior college in Kingman, British Columbia, left a note for her parents and slipped away in the wee small hours of the morning in her beat-up convertible. Her destination: Los Angeles, where she has plans to surprise and later shack up with her high school sweetheart Eddie (Tim O'Kelly). Her youthful optimism unfazed even when her car breaks down en route, idealistic hitchhiker Christine informs a friendly pick-up, “It’s very simple what I want to be; totally happy, totally different, and totally in love!” Of course, as soon as she says this, we know she doesn't have a chance in hell of being any of them.

You're Gonna Make It After All

What is Christine over the course of the story's three years? In no particular order: a bank teller, a mistress, a would-be actress, a schoolteacher, a flight attendant, a real estate saleswoman, a Vegas showgirl, a high-class call girl, a discontented housewife, a sugar mama, a widow, a kept woman, and (inevitably) a hooker. Whew! She also must have been very tired.

As you must have gleaned by now, the "grasshopper" of the title is Christine. She's the human embodiment of America’s "instant happiness" culture. A culture fearful of boredom, unable to withstand even a moment of silence, illness, or introspection, happiness is sensation. And if you don’t find it in your own backyard, America’s a big place with lots of backyards. All you need is a suitcase, a little resourcefulness, and who knows? Maybe happiness can be found in the next thing...and the next thing. 

Impetuous Christine falls for down-to-earth former quarterback Tommy Marcott 
Christine: Tommy, sometimes I envy you.
Tommy: Why?
Christine: You don't always have to be doing something. With me, it's sort of a disease. I guess it's because no matter what I'm doing or how much fun I'm having, somewhere way back in my head I'm thinking somebody somewhere else is having more fun than I am. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
In its over-earnest efforts to reflect the timbre of the times, The Grasshopper is guilty of cramming so much into its story that it comes across as more sensational than sincere. So many controversial topics are covered and touched upon in the film’s scant 98-minute running time, Bisset's character seems at times like a tour guide through a new Disneyland attraction called Sixtiesland. We have rock bands, groupies, free-love, homosexuality, lesbianism, interracial marriage, nudity, drugs, prostitution, pedophilia, and physical abuse. It all sounds like pretty incendiary stuff, but as the events are processed through Christine's dissociative gaze, a great many of the most hot-button social issues of the day are presented in a disarmingly matter-of-fact manner.  

No '70s "Now" movie worth its salt was without at least one gay character. The Grasshopper doubles the "with it" quotient by featuring both a lesbian and a gay couple. Atypically for the time, all are presented casually, as just part of Christine's circle of friends. 

PERFORMANCES
Throughout the early 1970s, Jacqueline Bisset and Raquel Welch were the two sex symbols most publicly vociferous in their claims of never being taken seriously as actresses or offered non-ornamental roles. The modestly-talented Raquel Welch had a point; she was pretty much offered one crap role after another, each hinged on how well she filled out her requisite bikini. Bisset, on the other hand, after surmounting forgettable fluff like The Sweet Ride landed, in succession, three major releases with sizable, showy, female lead roles: The Grasshopper (1970), The Mephisto Waltz (1971), and Believe in Me (1971). 

Bisset is at her relaxed best in the brief scenes she shares with the always-welcome Joseph Cotten

Because I like Jacqueline Bisset so much, I wish I could say that she made the most of these opportunities, but as a young actress (she improved immeasurably in later years), Bisset was a bit like a hot-air balloon; as events in the story around her heats up, she seems to get lighter. With little of her character's inner-life coming through, we're left with her precise, clipped British accent and camera-friendly face as compensations. Bisset is fine in scenes requiring wide-eyed optimism or vague restlessness, but as Christine's life begins to spiral out of control, one is made aware of Bisset's emotive shortcomings.  

We're Gonna Make Our Dreams Come True
The Grasshopper was co-written and produced by TV's Garry Marshall (Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley). Here Garry's baby sister Penny Marshall (Lavern herself, left, holding the ruler, pictured with Eris Sandy) plays a member of the "Plaster Casters" - a reference to real-life '60s visual artist/groupie Cynthis Albritton, who famously made plaster casts of the erect penises of rock stars.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Showgirls:1970. In his autobiography Wake Me When It's Funny, producer Garry Marshall writes that the original leaping pattern for The Grasshopper in preliminary screenplay drafts was considerably more global (London, New York, Hollywood) but for budgetary reasons, Las Vegas became the dominant location. I can't say I mind one bit. The shots of a long-gone Vegas Strip and the behind-the-scenes glimpses into those old-fashioned Vegas reviews are fabulously nostalgic.

The grasshopper perched first one place, then another...wherever she happened to land. And then she moved on. (Ad copy from the film's poster)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
When it comes to authenticity of voice, I suspect The Grasshopper would have benefitted from having at least one woman and one person under the age of 30 involved in its creation. The screenplay, a collaboration of three men on the far side of their teen years, is more of an outsider's rumination on the young. Christine's swift journey from innocence to world-weariness... a look at a rapidly changing world and a portrait of the emotional cost of no-strings freedom...has the air of a cautionary tale about it, and I don't really think that was the film's objective. 

What's lacking is Christine's voice. She's at the center of everything, be we watch her from a remove and can't really put our finger on the source of her personal dissatisfaction. This leaves her as a Candide-like character, reacting to the world and being changed by it, but not really conveying to us what she wants from it short of non-stop sensation. 

In Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (released the same year) Jack Nicholson also played a character who didn't know what he wanted from life or what life wanted from him. That film had been preceded by seemingly a dozen others similarly fixated on the state of the disillusioned white male, and its success guaranteed that it would be followed by just as many.

By no stretch of the imagination is The Grasshopper in the same category as Five Easy Pieces, but you can understand why it might hold a special place of nostalgia for me. It's not often (Michael Sarne's Joanna - 1968 qualifies) that the movies even considered how the modern world might be dissatisfying for women. Plus, no one gets abandoned at a gas station restroom.

And a parting shot in memory of that glorious backside that sparked my interest in The Grasshopper in the first place...

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012