THE LOVE MACHINE 1971

The Waiting Is Over...The Love Machine is on the Screen!

So declared the graphically austere poster ads (a gold ankh against a simple black background) heralding the arrival of The Love Machine—sorry, Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine—to movie theaters in 1971. Hard to believe when looking at the film now, but there actually was a degree of anticipation attending the release of The Love Machine, the big-screen adaptation of Susann's 1969 best-selling follow-up novel to the phenomenally successful Valley of the Dolls.  

Much of the anticipation was due to so much having transpired in the four years since 20th Century Fox first released Valley of the Dolls to big boxoffice and a torrent of lousy reviews in 1967. First and most significantly, Jacqueline Susann had proven herself a viable boxoffice name in her own right, capable of selling tickets regardless of the project's relative artistic or critical merit. Secondly, movies themselves had grown increasingly permissive in terms of nudity and language since 1967 (Fox's own Myra Breckinridge had seen to that); thus, there existed, at least among Jacqueline Susann's broad fan base, the hope that the film of The Love Machine would have more overall license to be every bit as tawdry and smutty as the source novel.

Naughty, Naughty

At last, the newfound permissiveness in movies allowed gay characters to be acknowledged as such, and they weren't required to die before the final reel (although they usually did, anyway). For movies that sought to be daring and hip, the inclusion of gay characters—always depicted as stereotypically as possible—was shorthand for provocative, taboo decadence. Here we have David Hemmings, in full flame with a cigarette holder, as fashion photographer Jerry Nelson and his blow-dried inamorato, British Shakespearean actor Alfie Knight (portrayed by Clinton Greyn).

In the minds of many, there also existed the misguided belief that The Love Machine was going to be a better film than Valley of the Dolls. Why? Well, putting aside for a moment the obvious...that it would be hard to make a movie that could be worse, it was Jacqueline Susann herself (who had never made secret her dislike for the movie version of Valley of the Dolls ) who promised fans that both she and her husband, Irving Mansfield, were taking steps to guarantee that they both would have creative input in bringing The Love Machine to the screen. 

Indeed, thanks to a lawsuit filed by Susann against 20th Century-Fox and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)—that unofficial, unauthorized, non-sequel—Susann and Mansfield were able to take The Love Machine to the more lucrative and contractually friendly pastures of Columbia Pictures. Columbia paid Susann $1.5 million for the film rights and granted her a possessive author's credit for the movie's title (Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine). With her husband installed as executive producer (apt enough, given that he was a TV producer by profession and The Love Machine was set in the television industry), this time around, the Susann-Mansfield household held a slightly tighter grip on the creative reins of bringing Susann's bestseller to the screen.  

The Hitchcock of Coarseness
Jacqueline Susann makes another cameo appearance in one of her films.
(That's LA newsman Jerry Dunphy on the left)

Possessive film titles like Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine are almost always clumsy and invariably rooted in contract perks, ego-stroking, and product branding. But like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, an author's name attached to the title also implies that the film will be a more accurate, authentic realization of the writer's intent and vision. Well, as anyone can attest who's seen Stephen King's abominable self-penned 1997 TV-movie adaptation of his novel, The Shining (he disliked the many alterations and omissions in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film), an author's participation in the adaptation of their own work is in no way a reliable guarantor of anything resembling quality. Or even watchability.

John Phillip Law as Robin Stone

Dyan Cannon as Judith Austin

David Hemmings as Jerry Nelson

Jodi Wexler as Amanda

Maureen Arthur as Ethel Evans

The Love Machine tells the story of the swift rise and fall of Robin Stone, an ambitious local news anchor who ruthlessly muscles his way into the job of network television president. Despite looking thin, wan, and in desperate need of a blood transfusion, Robin is an irresistible ladykiller who leaves a trail of broken-hearted, blue-bathrobed lasses in his wake. A cad with Nielsen ratings and audience-share figures where his heart should be, Robin Stone is like a male version of Faye Dunaway's Diana Christiansen in Network (1976), crossed with Valley of the Dolls' Helen Lawson, with a little of Stephen Boyd's Frankie Fane from The Oscar (1966) on the side.

Like most of Jacqueline Susann's characters, Robin Stone is allegedly based on a real-life individual. In this instance, the late CBS TV executive James T. Aubrey—the man we can thank for The Beverly Hillbillies and a host of other fragrantly lowbrow moneymakers during the '60s. Like his movie counterpart, Aubrey is said to have been a calculatingly shrewd cookie who held the TV-viewing audience in the lowest contempt and made a fortune banking on the public's insatiable appetite for mediocrity. Judging by the popularity of today's Jersey Shore/Kardashians train wrecks, you can't say the guy wasn't something of a visionary.

The Love Machine
In all but the most archly ironic circumstances, Jackie Susann failed to get the public to adopt "dolls" as popular slang for barbiturates. Her efforts getting "The Love Machine" into the vernacular as slang for TV sets (because it "sells love, creates desire"...you see) fared even worse.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

My fondness for a specific brand of bad film is as difficult to explain as it is to defend. It's not like I just get off on making fun of them. On the contrary, most of these films are very professional, technically well-made films in every regard. What I think I respond to is that scary zone in the creative arts where the attempt fails to match the execution. That twilight zone where all the talent, creativity, and hard work on one end somehow yields the 100% opposite of what anyone intended. It fascinates me because it can occur at any moment, no matter how heavily the deck is stacked for success. For example, consider Marlon Brando putting cotton in his cheeks in The Godfather. That could have turned out disastrous, but instead became iconic. Or what about Al Pacino's Cuban accent in Scarface. What an enormous risk that was! It would have derailed the entire picture if audiences found it ridiculous and started to chuckle whenever he spoke.  

No,  this isn't a shot of Robin Stone visiting Pee Wee's Playhouse.
This is just a horrific example of chic '70s decor.

I'm pointing out that the collaborative art of film is often like a dance on a wire; fiasco or triumph is sometimes based on tiny, intangible miscalculations or moments of blind overconfidence. Something that might not even be visible until after the film is already in the can. Hindsight makes it seem like an overripe performance or a particular narrative miscalculation could somehow have been avoided, but that's not true. It's the whole crapshoot element of it all that fascinates me.

If it's true in life that we learn most from our failures, I also believe there are similar lessons to be gleaned for the film buff confronted with a well-intentioned mess. When you watch a film that costs millions, involves hundreds of decisions, hours of hard work, the collaboration of many talented individuals...and the result is sometimes deplorable, you're staring straight into the face of the elusiveness of excellence. That or perhaps hubris, too many cooks spoiling the broth, or maybe (worst of all) professional cynicism: films that don't really care if they're good, so long as they make money.

Ambitious Robin Stone goes head-to-head with network
programming executive Danton Miller (Jackie Cooper)

 The Love Machine tries to be a hard-hitting, cynical, claw-his-way-to-the-top drama along the lines of The Sweet Smell of Success and The Young Philadelphians, but for all its faddish clothes, bare bosoms, and cuss words, it's fundamentally a creaky Fannie Hurst melodrama. It strives hard to be sensational and daring, but its focus needs readjusting. The story is too shallow to be good character drama, and its depiction of the inner workings of the TV industry is too superficial and cliche-ridden to serve effectively as expose. Even with all this considered, The Love Machine still manages to be a curiously addictive viewing experience, if only due to its utter cluelessness as to how airless and old-fashioned it is. 

The real star of The Love Machine is Robin's collection of blue bathrobes.
It got so that I started to miss them if they failed to show up in a scene.

PERFORMANCES

The likeable late actor (and last-minute replacement) John Phillip Law portrays Robin Stone with startling ineffectualness. Last seen sporting angel's wings and a feathered diaper in Barbarella, Law, who by all accounts sounds like a terribly nice guy in real life, latches onto Robin Stone's closed-off, inexpressive side and gives a performance that's too stiff even for a character referred to as a machine. He's given no help from the script, whose risible dialog suits the actor's robotic delivery. I've read that Jacqueline Susann (ever the fantasist) wanted Sean Connery for the role.

John Phillip Law's somewhat lifeless performance is partly due to his stepping in at the last moment as a replacement for originally-cast Brian Kelly (star of TV's Flipper), injured in a motorcycle accident three weeks into filming. In several scenes, it's evident that Law is wearing ill-fitting clothes cut for the shorter-in-stature Kelly.

Dyan Cannon has always been a favorite of mine, but her performance here (no great shakes, but heads above the rest of the cast) is consistently undermined by the jaw-dropping, high-fashion get-ups she's called upon to wear. Given that she's not really provided a believable character to play, her bizarre fashion sense always takes center stage. According to a Jacqueline Susann bio, Cannon was so struck by a case of the giggles during a preview of The Love Machine (inspired by both her performance and the film) she had to excuse herself from the theater.

Whose idea was it to dress the lovely Dyan Cannon, playing the wife of a television executive, in a test pattern? The answer to that rhetorical question is Oscar-nominated costume designer (Giant, What a Way to Go!, Morituri, The Way We Were) Moss Mabry.

In the movie Barbarella, Jane Fonda's title character makes the sound observation, "A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming." I've an observation of my own that's equally on-point:

A good many bad movies feature fashion shows. A parade of Moss Mabry's coif-centric costume designs amusingly pad out The Love Machine's running time.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

For anyone finding the film hard going (it's relatively slow by today's standards), I beg you to stick around for the climactic "Hollywood party fight scene." Here Ms. Cannon (balancing 23 pounds of teased hair) finally abandons her heretofore starchy acting style and lets loose with that infectiously raucous laugh of hers, setting in motion a truly memorable free-for-all that should have become a camp highlight by now. Finally, in trying to top Valley of the Dolls' infamous wig-down-the-toilet scene, The Love Machine finally does something right.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

When The Love Machine was first released to theaters, I was a mere 13 years old. Too young to see the much-ballyhooed motion picture but old enough to take my mom's paperback novel to school and pore over the "dirty parts" with my schoolmates. I'm not sure what my problem was at such an early age, but I was very much taken with this sleazy novel. Particularly the iconography of the ankh ring Robin Stone wears on the paperback cover art. (In my defense, I grew up in San Francisco during the hippie era, and ankhs were all over the place.) I also unsuccessfully tried to persuade my sister to buy that Faberge "Xanadu" perfume that was cross-promoted in the film (ads for which recommended you mark "his" favorite spot with an "x").

Xanadu by Faberge
Samples were given away at many theaters showing The Love Machine

2021 update

Reader swag! A longtime reader of this blog who has since become a dear friend (although we've never met) gave me the shock of my life when she sent me this vintage Xanadu Cologne she unearthed online. So, thanks to a very kind gesture of thoughtful generosity, a tiny bit of The Love Machine movie premiere experience is mine some 50 years after the fact. 

In spite of my unseemly youthful preoccupation with this movie, I didn't actually see The Love Machine until I was well into adulthood. However, I'm happy to say that I wasn't disappointed. A little bored, perhaps (this movie takes itself WAY too seriously), but not disappointed. And while it's not nearly as much fun as Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine has more than enough in the way of over-the-top fashions, poky dialog, and questionable performances to rank high among my favorite guilty pleasures.

"...and when you put it on, you'll live forever. And love me forever."

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011

BARBARELLA 1968

I saw Barbarella for the first time in 1968 at the age of eleven (I know, what was my mother thinking?), and for years it remained this extraordinary little gem of a film that no one else seemed to appreciate or even see. I saw it so many times that it came to signify one-third of the cinema trifecta that cemented my lifelong love affair with the movies (the other two being Rosemary's Baby and Casino Royale…the cool one with the Bacharach score).

In the ensuing years, fashion designers, photographers, and pop stars too numerous to mention, borrowed from it so extensively that it has become a mainstream/cult hit. To my unending chagrin, the many delights of Barbarella that once spoke exclusively to me are now superficially embraced (and largely misinterpreted) by text-addicted teens and iPhone-addled adults in suburban home theaters across the nation. To clarify, I don't know if I mind Barbarella reaching a broader audience so much as I mind a movie of such exuberant creativity being saddled with the dull and lazy classification of "camp."

Jane Fonda as Barbarella

John Phillip Law as Pygar

Anita Pallenberg as The Great Tyrant

David Hemmings as Dildano

Milo O'Shea as Durand Durand

Made at a time when the chief pop-cultural preoccupations were space, spies, sex, and rebellion, Barbarella was an intentional pop-art put-on; a sci-fi comic book spoof of drugs, un-sexy sex, and fashion as fetish. It may not be exactly what the '60s looked like, but to a sheltered, Catholic pre-teen, Barbarella is PRECISELY what the '60s felt like.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Enticed by posters and TV ads that enthusiastically beckoned, "See Barbarella Do Her Thing!" I went to see Barbarella with little knowledge of what to expect. So you can imagine my thrill and delight when, within the film's first two minutes, I discovered that Barbarella's "thing" involved performing a zero-gravity striptease while a tres-groovy theme song rhymed Barbarella with Psychedella on the soundtrack. WOW!

The image of the almost impossibly beautiful Jane Fonda floating naked around a fur-lined spaceship while animated credits none-too-successfully concealed her nudity was a vision that burned a hole in my retinas and remained tattooed on my psyche ever since.

  

PERFORMANCES

In a career of so many memorable and challenging roles, it must pain Jane Fonda to know that one of her most assured screen performances was in a film she spent the better part of the 1970s trying to live down. But really, she has nothing to be ashamed of. Years of appearing in bubble-headed Hollywood sex comedies prepared her well for the wide-eyed hijinx of this five-star, double-rated, Astro-navigatrix. Along with most of her body, Fonda as Barbarella displays an intelligence and winning comic timing that makes clear that she carries the entire film (plus several pounds of hair) on her shoulders.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The sequence where the angel Pygar flies Barbarella to the evil city of Sogo is a Frazetta illustration come to life. Though the special effects are primitive, the sequence has a vitality and sense of fun that is a stellar example of the kind of magic that movies do best.

Barbarella's mini-missile projector vanquishes another enemy

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Barbarella is one of those films that is so visually way out that you could enjoy it just as much without sound. The wonderful Lava-Lamp production design by Mario Garbuglia and iconic futuristic costumes by Jacques Fonteray & Paco Rabanne display a great deal more ingenuity and wit than the script.

No one passes out quite like Barbarella

Barbarella and Sogo Resistance leader, Dildano (David Hemmings), try their hand at an Exaltation Transference pill 

Barbarella in the Black Queen's Chamber of Dreams

By any serious standard of what makes a good film, Barbarella falls short. But over time, many "good" movies have proven unwatchable (Seen Chariots of Fire lately?), while many films dismissed at the time of their original release have gone on to become classics (The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane).

By no stretch of the imagination is Barbarella a classic (well, it IS a classic of sorts). But classic films do share one thing…they endure by having created a kind of perfect reality within the framework of their narrative.

And in this, Barbarella is a film that looks better the older it gets.

Marcel Marceau as Professor Ping

Ruminating on the druggy 1980s and the part it played in the jumble that was ultimately the film Xanadu, playwright Douglas Carter Beane said, "When you watch 'Xanadu,' you can see the cocaine on the screen."

Well, a 60s variation of the same can be said for Barbarella. Some serious mind-expanding drugs had to have been behind what's on display here. A fur-lined spaceship that looks like a flying Avon compact, blind angels, murderous dolls, orchid-eating exiles, killer canaries, a sex machine (no, not James Brown), a giant hookah in which swims a semi-naked man …it never stops!

Sure, by today's standards Barbarella's special effects are almost comically primitive (Pygar's flying is more like wind-blown dangling), but it ultimately turns out to be part of the film's charm. For 1968, this stuff was a considerable step above most of the kind of cheapie sci-fi/fantasy films I grew up on, so I was enthralled. I love movies that transport me, surprise me, and render the fantastic tangible. Every time I watch Barbarella, it reintroduces me to that kid-like part of me that can still be left thunderstruck by movie magic.

Barbarella and the evil Great Tyrant (Anita Pallenberg) are rescued from the burning city of Sogo by the blind angel Pygar (John Phillip Law). When Barbarella asks why he's saving the very woman who tried to have him killed, Pygar replies, "An angel has no memory!"

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES
Jane Fonda signed this for me on May 6, 1976, when she came to Sacramento City College to give a speech on behalf of her then-husband, Tom Hayden. I wasn't a student, but I knew I couldn't pass up a chance to meet THE Barbarella in the flesh. I remember zippo of her speech, but I do recall that when I managed to catch her before she was being whisked away in a VW bug driven by an aide, she kindly signed my photo, laughing at the image of herself. 

Poster art by Robert McGinnis

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009