GAMES 1967

Sometimes being a movie star just means having enough “brand name recognition” to bring to each movie a kind of distinct, firmly established name-association (a personality cachet, if you will) fully-formed and locked in place from a previous film. 

For example: to a large segment of the population Mia Farrow was and always will be Rosemary Woodhouse of Rosemary’s Baby. The films See No Evil (1971), The Haunting of Julia (1977) and the 2006 remake of The Omen all banked on the public associating Farrow with the macabre and horrific. None perhaps so blatantly or swiftly as Joseph Losey’s difficult-to-market 1968 psychological thriller Secret Ceremony, which was released only four months after Rosemary’s Baby opened. Although the film starred Hollywood heavyweights Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum in their only screen pairing, ads emphasized what was then the film’s one sure-fire property: Mia  Farrow - “More haunted than in Rosemary’s Baby!” the posters screamed.  

Satan Place
 Occult rituals are just one of many perverse diversions in Games

After the success of Halloween (1978) critics began hailing director John Carpenter as a worthy successor to Alfred Hitchcock. Hoping to further encourage such comparisons, Carpenter cast perennially Hitchcock-associated actress Janet Leigh in a thoroughly arbitrary role in his 1980 film The Fog. Janet Leigh, who should be commended for not having turned the entirety of her latter years into one long series of stunt-casting parts cashing in on her iconic Psycho role, did allow her image to be exploited just one more time - in the 1998 Halloween sequel, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (check out IMDB’s Trivia section for details) although it must be said these nothing roles at least afforded her the opportunity to appear onscreen with real-life daughter Jamie Lee Curtis.

Desensitization
A well-appointed game room features violent Roy Lichtenstein pop-art and a pinball machine that awards points for driving fatalities

In 1968, if American audiences knew much about French film star Simone Signoret at all (and they didn't) it was on the strength of three films: her Oscar- winning role in Room at the Top (1959); her Oscar-nominated turn in Stanley Kramer’s prestige flop, Ship of Fools; and… most popularly and most likely, the highly acclaimed and influential thriller Diabolique (1955). Internet sources maintain that the starring role of Lisa Schindler, the mysterious visitor in Games, was originally written for Marlene Dietrich, and when producers balked, the role was offered to Jeanne Moreau, who also declined. All of which may well be true. But after looking at this clever thriller full of twists and mysterious turns, the overwhelming evidence leans towards my belief that Games was conceived and written expressly to capitalize on and exploit the American public’s familiarity with Signoret’s starring role in Clouzot’s bloodcurdling French chiller.

Simone Signoret as Lisa Schindler

Katharine Ross as Jennifer Montgomery

James Caan as Paul Montgomery

Like most good thrillers, the premise of Games is marvelously simple. A well-to-do but eccentric young couple  who like to engage in elaborate games and practical jokes (Caan and Ross) meets their match when a mysterious French stranger (guess who) enters their lives. The couple, both blasé dilettantes dabbling in chic nihilism, prove no match for the genuine article.

Brando-ish 70's TV stalwart, Don Stroud (who five years later would appear as a nude centerfold in Playgirl magazine) plays Norman, the oversexed box boy. Another player in Games 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Compensating perhaps for all those years of hyperactivity in my youth, I’ve discovered of late that I’m remarkably adroit at being sedentary. It's a revelation to me that in my dotage I find I no longer go in search of thrills, but prefer instead for my thrills come to me. Ill-disposed as I am to amusement park rides, fast cars, or any activity calling for the deployment of adrenaline, I have become a huge fan of armchair adventure. I love mysteries, suspense thrillers, horror films (horror as in dread, not gore) and movie plotting that stays one step ahead of me. Even when a film has plot twists which can be figured out if one really puts their mind to it (as some claim to be the case with Games), I so enjoy the big “reveal” in these kinds of movies that I've learned over the years how not to spoil my own fun. I employ a subtle form of self-hypnosis, allow the plot to unfold before me and just let myself surrender to the director’s pace, trying not to put the pieces of the puzzle together unless the film leads me there first.

Identity and Illusion

Games is almost theatrical in its construct, as it’s sparsely populated (four principal characters) and takes place primarily in a single location (the tony townhouse of Paul and Jennifer Montgomery). Tension is derived from the uneasiness of having a cast of characters, none of whom we’re told very much about but all overtly fond of playing mind-games, interacting in both real and contrived situations. As it becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain whether a game has begun, ended, or is underway, it soon dawns that the film itself is but another of the games. One that we in the audience (like several of the characters in the movie) weren't aware we were playing.

PERFORMANCES

Regrettably, for all the fun to be had in watching Games (like the 1972 film adaptation of Anthony Schaeffer’s Sleuth, its pleasures don’t diminish even after its surprises are revealed) I can’t say it’s a film one is likely to remember for the performances. In just a few short years the producers of Games probably wouldn't have been able to afford either Katharine Ross or James Caan, but at this point in their young careers the future superstars are shown visibly trying to find their footing in this stylish thriller. Though falling short of making me really feel for the plight of the caracters, I've no real complaint with the beautiful Katharine Ross who is always an appealingly natural presence and is, I think,  actually better here than she is in The Graduate. She definitely comes off much better than Caan, who seems a tad stiff trying to play an urbane sophisticate who's still a little rough around the edges. 

Simone Signoret claimed responsibility for bringing Katharine Ross to the attention of director Mike Nichols when he was casting The Graduate

The ever-watchable Simone Signoret has had many finer moments on the screen and has certainly been photographed to better advantage than she is here, but for me, she is a dynamic screen presence and gives the film the garvitas it most certainly needs. Acting-wise, little is demanded of her save to appear mysterious and give off an air of European ambiguity in the face of Yankee frankness; but she's one of those less-is-more actressess who don't require showy display. She's fine as she is merely exuding style and a kind of debauched regalness.

Something Wicked This Way Comes?
Oddly unsettling artwork (Roy Lichtenstein?) dominates this shot and adds a sense of apprehension and danger to the scene

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Paul and Jennifer Montgomery are the idle wealthy. A little too much money and too much time on their hands extends to their eccentric collection of modern art. The pieces, whimsical and absurd works displayed throughout their spacious New York townhouse, create the effect that we are watching events play out on an oversized game board or inside a pinball machine.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The first time I saw Games was when it aired on NBC-TV back in the early '70s. I recall I'd found it to be very much the unsettling suspenser, keeping me on the edge of my seat as the swift turns of plot not only taking me by surprise but scaring the hell out of me. No longer a kid and revisiting it on DVD some 30 years later, I was prepared for it to be a nice, tame nostalgia trip with maybe the distraction of camp taking the place of the suspense.
Not the case. The years may have shaved a little of the originality off its plot, but the effectiveness of the film itself - the sustaining of mood, the building of suspense, the unforeseen twists - it all worked for me just as persuasively as when I first saw it in my youth. In fact, much of the film played better in some instances; particularly in my taking note of all the foreshadowing in events, and the allusions made to the articficiality and contrivance of pop-culture,  pop-art,and pop-amorality.

Although the term hipster didn't exist in 1967 in the context it's used today, James Caan and Katharine Ross play a 60s version of just the kind of obnoxiously trendy urban couple you might find yourself rooting for something bad to happen to.

Games is no classic, and to some it will look a great deal like a well-made '70s TV movie. But as suspense thrillers go (and when was the last time a good one of those appeared on the horizon?), I have to say, flaws and all, Games comes out looking like a winner.

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2013

THE STEPFORD WIVES 1975

Despite the fact that I was a pretty jumpy kid, I nevertheless LOVED to be scared at the movies. More to the point, I liked the idea of being scared. I had fun huddling in a dark movie house with my sisters, three shivering clumps of terror with knees drawn tight to our chins, peering timorously over fortress walls of raised sweaters. Unfortunately, I was also a very pensive and over-analytical kid with a habit of spoiling my own fun by taking what happened on the screen way too seriously.

The first time I recall doing this was back in 1968 when, at age 11, I broke into tears watching Rosemary's Baby. It was during the scene where the deathly pale and thin Rosemary, fearful that her child is dying inside of her, first feels it kick. In the middle of her cluttered apartment (she and her husband have just had a Christmas party), left alone by her guiltily skittish husband on the pretext of cleaning up, she sits rocking back and forth with her arms hugging her pathetically tiny belly. The look on Mia Farrow's face is so heartbreakingly happy that it just tore me up inside. Most people harbor memories of Rosemary's Baby as a fun, thrill ride of a scary movie (which it is), but I always remember how it struck me as being so sad.

Years later, I had a similar experience with another adaptation of an Ira Levin thriller, The Stepford Wives. Well-acted, suspenseful, and atmospherically creepy, I nevertheless left the theater feeling that the film was more poignantly sad than frightening.

"Daddy, I just saw a man carrying a naked lady."
"Well, that's why we're moving to Stepford."

The Stepford Wives is a feminist nightmare about a city family (Katharine Ross, Peter Masterson) moving into a suburban Connecticut town populated by dull, boorish men who all have stunningly beautiful wives who live for nothing more than slavish domesticity and sexual servility. The ingeniousness of the plot lies in its wry awareness that this women's nightmare is the waking fantasy of a great many men and a cornerstone of the American Dream itself. By pitting repressive traditional values against a more liberated definition of women's societal role, Ira Levin fashions a nifty modern horror story out of contemporary sexual politics.

Katharine Ross as Joanna Eberhart

Paula Prentiss as Bobbie Markowe

Tina Louise as Charmaine Wimpiris

Peter Masterson as Walter Eberhart

Patrick O'Neal as Dale "Dis" Coba

Nanette Newman as Carol Van Sant

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Films about losing one's identity (like Invasion of the Body Snatchers) only work when the film takes the time to develop the personalities of the protagonists in jeopardy. You can only be invested in the loss of something once the value of that thing is established. What I love about The Stepford Wives is how well it gets us to understand, identify with, and ultimately root for the flawed humanity of Katharine Ross' character.

From the film's first frames, we get a sense of her restless dissatisfaction and longing for something more meaningful beyond home and family. All the more tragic then that the very individuality she seeks to express is the one quality least valued in women in the town of Stepford.

Suburban Bliss: Dream House / Nightmare Life 

In Stepford, the wives don't even exist on mailboxes

PERFORMANCES
The casting of the principal ladies of Stepford is flawless. The women are all such distinct, lively, and interesting characters that you feel the men of Stepford have to be nuts (they are) to want to replace them with bland automatons. Tina Louise is surprisingly vibrant and even a little touching in her brief role.

Paula Prentiss, always a personal favorite, almost walks off with the entire film. But it's Katharine Ross' show, and she has never been shown off in a film to better effect. Hers is a deeply appealing, intelligent performance that is the genesis of the emotional impact of the unsettling dénouement.

Strange Things Afoot in Stepford

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
I think it was a risky step for the filmmakers to have the women in Stepford speak to one another almost exclusively in TV commercial clichés. It's hilariously appropriate, of course (the women in those commercials seem to operate on another plane of existence — they all derive a little too much joy from getting a floor clean or a stain out of a shirt). But it runs the risk of diluting the effectiveness of both the horror and the suspense. Happily, the film strikes just the right tone and unearths the eerie subnormality that lies behind the pursuit of conventional perfection.

"We Stepford wives are busy, busy, busy!"

 THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As stated earlier, I enjoy being scared by movies, but that's another way of saying I like to be engaged by them. I want a movie to draw me into its reality.

The Stepford Wives achieves this by emphasizing character and relationships over plot machinations. It's wonderful how well the film works, even though we never really learn just how the men accomplish what they do (like the issue with the eyes). It's plenty scary just letting your imagination go where the film takes you. I think most good writers and directors will agree that detailed explanations and ensuring everything is highlighted and accounted for aren't always necessary if you can successfully suspend disbelief just long enough to keep an audience off-balance.
Much of The Stepford Wives wouldn't stand up to the microscopic scrutiny of today's fandom culture, but the film works splendidly because it's so well-constructed.

The Men's Association

Speaking of scary, I confess that once again, although the film has much to recommend in the way of shocks (the fireplace poker scene is so well edited I jump every time). But what always stays with me is the tragedy.

There's a scene late in the film where Ross (who longs for a career as a photographer) shows her work to a New York gallery owner. Her eagerness to please and desperation to be acknowledged are palpable.

Gallery owner - "What do you want from it all, do you know?"

Joanna  -"I want... somewhere, someday, someone to look at something and say, 'Hey, that reminds me of an Ingalls.' Ingalls was my maiden name. I guess I want to be remembered."

Oh, gosh. That scene just breaks my heart...and all of a sudden, I'm 11 years-old again.

"There'll be somebody with my name, and she'll cook and clean like crazy, but she won't take pictures and she won't be me.
She'll be like one of those robots in Disneyland."

 BONUS MATERIAL

A bit of twisted trivia: Katharine Ross' bathroom wallpaper, seen briefly in the opening sequence of The Stepford Wives (a horrid kind of mustard-colored jungle print with leopards and flowers), shows up 38 years later in the film Lovelace (2013).

Top: 1975. With good reason, as it turns out, Katharine Ross isn't looking forward to moving out of New York.

Below; 2013. In Lovelace, the biographical film about 70s porn star Linda Lovelace, Linda's parents (Robert Patrick and Sharon Stone) watch their daughter on The Phil Donahue Show. An event placing the scene in 1980.

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Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011

THE GRADUATE 1967

A favorite film of mine that hasn't aged particularly well for me is Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, a '60s generation-gap social satire about directionless, Ivy League college grad Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) and his struggle to find himself amidst the hypocrisies and false values of post-'50s suburbia.

I've seen The Graduate many times over the years, and the witty dialogue and sharp performances always make me laugh. I even appreciate how the generational divide of idealism vs. cynicism still feels relevant no matter how many decades have past. 

I have noticed, however, that the character of Benjamin doesn’t wear so well on me after repeat viewings. Hoffman is really quite good, and the character is fleshed out enough to be authentically complex and contradictory in nature. But in the end, a major sympathetic stopgap for me is the degree to which I've come to find the character of Benjamin to be inherently unlikable; his moody self-absorption coming across like a wearisome extension of the film’s simplistic, very late-'60s “Noble Youth/Morally Bankrupt Adults” bias.

Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock

Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson

Katharine Ross as Elaine Robinson

Perhaps it’s just my age showing, but what grates is the arrogance of a kid who attends four years of college (on his parent’s dole), returns home, contemptuous of both of his parents and their way of life, yet whose high ideals fail to prevent him from exploiting his middle-class advantages and floating the summer away in their backyard pool (rent-free) while figuring out how not to wind up like them.

The main attraction in The Graduate and the sole reason why it ranks so high on my list of favorite films is, simply, the glorious Anne Bancroft, certainly one of the most talented and classiest acts ever to grace the screen. As the embittered, sexually predatory Mrs. Robinson, she is Star Quality personified and in every scene makes obvious how she became the ultimate older-woman crush for scores of young men at the time. Displaying a heretofore unseen genius for comedy, Bancroft is sexy and smart, tough and touching, and gives one of those surprising, nuanced performances that gets better and better with age.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I know that we are not really supposed to like Mrs. Robinson and the film sets her up as this big archvillain and symbol of what is wrong with the older generation, but, as is often the case with movie villains, hers is the best-written and most dimensional character in the piece. She’s a wonderful cinematic creation. An almost feminist deconstruction of the male adolescent fantasy of the older woman, Mrs. Robinson is not the lonely dreamy fantasy pin-up of Summer of ‘42, but a strong, assertive, and intelligent woman who knows what she wants and uses the leverage of her maturity to get it.

"Would you like me to seduce you? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

Sure she’s manipulative, an alcoholic and a self-professed “neurotic,” but she’s also the most emotionally honest character in the film and I like her immensely. She doesn’t kid herself (she doesn’t pretend to be in love with Benjamin any more than she does her husband), she doesn’t take any of Benjamin’s guff (love the way she hurls his car keys into his aquarium), and she has a killer fashion sense (the streaked hair and animal print wardrobe are beyond sensational).

Mrs. Robinson: The original cougar

PERFORMANCES

Satires are dicey because, by definition, they deal with caricature. Play it too broad, you have a cartoon, play it too straight and you run the risk of actually being the thing you’re sending up. In The Graduate Anne Bancroft is the emotional anchor which makes possible the arch absurdity of Nichols’ pointed barbs at American suburban rot. Armed with a set of regal cheekbones and a look of perpetual haughty nonchalance, Bancroft lays waste every other character the minute she opens her mouth and lets out with that throaty, no-nonsense voice of hers.

Bancroft imbues Mrs. Robinson with a steely world-weariness that gives way to surprisingly disarming smiles and glimmers of raw vulnerability; reminding us that toughness is often just the armor worn by those most disappointed by life and themselves.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Bancroft is one of the few actresses able to combine old-school movie star glamour with contemporary earthiness. No matter how gorgeous she looked (and she was seriously gorgeous …she was just 35 at the time, Hoffman was 30), Bancroft always exuded such genuine intelligence, humor, and sensitivity. You really can’t take your eyes off of her.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The early scenes between Bancroft and Hoffman are such masterfully choreographed games of sexual cat and mouse (Hoffman’s comic discomfort compliments Bancroft’s droll assurance) that they are what most people recall. But my favorite scene in the entire film is the hotel room tryst that comes after Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin have been involved for some time. Benjamin is eager to take things to a more personal level while Mrs. Robinson is content to keep things strictly physical.

As he badgers her to reveal details of her personal life, for the first time there is a power shift in the dynamic of this couple, and we get a glimpse into the sadness behind Mrs. Robinson’s cool exterior. Bancroft goes through a staggering array of emotions during this scene, sublimely conveying the heartbreaking regrets Mrs. Robinson keeps so well hidden. Bancroft has played many wonderful scenes in many films, but this remains my all-time favorite.

In retrospect, it surprises me to think of how long it took me to see The Graduate. I was ten years old when it first came out, and despite its "recommended for adults" rating, I would certainly have sneaked in to see it were I interested. What I recall most are the newspaper ads that played up the graphic of the dopey schlub accosted by the shapely lady's limb. Seeing this, I was positive the film would be one of those smirky, smutty 60s sex comedies of the type I loathed (the result of too many TV reruns of Tony Curtis movies, I guess). Anyhow, when I finally saw it at a revival theater at age 20, I was pleasantly surprised at how smart it was and how hilarious I found Benjamin’s bemused stutterings in the face of Mrs. Robinson’s determined seduction.

Those scenes still make me laugh, but I can’t say I enjoy the sequences without Anne Bancroft all that much. So, in a way, I guess Mrs. Robinson seduced me, too.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

Autograph of Dustin Hoffman. He was in the courtyard restaurant at a dance studio where I was teaching in Santa Monica. Very nice and unexpectedly, such a handsome guy in person!

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2010