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.

Clip from "Airport" 

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

BYE, BYE, BIRDIE 1963

Sure, Bye Bye Birdie is a bright, lively, tuneful, only intermittently funny satire of teenage pop culture in the '60s. But as far as I’m concerned, Bye Bye Birdie has two huge assets (I know what you’re thinking…and you should be ashamed of yourself!) which make it one of my all-time favorite movie musicals. Those assets: the unstoppable star-quality of Ann-Margret, and the snappy musical staging and choreography by Onna White. 

Ann-Margret as Kim McAfee

Bobby Rydell as Hugo Peabody

Dick Van Dyke & Janet Leigh / Albert Peterson & Rose DeLeon

Mary LaRoche & Paul Lynde / Doris and Harry McAfee

Jesse Pearson as Conrad Birdie

Adapted from the 1960 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Bye Bye Birdie pokes gentle fun at America’s burgeoning youth culture by spoofing the real-life pandemonium surrounding hip-swiveling pop star Elvis Presley being drafted into the army in 1958. Standing in for Elvis in the musical is the fictitious rocker Conrad Birdie (Jesse Pearson): a beer-swilling, ill-mannered, libidinous hillbilly who wreaks havoc on prototypical Midwestern small town, Sweet Apple, Ohio when he arrives to bestow a symbolic coast-to-coast televised goodbye kiss on an adoring female fan before being shipped overseas.

Cue the generation-gap complications and small-town vs. show-biz culture clash hijinks. None of which, I might add, should anyone having even the most cursory familiarity with '60s-era sitcoms should have trouble staying one step ahead of. Bye Bye Birdie, when it’s either singing or dancing, is the most engaging and sprightliest of musicals, full of fun and as eager to please as a puppy. In its quieter moments—scratch that, there are no quieter moments—in its non-musical moments, Bye Bye Birdie's amusing, if not particularly funny, screenplay feels a tad labored and more than a little creaky.
Rooted in a kind of broad, over-emphatic acting style of most sixties sitcoms (a style that struck me as riotous when I was nine, a good deal less so now) and over-reliant on moldy, near-vaudevillian comedic shtick of the sort that considers silly names (Hugo Peabody) and wacky plot contrivances (that deadly speed-up pill subplot) the height of comedic brilliance; Bye Bye Birdie stays afloat chiefly through its simple desire to entertain and because of the buoyant charm of its talented and energetic cast.

The Sweet Apple chapter of The Conrad Birdie Fan Club 
(fronted by Ann-Margret and Trudi Ames) pledge undying allegiance.

The film version of Bye Bye Birdie was significantly (and, as per the voiced consensus of Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Paul Lynde, and Maureen Stapleton, controversially) retooled from the stage production. Primarily a middle-aged romance (Albert & Rosie) against a satirically rendered teen-culture backdrop, the Broadway production was nominated for eight Tonys, winning four: Best Musical, Best Director, Best Choreography, and Best Actor (Van Dyke). By the time it reached the screen, what was essentially a Dick Van Dyke showcase was fashioned by director George Sidney into a $6 million valentine to vivacious protégé Ann-Margret.
This was Ann-Margret's third film (she made her debut in Pocketful of Miracles, and assumed the Vivian Blaine role in the 1962 remake of State Fair), but thanks to Sidney's loving attention and her heretofore peripheral character being thrust to the film's center, Bye Bye Birdie is the movie most people credit with making her a star.

What began life as an anti-rock & roll musical fashioned to reflect the middle-age mentality of adult Broadway audiences reeling from rock & roll upstarts like Elvis stealing the Sinatra crown, arrived on the screen as a youth-centric glorification of teenybopper culture that effectively allocated once-prominent adult plotlines and relationships to the sidelines to make way for the fresh vitality of its young cast members (aka Ann-Margret). With Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde the only carry-overs from the Broadway show, numerous songs jettisoned and plotlines abandoned or reworked; Bye Bye Birdie became the ironic embodiment of all that the Broadway play had spoofed. Bye Bye Birdie, hello to the first multimillion-dollar teenage musical!

Paul Lynde's comedic number, "Kids" was a showstopper that brought down the house on Broadway. When speaking of his much-abbreviated screen role, Lynde was fond of saying of the film, "They should have retitled it, 'Hello, Ann-Margret'!" 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One look at Bye Bye Birdie and it’s easy to see why it has become one of the most imitated and referenced movie musicals since The Wizard of Oz. Each number in the bouncy Charles Strouse / Lee Adams score is given almost cartoonishly vibrant life in increasingly clever and dazzlingly cinematic ways. So many large-scale musicals fall into the trap of thinking that mere size and expense is enough to make a film fun and energetic; Bye Bye Birdie is that rare example of a musical whose scale perfectly fits its subject, and whose accumulated talents (dancers, singers, cinematography, color, choreography, staging, and minor special effects) all remain on the same creative page. Every number throughout is infused with a lighthearted wit and silliness that remains true to the escapist tone of the entire enterprise. The effective musical film is almost a lost art, but Bye Bye Birdie is a glowing example of the genre done right. Small wonder that musicals like Grease and Hairspray, and entertainments as diverse as music videos, TV’s Mad Men, and Disney’s High School Musical franchise, have all owed a debt to Bye Bye Birdie.

The combined talents of director George Sidney (Pal Joey, Annie Get Your Gun) and choreographer Onna White (The Music Man, Oliver!) result in a movie whose clever, eye-popping musical sequences are a great deal of silly fun and still have the power to delight and captivate after all these years.

"The Telephone Hour (Going Steady)" predates the look of MTV music videos; "Put on a Happy Face" makes imaginative use of cute, if primitive special effects; and "A Lot of Livin' to Do" is a powerhouse production number of unparalleled energy and witty choreography.

Oscar and Tony Award-winner Maureen Stapleton makes her musical debut in
Bye Bye Birdie as  Mae Peterson, Albert's dominating mother.

PERFORMANCES

In her 1982 book 5001 Nights at the Movies, fave film critic Pauline Kael wrote the following about Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie...and I couldn't have said it any better: “Ann-Margret, playing a brassy 16-year-old with a hyperactive rear end, takes over the picture; slick, enameled, and appalling as she is, she’s an undeniable presence.” 

OK, I might have left out “appalling.”

Real-life teen idol Bobby Rydell makes his film debut as Ann-Margret's love interest

Beyond that, Kael pretty much nails Ann-Margret’s appeal for me in this film and why any director would have been a fool not to have kept the camera trained on her every second. She's a dynamo! Members of the film’s cast may have felt slighted, and fans of the stage show may cry foul, but in my book, if Bye Bye Birdie is remembered at all today, it’s due in large part to Ann-Margret. The material is just too ordinary as it is. She is camp, a little over the top, and perhaps artificial as hell, but she is blessed with that indefinable something that makes it near-impossible for you to watch anyone else when she's on the screen. She’s a star.

In the Broadway show, Bye Bye Birdie paid tribute to iconic, stone-faced TV host Ed Sullivan  in the song, "Hymn for a Sunday Evening." Director George Sidney snagged the genuine article for the film (that's him on the left, for all of you youngsters).

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

There aren't many lines across which the life experiences of gays and straights of my generation intersect, but one thing that many males (and a good many females) my age have in common—regardless of sexual orientation—is the memory of their first time seeing Ann-Margret singing the film’s title song. Whether we saw it on the big screen in full color or in black and white on our TV sets, like the Moon Landing, few of us ever forgot or recovered from that image. Wow!

At the start of the film, Ann-Margret's performance of "Bye Bye Birdie" is girlish and plaintive. When she reprises the song at the end of the film, her performance has become assured, teasing, and not a little sexually aggressive.

The fifties had Marilyn Monroe standing over that subway grate, but we children of the sixties had Ann-Margret on that treadmill. A sequence so obviously tame, perhaps it's a testament to our nation's level of sexual repression at the time that Ann-Margret, in those few short minutes at the start and end of the film, made men, women, children, straights, gays, lesbians, and adolescents of all stripes fall in love/lust with her.
The first time I saw Bye Bye Birdie was in black & white on late-night TV. I remember being just thunderstruck (I'm positive my jaw dropped open). I'd never seen anything like her! Advancing and retreating against that endless void, wind machine a-blowing...Ann-Margret was nothing less than a celluloid Venus emergent.

The dancer assuming the puppy hands pose with Bobby Rydell here is Lorene Yarnell, 
who found fame in the '70s as half of the popular mime duo, Shields and Yarnell.

The blonde staring agog at Jesse Pearson is '70s TV personality and Match Game stalwart, Elaine Joyce. Pearson himself would go on to write and direct porn films in the '70s until his untimely passing in 1979 at the age of 49. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As I've stated, Bye Bye Birdie is one of my favorite movie musicals, but primarily due to its songs, musical sequences, and the rapturous presence of Ann-Margret. I have no complaint with anyone in the cast except to say that they're sorely ill-served by the weak script and they're all goners when it comes to having to share any scenes with Miss You-Know-Who. Predictably, I'm finding that the older I get the more certain aspects of the film seem to strike me as charmingly camp or comically dated. Some of these things are fun: the middle-class suburban milieu, the fashions, all those rotary phones. Other things less so: the all-white cast, that Shriner's Ballet when it starts to get out of hand (the 2009 Broadway revival removed the number entirely claiming, in the words of its star Gina Gershon, "It seemed a little too gang rape-y").

Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye
When I saw Bye Bye Birdie on the big screen for the first time in the 80s, the film's biggest laugh came from the intentional misunderstanding of this sweet, totally innocent lyric. 

So whether enjoyed as camp, escapism, or an idealized journey to a past that never existed, Bye Bye Birdie is, at 50-years, still the most fun-filled musical around. And best of all, it has Ann-Margret!

This great caricature is the work of Pete Emslie

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

THE FAN 1981

At a time when most of her industry peers were retired, forgotten, or guesting on episodes of Fantasy Island and The Love Boat, 56-year-old Lauren Bacall was enjoying a career resurgence and public visibility rivaling that of her 1940s heyday when she was known as “The Look.”  The year 1981 saw Bacall headlining in the Broadway musical Woman of the Year; topping the bestseller charts with the paperback release of her 1978 memoir By Myself; shilling everything from jewelry to cat food in TV and print ads; and, most remarkably in those pre-Meryl Streep/Helen Mirren years of elder-actress marketability, starring in a nine-million-dollar major motion picture release.

The Fame Game

The Fan, a suspense thriller based on Bob Randall’s 1977 epistolary novel about an aging Broadway star stalked by an obsessive fan, gave Bacall arguably the biggest role of her career. Certainly, the first to require her to carry an entire film on her own.

Filmed on location in New York from March to July of 1980, The Fan was poised for release at the most opportune time to take marketing advantage of Bacall’s already-in-motion Broadway and bookshelf publicity. Unfortunately, as The Fan’s PR-friendly release date of March 15, 1981 neared, several real-life, obsessive fan-based tragedies occurred (targeting John Lennon and then-President Ronald Reagan), conspiring to make this fame-culture melodrama seem more an exercise in bad taste than a film of ripped-from-today's-headlines relevance.

Lauren Bacall as Sally Ross

Michael Biehn as Douglas Breen

Maureen Stapleton as Belle Goldman

James Garner as Jake Berman

Hector Elizondo as Inspector Raphael Andrews

Kurt Johnson as David Barnum

If musical theater geeks, Glee habitués, and folks capable of making it through an entire Tony Awards broadcast ever longed for an '80s slasher film to call their own, then The Fan more than fills the Playbill. This unappetizingly bloody, yet oh-so delectable/derisible blend of backstage musical, 1940s career-woman soap opera, slasher-flick, and woman-in-peril melodrama, is high-camp movie nirvana. An upscale cousin of the hagsploitation genre of the '60s, The Fan might have substituted seasoned glamour for the usual grotesquery, but in keeping with the requirements of the sub-genre, The Fan's raison d'être remained the prolonged persecution and victimization of a mature star from Hollywood's Golden Era. 

When The Fan opened in theaters in the spring of 1981, the film...to borrow a line from one of the hooty Louis St. Louis (Grease 2) showtunes sung in the film..."Got no love” from either audiences or critics. Patrons old enough to be enticed by the film's elder cast risked having their blue rinses turn stark white at the sight of the movie's copious bloodshed and some of the blunt, Bogie-wouldn't-stand-for-this dialog: “Dearest bitch, see how accessible you are? How would you like to be fucked by a meat cleaver?” Similarly, the teen demographic ordinarily drawn to slasher films weren't quite sure of what to make of a movie set in the middle-aged, Sardi's and cigarettes world of New York legitimate theater.  A wholly uninspired publicity campaign only added to the film’s troubles

The stark graphic design of the poster had a generic slasher film look
that did nothing to sell the film to the public. 

Had The Fan been a play, it would probably have closed in Boston. Whisked off screens within weeks of its release, The Fan resurfaced with some regularity on cable TV venues like HBO and Showtime throughout the '80s before ultimately disappearing into relative obscurity. Obscurity so complete that Robert De Niro's unrelated but same-titled 1996 sports-themed film has totally eclipsed Bacall's The Fan in the public's memory.

Happily, The Fan's recent release on DVD has rekindled awareness of this very '80s curio. A glimpse back at a New York still atmospherically seedy. A vision of a world populated with record stores, typewriters, payphones, legwarmers, and heavy smokers. All with nary a Starbucks in sight. And while it's no undiscovered classic, The Fan does have its merits (most of them camp-related, I'm afraid) that make it a movie worthy of rediscovery. Not the least of them being Lauren Bacall, a smoking, drinking, tough-as-nails star of Broadway and the silver screen, playing a smoking, drinking, tough-as-nails star of Broadway and the silver screen. And convincingly, too!

The intersect of stardom and fandom

"And the audience LOVES me! And I love them. And they love me for lovin' them and I love them for lovin' me. And we love each other. And that's 'cause none of us got enough love in our childhoods. 

And that's show biz, kid!"  - Fred Ebb

No low-budget, body-count slasher flick featuring nondescript teens stalked by a masked phantom, The Fan was conceived as a stylish, A-List, Hitchcockian thriller along the lines of Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). The latter, a sleeper hit that garnered '50s sexpot, Angie Dickinson, some of the best notices of her career. 
At least that's how things started.

Produced by movie/music mogul Robert Stigwood on the downturn side of a '70s winning streak that included youth-centric films like Jesus Christ Superstar, Saturday Night Fever, and Tommy; The Fan was Stigwood’s most expensive film to date and first stab at cracking the grown-up ticket-buying market. To this end, he amassed a distinguished cast of New York actors and pedigreed Broadway composers (Marvin Hamlisch and Tim Rice collaborated on two–fairly terrible but nonetheless irresistible–original songs). On the production end, he secured the talents of up-and-coming first-time director Edward Bianchi (from TV commercials and music videos) and choreographer Arlene Philips (Can’t Stop The Music, Annie).

If you've ever seen a Lauren Bacall musical, you know that her being lifted and carried about is a choreography requisite. I was surprised at the number of online reviews that questioned Bacall's "believability" portraying a Broadway musical star in The Fan. Reviews that later expressed surprise upon learning that she was indeed a musical theater star in real life. Bacall was the Best Actress Tony Award winner for both Applause - 1970 and Woman of the Year - 1981.

But as the saying goes, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and somewhere between screenplay to movie-house, The Fan transmogrified into a film beset by:
1) Bad decisions -  Friday the 13 became a hit during The Fan's post-production, prompting Paramount to order reshoots to ratchet up the violence. 
2) Bad timing and bad decisions - Three months before The Fan's release, John Lennon was killed by an obsessive fan outside NY’s Dakota apartments (as it happens, also the home of Lauren Bacall), after which it is said the film's original downbeat ending (if true to the novel) underwent some 11^th-hour tinkering and reshoots.
3) Bad luck -  Bacall's idea of promoting The Fan was to express to the press her disappointment in the finished product. Making matters worse, three weeks into The Fan's less-than-illustrious release, an attempt was made on President Reagan's life by a Jodie Foster-obsessed fan. Suddenly, a film very few people were interested in in the first place began to look to everyone like an exercise in exploitation and bad taste.

Bacall the Buzzkill
Bacall: "The Fan is much more graphic and violent than when I read the script."
Anna Maria Horsford (who appeared in Stigwood's Times Square in 1980) as detective Emily Stolz

Stigwood severely scaled back his usual bombastic pre-release publicity for The Fan (STD results have been released with more fanfare), while Paramount added a disclaimer to its theatrical trailers claiming The Fan was in no way inspired by the tragic death of John Lennon. The latter decision prompting the outspoken Bacall to declare to People magazine: “I think it’s disgusting, revolting, and exploitive!”

In the end, it didn't really matter, for The Fan wound up being one of those rare films capable of offering audiences simultaneously contradictory experiences–none of them satisfactory. Stylishly shot, overflowing in chichi urban gloss, and embellished with a chilling Pino Donaggio score (Carrie, Don’t Look Now) The Fan ultimately failed to find an audience because it clearly didn't know who the hell that was. Classic movie fans familiar with Lauren Bacall thought the film was too classy to be so trashy; slasher fans thought the film wasn't trashy enough. Gays had their own problems with the film.

Strangers in the Night

The Fan did itself no favors by alienating the very audience most receptive to a film offering up ample doses of musical theater, backstage drama, show tunes, tight male bodies in various states of undress, and Lauren Bacall in full Margo Channing mode. On the heels of Windows (1980), a stalker thriller about a lesbian psychopath, and Cruising (1980) a crime thriller about a gay psychopath; many members of the gay community felt The Fan's closeted theater-queen stalker was one gay psycho too many.

None of that applied to me, however. I was a presold audience in and of myself. I’d read The Fan back in 1978, intrigued by the way the book used the thriller genre to comment on the odd love/hate relationship between stars and their adoring public. I was also a longstanding fan of Lauren Bacall from her old movies with Bogart on The Late Show, Applause (the 1973 TV broadcast, anyway), and Murder on the Orient Express; so I was thrilled when I heard she'd been cast.  

Dana Delany making her film debut

Feiga Martinez as Elsa

Adding to my anticipation was the fact that Edward Bianchi was hired to direct and Arlene Phillips was to do the choreography. Bianchi & Phillips had collaborated on a series of eye-popping Dr. Pepper commercials in the late '70s for the advertising agency Young & Rubicam. Commercials I had been inspired by and borrowed from for a couple of my film school projects. When I also learned that Broadway great Maureen Stapleton had joined the cast and that Bacall’s rumored real-life paramour, James Garner, was also on board, The Fan swiftly became one of the most eagerly-awaited films of the year...for me, anyway.

I saw The Fan on opening day at Grauman’s Chinese Theater where the smallish audience of young people in attendance (clearly in search of a good scare) was underwhelmed. I, on the other hand, felt as though I’d died and gone to camp film heaven. Not since Eyes of Laura Mars had I seen such a slick-looking thriller. One capable of being enjoyed on so many levels at once. I wound up seeing it a total of three times before it disappeared from theaters.

Shot on location, The Fan provides many great glimpses of 80s-era New York.
Here the famed Shubert Theater is the site for Sally Ross' opening night in Never Say Never; the fictional musical providing The Fan with so much of its camp appeal

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What brings me back to The Fan time and time again are its many sequences depicting the behind-the-scenes creation of the fictional Broadway musical Never Say Never, which is to be star Sally Ross’ singing and dancing debut. What with its use of recognized Broadway dancers, NY locations, and knowing attention to procedural detail; the feel is very authentic, very 80s, and very stylishly evoked. I find these scenes a bit camp to be sure (what with all those legwarmers and Arlene Philips' trademark Hot Gossip choreography), but I have to say all of it contributes to giving us a refreshingly novel backdrop for a suspense thriller. Silly as they may be, they are also terrifically fun. Of course, it doesn't hurt that I saw this film during my early days as a dancer, or that in 1983, when I took my first trip to New York, I studied dance at Jo Jo's, the studio featured in the film.

That's Kurt Johnson providing literal backup to Lauren Bacall as she sings " A Remarkable Woman," one of two Marvin Hamlisch/Tim Rice compositions introduced in the film

UK Choreographer Arlene Phillips wouldn't actually choreograph for
Broadway until 1987's Starlight Express

All The Boys Love Sally
Broadway dancer Justin Ross (l.) appeared in the film version of A Chorus Line, and dancer Reed Jones (r.) originated the role of Skimbleshanks in the original Broadway production of Cats 

 PERFORMANCES

If you’re going to make a film about the kind of old-school, glamorous, show-biz diva capable of inciting the flames of obsessive fandom, you couldn’t do much better than landing all-around class-act, Lauren Bacall. Her gravitas as a full-fledged movie star from the golden era gives The Fan a shot of instant legitimacy every time she appears. In one of the largest roles of her career, Bacall is not always filmed as flatteringly as you'd expect, but the effect is rather refreshing. Her face looks terrifically lived-in, and her still-striking looks serve as a welcome change from the botoxed mannequins we've grown used to. Playing a role that isn't perhaps much of a stretch, awfully good. So good in fact, that I kept wishing the film would just allow the story's natural character conflicts (an aging star grappling confronting loneliness, self-doubt, and vulnerability) play themselves out minus all the genre machinations.

Bacall's appearance on Garner's TV show The Rockford Files in 1979, followed by their re-appearance in Robert Altman's HealtH (1980) and yet again here in The Fan, really had gossip-columnist tongues wagging about a romance between the two

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The '80s come vividly alive in the film's Broadway musical sequences, which are sort of Solid Gold meets Can't Stop The Music. As would be the case with the Broadway musical numbers in 1983s Staying Alive, it's near-impossible to imagine just what kind of Broadway this could be, as the numbers look more appropriate to a Las Vegas revue. But they left me wanting more, not less. (I feel safe in saying I'm likely the only person who felt that way.)

A Remarkable Woman

More Like Hot Flash, Baby, Tonight
I saw The Fan the night it opened at Mann's Chinese Theater in L.A., and I swear,  the entire audience did a collective spit-take when Ms. Bacall launched into this hilariously inappropriate disco-ditty.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I've never considered The Fan to be as bad a film as its reputation has led people to believe. Its screenplay is clichéd to be sure (the stage doorman is actually named “Pop”) and the violence needlessly gruesome for such a visually distinguished and stylish film (Bianchi’s music video background is in full evidence), but with a provocative theme and talented cast, The Fan has quite a bit going for it even with its flaws. 

Griffin Dunne a few years before his breakout
role in Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985)

Celebrity and fan obsession is a compellingly intriguing topic for a thriller. The whole codependent, love/hate, need/resent, fear/envy aspect of the “relationship” between the famous and the adoring public is ripe fodder for film treatment. The connection between celebrity and fan is a "relationship," by design and necessity, doomed forever to be one-sided: the fan feels an intimate kinship with someone who doesn't know they exist. Perhaps because of this imaginary, essentially hungry, connection, it's no surprise then how quickly fawning fandom can change to bilious hate if the fan’s attentions are even marginally rebuffed.

I’m reminded of a scene in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (a marvelously dark black comedy about fan obsession that would make a great double-bill with The Fan) in which talk-show host Jerry Lewis is walking down the street. When asked by a fan at a public phone to say a few words to her friend on the line, he politely demurs, claiming that he's running late. At this point, the seconds-ago adoring fan flips to bile-spewing enemy, shouting “You should only get cancer! I hope you get cancer!” Yikes! 

But such is the mercurial, frighteningly delicate line between love and hate that is fandom and celebrity obsession. Had The Fan set its sights on examining this already terrifying dynamic in the form of a strict psychological thriller, it had the potential for providing an insightful, genuinely chilling look at our increasingly celebrity-obsessed culture. In going the slasher/stalker route, The Fan cheapens and sensationalizes the material, making the events appear more remote and unlikely than in reality they are. 

"It's better than pot. It's better than booze. A shot of applause can stamp out the blues."
Lyrics from the title song of Bacall's first Broadway musical "Applause"  

Anyone who has ever attended a celebrity autograph convention or looked at the crowds outside of a movie premiere knows how Day of the Locust-like and unnerving celebrity-worship feels. There are so many things The Fan does right (depicting the many ways in which the famous are vulnerable to the public, conveying how the promise held forth by fame-culture fuels a never-to-be-satiated hunger in fans) but in not trusting the inherent, subtle creepiness of the material as is, misses a terrific opportunity to scare us with a bracing look at ourselves.

When it comes to The Fan, one might have wished for a little more finesse in the areas of motivation and character, but I seriously have a soft spot in my heart for this movie...mostly centered around the Broadway setting, the images of a still gritty and grimy New York, and reminders of my early years in dance. And, of course, it really is great to see late-career Bacall–with that amazing Gena Rowlands-like mane of hair–command the screen once more. Who was it that said, "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be"?

Clip of legwarmers in action in "The Fan" (1981) 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2012