SMILE 1975

The topics for satirical films come in three categories: 1. Overdue — health care (The Hospital, Robert Altman’s H.E.A.L.T.H.), rock & roll (This is Spinal Tap), regional theater (Waiting for Guffman); 2. Overdone — television (A Face in the Crowd, Network), Los Angeles, (Shampoo, S.O.B); and 3. Overripe — soap operas (Soap Dish), country music (Nashville), and beauty pageants (Drop Dead Gorgeous).

Understandably, it’s the latter two categories which pose the biggest challenge. For while public familiarity with the subject works to the filmmaker’s advantage, the potential for arriving at a suitably unique perspective to warrant yet another swipe at a favored pop-culture whipping-boy is statistically low. This is especially true of subjects that have, in one way or another, already become parodies of themselves.

The Summer of our Discontent
Michael Ritchie's Smile and Robert Altman's Nashville were twin satires of post-Watergate disillusionment released in the summer of 1975. With 1976 looming as both a Bicentennial and election year, Smile and Nashville appeared to be two extremely well-timed social comedies with their finger on the pulse of the tumultuous decade (Nixon's 1974 resignation, inflation, the oil crisis). Unfortunately, both films were swallowed up by that other 1975 summer release, Jaws.

Beauty pageants occur in every corner of the world, but it’s the American beauty pageant—with its discomfiting and vaguely unwholesome co-mingling of sex objectification, patriotism, Las Vegas vulgarity, and beauty-myth perpetuation—that looms strongest and most pervasively in the minds of the public. For as long as I can remember (even before the Women’s Lib '70s came along and forever pasted the stamp of “anachronistic, sexist, meat parade” on the whole practice) beauty pageants have struck me as curiously absurd rituals. Unabashedly kitschy, yet immensely entertaining, albeit for all the wrong reasons. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, is gladdened by the spectacle of eerily similar, Stepford-perfect women with lacquered hair and joyless smiles, trotted out, conveyor belt fashion, for our appraisal. As for me, few things look as cheesily ludicrous as a woman in a bathing suit wearing heels. The silliness of which is compounded tenfold by said woman being quizzed about government policy and solutions for world peace at the same time.

Bruce Dern as Robert "Big Bob" Freelander

Barbara Feldon as Brenda Di Carlo

Michael Kidd as Tommy French

For all the talk of celebrating inner beauty and scholastic achievement, I’ve not seen a single beauty pageant yet able to surmount the built-in incongruity of a “show” designed to display and reward that which is unobservable. Aware perhaps that there’s just no way to ethically reconcile a human competition  that bears more than a passing resemblance to a 4H Club prize heifer fair, beauty pageants always try to bump up the intellect and culture quotient. A decision which manifests in talent segments heavy on jarringly divergent high-brow/folksy mash-ups (e.g., classical pieces played on an accordion, baton twirling routines to pre-recorded recited poetry), and squirmingly awkward Q & A segments wherein contestants are required to answer preposterously weighty questions on the spot. You may not be able to show intellect and you can’t show a big heart, but what you CAN show is plenty of T & A and lots of smiles, smiles, smiles.

Contestants in the California Regionals of the Young American Miss teen beauty pageant

17 year-old Melanie Griffith is Miss Simi Valley, while directly behind her stands Colleen Camp, Miss Imperial County

*(Males aren’t immune to this lunacy, either. I once attended a bodybuilding competition, and aside from everyone there trying like mad to ignore the insistent homoeroticism of it all; I was made aware of how the contest as such [which is little more than your standard beauty pageant bathing suit competition on steroids—literally] seems to exist in this strange limbo where it’s neither sport nor full-out sideshow attraction. Divested of even the pretext of being about anything more than physical appearance, bodybuilding contests are the only real beauty pageants left.)

Contestants Robin (Joan Prather) and Doria (Annette O'Toole) ponder their situation.

Robin: Their parents made them beautiful, not them.
Doria: Yeah..but boys get money and scholarships for making a lot of touch downs, right? Well why shouldn't a girl get one for being cute and charming?
Robin: But maybe boys shouldn't be getting money for making touchdowns

Smile, Michael Ritchie’s smart and thoroughly delightful evisceration of beauty pageants (vis a vis small-town America in the post-Watergate years) is that most sought-after of satires: one which sidesteps the obvious and clichéd, landing on all that is surprising and fresh. Its humor hits the mark without resorting to unnecessary exaggeration or cruelty, and the observant, laugh-out-loud funny screenplay by Jerry Belson spares no one. Well, that’s not exactly true. One of the things I like best about Smile, which concerns itself with the mishaps surrounding the mounting of a regional teenage beauty contest, is that the film’s most obvious targets, the contestants, are treated rather sympathetically.

While affectionate fun is poked at everyone involved (with the harshest light shed on the adults who behave badly and should know better) there’s a refreshing lack of mean-spiritedness in this little-known but rather miraculous small film.

Fans of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory will recognize Denise Nickerson (Violet) as  Miss San Diego

Eric Shea, the bratty little brother in The Poseidon Adventure plays Bruce Dern's son, "Little Bob"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The lampooning of something as already over-the-top silly as a beauty pageant (a teen one, at that) runs the risk of leaving the satirist with nowhere to go. Smile is such a welcome exception to the rule because it consistently throws us a curve every time things start to look like they’re headed down a predictable path or angling for the easy satirical target. For example, the pageant choreographer, who I’d expected would be another tiresome gay stereotype, is portrayed by real-life Tony Award-winning choreographer Michael Kidd (Guys & Dolls, Lil’ Abner) as something like a sardonic Teamster. Expecting to laugh at the expense of Smile’s unsophisticated teen contestants and the usual small–town vulgarity, the film’s gentle tone and genuine affection for its characters caught me nicely off guard.

As Maria Gonzales, the hilariously guileful contestant not afraid to use the voting committee's racial ignorance/guilt to her advantage, actress Maria O'Brien gives, hands down, my favorite comic performance in the film. Not only do I love the concept of her character (a take-no-prisoners competitor), but O'Brien's comic delivery and timing is just brilliant.

Annette O'Toole (the very best thing in Paul Shrader's Cat People - 1982) is close to being the very best thing in Smile. Her disarmingly natural performance is smart and surprisingly nuanced. I especially like how the growing friendship between O'Toole and fellow-contestant/roommate, Joan Prather, is played.

PERFORMANCES

I remember once thinking that Bruce Dern must have had one hell of an agent. At one time the go-to guy for every loose cannon nutjob in every B-movie that came down the pike; sometime in the early '70s (I think it was after he killed John Wayne—yes, John Wayne—in The Cowboys) Dern began to crop up in a lot of seriously A-list movies playing normal, if not sympathetic, guys. It’s like he completely changed his image overnight and became a top-flight, Oscar-nominated star in major motion pictures. It appeared as though he would continue on that course until an ill-timed return to type playing a psycho tattoo artist in the unappetizing Tattoo (1981) put him back on the character actor track again. Dern has never really been my cup of tea, but there’s no denying his obvious talent. And in Smile he gives perhaps his most accessible and likeable performance. 

Geoffrey Lewis (pageant president) and Barbara Feldon
"There are just two things to remember: Just be yourself , and keep smiling!"

On the other hand, I've been crazy about Barbara Feldon since her days as Agent 99 on TV’s Get Smart. Here, as the starchily efficient pageant supervisor, Feldon mines (as Mary Tyler Moore did in Ordinary People) the dark side of all those “perfect on the outside” types so commonly held up as ideal images of American womanhood. She's good in that way that so often happens when actors are creatively cast against type.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

My favorite part of any beauty pageant is the talent competition. In Smile, that still applies.

  Talent competition: Saxophone and voice, the accordion (of course), 

and how to pack a suitcase. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Ruce Dern plays Robert Freelander. Known to everyone in the town of Santa Rosa, California as “Big Bob,” Robert is a pillar of the community and one of the beauty pageant’s biggest boosters. A member of the JC and several fraternal clubs, Robert owns “Big Bob’s Motor Home City” where he optimistically sells gas-guzzling trailers and RVs during the oil crisis. His idea of a romantic getaway for him and his wife is to take a trip to Disneyland, and he is trusting and honest to the point of naiveté. Relentlessly cheerful, optimistic, and a firm believer that a little hard work will make everything OK, Robert is essentially America as it liked to imagine itself to be before Watergate.

Like America in the mid-'70s, Robert suffers a “crisis of confidence” when forced to confront the less-than-perfect realities of the world around him, and the uncertain value of all the things he’d heretofore convinced himself were valuable. As heavy-handed as this might sound, Smile shows its true mettle in how deftly it handles the thematic metaphor, and Bruce Dern is a little heartbreaking in how well he conveys Robert’s crestfallen bewilderment.

A Young American Miss must be cheerful, a perseverant, and show a genuine concern for others.

Recently I've been seeing these Alain de Botton / Anthony Burrill art posters around town which read: “Pessimism is not always deep and optimism is not always dumb.”  With a great deal of humor and sensitivity, I think Michael Richie’s Smile made that very same point some 37 years ago.

In 1986, Smile was turned into a flop Broadway musical by Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) & Howard Ashman (Little Shop of Horrors).

Copyright © Ken Anderson

NIGHT MOVES 1975

For some of us film fans, certain directors come with their own baggage. If I see a David Lean film, I expect sweeping spectacle; If I see Bogdanovich, I expect film school redux. Kubrick is great for icy misanthropy, and Woody Allen is ideal for...well, Woody Allen.

Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) is a director whose name I so associate with serious themes and deep social commentary that even when he directs a simple little detective drama like Night Moves, it's difficult not to attach to it a profound, pithy significance that may not even be there. In the case of Night Moves, an updated noir bathed in the same chic nihilism as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), the "significance" is there in abundance.
In the summer of 1975, I had just graduated high school and my summer job was ushering at a movie theater in San Francisco while waiting to start film school in the fall. I was thrilled Night Moves opened in the theater where I was employed, allowing me the opportunity to see it countless times (for free!). And it's a good thing, too. for the plot of Night Moves is a real puzzler that benefits from repeat viewings. It was simply icing on the cake that Penn's solemn approach to the detective film genre so suited my post-adolescent self-seriousness.

Gene Hackman as Harry Moseby

Jennifer Warren as Paula

Melanie Griffith as Delly Grastner

Susan Clark as Ellen Moseby

The plot of Night Moves is ostensibly an update of the typical '40s film noir detective thriller, only with a post-Watergate deconstruction of the American hero myth thrown in. The detective in question, Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman, who, like Karen Black, seemed to be in every film made in the '70s), is adrift, both personally and professionally, when hired by a fading movie actress to locate her runaway teenage daughter. Seventeen-year-old Melanie Griffith, making her film debut, is cast as the sexually precocious daughter. A nymphet role of the sort she would play again in Paul Newman's The Drowning Pool (1975) and likely incite picket lines today. Griffith makes quite an impression, and I distinctly remember wondering if this girl's helium voice would change when she grew up. (It didn't.)

Gene Hackman as private eye Harry Moseby plays chess with himself
(knight moves, anyone?) during a  stakeout

Client: "Are you the kind of detective who once you get on a case nothing can get you off it? Bribes, beatings, the allure of a woman's body?"

A very young Melanie Griffith 

As was the wont of '70s films, as Moseby delves deeper into the mystery of his case, which takes him to the Florida Keys and has him stumbling upon a smuggling operation, he inevitably has to confront the even deeper mystery that is his life. 70s films were nothing if not about reducing all human experience to navel-gazing.

Marital Discord
Clark: "Who's winning?"
Hackman: "Nobody. One side's just losing slower than the other."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Uncompromised heroes can be boring onscreen. Saints and do-gooders always pale next to the more dimensional and colorfully drawn villains. One of the great things Penn does with Hackman's character is that he makes him so flawed in his reason; so limited in his awareness of self; basically, so human in his attempt to defend and uphold his moldy moral code, you can't help but find yourself drawn into his quest. Especially as the mystery he's investigating begins to spiral far beyond anything he initially thought it would be. 

Hackman's Harry Moesby joins the ranks of many '70s screen heroes: Jack Nicholson in Chinatown (1974), Warren Beatty in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and Hackman's Harry Caul in The Conversation. Heroes whose best efforts fail to pan out. Heroes who are no match for the larger systems of corruption they're fighting against. In a world where the bad guys and the good guys are no longer distinguishable by black or white hats, heroism itself can seem like an obsolete virtue.

"Does it matter, Harry?"

PERFORMANCES

I like Gene Hackman immensely (The Poseidon Adventure notwithstanding), but at this stage in his career, he seemed to be giving the same performance in film after film. It took Superman (1978) to shake some of the cobwebs off of his acting style. Mercifully, he's always an interesting actor to watch; intelligent and sensitive, yet always a kind of violent tension lurking beneath the surface. But the performance that really caught my eye and captured my attention was Jennifer Warren's.

As the enigmatic Paula, Warren is a modern update of the traditional noir femme fatale. Like those ladies, she's beautiful, earthily sexy, strong-willed, and prone to speak in riddles. I was most impressed by her natural acting style and striking presence. To me, Warren's husky-voiced, no-nonsense sexuality hinted at what feminism might have inspired in the contemporary screen sex symbol.

Harris Yulin as Marty Heller

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Paraphrasing like crazy here, but Raymond Chandler once wrote of detective thrillers that it didn't matter much in the end "whodunit"; what mattered was the successful exploration of human nature and the examination of the darkness at the center of man's soul. In that vein, Arthur Penn's Night Moves succeeds mightily and proves very effective as a dramatization of a man's inner journey. The big mystery and plot twists at the center of Night Moves are plentiful and satisfying, and the film has a really sensational ending. But I doubt if you'd be able to find two people who can agree on just what the hell is going on. But chiefly because of the quirky cast of characters assembled and the uniformly fine performances throughout, Night Moves is a puzzle of a film that works whether or not you can fit all the pieces together.

In case you forget you're watching a '70s movie, there's a post-coital scene 

where our couple enjoy red wine and fondue in bed 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Nobody did heady pretension like '70s directors. Night Moves is a perfectly enjoyable detective thriller when viewed on a strictly surface level, but I love that Penn chose this particular genre to make a heavy statement about the human inability to connect, abandonment, loneliness, betrayal, and the ambiguity of morality.

It's stylish, well-cast, and there's plenty to discover in the plot and in the performances with each viewing. After Bonnie & Clyde, Night Moves remains my favorite Arthur Penn film.

"Do you ask these questions because you want to know the answer, or is it just something you think a detective should do?"

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2010