BEHIND THE CANDELABRA 2013

A motion picture comfortable in its own skin, about two men who weren’t.

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight (no pun intended): during its most repressed and puritanical years, Middle America, under the guise of “showman,” took to its heart a fey and outlandishly flamboyant, closeted gay man and kept him a star for over 50 years. Twenty-six years after his death, in the presumably more enlightened era of the 21^st century, a motion picture about the personal life of said showman (Waldziu [Walter] Valentino Liberace) is unable to land an American distributor because the subject matter is deemed “Too gay.” This from an industry that would greenlight Heaven’s Gate II if it contained ten seconds of girl-on-girl action.

What to take away from all this: 1. America prefers its gay men closeted, cartoonish, or nonthreateningly “other.” Preferably all three. 2. Unless viewed and validated through the prism of the heteronormative gaze (where the prerequisites are shame, self-pity, and a tacit plea for acceptance) America is uncomfortable with anything remotely approaching an authentic depiction of gay life. 3. Hollywood doesn’t acknowledge lesbians, only hot women having sex with one other (explaining, perhaps, why the phrase "too lesbian" has never been said by any heterosexual male at any time, ever)

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Steven Soderbergh’s gleefully impudent Liberace film Behind the Candelabra, eventually found a home on cable television, cable and the Internet being the only frontiers of risk left in today’s landscape of cinematic follow-the-leader. As an HBO TV-movie, Behind the Candelabra emerged a critical and ratings blockbuster and a multi-award winner. An outcome confirming perhaps that the term “too gay” is valueless except perhaps as a signifier of a studio head being “Too ignorant.”

Michael Douglas as Liberace

Matt Damon as Scott Thorson

Rob Lowe as Dr. Jack Startz

Debbie Reynolds as Frances Liberace

  

Celebrity biography films, with their built-in melodrama, potential for questionable impersonations, and cheesy reenactments of real-life events, can be a lot of trashy fun. They can also be fascinating glimpses into the smoke and mirrors artifice of fame culture, often revealing the sizable disconnect between a star's public image and their private reality. But, more often than not, they tend to be formulaic, dramatized chronologies of the career milestones of a public figure. Like an AV study guide for a class called Celebrity History 101.

Celebrity biopics have been around so long that they’ve ceased being a categorization and have evolved into their own genre. But since real life rarely occurs in perfect three-act format, the fashioning of a coherent, workable narrative out of the often haphazard and random events of a public figure’s life often proves to be an obstacle for screenwriters that is not easily surmounted. Hence, most film bios rely on the serviceable but grossly overused rags-to-riches trope:
Initial struggle followed by success, then disenchantment followed by downward career spiral, all of it culminating on a note of ultimate redemption. A format as fixed and set in concrete as the footprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Cheyenne Jackson as Liberace protege Billy Leatherwood

I don't look to biographical films for documentary accuracy and adherence to facts, but it's frustrating when a bio appears hellbent on mythologizing its subject by skirting unpleasant truths. Similarly, I find dirt-only hatchet jobs to be as inherently dishonest and rose-colored as hagiographies. What I get excited about is when a filmmaker, in chronicling the life of a public figure, is able to seize upon a unique perspective which casts the work and life of the individual in broader context. To comment upon the difference between art and artifice, or perhaps hold up a mirror into which we, as a culture, can gaze and perhaps see something of ourselves reflected back. Something that might even indicate how we have played a part in making this individual a notable in the first place. 

The late Ken Russell, whose rhapsodically operatic films about the lives of classical composers gloriously transcended the usual “and then they wrote….” clichés, was a master of this. One can only imagine what a field day he would have had with Liberace’s excessive, troubled, and sequined-encrusted life.

Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich), wisely choosing to ignore the directive of Liberace’s “Too much of a good thing is wonderful!” paraphrase of Mae West’s famous line, avoids the potential for baroque overkill in favor of looking at Liberace’s life through the downsized prism of domestic drama. Behind the Candelabra, a serio-comic take on the last ten years in the life of the legendarily overdressed entertainer (adapted from the ghostwritten memoirs of former lover and current hot mess, Scott Thorson), is devoted to good-naturedly reducing Liberace’s grandiose public persona down to as close to human scale as the showman's outsized lifestyle and personality will allow.

In the process, both Liberace and Thorson are granted a depth of humanity not readily apparent in Thorson's sordid kiss-and-tell recounting of their years-long, tabloid-ready association. Indeed, given that Liberace, talent and fame aside, could be easily characterized as just another eccentric narcissist, and Thorson no more than a naive opportunist; the screenplay by Richard LaGravenese treats both individuals with a kind of empathetic delicacy. Not dissimilar to the way Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor approached their Southern Gothic grotesques.
That may sound like faint praise, but one need only look at what happened with Mommie Dearest to appreciate what a considerable achievement it is for a film to find the humanity, no matter how small the capacity, in a public figure so ceaselessly devoted to turning themselves into a living caricature.

The Emmy-Award winning recreations of Liberace's beyond-outrageous costumes
are the work of Ellen Mirojnick and Robert Q. Mathews

One of entertainment history’s great head-shakers is the fact that anyone with a functioning brain and eyes in their head ever thought for a nanosecond that mononymous pianist/entertainer Liberace was straight. More fascinating still, if his fanbase was comprised exclusively of, as one critic put it “Teenage girls afraid of sex and middle-aged women no longer interested in it,” what does that say about the breadth and scope of his appeal?

At the start of Behind the Candelabra Liberace is 57-years-old, firmly ensconced in the Vegas glitz period of his career, and the successful plaintiff of several homosexuality libel suits. As the darling of the blue-haired set and with a stage show gayer than a Judy Garland convention, Liberace’s public disavowal of his true sexuality at this point was largely moot; just another ritualistically maintained aspect of his manufactured public image, no more authentic than the hair on his head or the diamonds in his lapels.

Blatantly “out” in his cloistered private life, Liberace, already on the ebb side of a relationship with prissy protégé Billy Leatherwood (Cheyenne Jackson), feels an instant attraction when introduced to 17-year-old veterinary trainee Scott Thorson (42-year-old Matt Damon) by mutual friend, Bob Black (Scott Bakula).

The Seduction
Watching Liberace perform at the Las Vegas Hilton, Scott Thorson is already hooked.
Scott Bakula, mustachioed and bescarfed, is one of Scott's pre-Liberace lovers

In the tradition of countless May/December romances the world over, one individual’s great wealth proves as equal and potent an aphrodisiac as the other's youth and beauty...and voila! Say goodbye to all rational obstacles otherwise posed by a 40-year age gap. Liberace and Scott Thorson embark upon a relationship that lasts six years. An affectionate and (by this film’s account, anyway) mutually loving cohabitation wherein the isolated entertainer and the teen with the history of being shuttled between foster homes, formed a marriage (of sorts) and became a family.

But Liberace and Scott Thorson were no Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and their brief time together proved to be as toxic as it was intoxicating.

Given Liberace's personality, history, the insular nature of his life, and his at-crossed-purposes relationship with his sexuality, his mother, and his Catholic upbringing; it’s not exactly surprising that the riches he lavished upon his young paramour came with weirdly possessive strings. Nor was it as far-fetched as it sounds when Liberace launched on a plan to adopt Thorson, coming as it was from a place of kill-two-birds-with-one-stone pragmatism. Since gay marriage was illegal and gay couples had no legal protections or rights under heterosexist laws, adoption was the loophole by which many long-term gay couples availed themselves in order to gain legal protection in cases of illness and death. The second advantage to the adoption idea was that Liberace could further promote his heterosexual image by pawning Thorson off as his biological son.
The late Sydney Guilaroff, the famed, closeted hairdresser to the stars, did this very thing; he adopted his (much younger) male lover and publicly passed him off as his grandson.

No, where things take a turn for the bizarre is when Liberace has Thorson undergo extensive plastic surgery to resemble the pianist in his younger days. A strange request given that Liberace was always a rather peculiar-looking man, but understandable in light of it serving the dual purpose of feeding Liberace’s narcissism while further supporting the heterosexuality-reaffirming biological son gambit.

"I want you to make Scott look like this."
Liberace, whose private life and obsessions make him come across like the gay Hugh Hefner or Howard Hughes, enlists the services of a plastic surgeon to perform an unorthodox (if not downright creepy) variation on the traditional sugar-daddy-buys-mistress-a-boob-job routine

As drug use and petty jealousies escalated, and mutual sexual attraction waned, Thorson, at the ripe old age of 23, found himself the himbo soon to be put out to pasture to make way for the next “Blonde Adonis” on Liberace’s list. The latter part of Behind the Candelabra veers to the dark side as it recounts the painful circumstances precipitating the pair’s rancorous parting, complete with Liberace having his greatest fears being realized when Thorson files a very public palimony suit against him to the tune of $113 million. The lengthy court battle lasted nearly as long as the relationship itself, ultimately being settled out of court for $75,000).

Liberace succumbed to AIDS in 1987, keeping that closet door shut (at least in his mind) to the last. Behind the Candelabra affords the estranged couple a deathbed reconciliation and Liberace a glittering, heaven-bound sendoff more fitting than the modest burial he was given in real life.

Paul Reiser as Scott Thorson's attorney for the palimony suit he filed after
being evicted from Liberace's home. The ugly battle stretched out for four years

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’ve never been a fan of Liberace nor much understood his appeal (although if you haven't already seen it, I recommend you run, don't walk, to get your hands on the hooty 1955 film Sincerely Yours). But he’s one of those old-fashioned show-biz “personalities” who has their act so down pat, they’re rather difficult to actually dislike. Check out any of his TV appearances on YouTube and you’ll see a man who has mastered the art of amiable subterfuge. Repeating the same self-deprecating jokes and anecdotes for what must be decades, Liberace skillfully hides behind witty patter and good-natured evasion.

Like a politician, he’s able to speak sincerely and at great length without ever once approaching the truth or revealing anything about himself he hasn’t already calculated he wants you to know. All the while coming across as genuine, friendly, and accessible. It would be terrifying if it weren’t so entertaining. (Dolly Parton and Charo are the only stars I know today to possess a similar quality.)

With nothing to go on in the way of recorded images of the showman just being himself, I'm impressed by how screenwriter Richard LaGravenese was able to forge so richly a dimensional representation of Liberace. One gets the impression of a gravely lonely man of not overwhelming depth-of-character who is simultaneously believable (and quite frightening) as both powerful and selfishly controlling.

Behind the Candelabra paints a portrait of a gay man who has learned (all too well) the lessons for survival taught to him by society (homosexuality was illegal much of Liberace's adult life) and the Church (he was devout Catholic). The lesson: you must learn to exist as two people: one for your private life, one for public consumption. And of course, Liberace’s extreme, schizophrenically dual existence is but a gold-plated, gilt-edged amplification of the day-to-day reality for millions of gay men living in a society that encourages masks and role-playing for those outside of the heteronormative standard.

By exploring the Liberace/Thorson relationship beyond the extremes of lifestyle and eccentricities of character, Behind the Candelabra draws provocative and amusing parallels between the roles the couple adopted in public (Liberace is a heterosexual, Thorson his chauffeur) and the roles they assumed in private (ironically, a realm where Liberace proved more comfortable in his sexuality than the prudish Thorson, who clung unconvincingly to his "bisexual" life preserver).

If Behind the Candelabra is to be believed, it must be said that for all his public artifice, Liberace was nothing if not his fully out and authentic self in his private life. And while I’ve never found anything admirable in his distancing himself from anything remotely connected to the gay community in his lifetime, it’s difficult not to acknowledge how the outrageousness of his stage persona couldn't help but expand the boundaries of what was acceptable for a male performer to be (and look like) onstage. And getting the Bible-belters to swallow it, yet! Liberace was definitely a product of his time, but as closeted as he was, it's somewhat miraculous that he never resorted to going through a sham heterosexual marriage like his heir-apparent in sequined crass, Elton John.

Lee and Scott, Fat and Happy

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Whether true to the real-life circumstances or not, Behind the Candelabra is a love story...a marriage, in fact. And what I so admire about the film is that it tells this same-sexy love story in a language no different from what you’d see in any other film about dysfunctional romance (Closer, Blue Valentine). Unconcerned with the comfort levels of the audience, gay respectability politics, or whether or not it will “play in Peoria”; Behind the Candelabra depicts two people in an intimate relationship as it should be: kissing, caressing, bickering, fucking, and going about their lives in the manner of countless couples the world over. It's a credit to the filmmakers that the extreme trappings of wealth and eccentricity emblematic of Liberace's life never overwhelm the human element.

PERFORMANCES

I’ve seen Michael Douglas in a great many films since his debut in Hail, Hero! in 1969, but I honestly think his Liberace is the best work he’s ever done. He’s remarkable. Referencing Mommie Dearest yet again, Douglas was given a public figure every bit as over the top as Crawford (more, actually) and somehow found a way to access the complexity behind a conspicuously superficial image. In the early scenes of courtship, Douglas captures Liberace's studied vulnerability and manipulative neediness, yet still makes us see these are simply the survival tools of an aging, lonely, isolated man. Later, when his tough side emerges (a flamboyant gay man who manages to sustain a show business career for more than four decades HAS to have a tough side), the image of Liberace as a hard-edged survivor is made startlingly believable. 

Garrett M. Brown and Jane Morris are standouts as Scott's concerned foster parents

Without looking exactly like him, Douglas captures the essence of the Liberace we know, embellishing this mini-impersonation of the stage personality with a well-conceived characterization of a Liberace away from the public glare. In an astoundingly vanity-free performance, Douglas achieves the impossible: he turns Liberace into an authentic human being. Michael Douglas surprised the hell out of me with this film and he deserved every one of the many awards his performance garnered.

Dan Aykroyd as Liberace's fix-it-all manager Seymour Heller

For all the issues I have with Matt Damon, the man (occasionally he just needs to shut the fuck up), I like him a great deal as an actor. Playing a perhaps less guileful version of Scott Thorson than the real deal, Damon’s reactive performance is easier to overlook. But like a painter working with a blank canvas (and if you’ve ever seen one of the real-life Thorson's numerous television appearances, you'll know they don't come much blanker) Damon imbues the character with a grifter's survival instinct and an urchin's willingness to please that grows quite poignant in the latter third of the film when the relationship starts to sour (as good as they are in the film’s earlier scenes, both actors are at their best when these individuals are at their worst.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
With its gold-cast cinematography, impeccable eye for period detail in costuming and wigs, and painstaking recreation of Liberace's world of "palatial kitsch"; Behind the Candelabra is, as might be expected for a film about the life of one of show business's showiest showmen, a real visual treat. I suspect the visual haze and yellow glow also serve to soften the effect of the many prosthetic devices and makeup effects, as well as the digital work employed during Michael Douglas's scenes at the piano and during the finale where he appears younger than springtime.
I loved the film's sharp and funny script and its solid performances throughout (Debbie Reynolds is particularly good). As movie bios go, Behind the Candelabra doesn't rewrite the book, but it deserves kudos for being able to fashion something emotionally and dramatically compelling out of a personality and public figure who practically dared the world to take him seriously.

BONUS MATERIAL

Seeing is believing: The real Liberace and Scott Thorson, Las Vegas 1981

Liberace's oddness is used to excellent effect in Tony Richardson's brilliant satire of California and the funeral business, The Loved One (1965). Cast as "Casket Specialist" Mr. Starker, Liberace pretty much only has to play himself, but he's hilarious and looks infinitely more at ease hawking coffins than he did in his love scenes with Dorothy Malone in Sincerely Yours. 

Opened by Liberace himself in 1979, the no-longer-in-existence Liberace Museum in Las Vegas (it closed in 2013) had several buildings housing a collection of Liberace's performance costumes, automobiles, and pianos (not to mention the biggest rhinestone in the world). Located in a surprisingly unassuming mall just off the Strip, the location also contained Candelabra, Liberace's own restaurant. My partner and I visited it back in 2005 and it was a blast. I've never seen so many mirrors, rhinestones, and candelabras in all my life. You seriously could go glitter-blind in this place. The sheet music adorning the side of the building (below) is one of his performance staples, "The Beer Barrel Polka." 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

COMA 1978

Like counting the rings of a tree, there will likely come a day when a person’s age can be calculated by the number of films released in that individual’s lifetime that have fallen prey to the dreaded remake. Of course, such calculations would be mathematically calibrated to allow for the increased percentage numbers afforded genre films (Carrie, The Shining, The Stepford Wives, Psycho, et.al,) obviously Hollywood’s favored source for idea-harvesting.

This iconic image of coma patients eerily suspended by wires was used extensively in the promotion of the 1978 film. Today what I find most shocking about this photo is how impossibly fit all the patients are. It's like they're harvesting the organs of the US Olympic Team.

Coma, one of my favorite '70s thrillers, has recently been given the TV miniseries treatment. And while I wish it luck (ever the bullheaded traditionalist, I didn’t watch it and don’t plan to), seriously…can any remake ever hope to replicate in any dramatically meaningful way, that transcendent feminist moment in American cinema when heroine Geneviève Bujold doffed her wedged espadrilles and pantyhose before crawling through the bowels of Boston Memorial Hospital in search of the cause of all those suspicious coma cases? After years of women in thrillers and horror films falling victim to their feminine finery (running in heels and twisting an ankle being the genre standard), this small act of practicality was such a revolutionary repudiation of a sexist genre cliché that on the opening weekend screening of Coma I attended back in February of 1978, the audience I saw it with actually broke into applause!

Genevieve Bujold as Dr. Susan Wheeler

Michael Douglas as Dr. Mark Bellows

Richard Widmark as Dr. Harris - Chief of Surgery

Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Emerson

Rip Torn as Dr. George

Lois Chiles as Nancy Greenly

Tom Selleck as Sean Murphy

Ed Harris as Pathology Resident #2 (film debut!)

The plot of Coma, like many a good thriller, is marvelously simple: at prestigious Boston Memorial Hospital a higher-than-normal percentage of routine surgery patients are ending up in irreversible comas. Resident surgeon Dr. Susan Wheeler (Bujold) grows suspicious after both her best friend and a recently admitted healthy male patient both slip into comas following routine surgeries. Yet no one else at the hospital seems to share her concern. What follows is a paranoid suspense thriller that plays on our basic fears of hospitals and our vulnerability in the face of the sometimes callously impersonal medical profession.

The post-Watergate years may have been depressing as hell, but all that resultant disillusionment and cynicism was a bonanza for the suspense thriller genre. The pervading sense of skepticism and uncertainty that was the cultural by-product of such a large-scale political betrayal fueled and found catharsis in a great many fascinating films of the '70s. We had thrillers about conspiracy theories  –  The Parallax View (1974); morally confused private eyes – Night Moves (1975); and personal privacy paranoia  – The Conversation (1974). Coma remains one of my personal favorites because it ratchets up the tension of the conspiracy theory thriller by combining it with the combative feminist-era sexual politics of The Stepford Wives.

Dr. Wheeler's run-ins with the hospital's patronizing male staff can be viewed as a larger commentary on society's vulnerability to patriarchal institutions which would assume to know what's better for us than we do ourselves 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and Klute rank high on my list of unforgettable thrillers because each is a genre film (horror film, suspense thriller, crime mystery) that seizes upon an element of the cultural zeitgeist to create something marvelously new and chilling out the rote and familiar. The medical thriller at the center of Coma is intriguing enough (are patients deliberately being put into comas, and if so, why?), but the paranoia is amplified by having the usual disbelieved protagonist be a woman doctor in a field where women number in the minority and their concerns dismissed by patronizing superiors. 

The Men's Club
Coma uses institutionalized sexism as fodder for a marvelously engrossing paranoid thriller

The day-to-day condescension Geneviève Bujold’s Dr. Wheeler faces from her male co-workers takes on an increasingly ominous air when her growing anxiety and rational concern that something nefarious is afoot at Boston Memorial is met with “Don’t bother your pretty little head about it” disregard from her superiors. Especially the creepily paternal Chief of Surgery (Richard Widmark), who treats a serious professional discussion with Dr. Wheeler as if he's Andy Hardy's father, asked to give a heart-to-heart.

It’s established early on in the scenes between Dr. Wheeler and her professionally ambitious boyfriend, Dr. Mark Bellows (Douglas) that she is hypersensitive to the sexism and lack of respect she's expected to just accept as part of the price of working in semi-hostile, all-male environment of professional medicine. The film makes a point of showing us scenes where the in-hospital workplace talk is full of men making casually demeaning comments to or about women. 

If Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives gave us a paranoid thriller born of male anxiety about feminism, Coma takes the female perspective and devises a thriller in which female alienation from a male-dominated world inspires self-reliance and resourcefulness.

Much like in Rosemary's Baby when Rosemary’s pregnancy itself is diagnosed (by men) as being the source of her paranoia about her neighbors; Dr. Wheeler’s feminism and relationship troubles are viewed as being part of her perceived-as-hysterical suspicions about the male staff at her hospital. As her frustration mounts from not being able to convince anyone at the hospital that there is something to be concerned about, reactions from the male staff (she seems to be the only woman doctor there) range from flat out dismissals to bristling at the audacity of a woman daring to challenge the knowledge and authority of men. It's a wonderful add-on device that lends to Coma a subtext that fuels paranoia with extra layers of workplace frustration born of women not being taken seriously in male-dominated spaces. 

The best paranoid thrillers have a way of making the ordinary look really creepy

PERFORMANCES

I had the grave misfortune of having my first-ever exposure to Geneviève Bujold occur with the movie Earthquake (1975); a film whose most terrifying image was that of the lovely French-Canadian actress canoodling with the Skeletor-like countenance of Charlton Heston. In the ensuing years, I’ve enjoyed her performances in several notable films (1988's Dead Ringers is a must-see), but I guess I have a special place in my heart for Coma. As her first real starring solo venture, I thought it was to be the film that launched her to stardom. As I’ve said in a previous post, Bujold represented to me the direction I thought films were going to take in terms of motion picture leading ladies in the '70s. She was quirky, radiated intelligence, and embodied a non-traditional beauty coupled with remarkable acting skills. As the '80s fate of Debra Winger attested, Hollywood still preferred their leading ladies vapid and pliable, so the promise of Bujold was never realized (at least to my satisfaction).

In a nice reversal of the "supportive partner" role usually allocated to women in motion picture thrillers, Michael Douglas, fresh off of several years on the TV series The Streets of San Francisco, plays Bujold's allocated-to-the-sidelines boyfriend. 

Still, Bujold is terrific here, spunky and sharp with that great throaty voice of hers and those darkly intelligent, inquisitive eyes. She adds so much dimension to her role that she keeps character and motivation at the forefront, preventing Coma from becoming mired in its medical thriller plot. Unlike the kind of actress usually cast in roles like this (I call your attention to Lesley-Anne Downs’ implausible Egyptologist in Sphinx, another film based on a Robin Cook novel) Bujold is actually believable as a physician and is not required to scream every 15 minutes.

At the Ballet
Fans of A Chorus Line might recognize the short-haired brunette at the front of Bujold's embarrassingly cheesy dance exercise class as Kay Cole, the original Broadway production's "Maggie." By odd coincidence, Coma co-star Michael Douglas would go on to star in the woefully misguided 1985 film adaptation.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Unable to convince anyone of her suspicions, Dr. Wheeler's quest takes her to the architecturally foreboding Jefferson Institute. The scenes taking place at this futuristic chronic care facility (whose actual purpose I won't reveal here) are Coma's big set-pieces, and they really don't disappoint. A concrete and steel variation on the typical thriller haunted house, the Jefferson Institute scenes are notable not only for the poetic-nightmare images of roomfuls of bodies suspended in techno limbo, but also for the unforgettably bizarre performance of Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Emerson, the Institute's equivalent of a gargoyle at the gate. 

By Coma's midpoint, when the film's well-established atmosphere of tension is just about sunk by an interminable "romantic weekend" montage, Ms. Ashley appears and reboots the film back into high gear. Her introductory scene with Bujold is a classic that I remember had the audience laughing in a way that brought them even more into the film. You want to know if she's a real person or a robot. As the unblinking and inscrutable head of the Institute, Ashley carves an indelible impression and is one of my favorite characters in the film.

The Jefferson Institute
Coma knows that in real life, a large, impersonal medical building
like this is far more terrifying than any Gothic castle.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

No matter how clever the plot, a suspense thriller has to have thrills. Coma mines the already fertile creep-out atmosphere of hospitals for all its worth. It does so by allowing us to witness (to great effect, I might say) the day-to-day casualness with which doctors, nurses, and anesthesiologists regard that which is unnervingly life-and-death to us patients. If there is a level at which Coma scores its biggest points as a thriller, it's in giving the audience the impression that hospitals regard patients as a mechanic would a car on a lift; a bunch of billable parts in need of fixing. 

"You'll be getting a bill from each of us in the mail."

And then, of course, Coma has plenty of the good, old-fashioned kind of thrills too.

Remakes get a bad rap, but for every totally pointless rehash of a classic (Straw Dogs), there's a film like 1978's marvelous Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a retread that's really a re-imagining. I'm not sure what the remake of Coma will seize upon as a justification for its existence (the feminist subtext - which to my way of thinking is more relevant than ever - might be perceived as being dated), but unless it devotes itself to correcting some of this film's flaws (a few loose narrative threads, that mysterious hired killer), I think I'll stick to this imperfect but ever-so-satisfying relic from a time when even genre films felt that it was also important to comment on the world we live in.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

In 1982 I had the opportunity to see Elizabeth Ashley co-star on Broadway with Geraldine Page and Carrie Fisher in the play,  Agnes of God. As one might imagine, the experience was electrifying. Although very faded, Ashley's signature is on the bottom of the Playbill above.

To read more about Coma:
Another informative and fun post on "Coma" at Poseidon's Underworld

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2008 - 2012