VALENTINO 1977

"But if you've got the story, why do you want the truth?"

Though the question is asked of a newspaper reporter by a character in this, Ken Russell’s 11^th feature film, the above-quoted inquiry could well be one posed to movie audiences by any director daring (foolhardy?) enough to venture into the shark-infested waters of the biographical film.
Biopics and their dubious degrees of accuracy have, in all probability, been the topic of comment and controversy since as far back as Georges Halot's Execution of Joan of Arc (1898). Taken to task for their myth-making, fact-manipulation, and outright fabrication; biographical movies have always walked a tightrope straddling documentary and wholesale fiction. At their best, they humanize and give dimension to otherwise remote historical figures, presenting their subjects' lives and achievements in some kind of social or cultural context. At their worst, they’re misleading works of absolute fiction, pawning off hoary narrative clichés as truth by method of thumbtacking real names onto over-familiar narrative archetypes and hackneyed tropes.

Rudolf Nureyev as Valentino in Ken Russell's artful recreation of the 1921 silent,
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Entertainment industry figures, with their brand-name familiarity, built-in glamour, fame-idolatry, success-ethic traditionalism, and potential for soapy melodrama and scandalous sex; have always been popular choices for biopics. This in spite of the fact that they also court the potential for embarrassing impersonations, cheap-looking reenactments, actors looking absolutely nothing like the person they're portraying, and a public over-awareness of personal history that wreaks havoc with any desire to deviate from the facts.
But while an anachronistic, out-of-whole-cloth piece of movie fabrication like 1965's Harlow (which barely seems to take place on this planet, let alone the Hollywood of the 1930's) can be painful to watch, the truth is that a blatant disregard for historical accuracy doesn't automatically doom a biopic any more than just-the-facts-ma'am verisimilitude guarantees its success.

Rudolf Nureyev and Leslie Caron in a prototypically
stylized Ken Russell take on All Nazimova's 1921 silent film Camille

Biographical movies are a sub-genre unto themselves, and as such, unlike documentaries, their very nature presupposes and accommodates the application of a contrived dramatic structure (order, if you will) to otherwise haphazard real-life events. And while in many instances this only serves to make the already tenuous connection between the subjectivity of truth and the relative weightlessness of facts even more tangential; it at least provides filmmakers with the latitude to invest historical "truth" with a little creative ingenuity.

I've always held that the employment of a deliberate artistic sensibility is what accounts for the phenomenon which makes a brilliantly crafted, yet highly fictionalized and historically inaccurate film like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) somehow "feel" more fact-based and realistic than say, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid; an equally fictionalized film based on the lives of historic figures, which (due to its adherence to the conventions of the western "buddy picture") feels positively artificial.

If one of the main differences between a documentary and a biopic is that the documentary strives to take an "as is" approach while the biopic demands a distinct point of view; then I find I’m always willing to surrender a certain (flexible) degree of historical truth when a filmmaker has a creative and artistically valid reason to use the biographical film format to illuminate a broader human truth.

Rudolf Nureyev as Rudolph Valentino

Michelle Phillips as Natasha Rambova 

Leslie Caron as Alla Nazimova

Felicity Kendal as June Mathis

Seymour Cassell as George Ullman

In the interest of truth-in-advertising, the title of this film should really be Ken Russell’s Valentino. Making few allusions to historical accuracy beyond its costuming (the brilliant Shirley Russell) and art direction (Philip Harrison); Valentino bears Ken Russell's pyretic, idiosyncratic stamp on every eye-popping frame. Something which turns out to be a very good thing, indeed, since the script— penned by Russell and Mardik Martin (New York, New York)—so often allows the film's central enigma, Rudolph Valentino himself, to go MIA for long periods of time. Even when he's onscreen.

Silent film legend Rudolph Valentino, dubbed "The Great Lover" by his legions of female fans, seemed a shoo-in subject for the biopic treatment in the nostalgia-besotted '70s. But much in the way Fellini’s Casanova—released in the US about six months prior to Valentino—disappointed and alienated audiences by its almost perverse refusal to satisfy expectations (the public anticipated an extravagantly romantic roundelay about the famed 18^th century womanizer,  but what they got was an intensely anti-erotic meditation on the soul-killing effects of loveless sex); Ken Russell’s neutered, demythologizing approach to the legend of Valentino left audiences bewildered.

Valentino paying tribute to Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun for Nazimova's camera

As envisioned by Russell, Rudolph Valentino (Russian ballet star Rudolf Nureyev, grappling with an Italian accent and surrendering somewhere around Transylvania) is a moral innocent who only dreams of owning an orange grove, victimized by Hollywood's venal greed and the grasping self-interests of the women drawn to him. Indeed, Victim of Romance, the name of the solo album released by Valentino co-star and former The Mamas & The Papas songstress Michelle Phillips a few months before the film's premiere (Tie-in…cha-ching!), would have made for a dandy Valentino subtitle.

When introduced, Rudolph Valentino makes living as a taxi-dancer for lonely society ladies, but lives by his own Old-World code of honor: “They buy my flattery and my time, but my love is not for sale!” He holds women in high regard (he answers a starlet’s penitent confession of sexual promiscuity with, "All women are meant to be loved.”), but his irresistibility to the opposite sex—combined with a tendency to surrender all-too-easily to his own romantic fancies—makes him an easy mark for users and manipulators. Which, in this film, turns out to be everybody...women, most fatefully. 

Leland Palmer as Marjorie Tain, Valentino's ever-inebriated exhibition dance partner

"Well, God help you, junior. If you ever have anything worth taking,
some bright bitch is gonna give you the ride of your life!"

The film depicts Valentino’s rise from tango dancer to matinee idol as a largely passive journey, the dashing and occasionally unintelligible ladies man buffeted along by fate, circumstance, and the dominant whims and ambitions of the women who cross his path. From discovery to stardom, two marriages, studio suspension, a bigamy scandal, artistic pretensions (we never learn if he even thinks of himself as talented), to his death at thirty-one; Valentino is seldom depicted as the catalyst for anything that happens to him.

Even his reputation as The Great Lover is chiefly a PR creation born of the effect his masculine beauty and physical grace has on a newly liberated female population, giddily exercising the prerogative of male objectification. In portraying the silent screen Latin Lover as but a passenger in the vehicle life, Valentino often suggests a Brilliantined Joe Dallesandro prototype: the androgynously beautiful male of enticingly ambiguous sexuality, possessed of just the right amount of charismatic vacuousness upon which one can freely project fantasies of desire.

Depending on the Kindness of Strangers
Carol Kane as a silent screen siren who gives Valentino a leg-up in the movie business

Meanwhile, Valentino’s own desires are routinely presented as ineffectual, asexual, or latently homosexual. This leaves him only two dominant character traits: 1) His dream to have his own orange grove, and 2) A prickly, “he doth protest too much” sense of outrage whenever aspersions are cast on his masculinity. And indeed, speculation about the true nature of Valentino’s sexual orientation crops up so often in this movie it becomes the film's defining leitmotif.
I personally find it intriguing that Russell chose to depict Valentino as a man as elusive to himself as he is to his fans. A man certain of his sense of honor, but little else. The only problem with limiting so many of Valentino's most dynamic scenes to sequences of inflamed outbursts over having his masculinity impugned is that Valentino (at least as realized in Nureyev's haughty indignation) doesn't come across like an honorable man defending his name so much as an on-the-defensive closet-case (a la, Liberace) always a little too at-the-ready to fight and publicly proclaim his heterosexuality.

Is He or Isn't He?
Valentino teaches Nijinsky (Royal Ballet dancer Anthony Dowell) the tango. Nijinsky would have his own eponymous biographical film three years later

With the women in his life posited as the shapers of Rudolph Valentino’s destiny, Ken Russell is free to abandon the traditional rags-to-riches/disillusion-to-reclamation format of most biopics and instead takes a page from the Citizen Kane handbook: Valentino's life is told in flashback via the unreliable narrators who represent the most important women in his life.
The women: socialite Bianca de Saulles (Emily Bolton); screenwriter June Mathis (Kendal); actress Alla Nazimova (Caron); and designer/Nazimova protégée/ Valentino 2nd wife Natasha Rambova – nee Winifred Shaughnessy– (Phillips).  All have come to pay their final (in some instances, self-serving) respects to Valentino at the New York funeral home where his body lies in ostentatious display.

Each woman, in turn, is grilled by a motley phalanx of cartoonishly boorish “Noo Yawk” reporters straight out of The Front Page; the multi-character narration providing, if not exactly illuminating insight into the deceased, then an enlightening view of the deep chasm that can exist between a man and his public image. It also provides Russell ample opportunity to make several interesting (if relentlessly cynical) points about identity, gender, sex, image, art, commerce, and the fanaticism of fame-culture.

Linda Thorson as restauranter Billie Streeter & Emily Bolton as socialite Bianca de Saulles

Using the funeral home and the attendant public pandemonium surrounding Valentino's death as a framing device between flashbacks, this otherwise refreshing emphasis on the female perspective is dampened by the fact that, when contrasted with Valentino's genteel malleability and honest motives, the broad strokes with which some of these women are painted has them veering toward caricatures, or worse, grotesques.

Once the flashbacks have ended and the film fades out on the solemn image of Valentino's corpse lying on a slab in the morgue, only then does it dawn that Ken Russell has pulled off the audacious feat of making a movie about a world-renowned lover that is, in itself, thoroughly devoid of love or romance. You think back over the film and realize that at no time does Valentino ever realize any of his romantic dreams, or even successfully carry out a seduction. (Even the film's most explicit "love scene" is a masturbatory parody of fan-worship, with a star-struck actress realizing her dream of being alone with The Great Lover, yet only able to work herself into an orgasmic frenzy by ignoring the real, flesh-and-blood article and losing herself in solitary fantasy.)

Emotionally Isolated
Valentino and actress Lorna Sinclair (Penelope Milford) depicted 
as sexual strangers joined in isolated fantasy

If the difference between a documentary and a biographical film is the insertion of a point of view, then in the case of Valentino, Ken Russell's would appear to be using the life story of one of the film industry's earliest superstars to dismantle the myth of fame and celebrity-worship. Also, to maybe ask us to examine what difference exists, if any, between "the story" and the truth, and if in the end it really matters.

The heads of United Artists, MGM, and Paramount discuss 
how best they can profit from Valentino's death 

RECEPTION

Valentino was released amidst much publicity fanfare in October of 1977. Bolstered by a sexy poster which emphasized the erotic potential of the subject matter and the film debut of its lead (Nureyev IS Valentino!), it arrived at the tail-end of a spate of nostalgia-laced movies about the film industry: The Day of the Locust-‘75, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood-’76, The Last Tycoon- ’76, and Nickelodeon- ’76. Unfortunately, it also followed on the heels of several poorly-received nostalgia-laced Hollywood biopics—Gable & Lombard, Goodbye Norma Jean, W.C. Fields & Me - all 1976—a downturn in the trend that suggested perhaps audiences had had their fill of Marcel waves and art deco.

Budgeted at $5 million, Valentino was Russell’s most expensive film to date. And on a personal note, I was over the moon with anticipation. At this point in time, I was already a huge Ken Russell fan, though, discounting his BBC TV documentary on Isadora Duncan that aired on PBS, I had only seen three of his films: The Boy Friend, Tommy, and Lisztomania. Valentino was Russell’s follow-up to 1975s Lisztomania, a boxoffice flop that lost the director a bit of the Hollywood cachet he’d earned following the breakout success of Tommy.

I saw Valentino its opening weekend at the Royal Theater on Polk Street in San Francisco. The 100% male—read: gay—audience made me feel like I was in a porno theater. Advance publicity for Valentino suggested a return to the Ken Russell of Women in Love, Mahler, or Savage Messiah, but the audience I saw it with that day was wired for the camp overkill of Lisztomania. From the moment Nureyev opened his mouth and the film began its drag parade of unsubtle, highly-stylized performances, Valentino became a victim of its excesses.

Rudy, The Pink Powder Puff
Nightclub chorus girls sing a song lamenting the emasculation of the American male

REACTION

I was 19 and in film school when I saw Valentino (translated: very-self serious and pretentious) and I recall sitting in that theater feeling as though everyone around me had been sent some kind of prep notes on the movie that I’d failed to receive. Here I was taking it all in with deadly sober earnestness, while all around me people were cracking up at Nureyev’s uncertain acting, Phillips’ flat line readings, the curiously dubbed-sound of many of the voices, and the whiplash shifts from broad comedy to melodrama. Picking up on every line of bitchy dialogue and every glimmer of homoerotic subtext, the audience wasn't laughing AT Valentino so much as operating from a not wholly unsubstantiated assumption that Russell couldn't possibly be expecting us to take any of this seriously.

I was so thrown by the experience I left the theater not at all impressed with the film and returned the following week to find out if  my reaction had been unduly influenced by the audience (by then word of mouth had begun to spread and I had the place almost to myself).  I could have saved myself the money. I remained steadfast in my initial assessment of the impeccable, often breathtaking period detail and costuming; I appreciated the bitter satire and cynicism, and I honestly loved the larger points the film broached in its brutal evisceration of show business and Hollywood in particular. 

Valentino is blessed with a large and talented cast (Huntz Hall and Felicity Kendal are especially good).
But my favorite performance belongs to Leslie Caron. Playing actress Alla Nazimova
as a woman intoxicated by her own theatricality, Caron fits Russell's style to a T

But I had a better understanding of the source of all that audience derision. The movie just fails to gel as human drama (nor, given the pitch of the performances, opera). But not because of the camp or overkill (although I could have done without that prison scene). Valentino rates as flawed Ken Russell for me because in its 2-hours-plus running time, only two brief scenes—one with Leland Palmer, the other, Carol Kane—ever touched on recognizably human emotions in a way that drew me into the story.

Jennie Linden (Ursula in Russell's Women in Love) contributes a hilarious
cameo as Agnes Ayres, Valentino's desert love-interest in The Sheik

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Watching Valentino for the purpose of this essay was my first time seeing the film in nearly 40 years.
Has the film improved? Well, no. The same weaknesses still prevent it from being one I'd rank among Ken Russell's best.
Has my opinion of Valentino changed? Considerably.
The passing of so many years has made me more aware of how much Valentino is a product of its time. Its cold point of view reflecting the pervasive post-Watergate cynicism and revisionist nostalgia that influenced so many movies of the day (The Day of the Locust, New York New York). Its anti-eroticism, reflective of a late-'70s cultural disenchantment with the idyllic promise of the sexual revolution, falls in line with a spate of films whose themes challenged the notion of consequence-free hedonism (Saturday Night Fever, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and the aforementioned Fellini's Casanova). In 1977, I was far too callow for cynicism, and 19-year-olds, by nature, have only the faintest acquaintance with the meaning of consequences.

Perhaps it's my age or perhaps it's because Hollywood today is fresh out of ideas and only knows how to remake things; but Valentino, though far from perfect, feels like a much smarter film than I once gave it credit for. It's still an emotionally remote experience for me, but it clearly strives to be about much more than just the life of the late Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguella (whew!). It's a film with a point of view, it's the result of a consistent creative vision, and...although it only intermittently succeeds in getting them across....it's a movie of ideas. Besides, sub-par Ken Russell is still head and shoulders over the best work of many directors I can think of.

Ken Russell makes an unbilled cameo as Rex Ingram, director of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tony-nominated actor Mark Baker plays Andrew, the beleaguered assistant director 

BONUS MATERIAL

Many of Valentino's films -  including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, and Camille, are available to watch on YouTube. 

By all accounts, the making of Valentino was an unpleasant experience for nearly all involved. To read about Nureyev's distrust of Russell, Russell's crumbling marriage, the mutual animosity between Phillips and Nureyev, how Russell came to appear in the film, and the story behind that deleted funeral scene plot twist---I suggest the following books:

Ken Russell's Films by Ken Hanke
Phallic Frenzy- Ken Russell & His Films  by Joseph Lanza


AUTOGRAPH FILES

Have absolutely no recollection of when I got this autograph of Carol Kane in 1978.
Worse, I asked her to sign the inside of a paperback copy of Harold Robbins' The Lonely Lady

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

BLOODLINE 1979

I think one of the main reasons Wait Until Dark was so upsetting to me as a kid was because the person at the receiving end of Alan Arkin’s homicidal abuse was Audrey Hepburn. MY Audrey Hepburn! The sweet, elegant, refined, ceaselessly classy, Audrey Hepburn! I didn’t even think of her as the character in the film. In fact, even today, were you to ask me the name of her character, I couldn’t say. All I could tell you is that Eliza Doolittle is blind; Sabrina doesn’t know she's in possession of a doll full of heroin, and a mean man in a leather jacket chases Holly Golightly around with a switchblade.

Wait Until Dark - 1967

Like many, I fell in love with Audrey Hepburn the first time I saw her on the screen. And it never bothered me one whit that I rarely, if ever, expected her to be anything but her own glorious self from film to film. Hepburn’s screen persona and personal identity were both so intrinsically interlinked in my mind; actress and image remained one and the same. I simply counted on her bringing the same charming, immensely likable personality to whatever role she played—like an insurance policy of goodwill. It got so that no matter what a film’s shortcomings, Hepburn’s reliably enchanting presence assured me of at least a couple of blissful hours spent in the glow of her one-of-a-kind, movie star incandescence.

Two for the Road - 1967

I grew up during the early days of movie-star overexposure (via talk shows, game shows, TV specials), so a significant part of Hepburn’s appeal was scarcity. Not only did she not make many films (contributing to my youthful perception that when she did deign to appear in a movie, it HAD to be special), but Hepburn took a lengthy hiatus from acting precisely at the time I discovered her. I was in the fourth grade when she starred in two of what would become my absolute top favorite Audrey Hepburn films: Two for the Road and Wait Until Dark (both 1967)—only to abruptly drop from sight to raise a family. I was in college when she returned to the screen for Robin and Marian (1976).

I was overjoyed at the prospect of Audrey Hepburn’s comeback (“I hate that word!” – Norma Desmond) but Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag. Hepburn was wonderful as ever, indeed, she’s really rather remarkable, and her scenes with Sean Connery are heartachingly good and never fail to move me to tears. But I always saw Hepburn as a true original and a “star”…someone worthy of the kind of even-handed role Katherine Hepburn shared with Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter. In the Richard Lester film, Hepburn’s Maid Marian struck me as being just a shade above a secondary role. Responsible for shouldering all the emotional weight, hers was a mature, glorified but nonetheless typical “supportive girlfriend” role in a male action/adventure film.

Robin & Marian  - 1976

Although it would be three more years before Hepburn would grace the screen again (during which time there was talk of her starring in Out of Africa in the role that eventually went to Meryl Streep), when her name was announced for the lead in the screen adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s 1977 bestseller Bloodline, this time out I was genuinely (if injudiciously) stoked. At last, Hepburn was to star in a film more worthy of her stature and reputation: a glamorous, big-budget, international romantic suspense thriller!

And while saner minds might have considered Sidney Sheldon’s name attached to the project to be a red flag of no small significance, I allowed myself to be distracted by the possibilities posed by the film’s sizable, international cast of (mostly) genuine movie stars; Hepburn being reunited with director Terence Young (who guided Hepburn to her 5^th Academy Award nomination with Wait Until Dark); and the opportunity for her to sport chic frocks by her favorite designer, Hubert de Givenchy (Robin & Marian’s 16^thcentury nun’s habit didn’t cut it for me).

Bolstered by the popularity of the bestseller, the draw of Hepburn’s 2^nd screen comeback (ahem,…return), and an inordinate amount of publicity centered around the age discrepancy between the novel’s heroine (23) and Hepburn herself (50 playing 35), Bloodline was set to be a major release from Paramount for the summer of ’79.

Alas, despite its tony pedigree, Bloodline proved to be rather anemic at the boxoffice. Audiences, as they say, stayed away in droves, a result perhaps of finding the film’s rather distasteful (and nonsensical) porno snuff film subplot to be as cruel a misuse and mistreatment of Audrey Hepburn as anything Alan Arkin had dished out.

For those not around in the late-70s (or who were, but not as immersed in smut as yours truly), Bloodline's distinctive, ribboned throated female with the overemphasized red lips, poster graphic (figuring significantly in the film's bafflingly superfluous porno subplot) referenced...inadvertently perhaps..a then-popular line of porn mags and videos known as Swedish Erotica. That company's trademark was to feature "models" with deeply scarlet lips, wearing only a smile and a colorful scarf tied around the neck. The lovely platinum blonde with the hard countenance above is Seka, one of the company's most popular performers.

I know this because one of my earliest jobs when I moved to LA was working at Adam & Eve's Adult Books (Nudist Magazines! Art Films!), located right next to where I lived at the time: The Villa Elaine Apartments on Vine Street. I sold a lot those Swedish Erotica porno loops. Film is film, yes? Vive le cinéma! (screencap is from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls)

SIDNEY SHELDON'S BLOODLINE

Audrey Hepburn as Elizabeth Roffe

Ben Gazzara as Rhys Williams

James Mason as Sir Alec Nichols

Romy Schneider as Helene Roffe-Martin

Omar Sharif as Ivo Palazzi

Irene Papas as Simonetta  Palazzi

Maurice Ronet as Charles Martin

Michelle Phillips as Vivian Nichols

Gert Frobe as Inspector Max Hornung

Beautiful Elizabeth Roffe (the cardinal rule for trash novels is that all heroines must be beautiful) is the doting only child born to disappointed-she-wasn’t-a-boy pharmaceutical magnate Sam Roffe. When Mr. Roffe dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances, inexperienced but quick-to-learn Elizabeth instantly inherits a global, multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical dynasty. A financially beleaguered company suffering a recent streak (read: suspicious) of bad luck.

Although pressured by her stock-holding relatives to sell the company and go public, headstrong Elizabeth (thanks to the help of her father’s faithful secretary and a monumentally boring flashback to her great grandfather’s humble beginnings in Krakow, Poland) decides, in spite of her inexperience, to run the business herself. A decision which doesn’t set well with her relatives, a virtual “It’s a Small World” sampling of sinister multinationality, each grappling with various degrees of financial hardship.

Putting the Bored in Boardroom
Even The Muppet Movie didn't have this many scenes set behind desks 

As though to make it easier for ‘merican audiences to follow along, the extended Roffe family conveniently plays to familiar national stereotypes: Italian Ivo (Sharif) is a philandering bumbler being blackmailed by his heavy-accented, hot-tempered, black-bra-wearing mistress (Claudia Mori). Paris-based Helene (Schneider) is patronizing and rude, while her browbeaten husband (Ronet) sinks money into a failing vineyard. British MP Alec (Mason), in a state of near financial ruin due to his much-younger wife’s gambling addiction, nevertheless maintains a stiff-upper-lip formality and cool head. And good ol' American Rhys Williams (Gazzara) is a direct, straight-shootin’ sorta guy who’s only flaw seems to be having a weakness for the ladies.

With so many family members standing to financially gain from the company’s dissolution, it’s only a matter of time before Elizabeth discovers that not only wasn’t her father’s death accidental, but her resistance to selling the company has placed her own life in danger. As factory mishaps multiply, close calls escalate, and some bald dude keeps strangling anonymous women while being filmed by a shadowy male figure, the questions mount. Who can be trusted? Are bloodlines thicker than mountain climbing rope, brake lines, or elevator cables? And just who is that Boris Badenov lookalike orchestrating those repugnant snuff films?

More importantly, how the hell did MY Audrey Hepburn get mixed up in this mess?

Apt Metaphor
Audrey Hepburn trapped in a runaway vehicle that's careening out of control

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Whether it be Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, or Jackie Collins; I love a good, glossy trash movie. But Bloodline really puts my blind adoration to the test. It’s a film comprised of all the standard ingredients, but everything just feels a little off.

There’s the large cast of recognizable names. Excellent actors all, but just a wee bit past their prime. I don't like to think I'm an ageist, but a curious side effect of this cast all falling within the 49 – 60-year-old range is that it often appears as though everybody had a “must sit down” clause in their contracts. There’s a hell of a lot of sitting going on in this movie. It’s hard to get worked up over discovering the identity of the murderer when no one in the cast looks like they have the energy to get up out of their chairs and search.  

Beatrice Straight as loyal secretary Kate Erling

Then there’s the promise of exotic, far-off locations. Bloodline spent a sizable chunk of its $12-million-budget flying cast and crew to New York, London, Paris, Rome, Munich, Sardinia, and Copenhagen; so why does most of it look as though much of it was shot on a studio backlot? There’s a scene filmed in a European red-light district that has all the authenticity and grit of those fake-looking San Francisco backstreets Patty Duke stumbled around in Valley of the Dolls. 

Lastly, there’s the opportunity for a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the thrilling world of international corporations and industry. Arthur Hailey's Airport was overflowing with details about the airline industry; Harold Robbins’ The Betsy was set in the world of automotives; Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine was about the behind the scenes machinations of the TV industry; and Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline takes place in the cutthroat world of global pharmaceuticals. The sleeping pill jokes practically write themselves. The dull setting clearly posed a challenge to screenwriter Laird Koenig, for his idea of creating dramatic tension is to have characters declare “Let’s call a meeting!” with the frequency (and similar false-urgency purpose) of teens yelling “Surf’s up!” in a Beach Party movie. 

What little momentum Bloodline has, comes to a screeching halt as Gazzara takes Hepburn
on a 3-hour-tour of a Roffe pharmaceutical plant (or does it only feel that way?). The scene is
accompanied by composer Ennio Morricone's carbonated nod to disco and Giorgio Moroder, which had me wishing I had a few Roffe aspirins at my disposal

I’ve not read enough Sidney Sheldon to know if this is average or substandard for his usual brand of schlock. I've only read Bloodline and The Other Side of Midnight, but of the two, Bloodline is the one that feels sorely lacking. Something about the familiar, soap-opera-and-glamour format of Bloodline makes me feel it would have been better served if adapted as a TV movie or miniseries starring a low-wattage personality like Jacklyn Smith or Pamela Sue Martin (for a time Cabaret and Barry Lyndon star Marisa Berenson was in line to play the Audrey Hepburn role). Potboilers like Bloodline always stand to benefit from the built-in lowered expectations of television. As it is, with Audrey Hepburn and so many esteemed actors attached to the project, the film not only acquires a gravitas it can’t possibly live up to (not with THAT source material), but it also takes on a kind of self-serious air that’s poison to escapist trash like this. 

Hepburn's Givenchy wardrobe was more exciting than the film

PERFORMANCES

Sad to say, but Bloodline is something of an embarrassment for everyone involved (except Omar Sharif, who gleefully sinks to the level of the material and in doing so, somehow salvages himself).

But my dear Audrey Hepburn is particularly ill-served. I’ve read that she was very unhappy during the filming (her marriage was falling apart), was feeling rusty and insecure about her talent, and even sought to bail on the movie once she learned of the nudity/porn/snuff-film angle (perhaps she was too busy counting the zeroes on her $1 million paycheck to have been bothered with reading the novel or script beforehand). All this goes a long way toward explaining why she really doesn’t seem to be present in this film.

I’m usually delighted watching Hepburn in anything, but it’s no fun watching someone who seems to be having so little.

On the personal side, one good thing to come out of Bloodline was an affair between Gazzara (recently divorced from Janice Rule) & Hepburn (still married to Andrea Dotti) which lasted through to their next film together, Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed (1981).
True to movie tradition, the couple's real-life sparks fail to show up on the screen in Bloodline, sealing the film's fate as a romantic suspense thriller with no romantic chemistry, minimal suspense, and negligible thrills. I've never really understood Ben Gazzara's appeal. As Audrey Hepburn co-stars go, he's as bland and colorless as Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in Wait Until Dark. Terence Young can sure pick 'em.

Hepburn was a legendarily lovely woman, but even her iconic beauty was no match for this unflattering, matronly "Church Lady" curly perm that appeared to be all the rage during the late '70s-early '80s. Here it is doing absolutely no favors for (clockwise ) Hepburn, Mary Tyler Moore (Ordinary People -1980), Maureen Stapleton (Interiors - 1978), Dustin Hoffman...who actually looks pretty good (Tootsie - 1982), Ali MacGraw (Just Tell Me What You Want  - 1980), and Marsha Mason (Chapter Two - 1979).
*Special thanks to the readers who jogged my memory. 


THE STUFF OF DREAMS NIGHTMARES
Spoiler Alert: Read no further. Crucial plot points are revealed for the purpose of discussion. 

The most consistent complaint leveled at Bloodline is that the very focus of its print and poster ads, the thing that earned it its R-rating, the single narrative thread to stand alone as the most distasteful element of the film----in the end makes absolutely no sense and has no bearing on the central plot or mystery. 

From the time of Bloodline’s release, the subplot involving a serial killer strangling prostitutes, filming their deaths, and then discarding their bodies in the river (each with a red ribbon around their neck), has been a bad taste deal-breaker. Whatever narrow chances Bloodline might have had as a sophisticated thriller or even a camp classic were forever jeopardized by the ugliness of these scenes. Scenes made all the more odious due to the fact that they appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with anything else happening in the film.

Family Feud
Elizabeth- "According to my father, one of them is deliberately trying to ruin the company."

Well, that’s not entirely true. Bloodline is a movie that has all the earmarks of having been hacked to pieces in the editing process. A fact evident in characters and relationships never being fleshed out or explained, storylines and plot points left dangling, and a general air of abrupt abbreviation. The theatrical release runs nearly two hours, but when it was broadcast on television, there was 40 minutes of unseen footage available to use. Forty minutes!

A serious casualty of all this cutting (I can only assume) is that it’s never made clear what the hell the serial killer angle has to do with someone out to sabotage Roffe Pharmaceuticals.

What’s missing from the film is expounded upon in the novel (albeit cursorily), so for those who have no wish to subject themselves to Sidney Sheldon in print for the sake of making sense of a nonsensical movie adaptation, here goes: (Remember folks, spoilers ahead). 

Now, Voyeur
The man behind these filmed murders is seen reflected in the dresser mirror

Sir Alec (Mason) is sexually impotent, and as a result, his vain, much-younger wife (Phillips) is blatantly (and serially) unfaithful to him. Her incessant gambling and wanton spending brings the mob down on their heads (with one thug threatening to nail her knees to the floor), prompting Alec to resort to sabotage and murder to secure money from his share of Roffe industries.

On a connected but still random note, said Sir Alec, unwilling to divorce his wife yet hating her for her infidelities, is only able to achieve sexual gratification when vicariously “punishing” women whom he makes up to look like her (the red ribbon bit. The first time they made love, she was wearing a red ribbon around her neck). So Sir Alec pays a maniac to act out his revenge fantasy on anonymous women while he watches from the sidelines and a cameraman films their strangulation deaths. Are you sick yet?  
What's obvious from even this brief explanation is that the whole serial killer subplot is still superfluous to the story at large, and could have been jettisoned without affecting the plot in any way.  It was retained for its exploitation value. Ironically, it was also likely the very thing that kept the film from attracting the older crowd who remembered Hepburn so fondly.

STUFF OF FANTASY
For all its flaws, Bloodline has a place in this cinema diary of mine because I was so absolutely caught up with the hype at the time. It was one of those films you get so worked up over seeing that when it proves to be a bit of a disappointment, you don't really admit it to yourself. I recall sitting through it twice on opening night, and then returning the following week. Was it because I liked it that much? Not really. Was I THAT excited to see Audrey Hepburn on the screen again? Well, of course!
One clunker in a career of gems doesn't stop her from being MY Audrey Hepburn.

BONUS MATERIAL
On April 13, 1979 Grauman's Chinese Theater added two ugly, boxy cineplexes to the original theater built in 1926. Bloodline was one of a package of Paramount releases premiering at the new theaters that summer. I saw Bloodline on opening night, Friday, June 29th, which also happened to be the opening day of both the latest Bond film, Moonraker, and the Bill Murray summer camp comedy Meatballs, two films targeted at a young audience. I watched Bloodline with an audience comprised mostly of older couples and a few folks turned away from sold-out Bond screenings.

Premiere features were: Hurricane, Old Boyfriends, and, in the main theater, Superman 

Here's the trailer for Bloodline's 1986 television broadcast. Even in this 30-second clip are scenes not in the theatrical release. Accounting for supporting player Michelle Phillips being so prominently in the ads is the fact that she was appearing on the ABC TV series Hotel at the time.  HERE

Bloodline marked the 5th screen pairing of Romy Schneider and Maurice Ronet. 

Prior to Bloodline, they appeared in the mystery/thriller Qui? (1970)

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 -2016