THE TRIPLE ECHO 1972

"A triple echo is the sound a shotgun blast makes when fired in the country."  

A triple echo is also the sound of the triangular collision of three lives.

I first became aware of the late British director Michael Apted back in the early '70s as the filmmaker responsible for picking up the mantle and expanding upon Paul Almond's groundbreakingly innovative Seven Up! documentary series. Nine in total, these social documentaries spanned 1964 to 2019, chronicling the lives of its original subjects…14 children, each 7 years old…and checking in with them every seven years, from childhood to their 60s.

Over time, Apted established himself in feature films, gaining considerable success, if not Oscar recognition, for the superior celebrity biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and for taking on the James Bond franchise with The World is Not Enough (1999). A 3-time BAFTA winner and recipient of several DGA awards, when Michael Apted died at age 79 on January 7, 2020, he left behind a varied legacy of outstanding films reflective not only of his roots in television and years as a documentarian, but his lifelong commitment to exploring the emotional truth of human relationships. 

The latter is a distinguishing characteristic of his impressive feature film debut, The Triple Echo.

Glenda Jackson as Alice Charlesworth

Brian Deacon as Pvt. Barton 

Oliver Reed as Sgt. Arthur

Because The Triple Echo has the confined, minimalist structure of a three-act chamber drama, before I learned that it was based on a 1970 novella by H.E. Bates (co-screenwriter of the 1955 Katharine Hepburn film Summertime), I was under the impression the film was adapted from a stage play. 

The time is WWII, the spring of 1943. The place is a remote farm in a hilly expanse of rural Wiltshire, England. A farm maintained solely and with some difficulty by Alice Charlesworth (Glenda Jackson), a solid, no-nonsense type whose husband is a POW in a Japanese prison camp. Alice’s reconciled solitude is interrupted one day when Barton (Brian Deacon), a young man from a nearby military training camp, accidentally trespasses on her land. Hostile wariness warms to measured affinity when the boyish soldier reveals himself to be a sensitive type enamored of nature, disdainful of authority, and a farmer’s son with a knack for fixing machinery. 

The Triple Echo marks the film debut of television & theater actor Brian Deacon 

Driven by compassion and homesickness, the two embark on a tentative friendship. Motivated by loneliness and need—him: to forget the war, her: to remember who she was before the war—an impulsive romance unfolds. (The film hints at but does not clarify the couple’s age difference. In reality, Glenda Jackson is 13 years older than Brian Deacon.) 

They spend the soldier's extended leave together on the farm. The undisturbed seclusion providing an artificial Eden so lullingly appealing to the discontented "squaddy" (private soldier) that when the time comes to return to camp, he decides to make his temporary absence a permanent one by deserting and going AWOL. Barton's abrupt decision precipitates an equally hastily-arrived-at solution from Alice: to elude detection and avoid capture, Barton must grow out his hair and nails, dress in women’s clothing, and assume the identity of Jill, a fictional younger sister visiting to help out on the farm. 

Confinement brings unforeseeable conflicts of personality, and almost immediately, their relationship begins to buckle under the day-to-day strain of impersonation, complicity, and apprehension. Alice, implicated in Barton’s desertion yet sensing she’s the only one to grasp its seriousness, grows more fault-finding and resentful as feelings of “caring about” splinter into “being responsible for.” Meanwhile, the battle-resistant Barton, holed up indoors and chafing at the irony of his great escape resulting in only a greater loss of freedom, finds himself embroiled in a battle with himself as he tries to simultaneously suppress and understand what both he and Alice perceive, but cannot find the words to talk about: his subtle, inner responsiveness to externally gender-identifying as a woman.

With its remote farmhouse setting; Alice trudging about in the mud in boots and trousers; and Barton-as-Jill secreted away indoors laboring over the cooking and ironing, it feels more intentional than coincidental that in falling so obligingly (yet acrimoniously) into a traditional gender role dynamic, Alice and Barton’s relationship comes to resemble that of Ellen and Jill (!) in D.H. Lawrence’s 1922 novella The Fox. A similarity reinforced by the Freudian emphasis on shotguns in both narratives, and the central conflict in each story being the intrusion of a third party—a fox/male character—whose attentions drive a fateful wedge between (and this is where I think '70s audiences were lost) two women.

The Sergeant (Oliver Reed at his charming-menacing best) and his buddy Stanley (Gavin Richards) make a nuisance of themselves once they discover the remote farmhouse is occupied by a "married crumpet" and her sister

In 2019, Glenda Jackson spoke on the topic of gender while starring on Broadway as King Lear: “When we’re born we teach babies….to be boys or girls. As we get older [she was 82 at the time], those absolute barriers of gender begin to crack.” She went on to observe how, having been just three years old at the start of WWII, she grew up in a world of women. Seeing women participate in every field of endeavor left her heedless of gender limitations. That is, until the war ended, the men returned, and women were encouraged (strongly) to go back to assuming more traditional roles.

That the flexible quadrants of gender are a theme explored in the nearly 50-year-old The Triple Echo suggests that Glenda Jackson’s timely comments reflect what has been a career-long interest on her part: taking on roles that explore the entire spectrum of human experience. Whether they be queer identity, gender nonconformity, women’s autonomy, or sexual orientation, a considerable number of Jackson’s films have been about people and relationships that fall outside of the narrow confines of a gender binary paradigm:  Women in Love (1969), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Music Lovers (1971), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), and controversially, even her interpretation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in Hedda (1975). 

Michael Apted’s assured and nuanced The Triple Echo humanely explores a human reality...that long before there were terms like gender dysphoria, long before there was any understanding of assigned gender not always conforming to gender identity, there has been an unarticulated awareness that male-female / masculine-feminine are limited and inadequate qualifiers. That human beings are more complex than the simple roles they are assigned by society and nature. And there have always been individuals who naturally resist being what the world tells them they must be. 

One of my favorite things about The Triple Echo is that the film refuses to disclose to the viewer any information about the characters that they themselves don't know. So, Barton, in his youth, has no real understanding of what he's experiencing, while Alice picks up on things she herself doesn't have the words or sophistication to fully comprehend. The film's emphasis, that we must go on loving those we care about...even when we don't always understand them...is, to me, a profoundly sensitive perspective for a film to have.

I don't know how it performed in the UK, but considering Glenda Jackson’s popularity at the time and the opportunity the film posed to see her reunited with Women in Love co-star Oliver Reed, it's (somewhat) surprising The Triple Echo struggled to find an audience in the US. Today, it remains one of Jackson’s least-familiar, least-seen titles, failing—at least to my knowledge—to even get a VHS release.  

Of course, it didn’t help that the poorly-marketed 1972 independent feature didn’t appear in most American markets until 1974, then hoping to ride the publicity coattails of Jackson’s recent Oscar win for A Touch of Class (1973). But by then, The Triple Echo came off as a late-in-the-cycle entry in the early-'70s trend in films exploring transgender and gender identity. Films that were either of the well-intentioned but-sensationalized variety: I Want What I Want (1972), or blatant exploitation: The Christine Jorgensen Story, Dinah East, and Myra Breckinridge--all released in 1970.

The audience for gender exploitation was likely unenthusiastic about Apted’s simple, arthouse approach. The nostalgia crowd was disappointed when the film's age-difference love story didn't turn into Britain's answer to The Summer of ‘42 (1971). And critics, left rudderless due to The Triple Echo arriving on the scene minus the guideposts of prior film festival wins determining its pedigree, didn't know what to make of a movie that was part love story, part unorthodox romantic triangle, part gender-identity character drama, and part nail-biting thriller.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Usually, when I say “Only in the ‘70s” about a film, it’s meant as an affectionate pejorative relating to the decade’s reputation for turning out offbeat, idiosyncratic films that could only have been made during that tiny window of time between the assembly line days of the studio system and the market-research era of the franchise blockbuster.

When I say The Triple Echo is the kind of movie that could only have been made in the ‘70s, I mean it as a badge of honor. With a small budget, minimal cast, and an intimate story that staunchly defies categorization, The Triple Echo feels like anything but sure-fire boxoffice hit material. But very much like a film Michael Apted wanted to make and a story he wanted to tell…market prospects be damned. And THAT is definitely something that could happen only in the ‘70s.

Critics in 1972 never tired of referencing how "unconvincing" Deacon is as a woman. In a rare instance of an informed contemporary mentality working in favor of an older film, to watch The Triple Echo today and catch yourself obsessing over a jawline or a hairdo (bad wigs, however, are fair game) or ideas of "pretty," is to confront how fragile and arbitrary our ideas of masculinity and femininity really are. 

I missed out on seeing The Triple Echo during its original run, finally catching it on TCM just a few short years ago after decades of having had it on my holy grail list of must-see, hard-to-find films. With Glenda Jackson starring, I knew I wasn’t likely to be disappointed, but I didn't expect to be so moved or impressed by a first directorial effort. 

Even as the story veers toward the melodramatic, culminating in the tragic, The Triple Echo maintains an emotional perceptiveness and an authentic sense of time and place that give scenes the feel of having been culled from personal memory.

If director Michael Apted and screenwriter Robin Chapman reveal their filmmaking inexperience in a certain overstatement of symbolism (portents of doom abound), and an overreliance on ambiguity in characterization (Glenda Jackson’s complex, fully-inhabited performance tethers the more sketchily-drawn roles of Deacon and Reed); they display an uncommonly deft hand in managing the film’s many shifts in tone and in creating an accompanying atmosphere for the three distinct phases of the story.

In the film's first third, as Alice & Barton get to know one another, the look is sunshiny, and most scenes are set outdoors. The peaceful open spaces are punctuated by reminders of the war: the sight & sound of planes flying overhead, the carcasses of a downed airship overlooking Alice's farm like the eyes of TJ Eckelburg in The Great Gatsby.  

The second segment is characterized by confinement. Fear of detection leads to a shared sense of imprisonment which results in an emotional estrangement that eats at the couple. Claustrophobic interiors are the order of the day, as oppressively low ceilings and too-close walls stand in stark contrast to the open-air scenes that came before.  The low-angle shot here not only calls attention to the lovers braced coldly with their backs to one another, but also places Barton's lengthened hair and long, painted nails in the forefront.

The third and final act completes the triangle and introduces Sgt. Arthur's fateful dominance in the narrative. It takes us back to the outdoors, but now, the look is wintry. The atmosphere is dark, stormy, and threatening.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What if who you're pretending to be is actually who you really are? 

There’s a scene early in The Triple Echo where Alice sees Barton out of his military uniform for the first time and comments on his looking so different: “I’m a master of disguise,”  he says. A throwback reference to an even earlier scene in which, after Alice remarks that he doesn’t look much like a farmer’s son, Barton complains of having been “made” into a soldier by the Army. 

So much of life is being who we have to be, what we're told to be, and what we're expected to be; it feels like a genuine stroke of luck if any of those external demands ever align with who we actually are. 

Michael Apted has crafted a finely observed film that, at times, feels like the most heartfelt fable about the subtle tyranny of identities assigned and roles assumed, 

With Glenda Jackson giving what I think is one of her best and most underrated performances, it may have taken me almost 50 years to see The Triple Echo, but I say in all sincerity that I know I'm able to appreciate it more today than I ever could in the '70s.

Clip from "The Triple Echo" (1972)

BONUS MATERIAL

Triple Echo opened in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 29, 1974. Two years after the film was completed, but a month after Glenda Jackson won a best Actress Oscar for  A Touch of Class.

In a move not uncommon in the days before home video and DVDs, The Triple Echo was re-released some four years later in September of 1978, this time at the bottom half of an arthouse double bill (paired with Chabrol’s Dirty Hands) and christened with the fuck-all, act-of-desperation title: Soldier in Skirts.  

Lotsa Larfs & Sex
It's difficult to imagine how anyone thought it a good idea to market
 Michael Apted's somber character drama as a proto-Bosom Buddies comedy.
Misconceived, misguided, and blatantly misleading.

The first thing I ever saw actor Brian Deacon in was John Schlesinger's 1983 HBO telefilm adaptation of Separate Tables with Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Before then, I only knew of him as the husband of Rock Follies star and oft-parodied VO5 hairspray TV commercial pitchwoman Rula Lenska (the pair wed in 1977, divorced in 1987).

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021

WOMEN IN LOVE 1969

As a hormonal pre-teen whose nether regions went all atingle at the sight of Oliver Reed’s Bill Sikes waking up in Shani Wallis' bed in the 1968 kiddie musical Oliver!; no one wanted to see Ken Russell’s adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love more than I. More to the point: no 7^th grader with a wholesale unfamiliarity with either D. H. Lawrence or Ken Russell wanted to see Oliver Reed appearing full-frontal naked in a movie more than I.

But it was not to be.
For although my track record for persuading my mom to grant me permission to see age-inappropriate films on the basis of their “seriousness of content” was one both impressive and fruitful in one so young (my being both a shy and humorless 12-year-old got me into Bonnie & Clyde, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?); little did I know that my hopes for pulling the same stunt with Women in Love would be dashed thanks to my parents having seen the controversial film adaptation of Lawrence’s lesbian-themed novella The Fox (1967) a couple of years before. I was undone by the fact that the advertising campaigns for both The Fox and Women in Love downplayed the highbrow literary origins of these films in favor of stressing the inherently sensationalist virtues contained in their then taboo-shattering display of nudity and sexual frankness.

Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin

Glenda Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen

Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich

Jennie Linden as Ursula Brangwen

Eleanor Bron as Hermione Roddice

That I had been able to wheedle my way into the “Recommended for Mature Audiences” films listed above is largely attributable to the fact that they all pitched themselves as important, self-serious motion pictures commenting on contemporary issues. On the other hand, Women in Love, whose marketing betrayed a perhaps well-founded lack of faith in America’s interest in or familiarity with D.H. Lawrence, banked on the lure of eroticism to offset the stuffy reputation of British imports by choosing to go the exploitation route. Like The Fox before it, which used the promise of female-female sex as its prime publicity hook, Women in Love moved its homoerotic nude wrestling scene front and center as the defining image and focus of its entire marketing campaign.

And while I’m certain all of this paid off handsomely at the boxoffice, closer to home (seeing as it only solidified my mother’s perception of D.H. Lawrence as a high-flown pornographer, and strengthened her resolve to keep me far away from any film bearing his name) that particular marketing strategy ultimately proved disastrous to my private campaign to get a look at Oliver's reed. Roughly nine years passed before Women in Love's rounds at the revival theaters and my suitable chronological age coincided.

The stylish (if not eccentric) mode of dress of the Brangwen sisters not only establishes them as modern, independent-thinking women at odds with their dreary, working-class surroundings, but assert Women in Love's subthemes of internal (emotion and instinct), external (nature and environment), and man-made (industry and art) conflict.

Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen are two emotionally restless sisters whose naturally colorful natures chafe at the drab-grey existence proffered by their working-class status as schoolteachers in the coal-mining town of Beldover in postwar England, 1921. Both women are dreamy loners unable/unwilling to fit in with their surroundings. Both are also, if not exactly looking for love, reluctant to duplicate the domestic desperation of their mother, and therefore curious and receptive to exploring the experience.

Gudrun (Jackson), the youngest, is a self-styled artist and free-spirit sensually attracted to power and passion. (And, it would seem, brutality. In one scene she is shown becoming excited by the sight of Gerald mistreating a horse. In another, stimulated by a story an artist [Loerke] relates about having to beat one of his female models in order for her to sit still for a painting.)

"I would give everything...everything, all you love...for a little companionship and intelligence."
Vladek Sheybal  as Herr Loerke, a homosexual artist (Richard Heffer as his lover) presents Gudrun with a possibility of platonic love

Ursula (Linden), more of a realist and more sensitive than her sister, nevertheless envisions fulfillment as something achievable only through the surrendering of oneself to an idealized vision of one-on-one domesticated bliss. Into these sisters' lives, as though summoned by mutual longing, arrive Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich; best friends of dissimilar emotional temperament who contribute to forming, in their coupling with the sisters, two contrasting yet complementary halves of a cyclical treatise on the conundrum that is passionate love vs. romantic love. The perpetual struggle between the sexes.

Woman in Love #1- Rupert & Ursula's loving relationship is often photographed in nature

Ursula finds romantic kinship—if little in the way of stability—with Rupert (Bates), a school inspector possessed of extravagantly quixotic theories about nature, life and love, all seeming to channel from a nascent awareness of his bisexuality. Meanwhile, Gudrun, perhaps out of want of stimulation or, as Rupert surmises, a lust for passion and greed for self-importance in love, is drawn to Gerald (Reed), the brutish, aristocratic son of the town’s coal industrialist. A shared quest for power, corrosively mixed with a need for both intimacy and independence, makes theirs a passionate, albeit combative, relationship more or less doomed from the start.

Woman in Love #2 - Gudrun & Gerald's doomed relationship is often photographed in dark surroundings

Intruding upon Ursula and Rupert’s self-perpetuating emotionalism and Gudrun and Gerald’s incessant power plays, are: Hermione (Bron), Rupert’s one-time love and the walking embodiment of orchestrated eroticism with none of the heat; and Rupert himself, whose unrequited love for the mulishly impassive Gerald encumbers his relationship with Ursula.

Men in Love - Rupert advances the possibility of an implicit, perfect love shared between two men

Many films have used the entwined relationships of two couples to explore the inconsistent, conflicting complexities of spiritual and physical love (my favorites being Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge and Closer), but Ken Russell’s Women in Love gets to the heart of the matter (so to speak) in a way that is as visually poetic as it is emotionally painful. It's one of the most intelligent and genuinely provocative films about love I've ever seen.

I was in my early 20s the first time I saw Women in Love, and had you asked me, I genuinely would have told you I'd understood it then. But it seems with each passing year, the film reveals itself to be about so much more than I'd initially thought, I'm certain what I'd gleaned from the film at such a young age was but the mere tip of the emotional iceberg Russell presents us with.

Michael Gough as Tom Brangwen

Women in Love is one of those rare films that seems to grow smarter in direct proportion to the amount of life experience one chalks up. So it would seem, although you couldn't have convinced me of it at the time, my mom was right in thinking I was too young for this. Not that I wouldn't have loved to have seen Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in the buff, but Women in Love is far too mature in its themes for any of this to have made a whit of sense to me as an adolescent.

Sumptuously filmed, magnificently costumed (by Shirley Russell), and so exceptionally well-acted you can watch it again and again without ever unearthing all the delightful nuances in the actors’ performances, Women in Love is a thoughtful, surprisingly restrained film, and a pleasant departure from the operatic bombast of Russell’s later works.

Gudrun's desire for power and its liberating effects is poetically dramatized in a sequence in which her lyrical dancing tames and eventually overcomes a threatening-looking herd of highland cattle. (Amusingly, a herd which, when photographed from the front, share Gudrun's coloring and haircut.) 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

My favorite thing about Women in Love is how artfully it tackles the unwieldy topic of love. Especially the pain and emotional upheaval born of that overused word never seeming to mean the exact same thing to any two people at any one time. 
Obscured by illusion, distorted by need, thwarted by cowardice; the impulse to love may be innate and instinctual, but it’s also intensely confounding. Ken Russell contrasts images of nature with images of the encroaching industrialism of postwar England to dramatize the natural urges of the characters as being in conflict with their repressed, intellectual notions about love. Ursula, Gudrun, Rupert, and Gerald all do a great deal of thinking and talking about love, but none betray a  trace of genuinely having any idea of what love really is or what they want. 

As suggested by Women in Love's repeated use of the popular song "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," the characters all harbor romantic illusions about love: its potential for fulfillment, its ability to heal wounds, the emotional void it can fill. Conflict arises out of whether or not the grasping need of desire is capable of giving way to the vulnerability and freedom love requires.

Love & Death:  In a pairing shot that many critics of the day thought too heavy-handed (which, of course, meant I absolutely loved it), the drowning death of the film's only romantically idyllic couple (Sharon Gurney & Christopher Gable) is contrasted with Ursula & Rupert's unsatisfying first tryst. A premonition of blighted love, a graphic representation of romantic ideologies at cross purposes; the women's poses can be interpreted as lovingly embracing or greedily clinging to the men, the men, unequivocally adopting gestures of disentanglement.

Sharon Gurney as Laura Crich and Christopher Gable as Tibby Lupton

Gable would go on to appear in four other Ken Russell films and two Russell TV productions

PERFORMANCES

While Ken Russell's operatic zest and Larry Kramer's graceful screenplay mercifully spare Women in Love from the kind of over-reverential airlessness common in most film adaptations of classic novels, I attribute the lion's share of the credit for the film's vibrancy to the talents of the amazing cast. 

In an era that required so many actresses to play the compliant love interest to counterculture antiheroes, Women in Love was a refreshing change of pace in presenting two women who have a say in what they want from life and love. Personal fave Glenda Jackson (looking quite smart in her blunt, Vidal Sassoon bob) emerged in this film as something of the "New Woman" of '70s cinema.

Blessed with a mellifluous voice and an articulate beauty that radiates strength, intellect, and fleshy sensuality, Jackson is Old Hollywood star quality without the lacquered veneer. Much in the same way I attribute Woody Allen with unearthing Diane Keaton, Ken Russell and Glenda Jackson are a pair forever locked together in my mind. Her performance as Gudrun Brangwen, certainly one of the more complex, emotionally paradoxical characters in literature, is almost wily. Throughout the film she wears the look of a woman in possession of a secret she dares you to find out. The quintessential Ken Russell heroine, Jackson won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, and deservedly rose to stardom on the strength of this film. 

A real scene-stealer whose presence is very much missed when her character is required to recede into the background early on, is the ever-versatile Eleanor Bron as the pretentious Hermione: a potentially ridiculous individual made real and sympathetic by Bron's prodigious talent. Only after I'd read the book did I really come to appreciate the spot-on perfection of the self-enchanted sensual studiousness of Bron's performance.

Women in Love as a costume film/period piece, tightrope walks a space between stagy theatricality and naturalism that few but Russell—with his talent for finding natural locations that look like stage sets for an opera—could pull off. Alan Bates fits the film's romantic setting perfectly (because I find him to be so swoon-inducingly beautiful, I can’t honestly say I've ever been able to really evaluate his performance with much objectivity), and Jennie Linden is effective in the somewhat thankless role of Ursula.

Reed and Jackson bring such smoldering dynamic intensity to their roles that their scenes together always feel slightly dangerous. I can't think of another actress who could appear opposite Reed in a scene and leave you concerned for his safety. I think Reed's Gerald Crich is his finest screen performance. Employing his trademark whispers to great effect, he somehow manages to be brutish, refined, and heartbreakingly vulnerable all at the same time.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Given your average ratio of anticipation to disappointment, it came as no small surprise to discover, after having waited so many years, Women in Love’s fabled nude wrestling scene more than lived up to its reputation. Satisfied with merely being sensually enraptured by the sight of two obscenely sexy actors wrestling in the altogether; I wasn't at all prepared for what a dramatically powerful and daring scene it is. Daring not in its exposure of flesh, but in its exploration of a subtextual, taboo attribute of a great many onscreen male relationships (and, I daresay, many real-life relationships as well).

I'm not sure who said it, but someone once made the keen observation that homophobia in men is not really rooted in a general distaste for male-on-male sexual contact, but rather in the fear of "What if I like it?"
Heterosexual men have established a social order in which they have left themselves few avenues allowing for the expression of male affection. In lieu of this, they have contrived a network of female-excluding, male-bonding rituals so convoluted and complex (sports culture, strip clubs, ass slapping, "bros before hoes" guy codes, homophobic locker room humor, bromance comedies, misogyny masked as promiscuity [the Romeo syndrome], etc.) you sometimes wish they'd just have sex with each other and get it over with. One can't help but feel that the world would be a less aggressive, insecure place if they did.

In Women in Love, Rupert and Gerald's friendship is really the most intimate, passionate, and loving relationship in the film, but Rupert uses words and lofty theories to mask his inability to fully confront his own sexual confusion, while Gerald is too emotionally remote to allow himself to address the issue at all. On the heels of the death of Gerald's sister and following Rupert's less-than-fulfilling consummation of his affair with Ursula, the two friends find themselves at a loss for how to "appropriately" comfort one another. So, as is the wont of repressed heterosexual males the world over, Rupert and Gerald resort to displays of physical aggression as a heterosexual means of expressing homosexual intimacy.

As the friendly combat gives way to a physical exhaustion matching their physical closeness, it's clear to Rupert that Gerald feels "something" akin to his own feelings. But before that ultimate intimacy can be broached, Gerald, in an act of willful misunderstanding, finds it necessary to break off what has been established between them before things have a chance of preceding any further. (Wrestling by firelight, the very natural state of their nudity is made vulgar and shameful by the intrusion of the modern electric light he abruptly switches on.)

As a fan of '70s movies, what makes this sequence particularly compelling for me is how it symbolically evokes the unaddressed subtext in all those post-feminism, male-centric buddy pictures of the decade. Films like Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider—films in which women are shunted off to the sidelines—are all essentially male romances. In each film, women are present, even loved, but there's no getting past the fact that the deepest, most profoundly spiritual love occurs between the male characters. Women in Love's wrestling scene dramatizes the struggle men face when affection for another man is felt, and (at least in this instance), the societal and morality-imposed roles of "friend" are found to be inadequate.

It's an outstandingly courageous sequence whose confrontational frankness wrests Women in Love out of the past and centers it far and above what most mainstream filmmakers are willing to do even today. Who knew? A sequence I only expected to be a feast for the eyes proved to be food for thought as well.

Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, and Jennie Linden in a clip from "Women in Love" (1969)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Women in Love was promoted with the tagline—“The relationship between four sensual people is limited: They must find a new way.” And while this might sound more like the tagline for 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, it does at least touch upon the theme of the inadequacy of classically “romantic” notions of love in a modern world, and the need for a kind of sexual evolution.

The Proper Way to Eat a Fig
Almost as scandalous as Women in Love's nudity was the inclusion of a scene (not in the book) where Rupert compares a fig to female genitalia. The words are taken from D.H. Lawrence's 1923 erotic poem, Figs, which can be read in its entirety, HERE

None of the characters in Women in Love are able to fully align what they presuppose about love (nor what is true to their natures) with their present realities. In an earlier post about Mike Nichols’ Closer, I wrote:
“The four protagonists fumble about blindly seeking love without knowing how to return it, demanding love without earning it, and giving love without committing to it.”

The same can be said for the characters in Women in Love. And although more than 70 years separate the creation of the two works (Patrick Marber's play, Closer, was written in 1997, D.H. Lawrence's novel was published in 1920) it intrigues me that after so many years and so much human progress, the basic cosmic riddle that is love remains essentially and eternally unanswered.

Undomesticated
Rupert - "But I wanted a man friend eternal...as you are eternal."
Ursula - "You can't have it because it's impossible."
Rupert - "I don't believe that."

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2014

BURNT OFFERINGS 1976

I’m not sure what a sociologist would make of it, but the '70s (that post- hippie “Me” decade of Watergate, the energy crisis, and the close of the Vietnam War) seems to have spawned more than its share of movies and novels about malevolent domiciles. The Amityville Horror (1979), The Sentinel (1977), and The Shining (1980) are all films based on popular '70s horror-fiction novels that sought to update the traditional haunted house story.

Burnt Offerings, Robert Marasco’s 1973 novel chronicling the gradual dissolution and ultimate destruction of a family after they take up temporary residence in a large house possessed of a deadly supernatural force, predates Stephen King’s similarly-themed The Shining by four years. I read Burnt Offerings back in 1975, as soon as I’d heard that it was to be adapted into a motion picture reuniting Karen Black with Dan Curtis, the director of the popular TV-movie, Trilogy of Terror (1975).

"There's no such thing as fun for the whole family" - Jerry Seinfeld

The involvement of Dan Curtis—the man behind the long-running Gothic TV soap-opera Dark Shadows, and a TV-based director/producer who never met a horror-cliché he didn’t like—was considerably less promising to me than the possibilities presented by the top-drawer cast assembled (always such a rarity in horror films). Karen Black, red-hot at the time, was cast as the wife; Ken Russell alumni Oliver Reed, fresh from the success of Tommy (1975), was the husband, and veteran star Bette Davis was rescued from TV-movie hell to bring her What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? / Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte scream-queen gravitas to the small role of Aunt Elizabeth. Rounding out the intriguing cast were Oscar-winner Eileen Heckart and indefatigable hambone Burgess Meredith as the eccentric owners of the parasitic (vampiric?) summer rental at the center of the story.

Karen Black as Marian Rolf

Oliver Reed as Benjamin Rolf

Bette Davis as Aunt Elizabeth

Lee H. Montgomery as Davy Rolf

Eileen Heckart as Roz Allardyce

Burgess Meredith as Arnold Allardyce

On its release, I was happy to find Burnt Offerings to be a serious-minded, slavishly faithful adaptation of the book (with the exception of a more cinematic, crowd-pleasing ending) that avoided the usual post-Exorcist bombast and instead concentrated on mood and atmosphere. It's one of those rare films that can give you a good, solid scare when you watch it alone, yet provide plenty of unintentional laughs when you watch it with friends. Contemporary audiences are likely to find the film predictable, slow, over-reliant on tried-and-true clichés (there should be a moratorium on rainstorms in haunted house movies), and hampered by the kind of empty ambiguity that often signals poor storytelling. But those who saw Burnt Offerings when they were very young (the film was rated PG) or before The Shining and the Amityville series drove the genre into redundancy, tend to recall the film with the most fondness today.

The Face That Launched a Thousand Bad Dreams 

Few knew the name of the ghoulishly grinning chauffeur (Anthony James) but no one ever forgot the face. 

A film critic once compared the horror genre to pornography (a '70s film critic...long before the genre's decline and the arrival of those wretched "torture porn" movies) making the point that no matter the flaws, porn films work if you find them exciting, and horror films work if they are scary. Is Burnt Offerings scary? Had I seen it as a ten-year-old, I would say most emphatically yes. Seeing it as an adult, I can't say it scared me so much as it entertained me in a way that encouraged my suspension of disbelief to just sit back and have fun with it all. Perhaps it's due to Curtis having developed his "style" from years working in television,  but the PG-rated Burnt Offerings feels less like a feature film and more like an expanded episode of the TV show Night Gallery (a program Curtis criticized for its poor writing). Burnt Offerings is more a well-told mood piece than a good scary movie. (Perhaps the scariest and most unsettling thing is how this family considers it a "vacation" to spend their entire summer working harder than most people do all year. Even before the house starts acting up, all they do is clean!) However, ask someone who saw Burnt Offerings as a kid and they'll tell you it was the scariest film they ever saw...the stuff of nightmares.

Karen Black discovers that a long-neglected greenhouse has blossomed overnight

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of my favorite things about Modern Gothic is when the horror is portrayed as an external manifestation of some form of inner turmoil in the characters. As in The Shining (and more successfully, if in a slightly different vein, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby), Burnt Offerings nicely grafts familial dysfunction onto the conventions of the haunted house genre to create an eerie sense of tension both supernatural and psychological. When one really watches how the Rolf family interacts, it's easy to imagine that perhaps the "right people" the Allardyces seek for the house are ones living under a pressure cooker of repressed frustrations and barely constrained hostilities.

From the very first moments we meet the Rolfs, one gets a sense that all is not exactly well with this family. Pragmatic Ben and over-ardent Marian don’t really EVER see eye to eye before things begin to rapidly go awry between them. What is made explicit in the book (her domestic dissatisfaction, his creeping fear of mental illness) is only hinted at in the film, but the keen performances by Oliver Reed and Karen Black shore up the sense that the house doesn't really change these people, it merely amplifies that which is already there.

Unseen Terror

PERFORMANCES

Always one of my favorites, screen legend Karen Black may not have been able to sustain the kind of career she once had at the peak of her '70s popularity (the partial blame for which she subtly lays at the feet of Burnt Offerings director Dan Curtis in the comically discombobulated DVD commentary for this film), but there are few actresses who can boast of having starred or appeared in as many films that have gone on to attain classic or cult status.

Black’s boom years were 1974 to 1976, a period in which it was near-impossible to avoid her on the big screen or television (her performance of Big Mama Thornton's “Hound Dog” on The Tonight Show is burned in my brain to this day).  The uniquely glamorous, off-beat, unofficial face of The New Hollywood, the ubiquitous Karen Black appeared in a staggering 10 feature films and TV-movies in these three years, among them, some of the biggest and most high-profile releases of the era: The Great Gatsby (1974), The Day of the Locust (1975), Nashville (1975), and Family Plot (1976). And of course, one cannot forget Airport 1975, a film so iconically silly that the line of dialogue “The Stewardess is Flying the Plane!” was made into the title of a book about films of the 1970s.

Bring on the Crazy
The eminently watchable Karen Black is the main reason I love this film. Even when her performance veers into the eccentric (and let's face it, they always do), she is so obviously coming from a perceived place of truth for her character that she wins you over through sheer conviction.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The central gimmick of Burnt Offerings is that the house renews and repairs itself with every injury, drop of blood, or instance of physical or spiritual decline it can extract from its inhabitants. Dan Curtis’ television-trained penchant for close-ups and tight framing robs the film of the kind of visual scope necessary to make the scenes of spontaneous regeneration really pay off, but his claustrophobic eye is well suited to building a sense of dread out of a million little isolated details. Not all of them followed through with or given a payoff.

A history of violence is suggested by the discovery of a vintage pair of eyeglasses with a discomforting hole through the center of one lens.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm

Oliver Reed reacts to discovering all the clocks in the house have miraculously wound themselves

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Because I so enjoy a good scare at the movies, I’m almost ridiculously willing to suspend my disbelief if it better ensures a solid payoff at the conclusion. On that point Burnt Offerings delivers mightily; it has a great final act. But a movie has to work with me. I can accept the most outlandish plot machinations if a character's actions and motivations follow even a marginally identifiable pattern of a recognizable human behavior. As soon as characters go off doing patently stupid things just to advance the plot, well, then you lose me. 

To its credit, Burnt Offerings plays it smart most of the time. For example: to better counterbalance the swift susceptibility of the Karen Black character (who is sympathetic, if ultimately hard to relate to) and get the plot moving despite everything about the initial setup screaming, “Don’t rent that house!”, Oliver Reed’s dialog mostly has him giving voice to every doubt the audience is thinking. This is a great device that subtly pulls you in with presuming that if a character at least acknowledges something smells fishy, you're more likely to stick it out when they inevitably start disregarding common sense and doing all the wrong things.

Slightly annoying son Davy proves to be something of a disaster divining rod when it comes to who's to be the target of several "attacks" by the house in its attempts to destroy the Rolf family

Burnt Offerings is not a great horror film, but it's a good one that I enjoy rewatching a great deal. Not scary so much as eerie, Burnt Offerings plays like a supernatural parable on the risks of being controlled by one's possessions. Anyone who's ever owned a car, a home, or property can relate to feeling at times as if repairs, taxes, upkeep...the whole desire to acquire things.... can easily dominate one's life. That one is living one's life at the will and behest of the things we sought to possess, but which ultimately come to possess us.

The mysterious photograph collection of vaguely startled looking people 

The Dunsmuir Estate in the Oakland Hills (near my parent's house!) was used for the Allardyce mansion. It looks considerably less creepy now.

BONUS MATERIAL

Oh, and as for my Karen Black obsession: in spite of her having filmed Burnt Offerings near my family's house in Oakland, and the previous year filming Hitchcock's Family Plot in San Francisco where I attended college, I never once made the effort to catch sight of her on location. Thirty years later, in Los Angeles in 2007, I finally had the opportunity to meet the object of my teen fascination when I went to see her in her self-penned musical play Missouri Waltz. When it came time for the post-performance meet and greet in the lobby, she was a real sweetheart, and I was near speechless. But boy, you should have seen her face when someone held out a poster of The Day of the Locust for her to sign (not her favorite movie), it was like one of those looks she shoots Oliver Reed when she has to rescue him from the attacking vines!

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2012