THE NIGHT DIGGER 1971

In the little-known (but much-beloved by me) psychological thriller The Night Digger (The Road Builder in the UK), Patricia Neal portrays Maura Prince, a 43-year-old recovering stroke survivor who works part-time at a hospital helping other stroke victims relearn to speak. That the 44-year-old Patricia Neal had, in 1965, actually suffered a series of debilitating strokes which left her having to relearn how to walk and talk, adds a layer of autobiographical poignancy to both her character and performance.

Single and childless, Maura is what was once known as a spinster. A spinster who, when not stealing away for those brief-but-rewarding two hours a week at the hospital, is at the harried beck and call of her blind and ailing adoptive mother Edith Prince (Pamela Brown). The two women live alone in a somewhat secluded area in the Berkshire district of England in a cavernous old Victorian mansion whose facade, much like Maura herself, shows the wear of years of neglect and abuse. 

Patricia Neal as Maura Prince

Pamela Brown as Mrs. Edith Prince

Nicholas Clay as Billy Jarvis

Left with both a limp and frozen hand from her stroke, Maura dresses dowdily, looks older than her age, and walks with the weighted-down posture and downcast eyes of the defeated. She's a woman with a broken spirit, only part of which can be said to be attributable to her disability.
Yet in spite of the air of forlorn resignation which seems to follow her around like a personal storm cloud, Maura is surprisingly clear-minded and unsentimental about her lot in life. She harbors no illusions as to why, at age 15, she was adopted by the newly widowed Mrs. Prince (to serve as the elder woman’s free-of-charge live-in maid, cook, nurse, and whipping post); nor does she kid herself as to why she has allowed herself to be subjected to the interfering dominance of her mother for so many years.

Guilt and a sense of duty play a part, for it was her mother who nursed Maura back to health following her stroke. A stroke she had the misfortune of suffering mere months after running away (escaping?) with a man who would later come to abandon her. Yes, guilt and duty play a part, but loneliness seals the bargain. Maura submits to her mother’s strong-willed dominance simply because she has nothing and no one else in her life.

Together, these women live a life of claustrophobic co-dependency in an atmosphere of by-now-routine rituals of passive-aggressive resentment: Maura taking silent, unseen delight in her mother’s food-scattering efforts to feed herself; Edith basking in private, sadistic satisfaction whenever she's granted the opportunity to inflict some petty inconvenience on her daughter.

While gossipy Edith—who’s not above feigning a heart attack to get her way—shares the companionship of two equally talebearing neighbors (Jean Anderson & Graham Crowden); Maura, beyond her duties at the hospital, lives a life solitary and internal. But if her sunlit, pink-hued, hyperfeminine, and meticulously cared-for bedroom is any indication, one can safely assume Maura’s inner life is a vividly romantic one.

See No Evil and Hear No Evil get an earful from Speak No Evil

If there's nothing real to gossip about, Edith and best friends Millicent McMurtrey
 (Anderson) and Mr. Bolton (Crowden) sometimes have to resort to invention

Into this stifling yet drafty environment rides Billy Jarvis (Nicholas Clay), a boy of 20 who mysteriously turns up at precisely the moment the women are in need of someone to perform gardening and maintenance chores around the house. Claiming to be a friend of a friend’s nephew, it’s obvious from the start that Billy is a facile (if not particularly adroit) liar, but the means by which he actually comes to know of this particular job opportunity remains one of the many mysteries surrounding the young man's arrival.

Ever the skeptic, Maura sees easily through Billy's lies, but Edith—if perhaps only to annoy Maura—finds herself charmed by the boy's hard-luck stories (invalid mother died in a fire) and sincere avowals of religious fealty (a lie which later comes to bite him on the ass). After half-convincing herself that Billy might actually be a distant relative...a delusional leap of faith more designed to silence local gossip, Edith invites the boy to stay on as their unpaid laborer/houseguest. In Maura’s room, no less. Understandably overjoyed, Billy, who's been living an itinerant existence as a road builder, moves in immediately, his only possessions being his motorbike and a mysterious bundle secured by a leather harness (“Your Bible and prayer book, I suppose?” Maura sarcastically intones).

When forced to give up her room to the handyman, it's revealed that everything about Maura's room stands in stark contrast to the dark, drab, disarray of the rest of the house. It's our first indication that Maura, like Billy, might be quite different than she first appears.

The introduction into the household of an additional target for Edith’s whip-cracking has the unforeseen result of creating a tacit bond between the appreciative Billy and the emotionally guarded Maura. An empathetic, almost maternal-filial bond that comes to threaten the long-established dynamic between Maura and her mother. A bond that soon evolves into something eminently deeper, infinitely more complex, and ultimately, with the town suddenly terrorized by a serial killer known as The Traveling Maniac, ominous and macabre.  

The Night Digger is an unusual film. An odd, not-to-everyone's-taste motion picture in many ways deserving of its exploitative advertising tagline "A tale of the strange and perverse."  And while it's not a perfect film--a fact most evident in the somewhat rushed feel of the film's third act--the sublime deliberateness of its earlier scenes, combined with the richness of its characterizations, gives the film the feel of an undiscovered, underappreciated gem. (The Night Digger had a troubled shoot involving much script-tinkering and clashes with the composer. Neither Neal nor Dahl were pleased with the results, labeling the final edit "pornographic.")

Saddled with a terrible title and somewhat misleading marketing campaign more befitting a grindhouse slasher or exercise in hagsploitation; The Night Digger is a film so unusual I'm not entirely sure it would have found an audience even if its US distributors had not given up on it so quickly.

The Night Digger is an atmospheric suspense film more in line with art-house thrillers like Robert Altman's Images (1972) or unconventional character dramas like Michael Apted's The Triple Echo (1972). Critics have commented upon similarities to Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher (1971), but when I first saw The Night Digger, the films it most evoked for me were Night Must Fall (particularly the 1964 Albert Finney remake of the 1937 classic), and especially Altman's (again) That Cold Day in the Park. What The Night Digger shares with the 1969 Sandy Dennis starrer is a quality I'm drawn to in so many of my favorite films from the late-'60s/early-'70s: a willingness to allow a story to go to unexpected places. The Night Digger is an intriguing, emotionally provocative thriller containing just enough touches of humor and humanity to offset its pitch-black edges. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’ve little doubt that the things I love the most about The Night Digger are precisely the things that contributed to it being a film 1971 audiences (and its US distributor, MGM) showed so little interest in that it wound up being shelved not long after brief playoffs in limited markets. For me, The Night Digger's chief appeal is in the way it doesn’t settle easily into any particular genre classification.
Promoted as a psychological suspense thriller, The Night Digger, with its measured, seriocomic tone and glum atmosphere of neurosis and dread, is a compellingly effective Hitchcockian melodrama (a major asset being its terrifically creepy score by eight-time Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann). But the “thriller” nomenclature doesn’t fully allow for the fact that the film is at its strongest and most affecting when focused on the interplay of the characters.
At these moments, The Night Digger is a sensitively observed character drama about the despairing interactions of damaged people. People disabled in ways both visible and concealed who allow their lives to be ruled, ruined, or possibly reclaimed by their infirmity. This angle of the film is, for me, its most rewarding, for it effectively invests you in the fates of its characters before things start to shift into full-tilt weirdness. Once the unconventional love story starts to merge with the disturbing serial killer subplot, it's too late...you're hooked.

The emotional burden of dysfunction - be it physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual -
is at the core of Roald Dahl's unsettling screenplay for The Night Digger

The Night Digger’s offbeat tone and jet-black comedy are largely owed to the contributions of screenwriter Roald Dahl (You Only Live Twice, The Witches, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory). The story goes that Dahl purchased the rights to Joy Cowley’s 1967 novel Nest in a Falling Tree expressly for wife Patricia Neal (whom he painstakingly nursed back to health following her stroke), after her Oscar-nominated return to the screen in The Subject Was Roses (1968) failed to yield further job offers.

It’s Dahl who devised the film's serial killer plotline (not present at all in Cowley’s book) and rewrote the character of Maura as a stroke survivor. These revisions create effectively disorienting tonal shifts in the film's narrative reminiscent of Willy Wonka's terrifying boat ride or the introduction of the memorably terrifying Child Catcher into his otherwise sweet and sunny Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In The Night Digger, these tonal shifts—some delicate, others shockingly abrupt—play out with a sinister purposefulness well-suited to the film’s atmosphere of intensifying unease. Every time you think you’ve figured out where The Night Digger is headed, it throws you a curve.

Peter Sallis and Yootha Joyce as Reverend Palafox and Mrs. Palafox
contribute a hilarious bit as the objects of spurious speculation 

Movies fail for all sorts of reasons, but one of The Night Digger’s biggest hurdles had to have been the fact that an audience most receptive to a movie starring Patricia Neal was also an audience least likely to be welcoming of the film's nudity, violence, and lurid themes. Conversely, those in search of the kind of bloody mayhem normally associated with an R-rated serial-killer movie must have felt as though the rug had been pulled out from under them when confronted with a quaint senior citizen suspenser about a lonely spinster and her elderly mum.
So, how then is it that The Night Digger ranks as one of my favorite films? I guess because I fit the seldom-courted “sentimental dirty old man” demographic.

PERFORMANCES
Both Patricia Neal (The Fountainhead) and Pamela Brown (Secret Ceremony) give truly fine performances in The Night Digger. Neal, who usually commands every scene she's in with that marvelous voice and natural acting style, is given fair and equal support in Pamela Brown, an endlessly resourceful actress with an uncanny ability to convey multiple dimensions of her somewhat reprehensible character all at once. I absolutely adore Patricia Neal and think she gives a performance worthy of another Oscar nomination (had anyone actually seen the film) playing a strong woman who's come to define herself by her weaknesses.
The mother/daughter scenes she shares with Brown are so good (like watching an absorbing two-character stage play) I confess to having initially felt a twinge of regret once the story necessitated the introduction of a supporting cast. Happily, as I so often find to be the case with UK films made during this time, the level of talent assembled for the supporting cast (especially Jean Anderson) is beyond impressive.

Making his film debut in The Night Digger is the late Nicholas Clay (Evil Under The Sun), a favorite actor whose genuine talent I tend to undervalue because of his looks and his (blessed) tendency to take on roles requiring him to appear in various states of undress. The Night Digger sets a fine career precedent, nudity-wise, but it’s nice to report he also gives a solid and very engaging performance here, rounding out an overall exceptional cast.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I saw The Night Digger for the first time just a few years ago when it aired on TCM, but I remember wanting to see it back when it opened in San Francisco in 1971. At the time I didn’t really know who Patricia Neal was (her Maxim coffee ads and Waltons TV movie would come later) but my eye was caught by the newspaper ad and I was fascinated. Unfortunately, the ad also happened to catch my mother’s eye, the prominent presence of the word “perverse” in the ad copy effectively putting the kibosh on any hopes I had of finding out what this creepy-looking film with the cryptic title was all about.

It took a while, but in finally having the opportunity to see The Night Digger (several decades past that must-be-17-years-of-age hurdle), it's clear to me that I would have liked it in’71, but I’m positive it's provided me with a much richer experience seeing it today.
Always a sucker for films about the intrinsic human need to connect and the agony we put ourselves through trying to convince ourselves otherwise; there's a poignancy and pathos to the plight of the film’s characters that would have likely been a bit over my head as an adolescent. What the film has to say about the paradox of growth: that growing up inevitability leads to separation/that growing closer invariably increases one’s chances of being hurt—strikes the kind of emotional chord with me today that is unlikely to have been stirred at all at when I was twelve.

Similarly, I'm fairly sure that as a young man, I'd have taken the more gruesome elements of the story out of context. That is to say, I'd likely have looked upon the film's structure - which is to juxtapose scenes of inhumanity with moving passages of emotional longing - as being merely dramatic or "action-packed."

Having lived long enough to understand that part of life is making peace with the eternal coexistence of the gentle and the monstrous (the latter too often a result of a lack of the former); the violent events in The Night Digger don't feel as arbitrary to me as they might have. On the whole, what I like about the film and what I take away from it (and this is 100% my subjective take on a film I love, not a recommendation) is that it resonates with me as a nightmare fable about the life-defining events of our lives and how we choose to be ruled by them, or ultimately choose to grow to rule over ourselves.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

SECRET CEREMONY 1968

Back before the days of celebrity tweets, 'round-the-clock entertainment networks, and broadcast news programs that deem it essential we know what stage of rehab the celebrity-of-the-month is in before enlightening us on the state of the economy; film fans had to get their Hollywood fix from movie magazines. And of the many periodicals available in 1968: Modern Screen, Photoplay, Movie Mirror, and Silver Screen, to name a few—it was difficult to find one that didn't feature either Elizabeth Taylor or Mia Farrow on its cover. The personal and professional lives of both actresses were hot topics that year, reflecting, conversely, a career on the ascendance (Rosemary’s Baby made Hollywood flower-child, Mia Farrow, into a star at the exact moment her controversial and highly-visible marriage to Frank Sinatra imploded), and a career in decline (after eight films together, the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton magic had begun to pall in the wake of a string of boxoffice flops).

When production began on Secret Ceremony in March of 1968, Rosemary's Baby had yet to be released. With Farrow having only her Peyton Place TV fame and a forgettable role in A Dandy in Aspic (1968) to show for herself, Elizabeth Taylor was the main draw and attraction. Secret Ceremony would reunite Taylor with Joseph Losey, the director of her most recent film...the yet-to-be-released but much anticipated Taylor/Burton opus Boom!; a big-budget adaptation of the little-known Tennessee Williams play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. 

Jump ahead six months and the stardom tables had dramatically turned: Boom! proved to be the bomb its title augured, while Rosemary's Baby, director Roman Polanski’s American film debut, had become a blockbuster hit and launched Mia Farrow as a star of tomorrow.

Advance publicity for Secret Ceremony made extensive use of suggestive (and, in director Losey's opinion, misleading) images of Taylor & Farrow cavorting and bathing together, prompting superficial but boxoffice-baiting comparison to the forthcoming release of the lesbian-themed, The Killing of Sister George 

Overnight, the two queens of the Hollywood tabloid press had become two above-the-title movie stars appearing in the same film. Suddenly, Secret Ceremony, the eccentric, difficult-to-market arthouse vehicle adapted from an obscure short story by Argentinian author Marco Denevi, was a hot property with two very popular stars heading the cast. Posters for the film subsequently beefed up Mia Farrow’s participation, unsubtly alluding to her new-found success wherever it could (“More haunted than in Rosemary’s Baby!” read the ad copy).

I was just 11 years old when Secret Ceremony came out. And still flush with excitement from being caught up in the early throes of a lifetime fascination with Rosemary's Baby, a film I’d seen just a few months earlier. Naturally, I was fairly chomping at the bit at the prospect of seeing Mia Farrow in what looked to be another descent into horror, so, being secure in the belief that the film’s “Intended for Mature Audiences” rating accommodated know-it-all 11½-year-olds, I saw Secret Ceremony the week it opened.

Death & Rebirth
A graveside encounter where the sorrow and guilt of a childless mother (Taylor) conjoin with the forlorn loneliness of a motherless child (Farrow).

As it turns out, the combined marquee value of Taylor and Farrow proved no match for how taken aback '60s audiences were at seeing these two movie magazine divas in a sordid tale involving, as one critic cataloged, "...psychosis, incest, lesbianism, murder, suicide, obscenities...."  Secret Ceremony in spite of its cast, was lambasted by critics and flopped at the boxoffice.
I can't say that I was quite prepared for how "out there" Secret Ceremony was either, but—as should come as no surprise to anyone with a preteen in the house—there are few things more precocious (read: pretentious) than an 11-year-old film buff. I saw Secret Ceremony several times in the fall of 1968, and, enjoying it a great deal, convinced myself (if, perhaps, no one else) that I both understood it and had a solid grasp what I was watching. Not so much.

"What do you know about drowning?"
"Ducks don't drown."

When, in later years I revisited the film as an adult, I was surprised to find myself confronted with a movie significantly altered with age. Somehow in the intervening years, Secret Ceremony, a movie I had once thought I'd only liked, had morphed into a film I loved!

An offbeat oddity of a movie that’s as likely to impress some viewers as absurdist camp as readily as others are apt to view it as a deeply disturbing psychological exercise in magic realism; Secret Ceremony is full of motifs and themes that strike me as unimaginably obscure and inaccessible without benefit of a few years’ worth of life experience. In other words, there is no way in hell that my 11-year-old self understood this movie.

Elizabeth Taylor as Leonora Grabowski (I kid you not)

Mia Farrow as Cenci (pronounced Chen-Chee) Englehard

Robert Mitchum as Alfred

While visiting the grave of her ten-year-old daughter who drowned five years prior due to some real or imagined “neglect” on her part, Leonora (Taylor), a London prostitute, finds herself being followed by a strange, child/woman (Farrow) who insists that Leonora is her mother. That the mostly silent girl, named Cenci, recalls to Leonora her own dark-haired, hungry-eyed daughter, she allows herself to be taken to the girl's home—a huge, opulent mansion where Cenci resides in solitude—and learns that she herself bears an uncanny resemblance to Cenci’s mother, a woman whose illness and recent death the obviously unbalanced Cenci has failed to accept.

Family Resemblance
Cenci and her late mother, Margaret

Out of delusion, shared loss, mutual need, and subtle self-interest, an unspoken agreement is seized upon; each allows the other to use them as an instrument of atonement for unforgiven past familial transgressions. Leonora blames herself for her daughter's death, Cenci feels guilt for attempting to gain sexual superiority over her mother with Alfred, her stepfather. These feelings are agonizing demons of guilt and regret that can only be exorcized by engaging in cryptic, ritualized ceremonies of reenactment and transference.

What makes Secret Ceremony a film that feels richer and more textured with each viewing is the fact that, in this tenuous psychological merging of damaged souls (which, for all its artifice and deceit, comes from a deeply sincere desire for intimacy), it is not made readily apparent which parties are consciously engaging in delusional role-playing and which are merely incapable of determining reality from fantasy. That “reality” here is presented as a flexible, circular extension of perception (What roles do we all play? Is there a difference between identity and self-perception? What responsibility does one person have to another?), is what makes Secret Ceremony —a not very well-regarded film by critics and audiences alike—one of my absolute favorites.

Observing the portrait of Cenci and her mother, Leonora reacts to the dual likeness to herself and her deceased daughter. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Secret Ceremony is a rarity amongst my list of favorite films inasmuch as it’s a movie I enjoy and admire a great deal, yet I don’t know of a single soul to whom I could recommend it in good conscience. The film is just that weird.

For me, it has Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow giving fascinating, sharper-than-appearances-belie performances to recommend it (they stay true to their dysfunctional characters even at the risk of losing the audience), and the always-intriguing Joseph Losey, whose marvelous films, The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between reveal the artist’s deft hand at dramatizing offbeat psychological complexities. 

But chiefly, Secret Ceremony appeals to me because it addresses themes I find myself drawn to in film after film. Themes for which I so obviously harbor some kind of aesthetic predisposition, their mere inclusion in a movie’s narrative being enough to blind me to that film’s flaws. 

Secret Ceremonies
As a prelude to their ritualized games of incestuous role-playing, Albert, Cenci's lecherous stepfather, in a mock ceremonial gesture, places a wedding ring on her finger. All of the characters in Secret Ceremony engage in formalized patterns of behavior designed to avoid self-confrontation and purge guilt.

From even a cursory glance at the list of films I've written about on this blog, it’s obvious that I harbor a particular fondness for movies about psychological dysfunction and personality displacement (I don’t even want to think what that means). 3 Women, Images, Dead Ringers, The Maids, That Cold Day in the Park, Vertigo, and Black Swan, are all favorites having something to do with the shifting nature of identity and personality. Each is a melodrama or psychological thriller in which an individual or individuals (usually women) are at the center of a story which uses metaphor and allegory to explore themes of duality, role-playing, identity-theft, loss, longing, insanity, guilt, redemption, and, most significantly for me, the basic human need to connect.

When I saw Secret Ceremony as a preteen, its title struck me as nonsensical. Viewing it now, I discover that one of the things I most appreciate is how  Losey establishes from the outset a recurring motif of ceremony and religious ritual (frequently in solitude or secret, like a confession) that serves to both underscore and emphasize the film’s primary theme: the pain of loss and the passing of evil.

Leonora’s act of immediately removing her identity-concealing blond wig and washing her face after a john leaves her apartment is like a baptism ceremony designed to cleanse and wash away the “sin” of her actions.

As if enacting a passion play, Cenci engages in elaborate, incestuous, rape fantasies that cast her as a victim and absolve her of having to face her own sexual precocity or her repressed feelings of hostility and competitiveness toward her late mother.

Religious imagery and iconography abound. Prayers recited to protect the fearful from harm; lullabies sung to quiet restless souls; and throughout, scenes take place in and around churches and cemeteries, heightened by the death/rebirth symbolism of funerals and baptisms.

PERFORMANCES

Indicative of Secret Ceremony’s all-encompassing strangeness is the fact that, even as I write (in all seriousness) about what a provocative and arresting film I consider it to be, I’m also fully aware and understand why for some it has become something of a camp classic of bad cinema (the scene where Taylor wolfs down an enormous English breakfast and shows her appreciation with a huge, unladylike belch is an example).

But for me, Secret Ceremony is an example of the kind of risky, baroque style of filmmaking that largely died out in the '70s (Ken Russell was a master). A kind that takes so many chances and goes so far out on a limb that it risks courting giggles. Daring to look foolish can sometimes be a film's most appealing quality.

In this scene, Elizabeth Taylor's fine performance is undermined by unflattering costuming that is either character-based (Leonora is coarse and unsophisticated) or just plain ugly '60s fashion. 

Elizabeth Taylor long ago proved to be a natural for the brand of purple, overstated acting a film like this calls for, and Mia Farrow once again shows that there’s not an actress alive better suited to hitting all the right notes in a role requiring woman-child/sane-unstable ambiguity.

Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown are outstanding as the light-fingered, meddlesome aunts

As Alfred, personal fave Robert Mitchum rallies around his patented brand of complaisant sexual menace (if not a very sure accent. What is it supposed to be British? Scottish?) to ratchet up the psychodramatic stakes by going head to head (and psychosis to psychosis) with Taylor in a combustible test of wills.

Leonora, really getting into the whole playacting thing

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Even as a kid I was blown away by the gorgeous mansion occupied in solitary madness by Mia Farrow's character. With its ornate furnishings; eclectic, Moroccan and art nouveau design; and those mesmerizing blue and green ceramic tiles that line the walls and hallways like some Dali-esque mental institution of the mind...this house is as much a participant in Secret Ceremony's drama as The Dakota was in Rosemary's Baby.

The mansion used in the film is Debenham House, located in the Holland Park district of London. Built around 1896, architect Halsey Ricardo is one of perhaps several who worked on its design. Secret Ceremony production designer Richard MacDonald is credited with refurbishing the house and designing studio sets (the main bedroom, for instance) to blend with the original style.

Ken Russell made use of the mansion in his 1974 film Mahler

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

There’s no getting past the fact that Secret Ceremony is a strange film not suited to everyone’s taste. But another word for strange is interesting, and on that score, I cast my vote for directors who take chances over those who play it safe.

On the commentary track for the 1970 British cult film Goodbye Gemini (a remarkably bizarre film that could go toe-to-toe with Secret Ceremony for weirdness), producer Peter Snell speaks of a time when movies were made because someone found a story to be interesting, paying only marginal heed to things like what market the film should target and how well it would play outside of big cities. While this was probably a terrible way to run the “business” side of the movie business, quite a lot of worthwhile films were made. Not necessarily good ones, but at least they were films that sparked debate, discussion, and thought.

It's time to speak of unspoken things...

Secret Ceremony has Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum giving two of their better late-career performances (Taylor, in particular, is quite moving), and early-career Mia Farrow giving what amounts to her last cogent performance before her Woody Allen years (although I’m partial to 1977’s The Haunting of Julia), so, therefore, I think it's worth at least a look if you’re unfamiliar with it.

But remember, I’m not exactly recommending it. I’m just sort of dropping a hint.

Dear God, by whose mercy
I am shielded for a few hours
Let no one snatch me from this heaven

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER 1970

“There is so much talk now about the art of film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art.”

Pauline Kael

One of the things I’ve always loved about the late Pauline Kael, film critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, was that, as intellectual and committed to the arts as she was, she was not a movie snob. She was one of the few film critics to understand how trash films and pop entertainment can hold as much appeal and be every bit as satisfying and uplifting as great art. 

In her time, she continually repudiated the efforts of critics who sought to promote a narrow, solely academic, definition of cinema. A definition shrouded in high-mindedness, “good taste,” and a self-seriousness blind to film’s more accessible, subjectively emotional appeal.  Kael seemed to be on a crusade to stop moviegoers from feeling guilty for enjoying movies as pop culture pleasures, encouraging them to instead relate to film's immediacy, passion, and ability to get under our skin. In short, to learn to connect to cinema as the “lively art” it is.  

But this didn't mean that there was no room for discernment and or critical judgment. Kael drew the line at lazy, cynical, boxoffice-geared product which pandered to the lowest common denominator and insulted the intelligence of the audience. For a movie to be worthwhile, it had to have imagination, vitality, ideas, and something elemental in its plot capable of striking a chord with the soul’s need to find beauty, joy, heroism, or myth. If a film can convey to an individual even a shred of what that person holds to be beautiful about the world, it doesn't matter if it’s The Cool Ones or Fanny & Alexander.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, I bring this all up as a way of ushering in this essay about Vincente Minnelli's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever; a grievously imperfect film that I nevertheless find to be perfectly...pun intended...hypnotic.

Barbra Streisand as Daisy Gamble / Melinda Winifred Wayne Moorpark Tentrees, nee Wainwhistle

Yves Montand as Dr. Marc Chabot

Warren Pratt

Jack Nicholson as Tad Pringle

Bob Newhart as Dr. Mason Hume

John Richardson as Robert Tentrees

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is based on the moderate success/probable flop 1965 musical by Burton Lane/Alan Jay Lerner which starred the incandescent Barbara Harris and ran for 280 performances on Broadway. It’s a breezy romantic comedy with a glorious score and a charmingly original, if problematic, plot centering on ESP and reincarnation. It’s also the film that contains my all-time favorite Barbra Streisand musical comedy performance.

Simplified, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever relates the story of Daisy Gamble (Streisand), a nervousy introvert who seeks the services of psychiatrist/hypnotherapist Dr. Chabot (Montand) to help her to quit smoking. Daisy is a shrinking violet (hee-hee), a colorless wallflower (ditto, hee-hee...flowers are a major motif in the film) so cowed by her button-down fiancé, Warren (Blyden) that she tries to suppress the fact, both to herself and others, that she is actually gifted with ESP and, among her many talents, can make flowers grow simply by talking to them. 

"Hurry! It's Lovely Up Here"
If any voice could coax flowers out of their beds in the morning, it's Streisand's 

Under hypnosis, Daisy reveals herself to be the reincarnation of a 19th-century British clairvoyant named Melinda Tentrees who was executed for treason. Melinda is everything that Daisy is not: alluring, self-assured, and unreservedly sensual. For Dr. Chabot, fascination with Daisy’s case soon turns into infatuation with the elusive Melinda, while Daisy, misreading the doctor’s attentions, starts falling for Chabot.

That's quite a lot going on, what with showy fantasy flashbacks to the sumptuous Regency period to sort out the whys and wherefores of Melinda's untimely death; at least two, possibly three, romantic triangles (a hexagon, I suppose: Chabot/Daisy/Melinda & Warren/Daisy/Tad); a college scandal; plus time out to squeeze in several musical numbers. In fact, there's so much going on, several aspects of the film feel as though they are shunted to the sidelines or neglected outright.
The obviously truncated Jack Nicholson subplot goes absolutely nowhere, Daisy's own relationship with Warren feels like a series of blackout skits,  and I would have loved to have seen more of Leon Aames, the father from Minnelli's flawless Meet Me in St. Louis. Meanwhile, too much screen time is allocated to a wholly expository character like Chabot's colleague, Dr. Fuller (Simon Oakland), who exists solely to provide Montand's character an opportunity to engage in a windy reincarnation debate.

It's not unusual for women to develop crushes on older men, but the nearly 20-year age difference between Streisand and Montage did nothing to help the pair's already staggering lack of chemistry 

The overall result is a charming musical that is nevertheless strangely choppy and uneven in tone. The film is, at turns, out and out funny, whimsical, stylish, lyrical, and sometimes breathtaking; but it frequently feels like we're watching the combined efforts of artists assigned to do their work in isolation - without an awareness of what others are doing. Structurally, the film is designed to contrast the past and present, but this duality transfers somewhat schizophrenically in the combined efforts of the set designers, costumers, and especially the actors. Instead of creating the impression that time is cyclical and that the past and present are spiritually interlinked; On a Clear Day You Can See Forever frequently just feels like two separate films vying for screen time. A result, no doubt, of the movie being the victim of a great deal of editing. (Not the kind of fine-tuning editing necessary to sharpen a film, but the kind of butchering needed to cut a proposed 3-hour roadshow musical down to a little over 2-hours.)

On the rare occasions Minnelli ventures out of the studio, good use is made of the film's New York locations. Here, Yves Montand stands atop the Pan Am Building imploring Daisy to "Come Back to Me"
(or, as transposed by critic Rex Reed per Montand's French accent, "Cum Buck Dooo Meee!")

As it turns out, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever did indeed undergo a prodigious amount of cutting before release. Conceived as a roadshow* attraction, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever bears the brunt of the many songs, scenes, and subplots excised in the interest of whittling the film down to a marketable running time. But this doesn't fully explain On a Clear Day You Can See Forever saddling itself with a leading man so thuddingly dull that the film loses all romantic longing. Nor does it account for production values which would have looked dated in 1965; the curious choice of not having Streisand (a great comedienne) interact with any of the comic supporting actors (that's left to Montand, who sucks the laughs out of every scene); or the head-scratchingly weird decision to remove all of the score's liveliest and peppiest numbers (and this movie could use all the pep it can get) leaving only the melodic ballads.

*Roadshow: A popular distribution method for “event” films in the 60s, roadshow films were higher priced, reserved-seat screenings with overtures, intermissions, and exit music. These films were habitually 2 ½ to 4 hours long. They gradually fell out of favor in the late 70s.

The rooftop set and cast assembled for the Wait Till We're Sixty-Five production number that was filmed (and showed up on promotional stills) but cut out of the completed film

The film's score (among my favorites) is lushly romantic, but the film itself (a protracted, metaphysical cockblock) has been cast and directed in such a fashion as to render all potential romantic couplings undesirable. Personally, I didn't want Daisy to end up with ANY of her suitors.

Dr.Chabot hypnotizes Daisy through telepathy

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever was only the second Barbra Streisand film I’d ever seen (the first being What’s Up, Doc?), and one I somehow hadn’t even heard of until 1975 when it was booked as the bottom half of a double-bill at the San Francisco movie theater where I worked as an usher. Because of my job, I was initially only able to see bits and pieces of the film, but the first thing that struck me was how beautifully it was shot. The ultra-modern college campus scenes were an overlit bust, but the flashback sequences in England and stylized artificiality of Daisy's rooftop bore Minnelli’s trademark stamp of picturesque opulence. 

The Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England features in one of the film's many stunning flashback sequences.

The other thing that grabbed me was the music. Many of the songs from the original score had been excised and a few new ones written just for the film. But of those that remained, who knew that so many of my parents’ favorite standards - the virtual entirety of the Eydie Gorme, Robert Goulet,  Jack Jones songbook - came from this show? I was so taken with the brief bits I was able to glimpse of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever that I began to make up excuses to leave my lobby post: check for smokers, feet on the backs of chairs… anything, just so I could get another Streisand fix.

And what a fix it was. Lit to look like a goddess and costumed with decolletage for days, Streisand was a heady dose of '70s-style movie star glamour. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever was the movie that made me fall in love with Streisand (alas, a short-lived romance that ended with 1979s The Main Event) and my personal siren song was her gangbusters delivery of the title tune. I made a point of always being the usher stationed near the doors at the end of each screening just so I could stand inside, flashlight in hand, mouth agape, and wait for her to rattle the crystal on the chandeliers with that final note. Wow! Talk about your goosebumps moment. 

Not sure if this was a wig or her real hair, but this is the look I always associate with Streisand

Although On a Clear Day You Can See Forever played at my theater (San Francisco's Alhambra Theater) for two weeks, I never got to see the film in its entirety until I saw it at a Los Angeles revival theater many years later. After finally getting the chance to see the entire film from start to finish, I was a little taken aback to discover that I actually enjoyed On a Clear Day You Can See Forever more when I was seeing it a la carte. Seeing it in sections, I was dazzled by the visual style and Streisand's star quality. Seen as a whole, I was taken aback, given that the story is kind of magical and sweet-natured, that it somehow sidestepped giving us any other character besides Daisy to root for or like.

It's professional, well-done, and definitely enjoyable, but for a musical about mysticism, it's sorely lacking in that intangible kind of charm Minnelli pulled off so beautifully in Meet Me in St. Louis. Perhaps it's impossible to find an actress charismatic enough to be a musical lead, while at the same time, believably bland enough to make a convincing Daisy Gamble; but as cast, Streisand's Daisy doesn't really make sense. She's supposed to be a drip, but she's the most stylish, funny, and interesting person in the entire film. She's the only one you want to spend any time with. When Dr. Chabot expresses exasperation with her quirks, HE'S the one who comes off as unappealing, not Daisy.
Given all that was going on at the time, it's hard to feel that the legendarily meticulous Vincente Minnelli had his heart in this one. He was 63, his third marriage was breaking up, and his first and most famous wife, Judy Garland, had recently died.

"What Did I Have That I Don't Have?"
Streisand's vocal performance and acting on this song is peerless. I've seen it dozens of times and it always gives me waterworks.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Sure, the two leads have zilch in the chemistry department, and Barbra Streisand pretty much single-handedly gives the film all it has in the way of humor and pep. Yes, the film vacillates between feeling like there is too much plot and then not enough (and exactly whose idea of a counter-culture dropout is clean-cut Jack Nicholson with his distractingly mature hairline?). Certainly, it's a romantic comedy that strenuously works to keep the lovers apart. It's a movie that banks almost entirely on the appeal of its star. A film that piles on plot complications and eye-popping visuals so we don't really notice that the gorgeous musical score is far more emotive than the story at hand.

And yet...On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is still a film I take endless delight in. The whimsical plot makes me smile (even though it's a tad cumbersome) and I really like Streisand's performance here. And so what if my enjoyment is necessitated by my needing to fast-forward through most of Montand's scenes and overlook the fact that whenever Streisand is off the screen, the film just kind of lies there, inert? It doesn't matter because every few minutes or so, there is the sublime distraction of costumes, sets, and the bliss of getting to hear Streisand sing.

The visual pleasures of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever are considerable

Lane & Lerner's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is generally considered to be a wonderful score in search of a better book. The musical is rarely revived. In 2000, Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth headlined a concert version of the show ("Look ma! No book!"), and in 2011, Harry Connick, Jr. starred in an expensively-mounted Broadway revival that used several of the songs from the film and provocatively reworked the plot so that the character of Daisy Gamble was now a gay male assistant-florist named David Gamble who discovers he's reincarnated from a brassy female big-band singer. (A cute idea, but when his character asks the musical question, "What Did I Have That I Don't Have?" it seems to me an audience would have to exercise considerable self-control not to want to call out to the stage, "A vagina!"). The show lasted for little more than a month.

At left: the film's original "pot head" theatrical release poster. At right: Things are getting desperate. In an effort to draw a younger audience, newspaper ads featured an out-of-character, hippie-fied Barbra. Pic used is a Richard Avedon portrait from a photo shoot for Streisand's 1969 album, "What About Today?"

PERFORMANCES

If in Funny Girl Barbra Streisand seemed raw, and in Hello Dolly, lost; then in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever she seems more in charge of her talents than ever. And she's remarkably good. When she's helped by the script (as in the crackling first hypnosis scene) she's at the top of her game. At last given a chance to play sexy, in the flashback sequences, she practically wills you to find her beautiful.

The Great Profile

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Vincente Minnelli was the most painterly of directors, and the visuals he brings to On a Clear Day You Can See Forever are no exception. A feast for the eyes, the vivid period production design and more stylized contemporary sets of John DeCuir elegantly complement the splendid costumes by Sir Cecil Beaton (period costumes) and Arnold Scaasi (contemporary costumes). 

"I'll have what she's having."

Daisy's Emancipation / Melinda's Emancipation
 Daisy's recognition and acceptance of her reincarnated self is dramatized in the echoing of her costuming

The ultra-modern Arnold Scaasi designs used in the contemporary scenes of  On a Clear Day You Can See Forever provide a striking contrast to Sir Cecil Beaton's lavish 19th-century wardrobe. This simple little crowd-pleaser was worn by Streisand in a scene deleted from the film. And for those too young to have been around in 1970- no one ever actually wore an outfit like this in public...no matter what drugs they were taking.

For fans of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever who want to get depressed, here are links to sites offering more info on all that was cut from the film.  Just click on the highlighted sentences.

Behind-the-scenes info on the making of "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever"

YouTube audio (with stills) of the deleted Barbra Streisand / Larry Blyden duet: "Wait 'till We're Sixty-Five"

YouTube audio (with stills) of Jack Nicholson singing "Who Is There Among Us Who Knows?"

If they can restore 1973s Lost Horizon, why not On a Clear Day You Can See Forever?

Fans (or obsessives) of  '60/'70's pop culture will note that Daisy Gamble's fabulously floral bedclothes and wallpaper first made their appearance on the 1966 TV sitcom, Family Affair, in the bedroom shared by Buffy and Cissy.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I absolutely love the title song and Streisand's performance of it is stellar. She sings it so beautifully... it still can give me chills. Just crazy about the way Streisand begins the song like it's an idea that gradually starts to take root, then grows, then bursts with an assurance and awareness. If it was Streisand's intention to magnify the "flower" theme of the film and convey a sense of the character of Daisy "growing" into herself, she does a tremendous job of it. It's a lesson on how to put over a song so it's more than just pretty vocalizing...it's a first-class acting performance. Barbra Streisand's rendition of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is for me what I can imagine Somewhere Over the Rainbow is for Garland fans.

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2012