Showing posts with label Rip Torn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rip Torn. Show all posts

Monday, January 24, 2022

PAYDAY 1973

"We only pass this way once, might as well pass by in a Cadillac."

Two years before Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) gave us an epic vision of America viewed through the “politics is show-biz” prism of the Country & Western music scene, Canadian television producer/director Daryl Duke (The Silent Partner -1978) and novelist Don Carpenter (Hard Rain Falling - 1966) made their collective feature film debuts with the audacious indie character-study Payday
Chronicling 36 full-throttle hours in the life of hell-raising, second-tier country music star Maury Dann (Rip Torn), the focus of Payday’s lens may be narrower than Nashville’s, but in its depiction of the squalid glamour of an entertainer’s life on the road—fast money, fast food, & fast-living—it provides a picture of '70s American culture that is no less funny, raw, or keenly-observed. And thanks to Torn's career-best performance, it feels considerably more authentic. For this road-movie odyssey (described by one critic as “A study in amorality without a moral”) Duke and Carpenter have devised a wittily apt visual metaphor for Nixon-era America: an all-white Cadillac speeding heedlessly along a highway at 95-miles-an-hour on a path predetermined to be the road to success, but is just as likely a collision course headed straightaway to a dead-end.
Rip Torn as Maury Dann
Ahna Capri as Mayleen Travis
Michael C. Gwynne as Clarence McGinty
Elayne Heilveil as Rosamund McClintock
Cliff Emmich as Chicago

Imagine a Nashville sequel that abandons the ensemble format and instead focuses entirely on Keith Carradine’s callous, womanizing balladeer, Tom Frank—his future, burn-out years—and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what Payday is like. 
Maury Dann is a 35-year-old country-western singer/songwriter who’s achieved an appreciable degree of success in his career (his face recognizable enough to get him out of speeding tickets, his name drawing sizable crowds and an unbroken chain of disposable, star-struck groupies to his roadhouse gigs); but he’s nonetheless driven just a little bit crazy by his so-close-you-can-almost-touch-it proximity to the " big time." 

A growly crooner of shrewdly sincere songs of homespun virtues, the oilily charismatic Dann...a toxic combination of hard-working and hard-living…tours the one-night-stand honkytonk circuit of the Deep South in his chauffeured, cowhide-interior Cadillac, girlfriend-of-the-moment in tow, subsisting on pot, pills, booze, junk food, and sex. More savvy businessman than impassioned artist, Dann is not without talent, but ambition, greed, and love of the perks of privilege have him living for the payday. And it’s not difficult to understand why. 
Maury Dann & the Dandies
Cocooned from both truth and consequences by a small but selflessly loyal entourage of enablers, Dann’s fame and wealth afford him both the means and wherewithal to support his ex-wife and three children (whose ages he can’t keep straight) while providing his pill-popping mother with ample supplies of amphetamines. All with plenty left over for payola payouts to influential disc jockeys and buying himself out of the numerous scrapes his hair-trigger temper and violent mood swings get him into.

Payday kicks off with Dann already three months into his breakneck tour, in Alabama and headed for Nashville where the success he’s desperate for beckons in the form of a vaguely promised appearance on Johnny Cash’s TV special (Dann bitterly hints that he and Cash have been kicking around for roughly the same amount of time). The goal is clear, but the challenge faced is whether or not Maury Dann can steer clear of self-destruct mode long enough to make it.
Were someone to ask me what I like so much about ‘70s films and what I think distinguishes them from motion pictures made in any other era, I would point to Payday as a film representative of precisely those inarticulable qualities I love so much, gravitate to, and often only find in the movies made during the New Hollywood years. What I mean is that I like when a movie feels as though it were made because the filmmaker had a story they wanted to tell. Not because of market research, the desire to make a mint, or as a result of lawyers fashioning a "package" out of the merging of mutual advantage contracts.
Payday suffered at the box-office because it didn't fit into any particular genre and its distributor couldn't find a way to market it.   
Henry O. Arnold as Ted Blankenship
A former waiter and longtime Maury Dann fan who aspires to be a songwriter

With so many of today's movies being greenlit only after their market viability has been analyzed to the nth degree, my perhaps rose-colored nostalgia for the '70s stems from the number of unique, personal, difficult-to-categorize, and downright weird movies that came out of that era.  
That being said, how is it then that I only got around to seeing Payday for the first time just a couple of years ago?
I remember when Payday came out in 1973. It was one of a spate of intimate, personal films released during the Vietnam/Nixon years that sought to challenge Hollywood’s outsized and outdated “mythic hero” tradition by training its lens on the small, often ineffectual lives of ordinary people (Kansas City Bomber, The Last American Hero, Play it As it Lays, Electra Glide in Blue). 
Jeff Morris as Bob Talley, a member of Maury Dann's band
Actor Jeff Morris would play another country boy named Bob in 1980s The Blues Brothers
- proprietor of the roadhouse Bob's Country Bunker

Payday--whose newspaper ads targeted the arthouse crowd in urban markets while (misleadingly) pitching itself as a Burt Reynolds-style redneck romp in rural districts--received laudatory reviews on its release, was selected to be shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and at the end of the year, appeared on many critics' Ten Best lists. Yet despite bearing all the potential earmarks of becoming a sleeper hit or "critic's darling" underdog during awards season, nominations were not forthcoming, audiences stayed away in droves, and Payday wound up disappearing from theaters faster than a knife fight in a phone booth. (Just keepin' in the spirit of things.)
Why didn’t I see it? Well for one, there were considerably bigger cinema fish for this teenage movie buff to fry in '73: The Exorcist, The Last of Sheila, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Way We Were, Lost Horizon. Second, not only did the idea of a movie set in the world of country music fail to grab me (it would take Nashville to kickstart my love of country music), but I didn’t know anything about its director, and the only person in the cast I’d ever heard of was Rip Torn. And what little I’d seen of him in supporting roles in Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) and You’re A Big Boy Now (1966) was impressive, but not enough to convince me that seeing Payday was a better weekend option than going to see The Poseidon Adventure for the fifth time. 
On the Road Again
Dann and his ever-busy road manager McGinty
Of course, after finally seeing Payday (three times, so far), I truly regret having missed out on the opportunity to see it on the big screen. And I wonder how seeing it would have impacted my experience of Nashville two years later. Payday impressed me with the way it manages to be so familiar (A Face in the Crowd, The Rose, I Saw The Light: The Story of Hank Williams), yet via its dimensional characterizations and insightful script, was capable of catching me totally off guard. Narratively, nothing went where I expected. I know my 15-year-old self would have been thoroughly enraptured by it all. I think Payday is one of the best films of 1973, and Rip Torn was robbed of a Best Actor Oscar nomination (especially when I think of Robert Redford's department store mannequin performance in The Sting clogging up the category that year).  
In one of the film's best scenes, real-life Tennessee disc jockey Earl Trigg portrays an unctuously coercive fictional radio DJ named Bob Dickey. Earl Trigg is a former child actor (billed as "Tookie" Trigg) who appeared in some 30 features and Our Gang comedies.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Out of a naïve-but-purposeful desire to be in a music star’s orbit, a central character in Payday allows herself to be swept up in the counterfeit glamour of Maury Dann’s chaos-addiction lifestyle, whisked away in his Cadillac headed for god-knows-where…without money, a change of clothes, or notice given to the 5 and Dime where her cashier services are anticipated the following day. 
Watching Payday for the first time felt a little like that.
Payday unfolds in a non-stop, barely-time-to-catch-your-breath style ideally suited to the subject matter. An intimate, almost documentary style that made me feel as though I had been invited to see a country singer perform (I’m crazy about Rip Torn’s voice! It’s not good, but it’s right) only to find myself the unwitting recipient of a front-row seat to the spectacle of a dishonorable man’s disintegration.
Maury Dann - Living for the Payday
McGinty - (referring to roadhouse owner) He wants a piece of the gate next time out.
Dann - People in hell want ice water, too.

Like its lead character, Payday hits the ground running and sweeps the viewer up in the garish allure (or morbid curiosity) of its authentically-rendered backstage view of life on the road. A world of grungy motel rooms with wood-paneled walls and chenille bedspreads that play host to after-hours poker parties, informal business meetings, impromptu jam sessions, and drunken sexual assaults cloaked in fame entitlement and groupie expectation. Rooms littered with beer cans, Jack Daniels bottles, cigar butts, Hardee’s cups, and fast-food wrappers. Capturing the isolated, on-the-move, “what town are we in?” feeling of being on tour, Payday depicts Dann’s life as an episodic string of personality-revealing vignettes. A kind of road odyssey of self-confrontation headed down the road toward the inevitable day of reckoning. 
MEETING IN THE LADIES' ROOM
Girlfriend #1 confronts potential girlfriend #2
Most movies set in the music industry are about performers who can’t handle success. What eats at Maury Dann is not having achieved the kind of success he thinks he deserves. Indeed, one senses that behind Dann’s manic restlessness, quick-trigger temper, and hell-raising antics, is a man terrified of standing still. As the late Daryl Duke states on the DVD commentary, if Dann ever stopped moving, he'd be forced to confront the fact that he's a failure. Certainly, a failure as a husband and a father and as a human being...but also in failing to achieve the stardom that's obviously so important to him. Realizing that it will forever be out of his reach, fading further into the distance with each passing year.
Just a liquored-up good ol' boy firing a gun out the window of a speeding car for fun
Like all malignant narcissists, Maury Dann goes through life challenging
 fate with the dare: What can't I get away with?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Though my love for dark-themed movies is clear and well-chronicled, I nevertheless understand that most people, when faced with a movie whose main character is a lout and a heel, ask why they would want to spend time in the celluloid company of someone they’d cross the street to avoid in real life. 
Eleanor Fell as Galen Dann
Maury's ex-wife and mother to Billy, Kitty, and Elmore (Rip Torn's real name)

But the anti-hero trend in ‘70s films was always less about liking or even relating to the character in question; it was about confronting the "hero" myths we've bought into and examining the lies we tell ourselves through our traditional screen idols. The purpose served by the heroes of mainstream films was to perpetuate myths of honor and valor that flattered the audience's image of themselves. Hollywood in the '70s continued to lean into metaphorically simple concepts of evil and heroism: villains wore black hats, good guys were white, heteronormative males in the John Wayne tradition.

But the '70s reality is the same as it is today...the real villains don't wear black hats. They look like the people we had been taught to put our trust in and/or look up to: the politicians, the powerful businessman, the police, the celebrity, the military, the clergy. The '70s anti-hero...a by-product of the betrayals of Vietnam and Watergate, sought to make us look at the dark side of American myth and the traditional hero--in this instance, the family-values country-western singer--and in doing so, look at the dark side of ourselves as a society and a country.
Striking a Deal with the Devil
If you're famous and rich in America, there's no moral bottom
 you can hit that cannot be forgiven, enabled, or covered up 

In Payday Maury Dann is America. Or rather, those hypocritical aspects of American culture that seem to produce, reward, and encourage the Maury Dann’s of the world while simultaneously lying to itself about the supposed value it places in simpler virtues.
In Dann's relentless pursuit of money, fame, and the privilege perks of same (aka power) are written the very tenets of America's success ethic. Does it matter that in the achievement of these things, Dann has become a cruel and remorseless monster? Not likely. For Dann has learned--like most politicians, religious "leaders," and pop-culture celebrities--that for a public that loves to be lied to, having the appearance of being principled and moral is far more important than actually being those things.
Two Sets of Laws / Two Americas
Maury signs an autograph for a starstruck cop and gets out of a ticket in the bargain. Payday features several scenes showing Dann always being able to use his fame and wealth to skirt the law and avoid the consequences of his actions

It strikes me as both purposeful and perfect that Payday is set in the world of country music. As a genre that has long aligned itself with (and exploited) the so-called Christian, blue-collar, America's heartland, family values myth, it serves as the perfect illustrative metaphor exposing how America's persistent lies to itself have become its truth. The ethics of country singers are no more resistant to the usual temptations and corruptions of wealth and fame. In fact, their tendency to cloak themselves in the flag, the Bible, and those ever-illusory, gun-totin' "family values," likely makes them more susceptible to the sins of duplicity and hypocrisy.
Sex, Drugs, Country & Western

PERFORMANCES
Rip Torn’s raw, lived-in performance is the electrifying core of Payday. Bringing a homegrown gravitas to the character, Torn’s is the type of bravura screen performance given by an actor finally granted a role on scale with his talents (Don Carpenter wrote it with Torn in mind, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role). He's positively riveting. And though it sounds like just the kind of quote-ready critical assessment that movie publicity departments pray for, I genuinely think Rip Torn's performance in Payday is one of the best American screen performances of the '70s. 
Adding considerable support is Ahna Capri as Dann’s vigilant girlfriend, whose continued, hawk-eyed efforts to guard her interests are both amusing and reminded me of a pragmatic, more resilient version of Ann-Margret’s Bobbie Templeton in Carnal Knowledge. Very strong performances are also given by Elayne Heilveil, Michael Gwynne, and Cliff Emmich.

Payday is the day you get what your earn, what you work for, what you deserve. If you’re lucky, what you have coming to you on payday is what you expect. For the morally and spiritually bankrupt characters in Daryl Duke and Don Carpenter's brilliant first film, Payday might just be Judgement Day.

BONUS MATERIAL
Four of the original country songs in Payday’s soundtrack were written by the late, great Shel Silverstein: playwright, poet, cartoonist, author, and Grammy Award-winning songwriter (1969 Best Country Song “A Boy Named Sue”). Payday showcases the Silverstein compositions - “Slowly Fading Circle”, “Baby, Here’s a Dime”, and “Lovin’ You More” (whose chorus “I’m lovin’ you more but you’re enjoying it less” is [for those too young to take notice] a comic takeoff on the 1960’s Camel cigarettes slogan “Are you smoking more but enjoying it less?”). 
My personal favorite is “She's Only a Country Girl,” a catchy, drawling, earworm of a song that got stuck in my head for days after seeing this. It sounds like a song Henry Gibson's Haven Hamilton might have sung in Nashville
Payday features three more songs by different composers: “Road to Nashville”, “Flatland”, and “Payday” - leaving me wishing the film had been met with a little more success and produced a soundtrack album.

Elayne Heilveil, who portrays the naive-as-a-fox Rosamund McClintock in Payday, was the original Nancy Maitland (later played by Meredith Baxter) in the 1976 miniseries Family. That's her on the far right of this cast portrait that's so oddly staged that I suspect it's a composite. 


Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2022

Saturday, September 8, 2012

COMA 1978

Like counting the rings of a tree, there will likely come a day when a person’s age can be calculated by the number of films released in that individual’s lifetime that have fallen prey to the dreaded remake. Of course, such calculations would be mathematically calibrated to allow for the increased percentage numbers afforded genre films (Carrie, The Shining, The Stepford Wives, Psycho, et.al,) obviously Hollywood’s favored source for idea-harvesting.
This iconic image of coma patients eerily suspended by wires was used extensively in the promotion of the 1978 film. Today what I find most shocking about this photo is how impossibly fit all the patients are. It's like they're harvesting the organs of the US Olympic Team.

Coma, one of my favorite '70s thrillers, has recently been given the TV miniseries treatment. And while I wish it luck (ever the bullheaded traditionalist, I didn’t watch it and don’t plan to), seriously…can any remake ever hope to replicate in any dramatically meaningful way, that transcendent feminist moment in American cinema when heroine Geneviève Bujold doffed her wedged espadrilles and pantyhose before crawling through the bowels of Boston Memorial Hospital in search of the cause of all those suspicious coma cases? After years of women in thrillers and horror films falling victim to their feminine finery (running in heels and twisting an ankle being the genre standard), this small act of practicality was such a revolutionary repudiation of a sexist genre cliché that on the opening weekend screening of Coma I attended back in February of 1978, the audience I saw it with actually broke into applause!
Genevieve Bujold as Dr. Susan Wheeler
Michael Douglas as Dr. Mark Bellows
Richard Widmark as Dr. Harris - Chief of Surgery
Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Emerson
Rip Torn as Dr. George
Lois Chiles as Nancy Greenly
Tom Selleck as Sean Murphy
Ed Harris as Pathology Resident #2 (film debut!)
The plot of Coma, like many a good thriller, is marvelously simple: at prestigious Boston Memorial Hospital a higher-than-normal percentage of routine surgery patients are ending up in irreversible comas. Resident surgeon Dr. Susan Wheeler (Bujold) grows suspicious after both her best friend and a recently admitted healthy male patient both slip into comas following routine surgeries. Yet no one else at the hospital seems to share her concern. What follows is a paranoid suspense thriller that plays on our basic fears of hospitals and our vulnerability in the face of the sometimes callously impersonal medical profession.

The post-Watergate years may have been depressing as hell, but all that resultant disillusionment and cynicism was a bonanza for the suspense thriller genre. The pervading sense of skepticism and uncertainty that was the cultural by-product of such a large-scale political betrayal fueled and found catharsis in a great many fascinating films of the '70s. We had thrillers about conspiracy theories  –  The Parallax View (1974); morally confused private eyes – Night Moves (1975); and personal privacy paranoia  – The Conversation (1974). Coma remains one of my personal favorites because it ratchets up the tension of the conspiracy theory thriller by combining it with the combative feminist-era sexual politics of The Stepford Wives.
Dr. Wheeler's run-ins with the hospital's patronizing male staff can be viewed as a larger commentary on society's vulnerability to patriarchal institutions which would assume to know what's better for us than we do ourselves 

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

The day-to-day condescension Geneviève Bujold’s Dr. Wheeler faces from her male co-workers takes on an increasingly ominous air when her growing anxiety and rational concern that something nefarious is afoot at Boston Memorial is met with “Don’t bother your pretty little head about it” disregard from her superiors. Especially the creepily paternal Chief of Surgery (Richard Widmark) who treats a serious professional discussion with Dr. Wheeler as if he's Andy Hardy's father asked to give a heart-to-heart.
It’s established early on in the scenes between Dr. Wheeler and her professionally ambitious boyfriend, Dr. Mark Bellows (Douglas) that she is hypersensitive to the sexism and lack of respect she's expected to just accept as part of the price of working in semi-hostile, all-male environment of professional medicine. The film makes a point of showing us scenes where the in-hospital workplace talk is full of men making casually demeaning comments to or about women. 
If Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives gave us a paranoid thriller born of male anxiety about feminism, Coma takes the female perspective and devises a thriller in which female alienation from a male-dominated world inspires self-reliance and resourcefulness.

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

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

Still, Bujold is terrific here, spunky and sharp with that great throaty voice of hers and those darkly intelligent, inquisitive eyes. She adds so much dimension to her role that she keeps character and motivation at the forefront, preventing Coma from becoming mired in its medical thriller plot. Unlike the kind of actress usually cast in roles like this (I call your attention to Lesley-Anne Downs’ implausible Egyptologist in Sphinx, another film based on a Robin Cook novel) Bujold is actually believable as a physician and is not required to scream every 15 minutes.
At the Ballet
Fans of A Chorus Line might recognize the short-haired brunette at the front of Bujold's embarrassingly cheesy dance exercise class as Kay Cole, the original Broadway production's "Maggie." By odd coincidence, Coma co-star Michael Douglas would go on to star in the woefully misguided 1985 film adaptation.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Unable to convince anyone of her suspicions, Dr. Wheeler's quest takes her to the architecturally foreboding Jefferson Institute. The scenes taking place at this futuristic chronic care facility (whose actual purpose I won't reveal here) are Coma's big set-pieces, and they really don't disappoint. A concrete and steel variation on the typical thriller haunted house, the Jefferson Institute scenes are notable not only for the poetic-nightmare images of roomfuls of bodies suspended in techno limbo, but also for the unforgettably bizarre performance of Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Emerson, the Institute's equivalent of a gargoyle at the gate. By Coma's midpoint, when the film's well-established atmosphere of tension is just about sunk by an interminable "romantic weekend" montage, Ms. Ashley appears and reboots the film back into high gear. Her introductory scene with Bujold is a classic that I remember had the audience laughing in a way that brought them more into the film. You want to know if she's a real person or a robot. As the unblinking and inscrutable head of the Institute, Ashley carves an indelible impression and is one of my favorite characters in the film.
The Jefferson Institute
Coma knows that in real life, a large, impersonal medical building
is far more terrifying than any Gothic castle.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
No matter how clever the plot, a suspense thriller has to have thrills. Coma mines the already fertile creep-out atmosphere of hospitals for all its worth. It does so by allowing us to witness (to great effect, I might say) the day-to-day casualness with which doctors, nurses, and anesthesiologists regard that which is unnervingly life-and-death to us patients. If there is a level at which Coma scores its biggest points as a thriller, it's in giving the audience the impression that hospitals regard patients as a mechanic would a car on a lift; a bunch of billable parts in need of fixing. 
"You'll be getting a bill from each of us in the mail."
And then, of course, Coma has plenty of the good, old-fashioned kind of thrills too.
Remakes get a bad rap, but for every totally pointless rehash of a classic (Straw Dogs) there's a film like 1978s marvelous Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a retread that's really a re-imagining. I'm not sure what the remake of Coma will seize upon as a justification for its existence (the feminist subtext - which to my way of thinking is more relevant than ever - might be perceived as being dated), but unless it devotes itself to correcting some of this film's flaws (a few loose narrative threads, that mysterious hired killer), I think I'll stick to this imperfect but ever-so-satisfying relic from a time when even genre films felt that it was also important to comment on the world we live in.


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

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


Copyright © Ken Anderson 2008 - 2012

Sunday, October 16, 2011

YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW 1966


Coming-of-age films have always been with us, but they really came into their own during the youth-obsessed '60s. The post-Baby Boom "youthquake" of the '60s, which impacted American culture in ways both social and economic, was the perfect breeding ground for films pertaining to social rebellion, sexual awakening, and the challenging of authority. As a genre, coming-of-age films were tailor-made for the New Hollywood. A Hollywood desperate to court the new-found economic clout of the young through "personal" films populated with anti-heroes and comprised of romanticized depictions of the struggles of the post-adolescent set (almost always male). Given that coming-of-age films have also always afforded ample opportunities for sex, drugs, and the baring of female flesh, it's not surprising that Hollywood's old-guard (usually rather reluctant to respond to change) proved so receptive to even the more way-out, avant-garde entries in the genre. After all, whether audiences be young or old, sex always sells.

Time has granted Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) the uncontested title of representative coming-of-age film for a generation, but my favorite entry in cinema’s “pain of growing up” sweepstakes is this delightfully offbeat comedy from a young Francis Ford Coppola (only twenty-seven at the time). You’re a Big Boy Now was Coppola's first film for a major studio as well as his master's thesis submission to the UCLA film school, and as such, displays an engagingly youthful lack of discipline and the novice filmmaker's fondness for camera trickery...two things that don't exactly qualify as liabilities in '60s films.
Elizabeth Hartman as Barbara Darling
Peter Kastner as Bernard Chanticleer
Geraldine Page as Mrs. Chanticleer
Julie Harris as Miss Thing
Rip Torn as Mr. Chanticleer
Karen Black as Amy Partlett
You’re a Big Boy Now is about the misadventures of Bernard (scornfully nicknamed “Big Boy” by his self-centered father), a woefully under-experienced 19-year-old who, at the insistence of his father and against the protests of his obsessively over-protective mother, goes off to live on his own in Manhattan. Bernard’s naiveté and propensity to lose himself in flights of fantasy consistently get him into trouble as he attempts to navigate life and love along the bumpy path to adult independence.

Given how male writers and filmmakers never seem to tire of wistful, semi-autobiographical tomes hearkening back to the days of their sexual awakening; there’s never been a shortage of these “rites of passage” films to choose from. Indeed, one could probably fill an airplane hangar with them. Inherently similar in tone, most suffer from a kind of willful masculine myopia and gender fear which finds endless charm in the sexual fumblings of doltish, socially awkward, physically unattractive, emotionally superficial young men who nonetheless feel they rate the designated "dream girl" figure. Being the wish-fulfillment fantasies they are, our callow hero usually does get the longed-for beauty, but it’s a certainty that before the end credits roll, said dream girl will reveal herself to be somehow undeserving of his noble affections (take THAT pretty girls who snubbed the director in high-school!).
Message  Received: Women Are Terrifying
You’re a Big Boy Now doesn’t deviate far from this well-trod narrative path, but Coppola invests the proceedings with such creative exuberance (every scene holds at least one element of surprise - whether visually, verbally, or in the goofily straight/comic performances he elicits from his game cast), that the film feels more like a surreal satire of the genre rather than a representative of the genuine article.
Tony Bill as the exotically named Raef del Grado, Bernard's more sexually-assured friend


WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Providing, as it does, a subjective view of the overwhelming and perilous adult world as it's perceived by the sheltered Bernard, there is much to enjoy in the film's many eccentric visual flourishes, absurdist characters, and anarchic editing style. With its blaring (and rather good) score of pop songs by The Lovin' Spoonful, You’re a Big Boy Now is a '60s film to its core, complete with an overarching air of reproach directed at middle-class repression and sexual guilt.
"Don't eat too much, don't stay out late, don't go to suspicious places or play cards, and stay away from girls! But most of all Bernard, try to be happy."
I'd always thought of Peter Kastner (right) as looking like a cross between Robert Morse & Michael J Pollard, but a friend nailed it when he said Peter reminded him of Ernie (Barry Livingston) from My Three Sons.
The late Peter Kastner starred in his own TV series in 1968, The Ugliest Girl in Town; about a man who poses as a female model and becomes a boyish fashion sensation, a la Twiggy

PERFORMANCES
The desirable, yet dangerous, female is as much a staple of the coming-of-age film as the virginal hero having a more sexually sophisticated best friend/adviser (in this instance, the appropriately unctuous Tony Bill). When it comes to scary women, You’re a Big Boy Now has probably the most disturbing, dick-withering example of that gynophobic archetype ever to come out of the free-love era: the man-hating, aspiring actress/go-go dancer, Barbara Darling.
The character of Barbara Darling in less capable hands would be just another bitch-goddess cliché, but someone had the inspired genius to cast against type, and the late Elizabeth Hartman manages to be downright chilling, yet terribly funny, in the role. What makes her performance here so amazing is that I saw You're a Big Boy Now only after I had already seen Hartman in A Patch of Blue (1965), The Group (1966), and The Beguiled (1971); all roles emphasizing the gentle, almost fragile vulnerability of this immensely likable actress. Though obviously talented (she was Academy Award® nominated and won the Golden Globe for A Patch of Blue), there is nothing about her performances in any of those films that would lead you to believe she could be so aggressively carnal and convincingly, psychotically, mercurial. In a transformation the likes of which I've rarely seen, the Elizabeth Hartman of her earlier films is nowhere to be seen in You're a Big Boy Now. She gives my favorite performance in the film.
Displaying a surprising range and a flair for comedy, the man-eater of You're a Big Boy Now is light years away from the Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue.

















THE STUFF OF FANTASY
You're a Big Boy Now has some great shots of Manhattan and New York's seedy Times Square area that predate the gritty images in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971). It's fun seeing theater marquees advertising films like Born Free and The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
What's fun about watching the early works of accomplished directors is trying to catch a glimpse of some kind of nascent artistry or budding style that would later emerge as a defining trait or characteristic of their work. To look at the early films of Roman Polanski or Woody Allen is to see the beginnings of a style and preoccupation with themes they continue to bring to their work even to this day.
Watching You're a Big Boy Now, I was left with two thoughts: 1) with this film's pre-MTV kinetic rhythms, how is it that all of Coppola's subsequent musical outings (Finian's Rainbow, One From the Heart, and The Cotton Club) all turned out so flat?; 2) Coppola shows such a flair for comedy here, I'm surprised he hasn't had many more comedies on his resume.
Although You're a Big Boy Now is not a particularly well-known or talked about title today, Elizabeth Hartman and Geraldine Page were both nominated for Golden Globes for their performances, with Miss Page (married to co-star Rip Torn at the time) garnering an Oscar® nod as well. Best of all (for me, anyway, because I'm such a big fan) the film gave Karen Black her film debut. Pretty classy pedigree for a director's first major film.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011