SMOOTH TALK 1985

“You don’t understand. I mean, it’s not what you think. I’d never do that. It’s just…the boys are so nice to you. When we’re together…I never knew it was gonna be so nice. Did you ever have a boy hold you close and sing to you? This one boy, Eddie…he sang to me right in my ear. And he held me so sweetly. June, don’t you know how that feels? Just to be held like that?”

Laura Dern as Connie

Treat Williams as Arnold Friend

Mary Kay Place as Katherine

It’s summer vacation and 15-year-old Connie moves about the suburban California home she shares with her easygoing dad (Levon Helm), quarrelsome mom (Place), and “perfect” 24-year-old sister, June (Elizabeth Berridge), in a sleepwalker’s haze of idle distraction and adolescence-induced self-absorption. Able only to muster up enough energy for sunbathing, toenail-painting, music-listening, and practicing her “How to talk to boys” patter while smiling into mirrors, Connie’s at that age where she feels as if she’s harboring at least four different people under her skin. First there’s Daddy’s little girl; then the lazy, can’t-do-anything-right, “career criminal” her mother thinks she needs to keep her eye on 24/7; and, of course, her sister sees her as a spoiled, entitled brat. But Connie herself feels awkwardly suspended between wanting to remain a little girl like her naive friend Jill (Sarah Inglis), or becoming one of those sexy, self-assured girls at the roadside hamburger stand who attract the boys just out of high school. An ambition she shares with her more with-it friend Laura (Margaret Welsh).

But if at home Connie and her mother continuously lock horns due to one being concerned she’s seeing the image of her former self, while the other fears she’s looking at a vision of her future self; then its only during those long afternoons at the mall (it’s the '80s, the very height of mall culture) where, far from the gaze of those who think of her as a child, Connie has the opportunity to exuberantly, flirtatiously and (tragically) all-too innocently, explore the romantic possibilities of being an adult.

With sensitivity and a sometimes piercing insight into the peculiar pains and anxieties of verge-of-adulthood adolescence, Smooth Talk tells a melancholy coming-of-age story that’s also part Grimm fairy tale and horror story. A sexual awakening, yes, but an awakening to darkness.

“I look at you. I look right in your eyes…and all I see are a bunch of trashy daydreams.”

There’s a reason why a kind of neutered androgyny has always been standard equipment for male teen pop stars over the years. Why the over-effusive journalism of fan mags marketed to adolescent girls (Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine) trafficked in platonic, My Personal Dairy adjectives like, “huggable,” “cute,” “smoochable,” and “dreamy.” Why the casting of boy bands demands the representation of at least one of each prototypically “safe” male personality (the quiet one, the bad boy, the funny one, etc.). And why, in 1972, David Cassidy’s talk of drug use and his discreet display of pubic hair on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine sent hoards of adolescent girls heading for the hills and sounded the death-knell for his teen-idol career.

For a great many girls first becoming aware of their sexuality, sex isn’t really what it’s about at all. At least not in the clinical, literal sense. When you're young, vague adult urges collide with childish illusions. A burgeoning interest in sex during adolescence is, for most girls, a confused jumble of barely-understood, tantalizingly dangerous feelings centering on dreamy fantasies. Heady fantasies, romantic in nature, of idealized boy/men, more feminine than masculine in nature, who ask them out on dates and make them feel special, beautiful, and understood. Of safe, puppydog caresses and scary/exciting kisses which can be tender or torrid, but never go too far.

Does Your Mother Know?
Connie (Dern) and Laura (Margaret Welsh) are intrigued by an "older kids" roadside hangout. Less in a rush to reach adulthood, Jill (Sarah Inglis) lingers behind

If puberty in boys inflames an often difficult-to-understand surge in sexual desire and interest, these exact same feelings converge just as confusingly in adolescent girls, only with the added complication of the deceptively ego-gratifying awareness of the dubious female “power” to attract the male gaze. Of course, the tragic misunderstanding to be found in the pursuit of desirability through the self-objectifying manipulation of one’s appearance is that it only offers the illusion of control. The the possessor of the gaze is the one with all the power. It’s a sad fact of life that in our culture, girls learn the value of their bodies to boys and men long before they learn their own value to themselves.

Rules of Attraction
Longing to be noticed, Connie doesn't know she's already being watched

This tragic misunderstanding leads to girls longing to be cherished settling for being wanted (or worse, never being able to tell the difference), confusing physical development with emotional maturity, and to using sexual activity as a means of coping with emotional emptiness.  

The music of James Taylor, specifically his smooth talk version of the R&B classic, "Handyman"
serves as a premonitory leitmotif for dangerous seduction, just as Dern's
perpetually bare legs suggest a vulnerable voluptuousness

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Smooth Talk is adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’1966 allegorical short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Set in that same decade, Oates’ story—an early draft of which was originally titled Death and the Maiden—is dedicated to Bob Dylan (Oates was very into his music at the time, specifically the 1965 song, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue) and was inspired by a Life magazine article the author read about a real-life serial killer of teenage girls known as “The Pied Piper of Tucson.” That such a gracefully delicate film could emerge from such an unsettling source is a testament to Oates’ poetic ability to emphasize the humanity behind the horrific. Also, it's no mean feat that the filmmakers (director Joyce Chopra) are sensitive enough to know that what works in realistic allegory can be effectively softened in the very literal language of film while still achieving the same impact.  

Musician Levon Helm as Harry, Connie's loving but somewhat unconnected father

Wife and husband team of director Joyce Chopra and screenwriter Tom Cole do an extraordinary job of expanding upon and fleshing-out Oates’ slender, shivery prose. As if taking its cue from the mercurial shifts in mood typical of adolescence, Smooth Talk weaves scenes of languid dreaminess and tense family conflict (Connie, who always appears to be lost in a world of her own when around her family: “I wish I could just travel somewhere.”) with moments of the kind of joyous, impulsive wing-spreading we’ve all experienced as a natural part of growing up and discovering who we are.

The dark tone of the narrative’s third act feels, soberingly enough, like the intrusion of adult consequence on the childhood luxury of poor judgment and making mistakes.

With an almost ten-year age gap between them, Connie and older sister June (Elizabeth Berridge) don't even share the same memories

PERFORMANCES

Sometimes when I watch a film with a big star in the lead, the words of Valley of the Doll’s Helen Lawson come to mind: “The only hit to come out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson, and that’s ME baby, remember?” And by this I mean that some stars, whether intentionally or not; in order to keep the spotlight on themselves, seem to make it their business never to surround themselves with talents larger than their own. Smooth Talk, like a great many of my favorite independent films, features a cast so uniformly excellent, it has the feel of an ensemble piece even in the face of the powerhouse performances of Laura Dern and Treat Williams.

The always wonderful Mary Kay Place is one of those fine character actresses
incapable of striking a false note 

On the topic of Laura Dern, I’m afraid I’m going to come off sounding like one of those 16 Magazine writers myself, for I find it difficult to rein in the hyperbole when referring to this gifted actress. I’ve always been a huge fan, but she is just off-the-chart terrific here. As the character at the center of the story and the catalyst for all the film’s events, Dern makes sympathetically real a girl whose vanity and self-absorption might otherwise come off as shallow. She gives a natural, heartbreakingly honest, close-to-the-skin performance that’s ultimately disarming and oh-so touching. I think is chiefly because Dern, in her ability to expressively convey what a character is both thinking and feeling, clues us in that Connie is having just as hard a time making sense of her feelings as her family. I've seen Laura Dern in many things, but her performance in Smooth Talk has always remained my favorite. Beautifully written, directed, and acted, how Smooth Talk failed to get Oscar nominations in all the major categories is a mystery right up there with 1997s Eve's Bayou.

You can keep your Mike Myers, your Freddy Krueger,  your Jason Vorhees...Treat Williams as A. Friend is hands-down the screen's creepiest and scariest psychopath

THE STUFF OF FANTASY 
Because not a great many people have seen Smooth Talk, I don't want to give too much away about the film's unforgettable last half hour. It's a powerful scene remarkably well-played by Williams and Dern. Treat Williams in particular, gives one of those performances that sneaks up on you. It seems as first as if he's doing very little, then before you know it, you notice your heart has started beating faster and a subtle tension rising within you, making your pulse race. He's that scary...and that good. I was crazy about the film before, but this sequence, with its startling shifts in tone, just blew me away.

"I seen you that night and I said, 'Oh my God, that's the one...'"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As a gay man, I’ve never been able to fully identify with most coming-of-age-films. Ones told from a male perspective tend to be designed to flatter the egos of the male audience and mythologize the memories of the male writers. No matter what the title, these films were always populated with impossibly beautiful older women, dream girls, and willing prostitutes who craved nothing more than a sexual encounter with an awkward, gangly, pimply-faced premature ejaculate who couldn't find a clitoris with a GPS device.

Of course, there was the alternative of the John Hughes-type deification of youth movie. Films where, against evidence of logic and all common sense, adults are always corrupt and teens are all pure of spirit and mind. Where characters say things like, “When you grow up your heart dies” and aren't asked to immediately vacate the premises.

No, when I was going through puberty and struggling with adolescence, I didn’t go around punching out authority figures, drag racing, sleeping with lonely local widowers, or turning my house into a brothel while my parents were away. I was just an insecure kid struggling to find out what it meant to be a grown-up.
Male-focused coming-of-age films are encouraged to perpetuate the masculine myth: making puberty all about wearisome rites of passage (invariably centered around getting laid or channeling aggression), so if one wanted a story that dealt with emotions and inner struggle, female-centered coming-of-age-films were the sparse alternative. (Mainstream gay coming-of-age films were still a few decades off.)

I was well into adulthood when I saw Smooth Talk, but like no other film I've seen before or since, it captures, if not the particulars of adolescence as I remember it, most certainly the confused  feelings and anxieties. 

I recall my mood swings, my self-consciousness…my preoccupation with appearance, and need to be on my own. Like the character of Connie (and most teenagers), I'd go places and lie to my parents about where I'd been. I'd have one mode of dress when my parents saw me, but when out with my friends, I dressed more provocatively, hoping my clothes would speak in a sexual language I hadn't yet found the words for.

I grew up in San Francisco, so there were no malls to hang out in, but there the hangouts of Polk and Castro Streets. Too young to actually get in anywhere, my friends and I (a close-knit group out to one another, if no one else) we haunted the poster stores, record shops and moviehouses. Just being around so many out, gay men was exciting and empowering (although nobody used that word in the '70s) and made me feel unimaginably sophisticated and mature. Naturally, when I was actually approached by someone, my shyness and social ineptitude betrayed everything my precocious mode of dress sought to convey, and nothing would come of it. But the reality was, at age 15 and 16…just having someone show interest in you was more than enough.

These days it appears as though the stridently heteronormative strain that ran through the coming-of-age film genre of my era is at last starting to ease up. I certainly hope so. In this day of internet anonymity and sexual restlessness among adolescents, not much about what Smooth Talk addresses has changed over the years. Certainly not the threat of predatory attention. But with new stories to tell and a broader spectrum of human experience represented, films about adolescence and awakening sexuality are bound to reveal more of what we all collectively share, and make obvious the fact that none of us‒male, female, gay, straight‒escapes the pain of growing up.

 Copyright © Ken Anderson

HAIR 1979

Not having been a huge fan of the original stage production of Hair (Gerome Ragni, James Rado, and Galt MacDermot’s legendary “American Tribal Love - Rock Musical”), I think I’m one of the few to find Milos Forman’s screen adaptation—which deviates significantly from the source material in that it actually has a plot—to be a flawed but vastly superior improvement upon the original. The music was always great, but only the movie version got me to care about who was doing the singing.

Evolved from the free-form, counterculture, guerrilla theater experience taking place on college campuses across the country in the late '60s, Hair debuted on Broadway to great acclaim and much brouhaha in 1968 (nudity, swearing, hippies…on Broadway?) almost a year after 1967s so-called "Summer of Love" signaled both the pinnacle and simultaneous pop-cultural co-opting of the hippie/flower-child movement. Yet, much like A Chorus Line, Hair, when viewed today, is one of those Broadways shows whose reputation as a groundbreaking cultural phenomenon may be a little hard to fully comprehend.

As a 10 year-old living in San Francisco’s Haight St. district in 1968, I was too young to have been a participant in the whole Flower Power scene, but when it came to bearing witness to all the social and political changes afoot, I have to say I had the best seat in the house. Even then it was odd to think of one's neighborhood as the hub of a "movement" the entire nation was talking about. Mostly I remember the poster stores, the head-shops, the buttons with slogans, the streets full of panhandling hippies, and vibrant color everywhere...especially in the clothing. (Sartorially speaking, the hippie movement hit my older sister pretty hard. Once recognizable by her Catholic School uniform, virtually overnight, sandals, love-beads, headbands, tie-dyed tops, and tinted granny-glasses became her standard mode of dress. It was like a Timothy Leary reversal of The Stepford Wives.)

Ren Woods (Sparkle, Xanadu) sings the hell out of "Aquarius" in the film's visually explosive opening sequence.

Never fully the blissed-out, flowers & freedom era depicted by the nostalgia-prone, I recall the late '60s as a time undeniably colorful and charged with a kind of “winds of change” electricity (each day brought something new in fashion, language, ideologies, music), yet also a time seriously untethered and terrifying. I’ll always remember how confounding it was to be surrounded by so much talk of peace and love while the TV filled my head with nightmare images of Vietnam, the Zodiac Killer, assassinations, riots, and Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. I suspect the hopeful message proffered by Hair's anti-war themes struck a chord with a disheartened America favoring the promise of a Utopian “Age of Aquarius” over what seemed to be the existing dark specter of Barry McGuire's “Eve of Destruction.”  

Treat Williams as George Berger

John Savage as Claude Hooper Bukowski

Beverly D'Angelo as Shelia Franklin

Annie Golden as Jeannie Ryan

Dorsey Wright as Layfayette (Hud) Johnson

Don Dacus as Woof Daschund

Had Hair been granted a film adaptation back in the late '60s or early '70s - when Hollywood awkwardly courted the youth market by green-lighting any and every druggy, nonsensical, counter-culture script that came along (Skidoo; Head; Alex in Wonderland; Angel, Angel,Down We Go); there’s a good chance the show’s somewhat meandering free-form structure would have reached the screen intact. Mercifully for me, the passage of ten years and one flop 1977 revival contributed to the perception of Hair as a timepiece too dated for unaltered big-screen transitioning. This precipitated the enlistment of playwright Michael Weller (Moonchildren) to fashion an honest-to-god storyline around Hair’s marvelous score of songs, and, in lieu of the then-requisite bearded twenty-something fresh out of film school to helm the project, we have Oscar-winning director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), a man who was actually making films about '60s youths in the 60s (his 1971 comedy Taking Off is a favorite). Certainly in the late '70s the climate for Hair was right, what with the proliferation of films being released dealing with the '60s and the Vietnam War: Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979).

If one goes into Milos Forman’s Hair with any expectation of the film being a faithful adaptation of the Broadway show, watching the movie is likely to be a disappointing experience. The order of the songs has been rearranged, their intent altered, and many of songs are sung by totally different characters. I think the best and most rewarding way to view the film is to look at is as a completely different animal; an artistic expression unique unto itself. Where the play invited us “outsiders” into the world of the hippie tribe onstage, getting to know them through vignettes and pantomimes draped over a thin schematic structure. Foreman’s film maintains the perspective of the outsider and tells the story of Claude Hooper Bukowski (Savage), a naïve Oklahoma farm boy let loose in Manhattan for two days prior to his induction into the army. Depicted as an innocent adrift in a strange land, Claude is taken under the wing of a small band of hippies (their unofficial leader, Berger [Williams] first seen burning his draft card) and introduced to drugs, the girl of his dreams, and, most likely, the most fun he’s ever had.

Forman and Weller fashion a very entertaining and ultimately moving film out of what could have been just a timepiece jukebox musical. The film maintains the play's irreverent tone and captures rather well the generation gap conflicts and authority figure clashes that exemplified the era, but (and this is a big plus for me) never resorts to the kind of ageist oversimplification of that whole "don't trust anyone over 30" sensibility. Forman's Hair has an originality that far surpasses most adapted screen musicals, and a powerful and sensitively rendered final act that gets to me each and every time.

I Got Life
Berger (Williams) disrupts a dinner party to the consternation of all but an admiring Charlotte Rae (seated, dressed in pink).

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The experience of seeing a film based on a musical you’re very familiar with can be like going over a check list. You find yourself subconsciously keeping tally of how the film measures up to what you are already know. Hair destroys all of that from the first frame. It’s one of the most ceaselessly surprising musical adaptations I’ve ever seen. Whether structurally, musically, or visually, Hair consistently goes in directions different from where you think it’s headed. Just as things seem as if they will remain rooted in realism (the film makes great use of Manhattan locations), up pops a surreal or stylized sequence that totally blows you away. And the effect is exhilarating and exciting. All of a sudden the old feels brand new and you’re actually listening and watching, not comparing.

In one of Hair's more charming examples of an unexpected twist; an anticipated violent confrontation between loitering hippies and mounted police turns into a challenge dance routine.

PERFORMANCES

In populating his cast with relative newcomers to film (Savage, Williams, D’Angelo) and those making their screen debut (Dacus, Golden, Cheryl Barnes) Milos Forman succeeds in bringing a kind of ragged freshness to the film that’s perfect for the material. The more experienced do most of the heavy lifting, although newcomer Annie Golden is surprisingly good and a standout in her scenes. John Savage, fresh from The Deer Hunter, sidesteps the obvious clichés and makes his more reactive character into someone a great deal more dimensional than I would have expected possible. Treat Williams, saddled with an unfortunate wig, does the impossible by making an otherwise insufferably smug character into someone sympathetic and likeable. I think perhaps I’m fondest though of Beverly D’Angelo who is always such an offbeat and fascinating comedienne. I always wondered how Robert Altman ever passed her up. She seemed tailor-made for his ensemble pieces.

Making her film debut, Cheryl Barnes walked away with unanimous raves for her searing rendition of "Easy to Be Hard." 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Of all the numerous delights and surprises in Hair, the film’s one true inspired stroke of genius was in getting Twyla Tharp to do the choreography. An unassailable talent and legend in the world of dance, I’ve never cared for her work either before or since; but here, with her loose-limbed, eccentric, wholly stylized flailings evocatively capturing the look (and, more importantly, the feel) of the era…her work is beyond perfect. Nothing else would have worked. Not jazz, not literal recreations of dances of the era. Tharp's choreography (and whomever was responsible for the clever staging and some of the witty visual concepts) are ideally suited.

Ellen Foley(above center) sings the virtues of "Black Boys" while below, Charlayne Woodard, Nell Carter (center), and Trudy Perkins give equal time to "White Boys." The surprise twist given this number is hilariously ingenious and thoroughly audacious.

Melba Moore and Ronnie Dyson (members of the original Broadway cast of Hair) perform "3-5-0-0" at an anti-war demonstration staged in front of the Washington Monument.

Frequently, musicals have trouble sustaining their momentum through the third act, but Hair is one of the few movie musicals that come to mind that lack any downtime. It's extremely well paced and never lags for me. Even after multiple viewings. For every sequence of note I've mentioned, there are about three others that I don't have room to go into. Suffice it to say that the "Hare Krishna" number is one of those "worth the price of admission" sequences, and that it's more fun to discover the myriad actor cameos and conceptual surprises on your own.  

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The highest compliment I can pay Milos Forman's adaptation of Hair is that he has succeeded in excising virtually everything I never cared for in the play (chiefly its morally superior proselytizing and romanticizing of the young) and created a film of considerable heart and maturity. More even-handed than the theatrical production, I find in Forman's version of Hair to be a film that sees the past with a clarity born of distance. Sentimental, yes. Idealistic, yes. But the one thing it isn't is nostalgic. I like how it looks at the '60s: it holds both hippies and the Establishment to task, yet still finds it to be an era of optimism and hope.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Nell Carter - 1980

Copyright © Ken Anderson

THE RITZ 1976

Three distinct memories spring to mind when I think of the movie version of The Ritz, Terrence McNally’s gay liberation-era Broadway farce that won Rita Moreno the 1975 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play: 

1) I was 18 years old and attending college in San Francisco when The Ritz had its West Coast premiere there. I recall the local papers running photos of Moreno posing on a special The Ritz cable car surrounded by a phalanx of attractive young men in tight-fitting “The Ritz” t-shirts, ready to be transported to the film’s screening, and later, if memory serves, to a disco after-party held at one of the city's more popular gay bathhouses. Movie premieres were rare in San Francisco, and everything about this one (disco-themed, gay-centric, hip, and a little kinky) encapsulated all the things I associate with that particular time and place.

2) The Ritz was released in the summer of 1976. America was caught up in Bicentennial and Olympics fever, and me...I was swept up in a fever of a different kind. One resulting from prolonged exposure to the pervasive and persuasive ad campaign for that other summer '76 release, The Omen ("You are one day closer to the end of the world!"). I went bonkers for that movie and saw The Omen at least four times that summer, never getting around to seeing The Ritz even once (although, in my defense, The Ritz performed so poorly that it was in theaters only a short time). 

3) Curiously, while I couldn't be troubled to see the film itself, I did make the effort to go to the theater where The Ritz was playing just so I could buy myself a "The Ritz" t-shirt. It was this very cool (for 1976, anyway) European-cut white shirt with the film’s title in black art-deco lettering on the front and Al Hirschfeld’s poster art caricatures of the film’s cast on the back. I absolutely loved that shirt!  It lasted all through college and survived for many years until finally disintegrating in the wash sometime in the mid-'80s.

Even the usually reliable Ebay has proved fruitless in searching for another one of these T-shirts. I knew I should have bought two of them when I had the chance back in 1976

When I finally got around to seeing The Ritz on cable TV in the late-'70s, I found I enjoyed it a great deal, and it instantly became one of my all-time favorites. I was so impressed with the attempt to create a kind of modern Marx Brothers comedy of chaos —a classic farce full of broadly pitched performances and McNally's irreverent send-ups of everything from homophobia to show business, gay culture to gangster films. 

The raw material is a great deal of outrageous good fun that could have perhaps benefited from that intangible, crazy "something" that Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich brought to Young Frankenstein and What's Up, Doc?, respectively, but while The Ritz never reaches the heights of comic lunacy necessary to make this kind of comedy really soar, it nevertheless has a tremendously funny freneticism to it that throws new things at you so fast that even if you're not laughing, you're rarely, if ever, bored. 

Rita Moreno as Googie Gomez

Jack Weston as Gaetano Proclo

Jerry Stiller as Carmine Vespucci

Treat Williams as Michael Brick

F. Murray Abraham as Chris

Kaye Ballard as Vivian Proclo

One of the things that most struck me about seeing The Ritz for the first time, just a few short years after its initial release, was how swiftly it had become a period piece. Not in the superficial things like clothes and disco, but in reflecting an emerging liberalism that was already about to have the lid shut on it. In the intervening years since the glory days of the sexual revolution (the days of porno chic, Erica Jong, key clubs, wife-swapping, and Plato's Retreat —lest we forget that sexual recklessness was not the sole province of gays in the '70s) fundamentalist nutjobs like Anita Bryant, the AIDS crisis, and the burgeoning conservatism of the '80s conspired to render The Ritz's pro-sex, pro-acceptance, live-and-let-live egalitarianism something for the history books.

I always regret that I didn't first see The Ritz back when the climate of the times better reflected the optimistic spirit of healthy hedonism depicted on the screen. This out-and-proud retooling of the classic bedroom farce was one of the earliest (if not the first) mainstream examples of gay sexuality presented as normal, fun, and every bit as prone to comical chaos and misunderstanding as heterosexual sex. Gay characters are introduced in a non-tragic, comic milieu where for once, the humor derives from their personalities. Being gay is merely a part of who they are, not the source of a joke. I can only think of a handful of films from that era (Saturday Night at the Baths, A Very Natural Thing, Some of My Best Friends Are) that successfully portrayed gay people in a gay-specific environment that was neither defined nor impacted by hetero acceptance or disapproval. 

The fictional  bathhouse in The Ritz is modeled on New York's The Continental Baths, the infamous '70s recreational sex venue that boasted a pool, gym, cafe, disco, and most popularly, a cabaret where stars like Bette Midler, Barry Manilow, and Peter Allen got their start 

Summarizing a farce's plot in print is thankless and the written equivalent of a tongue-twister: you know what you intend to say, but it often sounds garbled. But I’ll give it my best (and briefest): Cleveland sanitation company president Gaetano Proclo (Weston) has a hit put out on him by his mafia-connected brother-in-law (Stiller), and mistakenly picks a N.Y. gay bathhouse to hide out in. 
Hoping to just lay low for the duration, Proclo finds himself the unwitting target of an amorous chubby-chaser (Paul B. Price), a blackmail-minded private detective (Williams), and a monumentally untalented Puerto Rican cabaret singer (Moreno) who mistakes him for a producer. Of course, everything that can go wrong does, and complications escalate to a delightfully silly pitch, all leading to the anticipated chase/free-for-all finale. 
Taking place over the course of one frantic evening, The Ritz is a door-slamming, identity-mangling, towel-snapping, man-chasing, gun-wielding, lunatic comedy of absurdly subversive sexual politics. Behind all the hilarity is a nifty little commentary on how hard it is to pin labels on people when everyone’s dressed in only a towel.

Oscar-winner F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus) leapfrogs over what could have been the unendurable cliches written into the character of Chris, a befuddled bathhouse regular swept up in a comic case of mistaken identity 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Depending on the critic, the film legacy of director Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night, Petulia, The Three Musketeers) has been categorized as either varied or uneven. But that which has been most consistent in all of his work—a talent for brilliant bits of staged pandemonium—is well-suited to this screwball fish-out-of-water burlesque that mines traditionally uncomfortable gay/straight confrontations for laughs.
In comedy, all is forgiven if you just come through with the funny, and on that score, Lester, with just a few minor lags in pacing, succeeds in keeping things moving at the requisite frenetic pace. Lester's confident handling of the dizzying particulars of so many characters, doorways, and complications never gets in the way of his Broadway-trained cast (Moreno, Weston, Stiller, Abraham, and mustachioed chubby-chaser, Paul B. Price all reprise their stage roles), each of whom is allowed their moment to shine.

Devoted fat-fetishist Claude Perkins (Paul B. Price) puts the moves on a badly-disguised Gaetano Proclo (Jack Weston)

PERFORMANCES
Before talent-free, self-deluding, fame-whores became a staple of show-biz (thanks, reality TV), they were the deserving targets of satirical derision. After years of American Idol, Rita Moreno’s Puerto Rican bombshell, Googie Gomez, doesn’t seem nearly the awful performer she’s supposed to be (she sings only marginally worse than, say, Katy Perry), but the loony, comedic brilliance of Moreno’s performance hasn't waned a bit. Like the late Madeline Kahn, Moreno is an actress capable of being outrageous and natural at the same time. Fabulously sexy, Moreno imbues Googie with a comic lunacy that steals every scene she's in. 
Legend has it that Terrence McNally wrote The Ritz for Moreno after seeing her perform the character of Googie at parties. If so, the man should be commended for resisting the impulse to place this dynamically colorful character at the front and center of the play. As a peripheral but indispensable element of crazy in The Ritz’s party mix, she is the film's spice;  The Ritz offers just enough Googie ineptitudes, tantrums, and malaprops to leave you wanting more.

Googie Gomez launches into a grievously misguided rendition of "Everything's Coming Up Roses"

Every member of The Ritz’s gamely peripatetic ensemble cast is worthy of accolades (this film must have been a continuity nightmare), but Jack Weston is my personal favorite. A rubber-faced master of the double-take with all the corpulent grace of Oliver Hardy, Weston makes me laugh aloud time and time again over his incredulous reactions to the not-so-fine mess he’s gotten himself into.

Googie tries her hand at seduction

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The Ritz is about as New York as you can get in terms of setting, subject, and humor, but was filmed, most likely for financial reasons, in the UK (the illusion is shattered less than a minute into the film when the actress cast as Jack Weston’s daughter delivers the line, “I want to go back to Cleveland” with a pronounced British lilt). What fascinates me about The Ritz is how British and Carry On-ish it all feels despite hewing so faithfully to the stage show and employing a largely Yankee. Director Richard Lester may be American by birth, but in having made England his home since 1956, I think he brings something to The Ritz that makes me wonder if perhaps there isn’t something to the widely held belief that there are really subtle and not-so-subtle differences between British and American humor.

In farce, all beds are made for hiding under, and situations are never as they seem

A curious thing about The Ritz, something that Kaye Ballard mentions in her memoirs, is that for a film set in a gay bathhouse, the movie is woefully low on male pulchritude. The Ritz has been cast with a straight male's detachment from (or fear of) his appreciation of male beauty. Lester found a way to include (in the burlesque tradition) a bevy of sexy females in 1966's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but clearly didn't think turnabout was fair play in this wholly appropriate male atmosphere. A peroxided Treat Williams (hilarious and endearing as the private eye with the helium voice and boyish nature) is pretty much it when it comes to beefcake.

"See something you like, buddy?"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Given that the heaviest topics can be lightened through levity, humor has always been one of the most pain-free ways to broach controversial subjects on film. With The Ritz, audiences otherwise loathe to spend 90 minutes watching a movie set in an environment as alien and potentially disconcerting as a gay bathhouse can galvanize around and have their latent homophobia assuaged by the more traditionally accessible comedy targets: sexism - the sexually rapacious heterosexual female; xenophobia - Googie's Puerto Rican assault on the English Language (I think Al Pacino studied Moreno her for his accent in Scarface); and irony - Googie's deluded belief in her own talent.
And if laughs are hard to elicit from viewers unsure of what to make out of a nonjudgmental look at an establishment where men gather to have anonymous, promiscuous sex with other men, then Gaetano Proclo’s exaggerated Alice Through The Looking Glass sense of bemused amazement provides the perfect outlet for all that nervous tension building up inside.

If, however, at film's end, audiences are left with their presumptions challenged, replaced with only the awareness that one has spent 90 minutes in the presence of a bunch of zany, eccentric characters, each unique and yet somehow the same...sympathetic, misunderstood, likable;...well, to me that's one small blow for the power of comedy.

Three Gay Caballeros

The Ritz is not perfect, but it IS a funny film, and there are more genuine laughs to be found here than in a great many more well-regarded comedies out there. It's a forgotten gem that has garnered a well-deserved cult following.  
The Ritz was revived on Broadway in 2007 for a limited run and featured Rosie Perez as Googie.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2012