LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR 1977

In hindsight, it seems coincidental and full of foreboding that both Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever were released within months of each other at the tail end of 1977 (October and December, respectively). These films brought a somber, reflective conclusion to a year that began with the release of George Lucas' escapist blockbuster Star Wars.

Diane Keaton as Theresa Dunn

No one could have known it at the time, but Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever sounded the dissonant, disco-beat death-knell tolling the end of the '70s and the demise of the sexual revolution. The looming specter of AIDS only serving to make Looking for Mr. Goodbar's dispiriting linking of sex and death feel positively prescient.
Both of these films embodied attitudes that stood as barbed provocation to the 1970s in general, and the Utopian promise of sexual liberation in particular. The hopeful assurance that drugs, free love, sexual exploration, feminism, group therapy, hedonism, the new morality, and porno-chic were the self-fulfillment remedy for the oppressive restrictiveness of the past. Meanwhile, on a somewhat minor, but no less catastrophic cultural scale, cinematically speaking, the blockbuster success of Star Wars signaled the waning days of major movie studios showing any interest in making mature, challenging films like Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

When, in 1976, I saw Martin Scorsese’s trenchant urban nightmare Taxi Driver, I thought then that I had seen the most depressing film the '70s had to offer. Clearly, I hadn’t reasoned on what 65-year-old writer/director Richard Brooks (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, In Cold Blood) had up his sleeve in bringing Judith Rossner’s controversial 1975 bestseller Looking for Mr. Goodbar to the screen. It was, without a doubt, the feel-bad movie of 1977.

Inspired by the gruesome 1973 real-life murder of New York schoolteacher/singles bar habitué Roseann Quinn, Brooks’ Looking for Mr. Goodbar is part opaque character study, part sociosexual thriller. It chronicles (with provocative moral ambiguity), the confused emancipation/dissociation of Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton): gifted teacher of deaf children by day, by night, pill-popping, singles bar-hopper salving her scars—literal and psychological—through submersion in the twilight world of detached, casual-sex encounters with anonymous, increasingly unsavory partners.

Theresa’s through-the-looking-glass (darkly) journey is largely a reactive one. Her romantic skepticism, a result of an over-idealized fling with an emotionally abusive college professor (Alan Feinstein); her lack of desire for children, a dual response to her sister’s multiple abortions, and her own fear of passing on congenital scoliosis. Her determined need for independence is most assuredly a backlash against the stifling life options proffered by her bellicose father (Richard Kiley) who would have Theresa settle down with a nice Catholic boy, cranking out one baby after another like her kid sister Brigid (Laurie Prange).

That Theresa’s emancipation ultimately takes the form of a paradoxical dual existence—"Saint Theresa by day and swinging Terry by night”—signals not only her unresolved inner conflicts, but underscore a point I think is germane to the appreciation of  Looking for Mr. Goodbar as something more complex and infinitely smarter than a simplistic moral cautionary tale about the dangers awaiting single women in the big, bad city.

It sheds light on the fact that the “New Morality” of the '70s did absolutely nothing to minimize or reconfigure the sexual double-standard. In spite of the newfound freedoms of the era, women were still viewed in terms of Madonna/whore. Their bodies and reproductive rights, open-forum landscapes for religious, politico-social debate; their very independence rendering them more vulnerable than ever as targets of male sexual aggression.
By way of example: most movie critics at the time blamed Theresa's violent fate on her reckless behavior. As though death was a foregone conclusion or some kind of patriarchal retribution for the sexually promiscuous female. Many weighed in on how self-destructive the character was, or how she harbored a death wish, but I don't recall a single critic placing the blame where it belonged: on her violent, mentally unstable rapist/murderer.  That and a homophobic culture that encourages men to loathe anything feminine within themselves, and to gauge their masculinity on a scale of sexual performance and aggressive behavior. 

Teaser ad from The Hollywood Reporter - 1977

When I saw Looking for Mr. Goodbar at the Regency Theater in San Francisco the first weekend of its opening, I was at the time just a sidelines observer to the sexual revolution. A 20-year-old virgin attending college in one of the most progressive cities in the world; I neither drank nor smoked, didn’t partake of drugs, and had yet to set foot in a disco. But the era was so alive and abuzz with change, excitement, and energy, even a Catholic-reared, late-bloomer like me walked around in a near-constant haze of sensual distraction. Honestly, San Francisco in the '70s was so stimulating an environment, you would have sworn the city's fog was at least 50% amyl nitrate.

Richard Gere as Tony Lo Porto

That being said, I think it was precisely my sidelines status that contributed to my taking note of signs of battle fatigue within the sexual revolution. What had started out as a cultural movement of joy and self-discovery had, by 1977, transmogrified into something quite different. The sexual revolution had become a commoditized, cynically co-opted wave of sex merchandising and lifestyle branding that exposed the unspoken lie behind the rhetoric of sexual freedom and liberation. The lie (or perhaps, the naïve hope) being that sex was not intimacy, human physical contact bore no psychological or spiritual consequence, and that we as humans were not profoundly affected by its lack. What led me to this conclusion was the odd phenomenon of getting a good look at the faces of all the high-profile hedonists of my generation. John Holmes, Marilyn Chambers, Hugh Hefner, Linda Lovelace...they all looked like hell. The average 1970s swinger, toward the end of the decade, tended to look like a hollowed-out pod person.

Surely, something beyond alcohol and drug use accounted for the glazed, dead eyes staring out from all those glossy sex magazines like Playboy, Viva, and Hustler. Was there a reason suburban swingers always looked so vacant and debauched? Why was it, whenever I passed by the doors of singles bars, none of the clientele ever looked particularly happy? If the new morality was as joyous and life-affirming as the pop culture media hype kept assuring me, why did its practitioners look so cheerless?
Something told me that the enraptured lyrics (and moans) of all those disco songs weren't telling the whole story.

The '70s: The era of sexual revolution or dehumanization?
Sex was more visible, but attitudes were still mired in sin, shame, and debasement

Although I hadn’t yet read the book, I knew enough about Looking for Mr. Goodbar and the incident that inspired it to be excited by the prospect of a contemporary film attempting to capture a cultural climate teeming with contrasts and contradictions. 

Tuesday Weld snagged a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her role as Katherine Dunn, a walking microcosm of '70s self-absorption and the unfocused quest for the ideal existence

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of my favorite things about the '70s is that it was such a self-reflective era in motion pictures. In fact, a frequent criticism leveled at American films at the time was that they, representative of the “Me Decade” in general, were in a rut of compulsive navel-gazing. Nearly always of the bleak, post-Watergate disillusionment sort. Looking for Mr. Goodbar was NOT the exception.

When the relatively hang-loose permissiveness of the late '60s evolved into the self-conscious hedonism of the mid-'70s, it wasn’t difficult to detect a hint of desperation behind disco music’s over-emphatic exuberance. The search for fulfillment through sensual expression ofttimes gave off the sense of a prowl or hunt...but for what? With all the rampant drug and alcohol use, had sexual liberation, once thought to be the gateway to honest and open human interaction, become just another means of escaping reality? To numb the pain of existence? To shelter our darker demons? To create a greater distance between people? 

Looking for Mr. Goodbar could have been subtitled: The Pleasure Paradox
The Pleasure Paradox is the belief that happiness, when pursued 
(that elusive Mr. Goodbar), remains ever beyond one's grasp 

Behind Looking for Mr. Goodbar's topicality and incendiary commingling of sex, guilt, and religion which so distracted critics at the time, the film is both artful and honest in its attempt to address many of the above-stated issues. More so than any film I've yet to see. Looking for Mr. Goodbar explores the fissures that began to show in the “If it feels good, do it” façade of the new morality. Tackling simultaneously: feminism, religious hypocrisy, the sexual double-standard, and America’s intractable linking of sex and violence.

When I first saw Looking for Mr. Goodbar, I knew right away it was something special. From the first saxophone strains initiating that gloriously unsettling title sequence, I was hooked. (The title sequence is like a short film in and of itself. It's a flowing montage of gritty black and white still shots capturing the vaguely dangerous allure of singles bars.)
The entire cast, Diane Keaton especially, makes something poignant and frighteningly real out of a story begging for sensationalism. Director Richard Brooks keeps to a palette motif of lights and darks; contrasting and paralleling the lighter scenes at the Dunn household (pitched to operatic levels) with the darkness of the emotional violence lurking on the sidelines of Theresa's solitary, but not lonely, independent life.

Richard Kiley as Theresa's no-patience-for-imperfections father

The jarring use of sound and William Fraker's dark, dark, dark cinematography (I initially thought it was shot by Gordon Willis) contribute to making Looking for Mr. Goodbar one of the most powerful movies of the '70s. And make no mistake about it, this movie scared the bejesus out of me. The book was so popular, even if you hadn't read it you knew how it was going to end; but knowing is not the same as being prepared. The harrowing, near-unwatchable concluding moments of Looking for Mr. Goodbar left me feeling shell-shocked. That opening weekend, I still believe the reason I  remained in the theater to watch it a second time was simply because I was just too stunned to move out of my seat.

Not everyone’s cup of tea for any number of reasons, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (dubbed Mr. Goodbarf by many left queasy by the film's violence) is for me an example of American self-reflective cinema at its best. Not the least because it’s an adult film that takes the risk of allowing itself to be misunderstood. I like that it doesn’t spell everything out and tell you how you should feel or react. It has a point of view and even an agenda, but it doesn't invite you to agree with it so much as it encourages you to just think about it. Some people dismiss the film as simplistic, others find it to be moralizing and misogynistic, and some just don't care for it because the topic is too depressing and sordid. No matter what people ultimately think, few find it to be forgettable. 

William Atherton as James (here washing the very knife that will play a role in the film's hellish denouement), the slightly creepy "nice guy" whose resentful response to being moved into the friend zone is to behave in an aggressive,  possessively entitled manner every bit as unstable as the woman-hating "bad boys" he thinks he's superior to.
 Sound familiar?

PERFORMANCES

Because there were so many interesting actresses around in the '70s, it’s easy for me to forget that the decade was largely a boys’ club devoted to buddy movies and misunderstood anti-heroes. By way of illustration, when the time came to adapt Rossner’s woman-centric bestseller to the screen, only male directors were considered: Bernardo Bertolucci, Bob Fosse (I shudder at the thought), Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, and Roman Polanski.

LeVar Burton as Cap Jackson
Looking for Mr. Goodbar marked the feature film debut of Burton, who became an overnight household name when the landmark miniseries, Roots aired earlier in the year

Closer to the reality of the '70s is that on those rare occasions when an actress was called upon to play something other than the girlfriend or male support system (to get Goodbar, Keaton turned down the largely thankless Julie Christie role in Heaven Can Wait), the characters were so well-written (Katharine Ross–The Stepford Wives) and performances so superb (Jane Fonda–Klute), their prominence in my memory contradicts their actual scarcity. 

Looking for Mr. Goodbar is unequivocally my all-time favorite Diane Keaton movie. I actually think it’s the best work of her career. But, apropos of the dark/light contrasts of the Theresa Dunn character herself, I don’t think I would have fully appreciated her work here were it not for my having previously seen her in Annie Hall (released the same year). Onscreen almost constantly, Keaton's performance here is astonishingly raw.
The range and depth of her characterization appear simultaneously natural and going-for-broke risk-taking. As screen heroines go (anti-heroine?) Keaton's Theresa Dunn is a true original; I've never seen a character like her in a film before or since. She's dimensional, complex, contradictory, funny, and operates under her own agency. For my money, Diane Keaton is simply staggering and was a very inspired choice for the part. It really makes you wish the actress had pursued more dramatic roles.

Alan Feinstein as Professor Martin Engle

As for the character itself, I've always considered Theresa Dunn to be '70s cinema’s first anti-heroine: a female sexual outlaw and cultural nonconformist. And, like all rebels, she’s not always likable, smart, or rational–just a paradoxical, vulnerable human being struggling to make sense of the contradictions of her nature, deciding for herself what she wants to be, and accepting the risks (which, as it turns out, are considerable in our culture of normalized female-directed aggression) of choosing to live life on her own terms.
Like a great many of her male counterparts in '70s cinema (portrayed by the likes of Richard Benjamin, Jack Nicholson, and Dustin Hoffman), Keaton's character delves into sex and drugs in a quest for self-discovery. And for once a woman’s exploration of her sexuality is presented in a manner both perceptive and honest enough to allow for the enjoyment of no-strings sex for its purely sensual appeal and the addictive nature of its ability to dull existential pain. 

"Get this into one of your two heads, the one that can think...I am my own girl! I belong to me!"

Controversial and prone to dividing critics and fans alike into "love it/loathe it" camps exclusively, I think the fact that Looking for Mr. Goodbar is such a downer of a film is the reason it never received the credit it deserved for the rather groundbreaking sincerity and seriousness with which it approached female sexuality. Anyone coming to Goodbar hoping for gauzy, soft-core porn cloaked in faux-feminist empowerment rhetoric (a la the popular Emmanuelle franchise) was in for a shock. Similarly, those who sought to see an allegory of a bad girl punished for her sins were left wanting, as well.

If screenwriter Brooks is guilty of anything, it's in being too honest. Taking a tack different from the book, the Theresa of the film is not the self-loathing masochist with a death-wish Judith Rossner wrote about (and so many critics longed for in order to help explain away their discomfort with the story's theme). She is simply a flawed, perhaps emotionally damaged woman who pays dearly for making one too many bad choices. Incidentally, Rossner was said to have been displeased with the film, finding Keaton's character too "happy."

Because things end badly for the character of Theresa, Looking for Mr. Goodbar was seen by many as an anti-feminist cautionary tale for single women. But I challenge that point of view as one laid at the feet of the viewer, not the film itself. I mean, things ended very badly for Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, but I don’t recall anyone calling that film a cautionary tale for hippie drug dealers.

Robert Fields as Rafe and Carole Mallory as Marvella
Fans of The Stepford Wives will recognize these two swingers. She played a robotized housewife, he played the chemist Raymond Chandler, Katharine Ross' first love.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I only got around to reading Looking for Mr. Goodbar two years ago, an experience which left me appreciating even more what Richard Brooks' skill as a screenwriter (his first career) brought to the film version. To me, his work is a vast improvement over the source material, which I found too quick to place a big, glaring bullseye on Theresa's back. Richard Brooks, when faced with the challenge of making the character more sympathetic (aka, real) and extracting suspense from a story whose ending most everyone already knows, builds tension through the stylized application of a motif that's almost Biblical in its emphasis on the argument of free will vs the predeterminism of fate.

Brooks cannily uses innocuous events in the "light" parts of Theresa's life (as a teacher) to foreshadow the progressively violent trend of her "dark" nocturnal pursuits.

In assisting a deaf child to feel the forming of a word, Theresa has the girl hold her throat. A choking image that will be reenacted (horrifically) later. 

Asked to come up with words that will produce enough air to move a feather, a child repeats the word "punch." When asked to come up with a less violent word, he responds with repeated shouts of "help!"

Having overslept due to a night of partying, Theresa is greeted by an angry classroom. On the board is written, "You don't care!" The phrase: an inadvertent commentary on her desire for emotional disengagement in her private life. The death-mask skull: an ominous foreshadowing of the film's final image.

At the time, so much was made of Theresa's "double life" (warmhearted teacher of deaf children by day / emotionally detached bar-hopper by night) as being a sure sign of her schizophrenic, self-destructive nature. A hetero-normative, gender-based double standard rearing its head once again. Looked at from a feminist or LGBTQ perspective, many individuals in the '70s, particularly gay people, lived lives of duality. Forced to behave one way during the day to keep their jobs, only free to be themselves on weekends or in the evenings at bars and clubs. From this point of view, Theresa's duality is less an indicator of a conflicted sexuality than it is representative of our culture's prudish double standards. Society consistently reveals its inability to recognize self-identified female sexuality beyond the confines of partnered/male validation (boyfriend, husband).

A scene reflective of our culture's inability to visualize women's agency outside the scope of their relationship to men: Theresa has difficulty convincing a one-night stand that her desire for him to leave is born of a personal choice. Instead, he's convinced she's awaiting the arrival of a boyfriend or husband. This is similar to when a man comes on to a woman, ignoring her personal claim of not being interested. She has to say, "I have a boyfriend," for it to be valid. Men are traditionally raised to respect other men's "property"--they're not often raised to respect a woman's personal choices.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

"How do women still go out with guys when you consider that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat to women! Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease.”    

Louis CK (I know, I know)

“Every guy has a ‘crazy girlfriend’ story. Why don’t women have ‘crazy men’ stories? I never hear that. Why? Because if you have a crazy boyfriend, you’re gonna die.”     

Stand-up comic 

"Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them."  

Margaret Atwood

Theresa's flights of fantasy reflect her conflicted self-identity

Looking for Mr. Goodbar was released decades before Sex and the City, so there were few cultural paradigms in place through which audiences could process the notion of a sexually active single woman living alone in a metropolitan city without resorting to blame-the-victim thinking and terminology. In discussing the film and Keaton's character, it was the rare reviewer who didn't resort to words like self-loathing, nymphomaniacal, self-destructive, desperate, mentally ill, masochistic, unstable, depressive. 
The whole thing was quite ironic: while calling out Richard Brooks for making a morally reactionary sexual thriller, movie critics couldn't stop themselves from reaching the conclusion that promiscuity, drugs, and drinking were a certain fast-track to death for a single woman. A point which failed to acknowledge that promiscuity, drugs, and drinking were cornerstones for a great many male coming-of-age films of the era, but nobody saw anything fatalistic in men engaging in such "boys will be boys" behavior.

Tom Berenger as Gary

On a similar note, Goodbar came out long before the concept of rape culture, so at no time could one find a journalist willing to devote even a paragraph to the castigation of the brutish, violent behavior of the men in the film. Nor could you find articles addressing our normalized attitudes on the matter of rape and other forms of female-directed aggression in the age of sexual permissiveness. All I recall reading were a lot of human-interest articles about parents taking their daughters to see the film as a means (I can only suppose) of terrorizing them into celibacy. Of course, there were no stories about sons being taken to the film by their parents to teach them not to rape and abuse women.

A lot has changed over the years, but not so much that a daringly mature film like Looking for Mr. Goodbar doesn't have something relevant to say to contemporary audiences. As stated earlier, it's a film that begs to be rediscovered and reevaluated in terms broader than the lazy label of  "cautionary tale" has afforded it. It's an unpleasant film, to be sure, but an honest one. Perhaps even a bit too honest. But it's an inarguably important entry from a decade when the objective of major motion pictures wasn't always to placate and pacify, but to get us to think. Unfortunately, I'm still looking for Looking for Mr. Goodbar...at least until the day Paramount decides to finally release it on DVD.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2014

PRETTY POISON 1968

For as long as I can remember, I've been intrigued by films whose themes dramatize a perception of reality I have held since my teens: the banality of evil. A term first coined in 1963 by political theorist Hannah Arendt in her Holocaust trial book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, it's a theory that has gone on to signify many things, most persistently for me—the notion of wickedness thriving in the most innocuous of environments. 

Rosemary's Baby found Satanic evil lurking behind the everyday meddlesome intrusions of nosy neighbors; The Stepford Wives exposed the murderous misogyny cloaked within patriarchal social systems; and Andy Warhol's Bad used basic-black comedy to satirize the lethal side of suburban materialism. In Pretty Poison, a bizarre little chiller that slipped past audiences in 1968 but has since developed a loyal cult following, first-time director Noel Black (with an award-winning screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. adapted from the novel, She Let Him Continue by Stephen Geller) treads a path well-worn by directors as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock (Shadow of a Doubt) and David Lynch (Blue Velvet): the dark underside of small-town life.

Anthony Perkins as Dennis Pitt

Tuesday Weld as Sue Ann Stepanek

Beverly Garland as Mrs. Stepanek

Anthony Perkins is Dennis Pitt, a recently-released-from-a-mental-institution loner (for the arson death of his aunt when he was 15) with, to put it charitably, a tenuous grip on reality. A pathological liar, albeit not a particularly accomplished one, Pitt is given to flights of espionage fantasy so elaborate, one is never quite sure…least of all Dennis himself…if he knows he's lying or not. Into his peculiar orbit comes drill team flag-bearer Sue Ann Stepanek, a 17-year-old high-schooler every bit as wholesome and unrefined as her name.

Convincing the gullible Sue Ann that he's a CIA agent on a covert mission to investigate environmental crimes committed by the chemical plant where he's employed, the delusional Pitt fancies himself the city slicker to Sue Ann's easily-seduced farmer's daughter. Unfortunately, it isn't long before things grimly escalate in this bizarre game of "Who's zooming who?" - a game that finds the hunter, a tad slow on the uptake, discovering he has been captured by the game.

Although Most Men Are Loath to Admit It, Women Terrify Them
Pretty Poison dramatizes this unassailable fact (the very genesis of the femme fatale) by adopting a familiar film noir trope: the wiseguy male who thinks he knows all the answers, gets himself mixed up with a woman who has rewritten the book. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of my strongest memories of being a pre-teen in the late '60s was the prevailing, almost oppressive sense (from movies, television shows, and newspaper articles) that America was in a tumultuous state of self-reflection. After so many years of looking outside ourselves at Germany, Russia, Japan, and the vague specter of communism as this monolith of absolute evil out to overthrow our just and unsullied American Way of Life; the ethical and moral morass that was the Vietnam War—coupled with the rash of political assassinations, civil-rights related violence, and campus rioting exploding throughout the country—posed the discomforting postulate that we were now living in an age when what we most had to fear was ourselves.

Movies as dissimilar and ostensibly politically benign as Last Summer, Rosemary's Baby,  Bonnie and Clyde, Petulia, Angel Angel Down We Go, Easy Rider, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The Parallax View, and Targets, all reflected the late-'60s zeitgeist: ambiguity about and disillusion with the beliefs, conventions, and institutions in which we once placed our absolute trust.

The All-American Girl
Rather pathetically, this image of a handgun amongst the innocent, little-girl trappings of a teen's dressing table still embodies the American ethos for a great many people: every man, woman, and child in the country armed to the teeth.

For a time, it felt as though everything clean and shiny about American culture was revealing itself to have an underside of decay and rot. Pretty Poison, a film whose title even captures this sense of wary disquietude, gives us a film that appears on the surface to be a harmless, anarchic black comedy about misfit youth, but is, in fact, a twisted and rather unexpected tale where nothing is as it seems and good intentions don't amount to very much.

Dennis studying a vial of the chemical his plant produces whose waste pollutes the river and nearby lake...or is he thinking of Sue Ann?

American films in the sixties were obsessed with unearthing the villains who presented themselves as the clean-cut upholders of family values; in exposing the hypocrisy behind the small-town bastions of normalcy and conformity; and in confronting the violent institutions and belief systems that casually traded lies for lives in the belief that something real was being defended. Films like Pretty Poison—films that sought to explore the enemy within—asked audiences to take a good look at what America had become.

PERFORMANCES

Whether Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld deconstruct or merely exploit their trademarked screen personas in Pretty Poison is debatable. But what is clear is that in assuming roles that both recall and add unexpected twists to past performances for which they've become indelibly linked in the public's mind (Psycho's unhinged Norman Bates for Perkins, Lord Love a Duck's covetous co-ed Barbara Ann Greene for Weld), Perkins and Weld—who share an electric chemistry—take audience preconceptions and make us choke on them.

It begins to dawn on Dennis that Sue Ann is something of a force to be reckoned with

Tuesday Weld, an incredibly talented actress who has shunned fame the way most people avoid a trip to the dentist, is said to have been miserable during the making of the film, loathed her director, and blamed him for her giving what she considered to be one of her worst screen performances. (Although upset and trying to make a point, Ms. Weld should know that dubious honor falls to her timeless work in Sex Kittens Go to College.)
On the contrary, despite being labeled a "neurotic" by Pretty Poison co-star John Randolph and said to have been frequently in tearful hysterics during the filming, Tuesday Weld gives a masterfully canny performance in the film. One that is, at turns, both charming and chilling. She's mesmerizingly good, her performance here ranks among the best of her career. And at almost 25 years of age at the time and playing 17, she somehow manages to get away with it...her preternatural physical development hinting at a shrouded psychological maturity.

Roger Corman stalwart (and personal fave), the consistently excellent Beverly Garland
 is a particular standout as Sue Ann's brassy mother. 

And then there is Anthony Perkins. When I was growing up, he always gave me the creeps. But upon discovering more of his pre-Psycho work, I have begun to find him strangely attractive and have since developed quite the posthumous crush. In Pretty Poison, Perkins is again cast to type in the kind of role he found near-impossible to escape following Psycho. Yet, typecast as he was, no one could ever accuse him of sleepwalking his way through Pretty Poison. His Dennis Pitt is one of his more affecting and underplayed performances. Sympathetic, complex, and imbued with a great deal of dimension. I especially like how his character reverts to an almost childlike state of bewilderment and confusion as his overactive fantasy life spirals out of his control into a nightmarish reality.

John Randolph plays Dennis' appropriately concerned case officer, Morton Azenauer

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Adding to Pretty Poison's already considerable quirk factor are the odd ways in which Pretty Poison's plot intersects with Tuesday Weld's 1966 teen-culture spoof Lord Love a Duck and Weld's real life. Spoler note: If you haven't yet seen Pretty Poison, you may want to skip over this section.

Pretty Poison / Lord Love a Duck / Real life

The characters Weld plays in both films have aggressively contentious relationships with their mothers. In real-life, Weld loathed her mother and was fond of telling reporters that her mother was dead, even though she was quite alive and kicking. This prompted Weld's mother, one Yosene Ker Weld, to write the tell-all book If It's Tuesday...I Must Be DEAD! published in 2003 - ironically, after her death.

Pretty Poison / Lord Love a Duck / Real life

The ageless, feckless men Weld manipulates in both films are portrayed by actors (Perkins, Roddy McDowall) who, in real life were closeted gay men. In 1972, Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins reteamed for the film Play it As It Lays, in which Weld portrayed an actress suffering a nervous breakdown and Perkins her gay best friend, a suicidal film director. In real life, the depressive Anthony Perkins was indeed Weld's good friend and directed two films...one of them being the last-straw sequel Psycho III.
The Lord Love a Duck connection finds Weld marrying the assistant of her good friend Roddy McDowall in 1965, only to discover that her new husband also happened to have been McDowall's lover.

Pretty Poison / Lord Love a Duck

Weld's character in both films is a dissatisfied, disaffected high-school senior who comes under the influence of a strange man whom she can manipulate into helping her out with her "problems."

Pretty Poison / Lord Love a Duck

In both films, Weld's character rises like a phoenix from the ashes while her male compatriot rots in prison.

  

Pretty Poison / How Awful About Allan

In Pretty Poison and the 1970 TV movie, How Awful About Allan, Anthony Perkins plays a man who, in his youth, causes the accidental death of a relative by fire. Both roles cast the twitchy actor as a potential villain, only later to reveal him as a victim of a complex, calculated scheme.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Given how superior their performances are and what a thoroughly hard-hitting thriller it is, it's a pity that neither Anthony Perkins nor Tuesday Weld care(d) much for Pretty Poison. Weld, for the aforementioned animosity she felt toward her director, Perkins, less for his performance than for finding the film "slow moving." I remember being intrigued by the newspaper ads and TV commercials when Pretty Poison was released in the San Francisco area in 1968. Still, given all that, it seemed to disappear from theaters so quickly that I never got around to seeing it until the late 1970s, when it was screened at a revival theater compatibly double-billed with Pert Bogdanovich's Targets (another socko, small film from the same year that I highly recommend).

I was simply floored by Pretty Poison and still consider it to be a film far superior and more frightening than some of the more high-profile films with similar themes (Badlands, Kalifornia, Natural Born Killers). There's really much to recommend it, not the least being a '60s vibe that somehow doesn't feel dated, and, most gratifyingly, top-notch lead performances by two of Hollywood's more charismatic (if idiosyncratic) stars.

She Let Him Continue
"I was such a fool, Mr. Azenauer. I let him go on even after I knew he was crazy..."

BONUS MATERIAL
In 1996, Pretty Poison was made into a pedestrian TV movie of profound mediocrity. All plot, no subtext.

Happily, Noel Black's Pretty Poison is available on DVD. Unfortunately, the U.S. version is without the director's commentary on the UK DVD release. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

LORD LOVE A DUCK 1966

Amongst the glut of socially satirical black comedies that came out of Hollywood in the post-Kennedy years, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963) has the respect, and Tony Richardson’s The Loved One has the classy pedigree (a screenplay by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood adapted from an Evelyn Waugh novel). But the only one I find to be even remotely funny is George Axelrod’s strenuously off-beat (and unrelentingly hilarious) skewering of '60s Southern California culture Lord Love a Duck.

Thier obvious filmic merits aside, I just personally have no taste for Strangelove’s brand of paranoiac political lunacy, nor do I find much that amuses me in The Loved One’s theater of the grotesque lampooning of the Los Angeles funeral industry (although I do adore Anjanette Comer's performance and Rod Steiger’s Mr. Joyboy has to be seen to be believed). In all aspects relating both to my peculiar sense of humor and uniquely twisted world-view, Lord Love a Duck (an expression of surprised bemusement much like, “I’ll be damned!” or Fred Mertz’s exasperated, “For corn’s sake!”) hits me where I live. Choosing for its satirical targets the idiosyncrasies of '60s American pop-culture that are near and dear to my kitsch-loving heart (celebrity worship, youth culture, beach party movies, consumerism, the California school system, pop-psychiatry, religious attitudes about sex…and that's just for starters), Lord Love a Duck is virtually made-to-order for a guy of my retro-centric sensibilities. Of course, what really pays dividends when a satire is as perceptive and acerbically witty as Lord Love a Duck (adapted from a 1961 book I haven't read by Al Kine) is that you can look at it some forty-plus years later and marvel at how the jokes still hit home and maintain their relevance because people (God love 'em) really don't change all that much.

Tuesday Weld as Barbara Ann Greene

Roddy McDowall as Alan Musgrave

Ruth Gordon as Stella Bernard

Lola Albright as Marie Greene

Lord Love a Duck is a sun-baked Faustian farce about Southern California teen Barbara Ann Greene (Weld), one-time Head Cheerleader and most popular girl at Longfellow High School, now facing an uncertain future of dreaded anonymity as a senior at the ultra-modern Consolidated High. The day before school is to start, Barbara meets the mysterious Alan Musgrave (McDowall), a transfer student from Irving High School with a checkered past. Calling himself Mollymauk (the name of an albatross-like bird, a replica of which Alan has hanging from his keychain as a kind of hypnosis charm) Alan professes to have the ability to make all of Barbara’s deepest desires come true…she need only give voice to them.

"Barbara Ann. Whose deepest and most heartfelt yearnings express, with a kind of touching lyricism, the total vulgarity of our time."  
Change the name and this 47-year-old quote could apply to anyone who has ever appeared on American Idol, America's Got Talent, The Bachelor...or any reality TV show today.

As it turns out, there is indeed something awful about Alan, especially in the way he goes about (without benefit of making explicit either motivation or method) seeing to it that each and every one of Barbara Ann’s tinpot dreams come true. Unfortunately, in the grand tradition of fairy tales and aphorisms that warn “Be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it,” Barbara Ann’s dreams consistently fail to measure up to her expectations. A lamentable realization for the not-very-bright baton-twirler, one compounded by the fact that the undisclosed “cost” of each wish (a sacrificial disaster or tragedy befalling someone in Barbara Ann's orbit) seems to escalate exponentially.

High school "fast girl" Sally Grace (the marvelous Lynn Carey, right) humiliates Barbara Ann into joining the Cashmere Sweater Club ("All you need are  twelve cashmere sweaters to join!") when she makes mocking reference to Barbara Ann's sweater being made of the moth-proof, rust-proof, fireproof chemical Acrison Silipolatex.

If at the start it looks as though the selfless Alan is but a tool to be used by the self-interested Barbara Ann to achieve her ambitions, toward the end it begins to dawn that perhaps Alan is harboring a secret agenda of his own and it's in fact Barbra Ann who's been the dupe. (Alan, like an asexual Myra Breckinridge, appears to be on some kind of personal crusade to dismantle and subvert the fabric of American culture one myth at a time.)
Lord Love a Duck not only uses its fairy-tale structure as a framework on which to hang a broad array of satirical jokes and sight gags, but as a device to dispense with anything resembling world-as-we-know-it realism. A scathing, surreal, jet-black comedy baked under a smoggy Southern California sun, Lord Love a Duck is a film I only recently discovered (thanks again, TCM!) but has fast become one my favorites.

The Devil You Say?: Mollymauk vs Pazuzu
Above, Barbara Ann signs a Faustian "pact" in cement with Alan (Mollymauk) Musgrave, a possibly Satanic character who represents himself with a drawing of a creature that looks alarmingly like the evil demon Pazuzu, replicated in poster-paint and clay by a pre-possession Linda Blair (below) in The Exorcist (1973)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

As I commented upon in an earlier post about Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc?, I don’t really understand comedy well enough to know why it sometimes works and why at others, it falls flat on its face. Satire, in particular, seems a peculiarly dicey realm, given how important a role the establishment of tone and balance plays into the comedy payoff. If the world presented is too lunatic, there’s no reality in which to ground the humor and everything just comes off as silly. Lord Love a Duck wins points by giving Los Angeles and '60s pop-culture (and its already built-in absurdities) just enough rope of verisimilitude with which to hang itself. 

Lord Love a Duck's Drive-In Church (presided over by Rev. Phillip Neuhauser and his wife "Butch") spoofs the real-life Garden Grove Community Drive-In Church of former televangelist Robert Schuller (The Crystal Cathedral) which opened in Orange County in 1961.

Alan and Barbara Ann A-Go-Go
The teenage Beach Party movies of the '60s are a major target of Lord Love a Duck's scorn. The fictional titles of which don't sound very different from the real thing: Bikini Vampire, I Was a Teenage Bikini Vampire, I Married a Teenage Bikini Vampire, The Thing That Ate Bikini Beach, Cold War Bikini, Bikini Countdown, and Bikini Widow.

PERFORMANCES

Actors, both comic and dramatic, attest that comedy is infinitely harder than drama, and I’m inclined to agree. I’m guilty as the next person of devaluing good comedic performances (Gene Wilder should have won an Oscar by now), but that can’t be said of my assessment of Lord Love a Duck, a film which succeeds largely due of its very talented and funny cast. While I’m less fond of Roddy McDowall in this (during this time in his career he seemed to be giving the exact same performance from film to film) Lola Albright and especially Tuesday Weld (doing her best work EVER) are pure gold. Albright brings unexpected pathos to her role as Barbara Ann’s promiscuous, cocktail waitress mother (“Honey, you know I never go out with a married man on the first date!”). Her brief yet memorably tragi-comic performance has a heartbreaking poignancy to it.

Under less than favorable circumstances, uptight society matron Stella Bernard (Gordon) meets Marie (Albright), the alcoholic mother of potential daughter-in-law, Barbara Ann.

Long one of Hollywood’s most underrated talents—her career hampered by an I-dare-you-to take-me-seriously name and a baby doll voice—Lord Love a Duck’s happiest surprise is Tuesday Weld (not really a surprise, actually. She’s splendid in the 1974 TV-movie, Reflections ofMurder, and brilliantly ups the ante on playing maladjusted cheerleaders in 1968’s chilling Pretty Poison). Lord Love a Duck showcases Weld’s talents as a truly gifted comedienne and affords her the opportunity to show what a nuanced dramatic actress she can be when given the right material.

It's a pity that Lord Love a Duck was so ignored on release. Weld is remarkable in it. In this scene in which Barbara Ann discloses to Alan her deepest desires, she humanizes and gives depth to a character that in less talented hands would be a one-dimensional cartoon.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Every film that sets out to offend (as most black comedies do) needs at least one setpiece moment of sublime vulgarity. Lord Love A Duck boasts an irresistibly over-the-top shopping spree for cashmere sweaters that erupts into a father/daughter consumer orgy.The screwball/suggestive colors of the sweaters provide as many laughs as the incestuously orgasmic reactions they elicit from Barbara Ann's father: Grape Yum-Yum, Banana Beige, Lemon Meringue, Pink Put-On, Papaya Surprise, Periwinkle Pussycat, Turquoise Trouble, Midnight A-Go-Go, and Peach Put-down. At this point in the film I was aware that I liked Lord Love A Duck, but after this scene, I knew I LOVED it. This sequence is the absolute best in mainstream cinema weirdness!

The inimitably demented Max Showalter (as Howard Greene) is the more than appreciative audience for Barbara Ann's hysterical impromptu fashion show.

I could go about Lord Love a Duck's many other merits, but in the interest of space, let me call attention to the top-notch turns by Ruth Gordon, Harvey Korman, martin West, and Donald Murphy.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Lord Love a Duck was promoted with the tagline “An act of pure aggression,” but truth in fact; it’s mostly an act of pure cantankerousness. For all its outrageousness, at its core it’s a middle-aged, middle-class diatribe by the older generation (those more amenable to the comedy styles of Alan Sherman, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, or Sid Caesar) against America’s burgeoning youth movement. A movement that was swiftly rendering director/ writer George Alexelrod’s patented brand of "tired businessman" comedy (The Seven Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? How to Murder Your Wife) old-fashioned, if not obsolete.

1965 Playboy Playmate of the year, Jo Collins, is really a hoot as Kitten, the bored Beach Party movie starlet whose dialogue consists entirely of variations on the sole retort she has for anything said to her by producer/sugar daddy, T. Harrison Belmont: "Oh, Harry...you're such a drag!" 

Forty three years-old at the time this film was made, Axelrod was well past the age of distrust for the teenybopper set, and one can almost taste his vitriolic annoyance at what had become of his world of martinis, big bosoms, and smirky sex jokes. All of which probably accounts for why I find Lord Love a Duck to be so terribly funny. There's a really pissed-off, old fart sensibility behind it all that gives each satiric barb a particularly acrid sting not possible were the film coming from a place of affection. Or even understanding, for that matter. I guess that's something I can relate to.

If you’re among those who are of the mindset that we currently live in an age of smart phones and increasingly not-so smart  people, then the hedonistic, amoral, anti-intelligence, youth-centric world lampooned in Lord Love a Duck provides irrefutable and entertaining evidence of the fact that we didn't just arrive at this state of affairs overnight. It’s a course we've been headed on for quite some time.

"Talk to me. Just tell Mollywauk."

Copyright © Ken Anderson