LIPSTICK 1976

Spoiler Alert: Crucial plot points are revealed in the interest of critical analysis and discussion

Lipstick is a dramatized exposé and social critique on the serious topic of rape in the same way that Mommie Dearest is a dramatized exposé and social critique on the serious topic of child abuse.  

For all its purported noble intentions and "socially conscious" pre-release hype, Lipstick, a slick, high-concept dramatic thriller with a whopper of an identity crisis, is a film that can’t seem to avoid having its motives called into question. Since its release, Lipstick has suffered a public perception problem arising out of the cacophonous dissonance struck by the seriousness of its subject matter contrasted with the profound superficiality of its treatment. 

Poised to be the first major motion picture to thoughtfully address the dual victimization women face in cases of sexual assault—the crime itself and, later, the "victim blaming" judicial system—Lipstick hoped to provoke the kind of cultural controversy and heated social conversations sparked by Martin Scorsese’s then recently-released Taxi Driver. But the only dialogue Lipstick prompted was widespread criticism for what many saw as a tasteless attempt to exploit a serious issue by using “social relevance” as a smokescreen for a routine rape-and-revenge flick. 

And, indeed, audiences—unpersuaded by the film’s $3.5 million budget; team of legal technical advisors; and Oscar-adjacent pedigree…its cast included an Academy Award-winner (Anne Bancroft) and nominee (Chris Sarandon [Dog Day Afternoon]), its crew, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bill Butler [One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest])—recognized Lipstick for what it was: an exploitation B-movie in A-list clothing.

Corner of Sunset and Larrabee

Logo design by Sandy Dvore

Producer Dino De Laurentiis, who scored a major hit with the Charles Bronson vigilante thriller Death Wish in 1974, hoped to land another jackpot with Lipstick. A movie that instead proved that you can take the exploitation fick out of the grindhouse, but you can't take the grindhouse out of the exploitation flick.  

Critics (those wholly unacquainted with feminism, anyway) were quick to label Lipstick "A feminist Death Wish," while a bemused public, tasked with trying to make sense of a film so clearly at cross-purposes with itself, fractioned off into two distinct camps. 

One camp comprised exploitation movie fans who enthusiastically embraced Lipstick's post-Billy Jack /neo-Taxi Driver zeitgeist and cheered the film's extravagant tawdriness and outrageously contrived (and outrageously satisfying) violent ending. 

Though perhaps unintentional, Lipstick's hyperfocus on model Margaux Hemingway's beauty somewhat clouded (if not outright contradicted) the film's determining theme that rape is an act of violence and control, not desire and sexual attraction  

The second camp was individuals who detected in Lipstick’s advance publicity and early plot synopsis, similarities to the real-life legal cases of Joan Little and Inez Garcia—two women at the center of two headline-making, mid-’70s court trials in which the rape victim killed her assailant—and hoped the film would be an illuminating examination of the thorny issue of violence and victim’s rights. This was the group most disappointed and offended by Lipstick, voicing the common head-scratcher complaint/query: who thought it was a good idea to make a glossy, glamorous movie about rape?

Since American culture holds the not wholly inaccurate perception that the wealthy and beautiful are shielded from life's harsh realities, I think Lipstick sought to dramatize that no woman or girl is invulnerable to the threat of violent sexual assault. But somehow, that message didn't really land. 

"The built-in sensuality of the film medium presents a permanent dilemma: A director, even with good intentions, can hardly help turning a beautiful woman into a sex object, and there is always the danger that what starts out as an exposé becomes exploitation." 

Molly Haskell, in her 1974 book "From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies."

Of course, there was a third camp—the word "camp" being particularly germane in this instance—who saw in Lipstick's earnest self-seriousness and heedless vulgarity a true cult film in the making. Normally, lovers of Bad Taste Cinema would have to look to the films of Andy Warhol, John Waters, or Russ Meyer to find a more preposterous co-mingling of haute couture, gratuitous nudity, sweaty-palmed villainy, flared nostril acting, and off-putting violence. 

Not this time. If it can be said that Lipstick is in any way successful, I contend that it truly triumphs as an unintentional trash classic and an early contender for the title ascribed to Andy Warhol’s BAD the following year: “A picture with something to offend absolutely everybody.”

Whose Gaze Is It, Anyway?
Mr. Stuart cools his cobblers while making an obscene music phone call

In telling its story, Lipstick plays fast and loose with just whose perspective we're afforded. In the early part of the film, the camera's gaze is more sympathetic to the rapist's experience. Evident in how the brutal assault is shot and edited in ways protective of the assailant's modesty, yet never missing an opportunity to expose the victim's nudity in a sometimes startlingly crass tableau. 

Were Lipstick even a marginally better-made film, I think I’d find it too disturbing (or offensive) to sit through. So I take it as a kind of mercy that it’s a movie that lavishes appreciably more imagination and care on its modeling sequences and fabulous disco synth soundtrack (by French composer Michel Polnareff) than on the darker implications of its central drama.  It’s clear Lipstick strives for “ripped from today’s headlines” realism, but its melodramatic tone almost dares you to take it seriously. 

Margaux Hemingway as Chris McCormick

Chris Sarandon as Gordon Stewart

Mariel Hemingway as Kathy McCormick

Anne Bancroft as Carla Bondi

Perry King as Steve Edison

In a reversal of the standard ‘70s practice of made-for-TV movies borrowing the plotlines of then-current feature films, Lipstick’s plot has much in common with the groundbreaking 1974 TV movie A Case of Rape. Both films dramatizing how a woman’s thwarted efforts to put her rapist behind bars expose a judicial system that instead puts the victim’s life and sexual history on trial. But where the Emmy-nominated Elizabeth Montgomery TV film opts for a somber tone of social realism, Lipstick’s unsubtle approach prioritizes shock. 

In a choice that seems to go against everything this film pretends to be about, screenwriter David Rayfiel gives Chris a brother who's a brother…or rather, a priest (played by John Bennett Perry, father of the late Matthew Perry). Given the size and inconsequence of the role, his presence feels like a tacked-on, tone-deaf signifier of  Chris' virtue. The sexist "good girl" -"bad girl" moralizing behind antiquated rape laws is what this movie is supposed to be denouncing...not perpetuating.

Story: Model Chris McCormick (Margaux) agrees to meet with her 14-year-old kid sister Kathy’s (Margaux’s own 14-year-old kid sister Mariel) favorite teacher, Gordon Stuart (Sarandon), to listen to his experimental music compositions. Stuart ends up sexually assaulting Chris, but when charged with the crime, he convinces the court that it was consensual rough sex initiated by the sexually jaded plaintiff. 

In the wake of the court’s Not Guilty verdict, Chris suffers losses both personal and professional. When Mr. Stuart targets Kathy in a second assault, big sister is forced to take matters into her own hands.

Despite Lipstick’s pervading tone of reality-challenged sensationalism, it does manage to make the occasional hamfisted point or two. Either by using Bancroft’s legal prosecutor character as a rape-statistics mouthpiece, or via the whittling down of complex issues into gratuitous setpiece moments calculated to provoke maximum audience outrage and catharsis. 

But as a representative dramatization of what a distressing percentage of women go through, Lipstick is both too specific and too far-fetched to resonate as any sort of larger, relatable social indictment. Even the most obvious angle of social commentary available to the film—using the profession of modeling to explore the role that media and advertising play in perpetuating and normalizing rape culture—proves to be an opportunity largely squandered.

In an act of guerilla programming, filmmaker Martha Coolidge (Rambling Rose, Valley Girl, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge) released her debut feature Not a Pretty Picture—a sensitive semi-documentary about date rape—in New York on Wednesday, March 31, 1976…just two days before Lipstick opened in theaters on Friday, April 2nd. Though not widely seen then, critics hailed it for being, in execution, all that Lipstick sold itself to be. 

Directed by Lamont Johnson (That Certain Summer—1972) and written by David Rayfiel (Three Days of the Condor—1975), Lipstick was released in a surge of social relevance and pop culture topicality. The latter, courtesy of Margaux Hemingway, the 6-foot supermodel and granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway whose then-ubiquitousness (appearing on the cover of  Time and landing a million-dollar contract with Fabergé Cosmetics, all in less than a year) made worthwhile the gamble of handing over the lead role in a major motion picture to an acting neophyte.

I Found A Million Dollar Babe

Cringe ads like these, promoting the dominance of the male gaze and implied proprietary physical access to women's bodies, were very common in the '70s. It was my hope that part of Lipstick’s agenda included exploring the role advertising plays in rape culture and normalizing the casual objectification of women.  

Lipstick first came to my attention when I saw the movie's lip-shaped logo featured in a full-page teaser trade ad in Variety. Combining two of my favorite things—movies with one-word titles and movies with catchy slogans—I had no idea what any of it meant, but I was all in. 

I took it as a hopeful omen that many of my recent favorites were movies with symbolic, single-word titles: Nashville, Smile, Shampoo. Plus, in a '70s movie landscape overcrowded with buddy films and male-centric stories, Lipstick felt like a signal heralding an emergence of more movies about women and featuring stronger female characters.

The courtroom scenes never rise above Perry Mason-level familiarity, and the terrible case Bancroft's prosecuting attorney mounts will have you screaming at the screen. Performance-wise, it's hard to tell if Bancroft is overacting or just seems that way next to the TV-scale performances of her co-stars. 

What really boosted my enthusiasm was when I learned that Lipstick was to open in San Francisco at MY theater! Which is to say, the movie theater where I’d been employed since high school--The Alhambra Theater on Polk Street. The once spacious Alhambra had been divided into two smaller theaters in 1974, and Lipstick was slated to replace Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in Alhambra #1 (after a staggering 13 months!), while Alhambra #2 turned things into an unofficial Chris Sarandon Film Festival by hosting Dog Day Afternoon.   

The only downside to this terrific news was my awareness of the Alhambra being a neighborhood movie theater (sister theater to the first-run Regency on Van Ness), and as a result, we rarely ever got the movies that the studios had confidence in. 

I’m not sure if the fault lies with the actor, director, or simply how the role was written, but given that the reality for many women is that rapists look like the average guy-next-door, it does the film no favors to have Sarandon's character be a weird, twitchy, Norman Bates type. At our first glimpse of him, he's so obviously off-the-rails that we question Chris' judgment in letting her little sister near him in the first place.  

With a dash of trepidation now introduced to my otherwise unbridled sense of anticipation, I was reluctant to see Lipstick in the usual manner of theater ushers…in out-of-sequence bits and pieces while standing in the back of the theater with a flashlight. Craving the full, uninterrupted Lipstick experience, I went on opening night (on my day off) and sat in a sparsely populated, virtually all (gay) male audience. The porno theater vibe of the experience was hard to ignore. 

After its first week of release, Paramount knew it had a bomb on its hands. Marketing went from understated to alarmist, with newspaper ads in major cities disclosing local rape statistics over increasingly violent imagery

Lipstick had been booked into the Alhambra for a month, but there was no way it could survive four weeks as a solo. After the first week, Lipstick was paired with Straw Dogs (1971), then Chinatown (1974), and finally Once is Not Enough (1975).

I think I went into Lipstick expecting something perhaps along the lines of Klute…a gritty crime story built around a character study of a woman. I was way off. I sat through Lipstick twice that night, liking it more the second time when I surrendered to it being the schlock exploitationer it was. And while it was not the movie I had hoped it would be, it was somehow both better and worse than I could ever have imagined.

And if you think that sentence sounds convoluted and paradoxical, well, say hello to the two words that perhaps best describe Lipstick.

Vogue meets International Male

Handsome Perry King has little to do as Chris' semi-supportive boyfriend with the blown dry hair and dubious mustache.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

As a lifetime devotee of so-bad-they’re-good movies, and confirmed aficionado of Cinema de Strange, virtually everything I love about Lipstick stems from its outré luridness. It's so trashy! It’s like a Sidney Sheldon potboiler crossed with an Italian Giallo. And as Lipstick’s alluring but superficial gloss isn’t offset by anything more substantive in the way of writing, acting, or characters, none of it actually feels tethered to reality. Too much of Lipstick’s rape & revenge plot feels engineered to provide a visceral experience, not a contemplative one.

Dressed to Kill

What can you say about a movie whose apogee and nadir is the blissfully baroque image of a beautiful, statuesque model, lacquered and coiffed, racing through the parking lot of the Pacific Design Center in a glittering red evening gown while brandishing a rifle? It’s got Ken Russell written all over it.

It’s important that I not be too dismissive of Lipstick, for though it was a commercial and critical flop (one critic called it a “Tower of Trash”), Lipstick actually did influence rape laws in California. In late 1976, the California Legislature passed a resolution that prohibited the mention of a rape victim’s sexual history from being brought up in court. It was named The Margaux Hemingway Resolution No. 109 in her honor. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

That Lipstick is a triumph of style is nowhere more evident than in the superb title sequence, which, for me, is alone worth the price of admission. The film’s opening 3 ½ minute model photoshoot economically combines a chic, music video-style credits sequence with the subtle (the first and only time that word can be applied to anything related to this movie) establishment of Lipstick’s undeveloped subthemes regarding the normalized dehumanization at the core of sexism and misogyny. 

We see a woman, passive and silent, attended to by a phalanx of men devoted to enhancing her appearance. Often using the language of seduction (tellingly, the only female voice present is dismissed summarily). We're left to ask ourselves. is the woman we’re watching being glorified or objectified? 

It's practically documentary: Margaux Hemingway is photographed by the man who launched her modeling career, Francesco Scavullo. Also present are Scavullo's assistant and life partner, Sean Byrnes,  Way Bandy (makeup), and Harry King (hair). The only fictional addition is actress Catherine McLeod playing an ad agency executive. 

PERFORMANCES

Though ill-served by a script that conceived her character as almost entirely reactive, I like Margaux Hemingway in Lipstick and never thought she was as bad as the critics made out. True, she doesn’t have much range, but she has an appealing presence and earthiness that might have been showcased to better advantage with a director more protective of her limitations (you don’t keep cutting to reaction shots of someone with so little variance in expression). Still, if you compare Margaux’s performance in this, her first movie to, say, Raquel Welch in her 13th feature film…1969s Flareup (which shares with Lipstick a similar “A woman’s outrage, a woman’s revenge!” dramatic arc), Margaux comes off looking like Liv Ullmann.

Everything that was said and written about Mariel Hemingway stealing the movie out from under everyone is quite accurate. As the most authentically realized character in the film, her performance is quite remarkable in its naturalness and sensitivity. When the failure of Lipstick signaled the end of  Margaux's lucky streak, the accolades Mariel received created a rift between the sisters. Margaux was quoted as saying: “She ended up stealing the movie and deserved the acclaim, but I was upset. Because It was as if people were tired of me and gave her the attention.”

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I can't say whether Lipstick is simply a timepiece that stands as evidence of an era when no one batted an eye that a team of men would craft a movie about rape without the creative input of even a single woman, or if it's a movie that deserves credit simply for drawing attention to a topic few major films were even willing to tackle. For me, part of its lingering legacy is the sad, meta intersection of reality and fantasy that comes with the participation of the two Hemingway sisters and all that we now know that we couldn’t have known then.

Cover Girls
Cover: An item placed in front of something to protect or conceal

It's discomfiting to watch a film about rape/sexual abuse that stars siblings who themselves faced issues concerning mental health, body image, eating disorders, alcohol and drug abuse, and sexual abuse.  

Margaux Hemingway died of an overdose on July 1, 1996, at the age of 42. Mariel became a successful  Oscar-nominated actress (Manhattan - 1979) and is currently a tireless advocate for mental health.

Lipstick co-stars Mariel Hemingway and Chris Sarandon went on to work together in three other films: Road Ends, 1997; Perfume, 2001; and above, a Canadian film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Men, 1998.

BONUS MATERIAL

Lipstick's fabulous opening sequence. 

From Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) to Faye Dunaway stopping traffic in Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) fashion shoots in movies have always been a favorite of mine. 

Francesco Scavullo

Copyright © Ken Anderson      2009 - 2024

THE DRIVER'S SEAT 1974

Spoiler Alert: Crucial plot points are revealed in the interest of critical analysis and discussion

Elizabeth Taylor as Lise

Ian Bannen as Bill

Mona Washbourne as Mrs. Helen Fiedke

Andy Warhol as The English Lord

Guido Mannari as Carlo the Mechanic

Maxence Mailfort as Pierre The Right Type

The Driver’s Seat (alternate title: Identikit) is a dreamlike, metaphysical grim fairy tale whose non-linear narrative—in its recounting—sounds a little like a collaboration between Edgar Allan Poe and David Lynch. This visually distinguished Italian production casts a game Elizabeth Taylor (during her quirky, art film phase) as Lise, a raven-haired Goldilocks who visits Rome on a determined quest to find a man who is not too hot, not too cold, but “just right” to serve as her Dark Destiny escort. 

Whereas Goldilocks’ curiosity led her to three domesticated bears, Lise’s schizophrenia-fueled search for her Wizard of Odd merely yields three unmitigated bores: one ideologically overbearing (Ian Bannen), the other sexually assaultive (Guido Mannari), and the third, empathetically apathetic (Andy Warhol).

But like Joseph in the Bible—the one who also favored the conspicuous masquerade of a coat of many colors—Lise, whose name means “Pledged to God,” isn’t one to let a few setbacks and disappointments shake her faith in the incorruptible purity of her morbid pilgrim’s progress.

Every detail of Lise’s journey is planned to be just so. She purchases a violent paperback novel (The Walter Syndrome by Richard Neely, a 1970 thriller about a serial killer) and throughout her trip, holds it in front of her like an airport greeter. 

"It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a lesson: never talk to the sort
of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room
 for the servants to pick up"  - from the novella "The Driver's Seat"   

As is the wont of fairy tales, Lise is assisted on her journey by a Fairy Godmother figure (Mona Washbourne) who supplies the crucial athame for Lise’s tryst of fate with her (literal) “man to die for.” It’s also traditionally fitting that through her guidance, Lise comes to the Dorothy Gale-esque realization that the very thing she has been searching for so intently, has been there all along, right under her nose, the entire time.

Getting to the Point
"It's in my mind, and I can't think of anything else but that 
you and my nephew were meant for each other."

A movie as confounding as it is compelling, The Driver’s Seat is based on the 1970 novella of the same name by author Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). Spark, who considered The Driver’s Seat to be her best-written novel, labeled the book a “whydunnit” murder mystery because the story begins in the middle (Lise’s madness is already full-blown...we know not its source or duration, only that she has reached the end of her tether) and calls on the reader to disregard the story’s openly divulged victim and killer, concerning themselves instead with the motive. 

Easier said than done.

The Driver’s Seat is a mesmerizingly loopy movie that, while leaving me with more questions than answers, is imbued with such a poignant air of despairing sadness that it impressed me as something of a distaff Death in Venice. Which brings me to note that thus far in this essay, I’ve been being needlessly coy about something the novel reveals right off the bat: that Lise—in a perverse distortion of the fairy tale trope of the heroine waiting to be rescued by the idealized man—is searching for the perfect man to kill her. 

As a damsel in emotional distress who’s more desirous of release than rescue, Lise is staunch in her belief that the right man will “Recognize me for the woman that I am right away,” but is willing to leave only so much to chance. To speed things along and better facilitate the precise outcome she seeks, it’s necessary for Lise, like a Grim Reaper Dolly Levi, to be a woman who arranges things. 

Indeed, in taking the driver’s seat and micromanaging her predestined demise with the fastidious attention to detail of an overconscientious party planner, Lise, in this identity-crisis puzzler, assumes the identity of both murderer and victim.

Mrs. Fiedke- Will you feel a presence? Is that how you'll know?
Lise- Not really a presence. A lack of absence. That's what it is.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

Directed and written with idiosyncratic assurance by Guiseppe Patroni Griffi (screenplay co-written by Raffaele La Capria), The Driver’s Seat is a dark (occasionally darkly comic) and melancholy portrait of a woman well past the verge of a nervous breakdown. 

Faithfully adapted from Spark’s oblique novella, the filmmakers have crafted an equally abstruse, illusory film that combines elements of a road movie (Lise’s journey being both literal and psychological), murder mystery (again, the why, not the who), and character study (everything that’s not presented as part of a police investigation into events that have yet to occur, is seen from Lise’s point of view). Along the way, The Driver’s Seat toys with concepts of perception-interpretation/identity-self as they relate to one of my longstanding favorite “human condition” themes: emotional alienation and the innate need to forge a connection with others.   

Our introduction to Lise is abrupt and totally lacking in qualifiers. First, encountered mid-argument with a saleswoman over a stain-resistant dress: “Do I look like the kind of person who spills things on my clothing?”… then Medusa-maned and mascaraed within an inch of her life as she embarks upon her gloomy Roman Holiday dressed like a color TV test pattern. 

The film takes the novel’s starts-in-the-middle story and future-intrudes-upon-the-present narrative structure and translates it into a deliberately fragmented, disorienting cinematic style that forces the audience to filter reality through Lise's alternatingly distracted/laser-focused gaze. Potentially mirroring Lise’s intensifying sense of isolation, the vision of the world we’re given feels lacking in warmth, subtly hostile, and ever on the brink of some sudden outbreak of violence. In this paranoid landscape of shadowy faces and elliptical conversations, everything and everyone feels just a little bit off.

Not the least, Lise herself, who, when her eccentrically flamboyant appearance isn’t drawing stares, eliciting giggles, or the haughty disdain of near-identical coil-coiffed salesgirls, moves about in an almost trancelike haze.

Lise, the Kook Magnet
Scottish actor Ian Bannen is positively brilliant as the macrobiotic food nut whose diet requires an orgasm a day. Nearly everyone Lise comes into contact with either fuels or feeds off of her erratic mood swings and neurotic compulsions. 

It’s ultimately revealed that there is a method behind Lise’s behavioral madness and that everything from her provocative appearance (we've seen that in her day-to-day life she dresses very conservatively) to her attention-getting conduct is calculated for deliberate effect. She’s seeking to make an impression, to leave a mark, to be remembered, to be identified. An attempt, conceivably, to achieve in death something she lacked in life.  

The Driver's Seat was released as Identikit everywhere but in the US. An Identikit is a system of criminal identification that collects facial feature details from witness descriptions and combines them to create a composite portrait of the individual they are seeking.  

The Driver's Seat narrative unfolds in a time-warp fashion, with Lise and the Italian police engaged in a simultaneous, dual manhunt. Both are in search of a killer, Lise before, and the police after. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The first time I became aware of The Driver’s Seat was in 1973 (was I the only kid who read Weekly Variety in high school?). At the time, Taylor and Burton were in the throes of the first of their eventual two divorces, so despite Taylor’s comparative irrelevance vis-à-vis the New Hollywood, both she and the film were generating plenty of publicity traction. With Glenda Jackson, Jane Fonda, Karen Black, and Faye Dunaway crowding my movie infatuations back then, Elizabeth Taylor was more a gossip magazine stalwart and movie star for my parents than an actress I paid much attention to. 

Taylor had been effectively off my radar since 1968’s Secret Ceremony (which would make a great double bill with The Driver’s Seat, by the way), but my interest was reignited when she starred in the surprisingly effective mystery thriller Night Watch (1973). When I read that the forthcoming The Driver’s Seat (made between the movies Ash Wednesday and The Bluebird) was also to be a thriller, I was seriously stoked and eagerly anticipated its release. 

But like several other ‘70s releases that pinned their hopes on the Nostalgia Craze appeal of faded-luster Classic Hollywood (Mae West’s Sextette; Billy Wilder’s Fedora; Marlene Dietrich and Kim Novak in Just A Gigolo), The Driver’s Seat opened in theaters with all the fanfare of an ex-mobster entering the witness protection program. Despite Elizabeth Taylor’s star power, The Driver’s Seat (Taylor’s first completely foreign-made film) struggled to get American distribution and was barely shown outside of a handful of major cities. In fact, it wasn’t released in my neck of the woods (San Francisco) until 1978, by which time I had graduated from high school and moved to Los Angeles. 

Instead of opening in arthouses where it belonged, when The Driver's Seat finally had its San Francisco release in August of 1978, it played at one of the grindhouse theaters on Market Street on a double bill with a Sophia Loren movie I'd never heard of.

For the longest time The Driver’s Seat existed as one of those movies more talked about than actually seen. And, as so often happens in such cases, its unavailability gave it a cult cachet. When I finally saw it in the mid-to-late ‘80s (a VHS rental, I think), The Driver’s Seat had earned the reputation of being one of Taylor’s so-bad-it’s-good camp-fests, surpassing even BOOM! (1968) in outlandishness. 

Armed with little else to go on, that's the perspective through which I approached it and enjoyed it. But as I’ve learned in the years since—after several revisits and reading the novella—watching The Driver’s Seat exclusively through the prism of its arthouse camp appeal is like not really seeing it at all.

Nothing goes well for Lise when she's not in the driver's seat

If the tenets of camp embrace artifice, stylistic excess, and a preoccupation with offbeat sex, then The Driver’s Seat more than qualifies for the classification. With its dialogue that wouldn’t sound out of place in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: “When I diet, I diet. When I orgasm, I orgasm. I don’t believe in mixing the two cultures,”; Neely O’Hara-suitable outbursts: (Lise) “Well then, don’t just stand there staring at me like a chicken with one eye! Help me!”; and scenes of Taylor writhing around on a bed clutching her breasts, or Andy Warhol popping up like he’s en route to his Love Boat cameo, 12 years early…there’s no denying that The Driver’s Seat can be a delightfully kitschy howl.

I've never been sure if the bandage on Lise's left wrist is a character clue related to what was briefly disclosed early in the film regarding her history of mental illness, or merely evidence of the famously accident-prone actress' latest mishap.

But I contend—and this goes back to my interpreting the movie as something of a fractured fairy tale about a lonely and unbalanced woman’s romantic obsession with death—that The Driver’s Seat is such an unusual, even impenetrable story told with so few narrative guardrails that responding to it purely as camp was just the easiest, most entry-level route of access for me (laughter often being the go-to when one is confused or made uncomfortable by something ). But when I stopped trying to laugh at The Driver’s Seat, it surprised me how much I was moved and disturbed by it.

Lise-  I feel homesick.
Bill- Homesick for what?
Lise- My loneliness. I want to go back home to feel all my loneliness again.

Okay, I admit it. That exchange gave me waterworks. 

PERFORMANCES

While the results of her efforts tended to vary significantly, I nevertheless have to hand it to Elizabeth Taylor for not taking the predictable career path her global motion picture celebrity afforded. She could easily have gone on churning out formulaic, commercially successful potboilers like The Sandpiper and The V.I.Ps, but throughout the late '60s and ‘70s, she instead pursued daring, unconventional roles in often aggressively offbeat films.

I rank Elizabeth Taylor’s performance in The Driver’s Seat as one of her most emotionally resonant of this period, especially in the film’s latter third. It's then that the heretofore performative aspects of Lise’s madness grow more internal, evoking a weary despondency that’s truly heartbreaking. 

But paradoxically speaking, while I think Taylor is definitely the best thing in the film and its principal driving force (see what I did there?), I also think she’s its biggest liability—or rather, her inescapable Taylor-ness is. The Driver’s Seat is one of my favorite ‘70s films, capturing the darkness of Nixon-era nihilism, post-Women’s Lib uncertainty, and “Me Era” selective self-delusions. But how accessible can any of this be when the most significant obstacle anyone watching The Driver’s Seat is faced with is trying to forget you’re watching Elizabeth Taylor? 

I'd read that at one time, director Luchino Visconti had once hoped to make The Driver’s Seat with Glenda Jackson. Oh, my God! Jackson's casting would have been ideal, what with her talent and no-nonsense gravitas making the film easily imaginable as a totally camp-free experience (as much as a Visconti film can be divested of camp, I suppose). While I'm sure Taylor's participation was integral to financing and getting the film green-lit, I can't help but mourn the subtleties lost. Take, for example, the dramatic significance of Lise's adoption of such a luridly flashy appearance for her sojourn in Italy. Signaling as it does Lise's identity crisis and mental disintegration, its impact was considerably defanged by the fact that by the 1980s--when I saw it---Taylor had adopted this very look as her personal style during her José “Shake your head, darling!” Eber, big hair, big-makeup period.

Lise's "madwoman" eye makeup was all the rage by 1980 (Brooke Shields, Vogue, 1980).
No wonder the only thing I thought about the first time I saw The Driver's Seat
was how incredibly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor's eyes are.

Documents in the Muriel Spark Archives at the National Library of Scotland reveal that the author was happy with the casting of Elizabeth Taylor, and the two exchanged Mutual Admiration Society letters before production began.

In later years, Spark has maintained that she thinks Taylor did a good job in the film, only that she was perhaps miscast: “Elizabeth Taylor was very good, but she looked too healthy to be the neurotic girl. 

There was no way in which Elizabeth Taylor could look as if she wanted to die. She looked as if she wanted to drink.”   Muriel Spark -  SF Examiner May 21, 1986

It's unclear whether Lise is pursuing or following her destiny, but I love how
the film signifies her being on the right path by its use of a glowing orb of light. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Dangerous Women. 

Lise’s last words in The Driver’s Seat are “Kill me!” Gloria’s (Jane Fonda) last words in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? are “I’m ready.” Theresa’s (Diane Keaton) last words in Looking for Mr. Goodbar are “Do it!” 

Was this a trend or something? I kinda think so.

To me, these films, with their tragically bleak conclusions, form a trilogy that encapsulates the male-centric New Hollywood's perception of what I call the 'Dangerous Woman.' This character, a contemporary, post-The Feminine Mystique iteration of the disillusioned Angry Young Man of ‘50s New Wave cinema, is seen as a threat to the established order, and her only 'out' or 'Happy Ending' is often depicted as self-destruction.

"It was as though something came out of her--some force that all women feel latent in themselves...stifled. A potential for catastrophe. In her, it was terrible. Terrifying." 
- A witness describing Lise to the police

What connects The Driver’s Seat to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Looking for Mr. Goodbar is that they are all about women…angry, frustrated, or rebellious women…who, for one reason or another, have reached the frayed end of what Alexandre Dumas called “the slender thread” by which life and fortune hang. 

 Movies in the '70s gave us literal armies of angry, disillusioned, and rebellious men who were perceived to be heroic in their discontent. Not so much with women. 

Female characters embodying the same disillusionment were viewed differently onscreen. Maybe because there are audiences, male and female alike, who can identify with the male desire to stick it to "The Man" easier than they can get behind a woman sticking it to "Men" in general. 

I like to think that the time has passed when death is seen as the only recourse and outcome for cinema’s 'Dangerous Women.' But provocatively, in this day and age where the fundamental human right of body autonomy is still a debated subject, it gives me food for thought to ponder how The Driver’s Seat presents Lise’s suicide (or assisted suicide, if you will)—the kind of act traditionally associated with the loss of control—as something so controlled and plotted that it takes on an air of self-actualization. As though Lise is exercising the only power she may feel she has, the power to do with herself as she pleases. The ultimate exercising of her right to choose. Even if it's death.

And if that doesn't sound like a Grim(m) Fairy Tale, I don't know what does.

Into The Woods

BONUS MATERIAL:

In 2015, The National Theater of Scotland staged a theatrical version of The Driver's Seat adapted and directed by Laurie Sansom. Starring Morven Christie as Lise. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2024