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

KÖTÜ TOHUM (THE BAD SEED) 1963

* Spoiler Alert! This critical essay presumes the reader's familiarity with the 1956 film The Bad Seed and features major spoilers. Plot points and details related to both films are divulged for critical discussion and analysis.

Show of hands; how many of you folks out there were aware of a 1963 Turkish remake of that beloved camp classic about pigtails, penmanship, and passed-on psychopathology, The Bad Seed (1956)? That many, huh? I don't believe you.

Please appreciate, dear reader, any aspersions cast on your doubtless incontrovertible honesty is simply me projecting my absolute gobsmacked astonishment at how—after being near-obsessed with The Bad Seed for nigh on six decades—I've only just NOW discovered this movie! And it commemorating its 60th anniversary, no less.

From what little I've been able to glean, Kötü Tohum (Bad Seed) was a very popular release in its country of origin but was never given a foreign market release in the U.S. .… perhaps for copyright-related reasons (its score is comprised of music culled from disparate sources, e.g., Leonard Bernstein's "Maria" cha-cha from West Side Story and Alex North's "Unchained Melody.”) All of which would explain why I never saw it, but does absolutely nothing toward clearing up how, in all these years, I never managed to hear or read a single word about the existence of this extraordinary remake of a lifelong favorite. Indeed, had it not been for a blurry, TV-to-VHS transfer of Kötü Tohum popping up in my YouTube suggestions menu a few years back (which seems to be the only copy in circulation), I might never have seen it at all.

Click here to read my essay on the original The Bad Seed (1956) 

Nancy Kelly as Christine Penmark and Patty McCormack as Rhoda Penmark

By way of a bit of backstory: The Bad Seed is a 1954 bestselling suspense novel by William March whose plot is built on the somewhat wobbly premise of an angel-faced 8-year-old inheriting the homicidal genes of her serial-killer grandmother. The then-explosive theme of a child committing cold-blooded murders appealed to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Maxwell Anderson (Key Largo, Anne of the Thousand Days), who turned March's book into a Tony Award-winning Broadway play later that year.

The sweet smell of Broadway success wafted all the way to Hollywood, and in 1956, movie director Mervyn LeRoy (Little Caesar, Gypsy) retained the services of most of the Broadway cast for the somewhat sensationalized screen adaptation. The Hays Office, Hollywood's self-regulating censorship board, mandated The Bad Seed alter its original twist ending (which saw Rhoda getting away with her crimes) to one in which Rhoda involuntarily keeps an appointment with "Heaven's Electric Chair." With a reassuring "cast curtain call," coda tacked on for good measure. The movie version of The Bad Seed was a boxoffice hit with 4 Academy Award nominations.

1956                                                1963

The Bad Seed premiered on broadcast TV in 1962, quickly becoming a late-night movie programming staple. I saw it for the first time in 1966 when I was eight. My initial impressions: a) It was really scary, b) "Au Clair de la Lune" would forever creep me out, and c) Rhoda Penmark was my first movie monster that wasn't a vampire, werewolf, or creature from outer space.

But just as quickly—thanks to the dated artifice of its plot, its stagey over-rehearsed performances, and Patty McCormack's James-Cagney-in-a-pinafore take on Rhoda—chills were soon replaced by chuckles, and The Bad Seed morphed irretrievably into a movie I loved for its camp appeal and unintentional laughs. 

Stateside, The Bad Seed has only spawned TV movie remakes. 
The first, starring David Carradine & Blair Brown, aired on ABC in 1985. The latter two (2018 & 2022) were rare non-Christmas-themed Lifetime Network movies in which Patty McCormack appeared as an unusually inept child psychologist. Rob Lowe gender-flipped the Nancy Kelly role in the 2018 movie, which I think abandoned the whole hereditary thing (I can't be sure because I fell asleep watching it).      

Subsequent TV movie remakes (at least three, by my count) sought to rectify this, but those not hampered by their utter lack of distinction in the casting department (not just any kid with a SAG card can step into Patty McCormack's metal-cleated Mary Janes) betrayed their fundamental lack of understanding of the material by wrongheadedly trying to turn The Bad Seed into some kind of "invincible killer" franchise like The Omen or Godzilla.  Instead of finding something new in the material or, at the very least, having a clue as to what made The Bad Seed work in the first place, each new iteration only confirmed and solidified The Bad Seed's already high-ranking status in the canons of camp. 

I expected more of the same when I settled in to watch Kötü Tohum.

The very LAST thing I expected was to be moved to tears (!) by a sensitive, thoughtfully reimagined adaptation that remains doggedly faithful to the original (it keeps the Hollywood-mandated finale) yet strikes out on its own with an insolent daring that borders on brilliance. 

In prioritizing action over exposition, human emotion over melodrama, and narrative conflict over genre-driven shock mechanisms, Kötü Tohum is an act of (little)monster regeneration rivaling anything attempted by Dr. Frankenstein.

Alev Oraloglu as Alev Caliktas - (Rhoda Penmark)

Lale Oraloglu as Lale Celiktas - (Christine Penmark)

Ozturk Serengil as Memo - (Leroy) 

Nedret Guvenc as Nuran Seren - (Mrs. Hortense Daigle)

Levent Haskan as Cemel Seren - (Claude Daigle)

Real-life mother and daughter Lale and Alev Oraloğlu star as the Christine and Rhoda Penmark of Kötü Tohum; their performances' relaxed, easy chemistry setting this adaptation's naturalistic tone. Both actresses reprise the roles they originated in a successful 1961 theatrical run of The Bad Seed performed at Istanbul's Oraloğlu Theater (founded in 1960 by Lale Oraloğl—an esteemed actress, director, writer, & producer…with her husband, journalist Ali Oraloğlu). 

[NOTE* I'm claiming the "Old Dogs, New Tricks" rule here: The 1956 movie has been in my pop culture Rolodex for too long. For the sake of clarity (chiefly my own), I will be referring to all the characters in the remake by their names in the original movie.]

Hale Akinli as Mrs. Nevin - (Miss Fern)

As remakes go, Kötü Tohum is a perfect example of the adage: It's not the tale; it's in the telling. 

Part of the shock value of the original The Bad Seed (released when idealized images of ‘50s middle-class life flourished via TV shows like Leave It To  Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Donna Reed Show) was rooted in the distasteful notion that a child (innocence itself) from a good home and raised with all the advantages of wealth and a good neighborhood, could ever turn out to be a coldblooded killer.  

The 1956 Bad Seed portends to be a “Nature vs. Nurture” debate, but there’s never really any doubt that the whitebread suburban ideal of Rhoda’s upbringing will prove blameless for what Rhoda has become. A verdict of “Nature” (she inherited her evil, end of story) restores conformist order and absolves the surviving characters from having to ask themselves what part their blinkered ignorance, pampered over-indulgence, and perfectionist values of achievement (“Oh, you like little girls to curtsy?”) played in fostering Rhoda’s psychopathy.

Christine's landlords are no longer Monica Breedlove and her "larvated homosexual" brother Emory. In the remake, they are (r.) Mrs. Malek (Bedia Muvahhit) and her daughter (center) Gonul (Suna Pekuysal). Both are depicted as horribly elitist snobs. 

Kötü Tohum—directed and adapted screenplay by Nevzat Pesen—retains all the pertinent aspects of The Bad Seed's plot, but in the retelling, it looks at the insulated, elitist world of the privileged classes and sees it as EXACTLY the sort of environment where narcissism is cultivated, a lack of compassion is normalized, and rabid self-interest and the casual disregard for the humanity of others could easily go unnoticed. In such surroundings, a pint-sized sociopath would call no attention to herself. 

The Seren Family: Nuran, Cemel, & Yilmaz (Muzaffer Yenen) / Claude Daigle & parents 

The most startling and noteworthy of Kötü Tohum's narrative inventions is the decision to make the traditionally unseen character of Claude Daigle a major protagonist. Written (to heartbreaking effect...they even give him an impending birthday) to be the sweetest, most compassionate character in the movie, Claude's prominence in the story has a seismic impact on every aspect of the film.     

Kötü Tohum has been very effectively opened up and spends a great deal of time showing us Rhoda's relationship with Claude—they're classroom seatmates, Claude harboring a bit of a puppy love crush on Rhoda that somewhat blinds him to her polite indifference. The film trims away a great deal of narrative fat (bye-bye to the Freudian mumbo-jumbo, windy true-crime debates, and endless mansplaining) and makes the bold choice to dramatize events that occur offscreen or are merely talked about in the original (we're shown the Penmanship Contest [Yay!] and we actually see the murders [Yikes!]).

Rhoda goes head-to-head with her nemesis, handyman Leroy. Only this time, it's no dainty tea set they're squaring off over; it's a toy train set. One whose propulsive force (that only goes in circles) is a marvelously cinematic analogy for their roundelay sparring.

The cumulative effect (and one that proves a major plus) is that Christine's emotional journey of discovery is no longer so centralized. Indeed, her big "Whose child am I?" revelation scene is introduced and dispensed with so quickly that it feels as though the director was embarrassed by the whole "My child inherited my mom's skipped-a-generation serial killer genes" gimmick.

Whatever instincts inspired Pesen's decisions in adapting the material, I must say they're exemplary. He and his talented cast have made Kötü Tohum a tighter, more cinematic, and, ultimately, for me, the most satisfying retelling of The Bad Seed.

The Bad Seed meets its match in the superb Kötü Tohum  

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

My gripe with most remakes is that they're so often these totally superfluous, market-driven retreads with nothing new to add. Kötü Tohum is the only remake of The Bad Seed to attempt to use the material to say something beyond the genre scope of its premise. Every scene written by Nevzat Pesen serves double duty: 1) as a critique of classism, bourgeois society, and its tendency to prioritize its needs over the concerns of others; 2) as a means of adding complexity to the characters and context to their relationships.

The Penmanship Contest

A fascinating fabrication of this remake is seeing just how the Penmanship Contest goes down. The entire class participates, and Rhoda (seated next to Claude) is as serious as a heart attack. Disaster strikes when her pencil breaks mid-test, leading her to turn wordlessly to Claude with a "Well...?" look on her face (though previously shown as aloof to his friendly overtures, it’s clear she’s not above exploiting his crush when she wants something).

Claude obliges by giving her his pencil (no “Thank you” from Rhoda), and while she resumes the contest, he sharpens the pencil and returns to his own paper. The director inserts a shot of their teacher catching sight of this act of gallantry, offering the tantalizing suggestion that Claude’s humanist values (prioritizing kindness over winning) may have also played a part in his ultimately winning the contest. 

The School Pageant

To be found in no other existing version of The Bad Seed is this marvelous school recital sequence held a few days after the Penmanship Contest. As the scene opens, Claude is shown dancing a vigorous twist onstage while Rhoda glowers at him from the wings. In the audience, the beaming Daigles sit within unfortunate earshot of Rhoda's mother and the two snobbish landladies; the latter commenting rudely on what an egregious error it was to have awarded the medal to anyone but Rhoda. 

Rhoda soon appears onstage in a meta, art-reflects-Iife number that sees a host of little girls dancing in tutus having their frolic brought to an abrupt halt by the intrusion of Rhoda brandishing a rifle (!). Understandably, the toe dancers scatter, leaving Rhoda (apparently playing a shepherd) with the stage all to herself, going solo. As she does every day in the school playground.

The Flashback

One of the principal virtues of Kötü Tohum is that it feels like a thriller made by a director who hasn't learned the clichés of the genre. As evidenced in the flashback sequence devised to accompany Rhoda's confession to her mother that she killed Claude at the picnic for the Penmanship Medal. Though an emotionally harrowing sequence, it's not written with any of the melodrama one would expect. The remake stays true to the characters' psychology, so instead of having Rhoda single-mindedly stalk Claude around the picnic grounds like Bruce the Shark in Jaws, Kötü Tohum introduces a note of tragic poignancy. It's Cladue who pursues. 

True to form, Rhoda is off to herself at the picnic, brooding while the other children play. Claude deserts his friends to check on Rhoda, who, in a repeat of her "willingness to exploit a vulnerability" behavior during the contest, informs Claude that she’s going off by herself to the lake, making sure to drop the bomb “You can come if you want to” as she departs. Poor lovestruck Claude follows, his doom truly sealed when Rhoda takes his hand in her first and only display of friendliness towards him. 

 

"What will you give me for a basket of kisses?"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS  

The general mindset of American pop culture is that the darker or more hopeless something is, the more inherently "real" or true-to-life it must be. Happy endings, or conclusions where justice is meted out, are seen as pure Hollywood copouts. 

I'm unaware of 1963 Turkish cinema being bound by any of the censorship constraints of Hollywood, 1956, so the decision to retain The Bad Seed's Hollywood ending over the play's original twist (ironic, cynical) ending is perhaps surprising, but it's also consistent; Kötü Tohum is a very moral movie.

Where The Bad Seed often emphasized shock and melodrama, Kötü Tohum just broke my heart in the way it gave prominence to the pain of grief and loss. The actors in this film are first-rate.    

Indeed, Kötü Tohum's prime distinguishing trait is its humanist perspective. Through its expansion and centralizing of the Claude Daigle character (representing the virtues of decency, kindness, and compassion), I felt the film established the crucial elements of its moral universe. To end on a note of irony or "twist" for the sake of an audience gasp would feel incredibly irresponsible to me.

And how is Rhoda getting the "Leave Her to Heaven" retribution treatment any kind of a happy ending, anyway? It's only a happy ending if you forget about Claude's anguished parents, Leroy's agony, or absentee dad Mr. Penmark losing both his wife and daughter within days of one another.

He doesn't, and they don't.

I don't usually recommend the movies I write about, but if you're a fan of The Bad Seed, I would definitely recommend keeping your eyes open for a copy of this movie on YouTube or elsewhere online. I won't say you'll feel the same way as I do about it, but  I'm certain you'll find comparing the differences between the two irresistible.

Clip from  Kötü Tohum  (press CC for English subtitles)  

BONUS MATERIAL

All Grown Up

I don't know if the mother and daughter acting team of Lale Oraloğlu and Alev Oraloğlu ever made another film together, but they appeared in several productions at Istanbul's Oraloğlu Theater. Lale Oraloğlu, who passed away in 2007 at 82, had a long and distinguished career in virtually every facet of TV, film, and theater…in front of and behind the scenes. Kötü Tohum was Alev Oraloğlu's first leading role in a movie. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she continues to act in television, film, and theater today.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2023

THE TENANT 1976

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

Somewhere beyond the boundaries of the healthy, adaptive kind of Cultural Paranoia that I, a Black gay man, accesses daily to navigate hostile environments of discrimination and racial bias; on the far side of whatever amorphous fears are harbored by the kind of people who routinely dress in fatigues and buy anything with the word “Tactical” on the packaging; past the limits of the alternately narcissistic/masochistic borders of “Everyone’s out to get me!” delusional paranoia…there lies the macabre Twilight Zone that is Roman Polanski’s brilliant The Tenant. A bizarre, Kafkaesque exploration of social alienation and encroaching madness that film critic Vincent Canby accurately described as a nightmare vision of “Emotional isolation that becomes physical.”

Adapted for the screen with almost religious faithfulness by Polanski and longtime collaborator Gerard Brach from the 1964 novel Le Locataire Chimérique by Roland Topor, The Tenant marks the Academy Award-winning director’s 9th feature film. It also marks what many consider to be the third and final entry in his unofficial Urban Paranoia Trilogy (aka, his Apartment Trilogy): Repulsion – 1965, Rosemary’s Baby – 1965, & The Tenant – 1976. 

For his part, Polanski flatly denies ever deliberately setting out to make a contemporary terror triptych. But admirers of his work have seized upon the thematic recurrence in these films of many of the director’s most fervent obsessions: paranoia, alienation, sex, psychosis, subjective reality, and cramped dwellings. Each film in the trilogy is a modern-gothic study of urban dread set in a different, obliquely-threatening, impersonal city (London, Manhattan, and Paris, respectively). Their eerie narratives unfold largely within the oppressive confines of decaying apartment structures, wherein rooms take on the character of four-walled prisons-of-the-mind, mirroring the progressive mental deterioration of their psychologically isolated protagonists.

The lead character in The Tenant is male (Polanski himself, his 3rd on-screen appearance in one of his own films), signifying the trilogy’s sole departure from having a woman as the central focus of a storyline. 

It's neither coy nor misleading when I say that The Tenant does not disrupt the gender prominence of the trilogy. 

Roman Polanski as Trelkovsky

Isabelle Adjani as Stella

Shelley Winters as The Concierge

Melvyn Douglas as Monsieur Zy

Jo Van Fleet as Madame Dioz

Lila Kedrova as Madame Gaderian

There's a scene in the movie musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever where Barbra Streisand—as wallflower go-a-longer Daisy Gamble—discloses to hypnotherapist Yves Montand the results of a vocational guidance test: "Healthy, adjusted, and no character. I mean, no character of any kind. I mean, not even any…characteristics!”

Well, that describes The Tenant's Monsieur Trelkovsky in a nutshell. Trelkovsky, a soft-spoken Polish-born office clerk of indeterminate disposition who continually has to remind people he’s a French citizen, is a fellow who tiptoes through life as though he holds only a month-to-month tenancy on his own body.

During what can only be assumed to be a severe mid-‘70s Parisian housing shortage, Trelkovsky is so desperate for lodgings that he pursues—with a self-interest bordering on the ghoulish—the not-yet-vacated apartment of a not-yet-dead attempted suicide. The tenant, a young Egyptologist named Simone Choule, threw herself from the window of her flat just days before and now lies in a coma at a nearby hospital.

Faced with a moral conundrum (his wish to acquire the apartment is the silent, simultaneous wish that she won’t recover), Trelkovsky, in a gesture bearing the outward appearance of sympathy, but could just as likely be a cagey "calculation of probability" field trip—visits Mlle Choule in the hospital. Wrapped head to toe in bandages, the Egyptologist indeed looks like a mummy herself, with nothing of the woman beneath visible save for a single staring eye and a gaping mouth from which a tooth is conspicuously, grotesquely missing.

Presented as though it were a bonus feature of the apartment, the concierge shows
Trelkovsky the hole Simone Choule's body made in the glass awning four stories below

Simone Choule dies shortly after this visit (brought to a jarring conclusion when the patient lets out a soul-rattling scream at the sight of the stranger at her bedside). And Trelkovsky—pragmatically heedless of any possible bad omens augured by gaining advantageous self-benefit at the price of another's misfortune—wastes no time moving into the apartment. An apartment that hasn’t yet been entirely cleared of the dead woman’s possessions.

Early scenes show Trelkovsky getting what he wants by adopting a persona of over-polite inoffensiveness (e.g., he finesses the bulldoggish concierge by paying her a gratuity and placates the surly landlord by appealing to his financial practicality). These passively assertive acts suggest that perhaps Trelkovsky’s outwardly suppressed identity is more of an adaptive skill; a tool a Polish émigré hones in a city where being “foreign” instantly brands one a target of suspicion and distrust.

Presuming that a certain characterlessness and malleability of personality are what Trelkovsky has always relied upon as a survival mechanism to go about life as unobtrusively as possible; The Tenant effectively puts the turn to the screw by making this quality in Trelkovsky...a “vacancy of self”...the tragic flaw that will come to seal his fate. 

Though interested in Simone's friend, Stella, Trelkovsky, by lying about knowing Simone and keeping his occupancy of her apartment a secret, must keep part of his true identity hidden.  

The apartment building Trelkovsky now calls home can be summed up by a term coined in Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery; a neurotic’s jackpot. Almost immediately after moving in, Trelkovsky begins to suspect every tenant of being a furtive, inhospitable oddball who, when not lodging noise complaints about his every move; monitoring his comings and goings; or staring into his apartment from windows across the courtyard, is working in concert in a plot to get him to somehow become Simon Choule and give an encore performance of her dramatically gravitational exit.

But after an incident at Simone's funeral (where his sexual guilt turns a eulogy into a fire and brimstone lambaste), it's apparent Trelkovsky isn't what you'd call a reliable narrator. 

Thus, The Tenant builds suspense by sustaining a disconcertingly ambiguous tone throughout. One is never quite sure whether Trelkovsky's horrors are psychological (a mental breakdown), sociological (xenophobia), or supernatural (anyone for a mummy’s curse?)

Trelkovsky: Tomb Raider

Clockwise from top left: 1. The mummified Simone Choule. 2. Trelkovsky receives a postcard of an Egyptian sarcophagus. 3. In a hallucinative state, Trelkovsky sees Egyptian hieroglyphs on the building’s communal bathroom wall. 4. Trelkovsky is given one of Simone's books, The Romance of a Mummy by Théophile Gautier (1858). 

Simone being an Egyptologist, rather than merely being a bit of backstory info about the former renter, becomes a prominent theme underscoring the somewhat paranormal shift The Tenant takes in its second act. The fact that so many of Simone Choule’s left-behind items (books, drawings, sculpture) reflect her interest and immersion in the culture of ancient Egypt makes Trelkovsky’s swift occupancy of her apartment feel as though he’s somehow disturbing the resting space of the deceased. Similarly, the Egyptian belief in immortality, with its attendant burial rituals devoted to preserving the body and the soul's rebirth, finds its queasy contemporary correlative in Simone Choule’s medical mummification. Swathed in bandages, Simone and her staring eye and missing tooth horrifically reference the Egyptian “opening of the mouth” ceremony; a rite performed to return the human senses to the soul in the afterlife.

Self-Alienation / Fragmented Identity

Trelkovsky’s “possession” by Simone is entirely superficial (he gains absolutely no insight into the woman’s self) signaling his metamorphosis is more a self-generated delusion than an act of actually "becoming" Choule. Amounting to little more than the appropriation of only the most external signifiers of Simone's identity—clothes, makeup, cigarettes, hot chocolate, books—Trelkovsky turning into Simone feels less like The Tenant seeking to explore the flexible quadrants of gender and more like surrealists Topor and Polanski merely attaching existential theory to the question "Do clothes make the (wo)man?"

Trelkovsky's one success at making human contact.
Unable to prevent his own suicide, Trelkovsky intervenes in the possible suicide of Simone's unrequited suitor George Bedar (played by Jacques Narcy). Bedar's romantic misdirection (he was apparently unaware of Simone's disinterest in men) mirrors Trelkovsky's inert sexuality

In Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski toyed with the notion of ancient evil (pagan witchcraft and Satan worship) surviving into the 20th century. A similar vein is mined in The Tenant’s paralleling of Egyptian mythology (immortality and the dominance of the soul in determining self) with the dissociative aspects of modern urban life (the separate-yet-together existence of apartment-dwelling) that prioritize the individual. I.e., a civilization that values holed-up privacy, solitude, keeping to oneself, and minding one’s own business can foster relativism and the solipsistic view that the mind alone is sovereign of the self.

But if the mind is the sole determiner of self, is each person then ruled by their own individual perception of reality?

Heads, attached and disembodied, figure as a motif in The Tenant. Ceramic busts appear in the apartments of Trelkovsky (Egyptian, of course) and Mr. Zy. Trelkovsky has a hallucination that his neighbors are playing football with a human head (Simone's or his own) in the courtyard

A drunk Trelkovsky ponders the philosophical, metaphysical,
and mythical concepts of "self"

The Tenant premiered at The Regency Theater in San Francisco in the summer of 1976, and I was beyond excited to see it. Expectations were high, as it had been two years since the release of Chinatown. The Tenant’s chilling teaser trailer (with the soon-to-be-unfortunate tagline “No one does it to you like Roman Polanski”) promised a welcome return to type from the director who scared the hell out of me when I was eleven with what was then...and still remains...my #1 favorite motion picture of all time: Rosemary’s Baby.

The Wide-Angle Distorted Perception Peephole Shot
Repulsion - Rosemary's Baby - The Tenant

 WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

It's not overstatement when I say The Tenant had me from the jump (pun possibly intended). After the sun-baked Southern California vistas of Chinatown, I was delighted with Polanski’s return to creepily claustrophobic interiors, menacing old people, and his lived-in, off-kilter brand of psychological horror. A movie that hits the ground running—with a dizzying, voyeuristic panning shot of apartment windows, revealing shifting glimpses of both Trelkovsky and Simone Choule staring through curtains at “the real(?)” Trelkovsky entering the courtyard to inquire about the availability of the apartment he already appears to be occupying—The Tenant is a film that wears its weirdness on its sleeve. 

That's the film's composer Philippe Sarde as the theater patron who prefers
watching Trelkovsky and Stella to watching the movie screen. It's a running paradox
in The Tenant that Trelkovsky's privacy decreases as his alienation increases.

Given invaluable, atmospheric assist by Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist and French composer Philippe Sarde, Polanski, in adapting Roland Topor’s novel, proves, as he did with Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, he's adept at making someone else's nightmares seem as though they originated out of his own well-stocked store of personal demons and obsessions. Sharing Topor’s outsider's eye for finding the ominous in the ordinary (both are Paris-born sons of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents), the close-quarters dictates of The Tenant's setting allow Polanski to indulge his trademark canniness in turning living environments into starkly-rendered extensions of a character’s inner dread.  

Roland Topor, the surrealist artist, novelist, and playwright behind The Tenant, played
 Renfield opposite Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu (1979). Topor's scatological preoccupations, dark humor, and absurdist worldview find their aesthetic twin in Polanski.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Psychological thrillers about personality theft, duality, and the fluidity of identity have fascinated me…forever. Especially when they spill over into possible supernatural/horror territory. Growing up the only boy of five children, parents divorced/mom remarries, Catholic school, gay, shy, and the only Black family in an all-white neighborhood gave me a leg-up in the “Who the fuck am I?” adolescent identity sweepstakes. So, films were my retreat, and movies that (melo)dramatized the puzzle of self: Vertigo (1958), The Servant (1963), Secret Ceremony (1968), Performance (1970), Images (1972), Obsession (1976), 3 Women (1977), Fedora (1978), Dead Ringers (1988), Single White Female (1992), and Black Swan (2010)—were my catharsis.

My recently having had the opportunity to read the novel prompted my partner and me to watch The Tenant last Halloween. My first time seeing the film in several years. This time out, I was struck by how many of the persecutory torments pushing Trelkovsky to the brink of madness (being persistently watched, always having his behavior monitored, instantly being branded a target of suspicion, prejudicially profiled, having his experience invalidated) is kinda like an average day for a Black person living in America. 

The terrorism of racism and "Living While Black" has always resulted in feelings of alienation, isolation, and anxiety among Black people, and movies like The Tenant have been a means of accessing those fears in a broad, generalized context. However, it wasn't until the release of 1995's Tales from the Hood by Rusty Cundieff, and Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) that I ever saw a director illuminate the anxieties particular to racism and unique to the Black Experience in this country in the form and context of the horror genre.

The American cast members of The Tenant

PERFORMANCES

Polanski started out as an actor (and never stopped, if all those behind-the-scenes photos of him “directing by demonstrating” tell the tale), so I wasn’t really surprised by how effective he is in the role of Trelkovsky. Casting himself very much to type, Polanski essentially IS the Trelkovsky of Topor’s novel...there being the shadow of something unsavory about him even at his most vulnerable. And he's particularly persuasive in conveying the anxiety and jumpy self-absorption that accompanies his character’s intensifying psychotic delusions. 

I've no idea what motivated Polanski to cast so many American actors in major roles in this Paris-set thriller (likely financial in origin, to secure American distribution or wide release). But the overall effect is so discordant it actually feels intentional. The clashing of Trelkovsky’s faint Polish accent against all those flat Yankee diphthongs dramatically emphasizes his "otherness.". At the same time, the incongruousness of the glaringly non-Gallic Shelly Winters, Jo Van Fleet, and Melvyn Douglas only seem to add another layer of wacko to The Tenant’s existing Theater of the Absurd vision of Paris. 

French cinema icon Claude Daupin makes a brief appearance (with Louba Guertchikoff)
 but his mellifluous accent is dubbed over with an affectless American voice 

Unfortunately, a similar decision to have many members of the film's French supporting cast dubbed (poorly) by American actors doesn't fare nearly as well. Certainly, a case could be made that those braying American voices coming out of the mouths of Trelkovsky's boorish friends is a reflection of how he sees them, but I only found it distracting. Polanski's eye for casting people with unusual and characterful faces is as sharp as ever, but hearing those commonplace voices coming out of those unorthodox faces was like having ice water thrown in my face. It jolts me out of the atmospheric dream world I'd rather be immersed in. 

Although sorely underutilized, I adore Isabelle Adjani in The Tenant. I only recently learned that Adjani's voice was dubbed by Dark Shadows actress Kathryn Leigh Scott. Seen here with Sam Waterston in 1974's The Great Gatsby

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Polanski films are always rich in visual motifs, and The Tenant is no exception. The aforementioned Egyptian details, mummification references, and emphasis on all things cranial. Present, too, are his amplified ticking clocks and distorted perception shots of hallways and rooms (in particular, a fabulous fever dream sequence where Trelkovsky is dwarfed by the furniture in his room).

La Peinture Lure (Hello, Google Translate)
It seems Polanski hired Roland Topor to paint this mystifying poster
that appears frequently and enigmatically throughout the film

But in a film about paranoia, it's simply genius to have so many characters sporting those ginormous spectacles that were so popular in the '70s. They're like portable windows with magnified eyes staring out at Trelkovsky. 

The Tenant is one of my top five favorite Roman Polanski films. It's an intriguing puzzle that yields a different solution every time I watch it.

BONUS MATERIAL

The First-Time Tenant

I moved to Los Angeles in 1978, and my very first apartment was a small furnished single on the second floor of The Villa Elaine Apartments in Hollywood. I was 20 years old, my first time away from home, and I couldn’t believe I was living within walking distance of THE Hollywood and Vine. The rent was $160 a month, including utilities, and I was in absolute heaven. Built in 1925, The Villa Elaine has since been declared a historical landmark. My old apartment now goes for $1650.

My Apartment Is In Here Somewhere
I lived in the Villa Elaine until 1981, moving to a courtyard-view apartment in 1979 that afforded a Rear Window panorama of my neighbors. Note the poster for The Tenant at bottom left

The day I moved into The Villa Elaine was Sunday, June 4, 1978. A date whose significance was compounded by what happened after I’d settled in and kissed my parents (who’d driven me and my blue storage trunk down from Berkeley for a weekend of whirlwind apartment-hunting) goodbye.

To exercise my freedom, I went out to look at my "new neighborhood." My walk took me to Hollywood Blvd., where the movie Grease was having its World Premiere at Mann's Chinese Theater. In those days, onlookers could stand and star-gaze in relative close proximity behind a velvet rope, so I was overjoyed at experiencing a real-life The Day of the Locust moment (minus the apocalyptic carnage) and screamed along with the rest when Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta arrived in a vintage car.

As I walked back to my apartment, the 1977 Rufus & Chaka Khan song “Hollywood” playing on a loop in my head; I was thoroughly over the moon. I couldn’t believe my first night in LA had serendipitously yielded such a quintessential, only-in-Hollywood experience. All of which I, of course, took as an omen that I had found my new home. And I guess it was; June 4th of 2023 will mark my 45th Anniversary as an LA resident.

The Villa Elaine courtyard as it looks today

I’ve lived in many apartments over the years, and I'm happy to say I've never had an experience even remotely similar to what’s in The Tenant.

Scene from "The Tenant" (1976)

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009  -  2023