THE SHINING 1980

In 1980, if you were of R-rated moviegoing age and among those who first got a glimpse of that unforgettably chilling, minimalist classic of a theatrical teaser trailer for The Shining; there was no way in hell you weren't going to see the movie. (1980 Teaser Trailer for The Shining on YouTube)

If I remember correctly, I first saw the trailer at Hollywood’s Mann’s Chinese Theater as early as December of 1979 or January of 1980 (The Shining was released in May 1980 to kick off the Memorial Day weekend). Then, as now, the average movie trailer hewed to the familiar pattern of sensory bombardment combined with the suspense-killing, full disclosure of each and every plot point that might have rendered the film even remotely intriguing (the term, “spoilers” didn't exist). The trailer for The Shining deviated so significantly from the prevailing standard that when first appeared that famous static shot of the twin elevator doors, accompanied by that eerily intensifying discordant music, the theater became so still you could practically feel the collective pupils of the eyes in the audience dilate all at once.

In 1980 Stephen King was not the household name he is today so the floating title, “The Shining” drew little response. It was only when Stanley Kubrick’s name was revealed that the crowd joined together in what can best be described as an aggregate, apex-of-the-rollercoaster, intake of air. At the same time—as nothing had yet happened onscreen beyond the music growing increasingly agitated and ominous— a pervasive air of, WTF? mushroomed throughout the theater like a vapor.

And then, the slow-motion torrent of blood began to spew forth from the elevator shaft. Oh…My…God. All at once the thudding soundtrack was drowned out by a consolidated, rising-tide of “Whoooooa!” from the audience that lasted until the now-bloodstained screen once again displayed the film's title. A second or two of stunned silence was followed by applause, animated chatter, and delighted giggles of the sort usually associated with a children's birthday party after a magician has pulled off a particularly startling bit of trickery. On the strength of this one remarkably classy, 90-second trailer, coupled with the anomaly of an Oscar-nominated director of Kubrick’s stature venturing into the realm of horror, over the course of the next few months The Shining became the movie to see. 

When the Saul Bass-designed poster for The Shining began appearing all over Los Angeles, the film immediately jumped several points on my personal "Cool-o-meter" (I took this pic in April of 1980 on The Sunset Strip in front of the famous Whisky a Go Go during its short-lived punk phase)

I was especially hopeful about The Shining, inasmuch as I have always loved a good scare at the movies but had grown increasingly dismayed by 70s horror films’ over-reliance on gore and their tendency to think of shock cuts as viable substitutes for suspense and atmosphere. Considering both Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975) to be, if not exactly masterpieces, then certainly masterful, I sincerely believed that Kubrick’s The Shining had the potential to be the Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist of the '80s.

Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance

Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance

Danny Lloyd as Danny Torrance

Scatman Crothers as Dick Hallorann

Barry Nelson as Stuart Ullman

If ever you want to get both the best experience of a movie, yet at the same time the least reliable impression of how that film will actually perform at the boxoffice, go see it on opening day. I attended an evening show of The Shining when it opened on May 23, 1980 at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.  The turnout was amazing. The crowds stretched around the block, past the parking lot, and into the nearby residential neighborhood. All of us waiting in line (some as long as three hours) were geared up for the scare of our lives, positive we were going to be among the first to see the big blockbuster hit of the summer. Fanning the flames was an enormous blow-up of Newsweek magazine’s rave review of The Shining (“The Ultimate Horror Movie!”) displayed in the theater’s forecourt. When the ushers came to release the velvet rope, I’m sure our faces had about them the look of vague genuflection, as though we were being granted a supreme privilege rather than just being allowed to see a movie we’d just paid for.

Original Ending
I was lucky enough to have seen The Shining before Kubrick mandated the excising of the scene that takes place after Jack freezes to death in the maze, but before the final shot of the photograph in the Overlook Hotel lobby. The deleted scene, which adds another layer of "What??!!?" onto an already maddeningly enigmatic conclusion, had a suspiciously solicitous Stuart Ullman (the hotel manager) visiting Wendy and Danny in a hospital where Wendy is recovering from shock. Wendy is interested in hearing if any evidence had been found at the hotel of all that she had recounted to the authorities. Ullman informs her that while the bodies of her husband and Hallorann had been recovered, there was no evidence in the hotel of any of what she had reported as having seen or occurred there. 
He insists that she must have suffered some kind of breakdown and that it was all in her mind. After this, I seem to recall his making an offer for Wendy and Danny to move in with him, and (this was the kicker) before he leaves and out of Wendy's view, he hands Danny the yellow tennis ball that had earlier materialized out of that mysterious room 237.
Personally, I LOVED this ending and preferred it to the one which now stands, but I seem to be alone on that score. I went to see The Shining again the weekend after its opening and the scene had already been deleted.

There’s a point at which one’s expectations for a movie can be so high that, on first viewing, you’re not responding to the film so much as reacting to whether or not the film has met or dashed your hopes. Such was the case for me on first seeing The Shining. So keen was I on The Shining being the epic horror film the pedigree of its cast and director augured, that when it proved itself (only) to be an intelligent, superbly well-made, largely effective horror thriller, I was disappointed. 

And from the feel of things, so was the opening night audience. The electric tension that greeted the film’s early scenes over time gave way to a funny kind of mistrustful hesitancy in not knowing how to respond to the minimum horror and maximum attention to visual style. Let down by the film’s lack of cover-your-eyes scares, the eager-to-be-entertained audience instead zeroed in on the burlesque of Jack Nicholson’s performance. As Nicholson trotted out the entirety of his even-then overfamiliar arsenal of arched eyebrows, Cheshire cat grins, and baroque overplaying, the audience assuaged its sense of letdown by losing itself in the film's mood-killing, dubiously intentional black comedy.

It's very difficult for an actor to convincingly portray drunkenness or insanity without resorting to overacting and cliche. In The Shining, Jack Nicholson has the dual challenge of playing an alcoholic driven to madness (as Nicholson plays it, it's a pretty short trip). 

Taking their cue from an actor who didn’t appear to be taking things seriously himself, the audience started to find everything Nicholson did funny. Even when he wasn’t trying to be. The Shining began to pick up and find its rhythm by the latter third, but by then the audience had already been lost. The crowd leaving the theater that night was a considerably more subdued and bewildered one than had entered. By the end of the 3-day Memorial Day Weekend, word of mouth had more or less undermined all the good the trailer and the film’s sizable advertising budget had done, and The Shining limped along for the rest of the summer, a modest success, eclipsed at the boxoffice—proportionately by budget—by that other summer horror film release of 1980 (God help us), Friday the 13^th.
Ultimately, time, cable TV, home video, and the overall decline in the quality of horror films over the years, has allowed for a more clear-eyed, fair-handed assessment of The Shining’s virtues. Today it is widely regarded as a minor classic and one of Kubrick's most highly regarded films. Me, I like it a little more every time I see it, finding it easier to appreciate what Kubrick was trying to do when I no longer filter it through what I wanted him to do.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Stanley Kubrick is perhaps a little too removed a director to engage me emotionally in the way necessary for me to be made to feel real fear (the way Roman Polanski can), but there is something ideally chilling in the setup of a vaguely dysfunctional family holed up for an entire winter in an isolated hotel that may or may not be haunted. Where Kubrick really excels is in creating indelible images (the elevator scene alone qualifies the film for classic status), developing tension, and establishing a world wherein events proceed on a collision course of horror that feels devilishly preordained, yet the particulars of what is real and why it’s all happening are open to any number of interpretations. Letting his meticulously evoked intermingling of the paranormal and the supernatural propel the plot, The Shining is almost willful in its ambiguity. (And don’t let anyone convince you that there is a single “right” way to interpret The Shining. Part of the film's brilliance - and no small part of its frustration to many - is how well it supports many different, perfectly valid interpretations.)

The Torrances: One big, happy family.

PERFORMANCES

Jack Nicholson has been a star for so long that it’s easy to forget that in the years following his 1975 Oscar win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, many thought that Nicholson had fallen victim to the dreaded “Oscar Curse” (later dubbed The F. Murray Abraham Syndrome)— a downward-trajectory jinx that befalls the careers of many Academy Award winners. Jack Nicholson’s hammy and/or ineffectual turns in the late 70s flops The Missouri Breaks, The Last Tycoon & Goin' South, played like dry-runs for his over-the-top performance in The Shining, and critics were less than kind. Until just recently, I’ve always felt that Nicholson single-handedly ruined The Shining and that Kubrick afforded him far too much leeway (as he did Peter Sellers in Lolita). Even today I can’t say that I’m fully persuaded by Nicholson in the role, but I’ve since warmed up to his particular acting “choices” for his portrayal of Jack Torrance. The common complaint that Nicholson's Jack Torrance looks plenty crazy before he's even driven insane in The Shining echo a similar grievance leveled at the choice of actor John Cassavetes for the husband in Rosemary's Baby. To critics in 1968, Cassavetes looked guilty of something before his character even did anything.

On the flip side of my feelings about Jack Nicholson is my affection for the popularly-unpopular choice of actress Shelley Duvall. I think she is terrific in The Shining and any emotional engagement I have in the film at all is attributable to her pitch-perfect performance. Perhaps I’m prejudiced, but I’ve liked Duvall in everything I’ve seen her in…especially her Oscar-worthy work in Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977).  

The casting of actress Shelley Duvall in the role of Wendy Torrance rates high on the list of controversial Kubrick choices. Even her co-star weighed in on the decision: 

“I said, ‘Shelley Duvall?! What’s the idea, Stanley?’ And he says, ‘Well, you gotta have somebody in that part that maybe the audience would also like to kill a little bit!’”

Interview with Jack Nicholson by Nev Pierce for Empire Magazine 

If critics didn't appreciate Duvall in The Shining, they more than made up for it with the raves she garnered later that year playing the part she was born to play: Olive Oyl in Robert Altman's Popeye (1980)  

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

  The Overlook Hotel as envisioned by Kubrick and his team is one creepily spectacular location for a horror film.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As opposed to what I enjoy most about good horror films, The Shining never hits me where I live in terms of tapping into some deep-seated fear and giving it a face. The single scene that accomplishes this is the brilliant "All work and no play" reveal of Jack Torrance's insanity (which hit me with the same jolt that the Scrabble anagram sequence in Rosemary's Baby did). What I think The Shining has that keeps me returning to it and what has caused it to consistently rise in my estimation, is that it's terribly smart and thoughtful in its construction. There are worse things you can say about a horror movie than that it is one of ideas. 

The Shining has perhaps more head than heart, but its predetermination has an intrigue and attraction all its own. Whether it feels like a treatise on the eternal nature of evil, a dramatization of domestic violence, or just a vision of a family going mad together, it makes me want to watch every corner of the frame, listen to every detail of dialog, literally scour the film from start to finish in hopes of uncovering the "key" to what it all signifies. In the end, The Shining may not have much to say about the many questions it proposes, but a movie that provokes thought, any kind of thought, is always a step in the right direction.

Promotional postcard for the truly atrocious 1997 TV miniseries -The Shining.
 The Stanley Kubrick film began to look a lot better in people's eyes after author Stephen King tried his hand at adapting his own novel. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2012

SMILE 1975

The topics for satirical films come in three categories: 1. Overdue — health care (The Hospital, Robert Altman’s H.E.A.L.T.H.), rock & roll (This is Spinal Tap), regional theater (Waiting for Guffman); 2. Overdone — television (A Face in the Crowd, Network), Los Angeles, (Shampoo, S.O.B); and 3. Overripe — soap operas (Soap Dish), country music (Nashville), and beauty pageants (Drop Dead Gorgeous).

Understandably, it’s the latter two categories which pose the biggest challenge. For while public familiarity with the subject works to the filmmaker’s advantage, the potential for arriving at a suitably unique perspective to warrant yet another swipe at a favored pop-culture whipping-boy is statistically low. This is especially true of subjects that have, in one way or another, already become parodies of themselves.

The Summer of our Discontent
Michael Ritchie's Smile and Robert Altman's Nashville were twin satires of post-Watergate disillusionment released in the summer of 1975. With 1976 looming as both a Bicentennial and election year, Smile and Nashville appeared to be two extremely well-timed social comedies with their finger on the pulse of the tumultuous decade (Nixon's 1974 resignation, inflation, the oil crisis). Unfortunately, both films were swallowed up by that other 1975 summer release, Jaws.

Beauty pageants occur in every corner of the world, but it’s the American beauty pageant—with its discomfiting and vaguely unwholesome co-mingling of sex objectification, patriotism, Las Vegas vulgarity, and beauty-myth perpetuation—that looms strongest and most pervasively in the minds of the public. For as long as I can remember (even before the Women’s Lib '70s came along and forever pasted the stamp of “anachronistic, sexist, meat parade” on the whole practice) beauty pageants have struck me as curiously absurd rituals. Unabashedly kitschy, yet immensely entertaining, albeit for all the wrong reasons. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, is gladdened by the spectacle of eerily similar, Stepford-perfect women with lacquered hair and joyless smiles, trotted out, conveyor belt fashion, for our appraisal. As for me, few things look as cheesily ludicrous as a woman in a bathing suit wearing heels. The silliness of which is compounded tenfold by said woman being quizzed about government policy and solutions for world peace at the same time.

Bruce Dern as Robert "Big Bob" Freelander

Barbara Feldon as Brenda Di Carlo

Michael Kidd as Tommy French

For all the talk of celebrating inner beauty and scholastic achievement, I’ve not seen a single beauty pageant yet able to surmount the built-in incongruity of a “show” designed to display and reward that which is unobservable. Aware perhaps that there’s just no way to ethically reconcile a human competition  that bears more than a passing resemblance to a 4H Club prize heifer fair, beauty pageants always try to bump up the intellect and culture quotient. A decision which manifests in talent segments heavy on jarringly divergent high-brow/folksy mash-ups (e.g., classical pieces played on an accordion, baton twirling routines to pre-recorded recited poetry), and squirmingly awkward Q & A segments wherein contestants are required to answer preposterously weighty questions on the spot. You may not be able to show intellect and you can’t show a big heart, but what you CAN show is plenty of T & A and lots of smiles, smiles, smiles.

Contestants in the California Regionals of the Young American Miss teen beauty pageant

17 year-old Melanie Griffith is Miss Simi Valley, while directly behind her stands Colleen Camp, Miss Imperial County

*(Males aren’t immune to this lunacy, either. I once attended a bodybuilding competition, and aside from everyone there trying like mad to ignore the insistent homoeroticism of it all; I was made aware of how the contest as such [which is little more than your standard beauty pageant bathing suit competition on steroids—literally] seems to exist in this strange limbo where it’s neither sport nor full-out sideshow attraction. Divested of even the pretext of being about anything more than physical appearance, bodybuilding contests are the only real beauty pageants left.)

Contestants Robin (Joan Prather) and Doria (Annette O'Toole) ponder their situation.

Robin: Their parents made them beautiful, not them.
Doria: Yeah..but boys get money and scholarships for making a lot of touch downs, right? Well why shouldn't a girl get one for being cute and charming?
Robin: But maybe boys shouldn't be getting money for making touchdowns

Smile, Michael Ritchie’s smart and thoroughly delightful evisceration of beauty pageants (vis a vis small-town America in the post-Watergate years) is that most sought-after of satires: one which sidesteps the obvious and clichéd, landing on all that is surprising and fresh. Its humor hits the mark without resorting to unnecessary exaggeration or cruelty, and the observant, laugh-out-loud funny screenplay by Jerry Belson spares no one. Well, that’s not exactly true. One of the things I like best about Smile, which concerns itself with the mishaps surrounding the mounting of a regional teenage beauty contest, is that the film’s most obvious targets, the contestants, are treated rather sympathetically.

While affectionate fun is poked at everyone involved (with the harshest light shed on the adults who behave badly and should know better) there’s a refreshing lack of mean-spiritedness in this little-known but rather miraculous small film.

Fans of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory will recognize Denise Nickerson (Violet) as  Miss San Diego

Eric Shea, the bratty little brother in The Poseidon Adventure plays Bruce Dern's son, "Little Bob"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The lampooning of something as already over-the-top silly as a beauty pageant (a teen one, at that) runs the risk of leaving the satirist with nowhere to go. Smile is such a welcome exception to the rule because it consistently throws us a curve every time things start to look like they’re headed down a predictable path or angling for the easy satirical target. For example, the pageant choreographer, who I’d expected would be another tiresome gay stereotype, is portrayed by real-life Tony Award-winning choreographer Michael Kidd (Guys & Dolls, Lil’ Abner) as something like a sardonic Teamster. Expecting to laugh at the expense of Smile’s unsophisticated teen contestants and the usual small–town vulgarity, the film’s gentle tone and genuine affection for its characters caught me nicely off guard.

As Maria Gonzales, the hilariously guileful contestant not afraid to use the voting committee's racial ignorance/guilt to her advantage, actress Maria O'Brien gives, hands down, my favorite comic performance in the film. Not only do I love the concept of her character (a take-no-prisoners competitor), but O'Brien's comic delivery and timing is just brilliant.

Annette O'Toole (the very best thing in Paul Shrader's Cat People - 1982) is close to being the very best thing in Smile. Her disarmingly natural performance is smart and surprisingly nuanced. I especially like how the growing friendship between O'Toole and fellow-contestant/roommate, Joan Prather, is played.

PERFORMANCES

I remember once thinking that Bruce Dern must have had one hell of an agent. At one time the go-to guy for every loose cannon nutjob in every B-movie that came down the pike; sometime in the early '70s (I think it was after he killed John Wayne—yes, John Wayne—in The Cowboys) Dern began to crop up in a lot of seriously A-list movies playing normal, if not sympathetic, guys. It’s like he completely changed his image overnight and became a top-flight, Oscar-nominated star in major motion pictures. It appeared as though he would continue on that course until an ill-timed return to type playing a psycho tattoo artist in the unappetizing Tattoo (1981) put him back on the character actor track again. Dern has never really been my cup of tea, but there’s no denying his obvious talent. And in Smile he gives perhaps his most accessible and likeable performance. 

Geoffrey Lewis (pageant president) and Barbara Feldon
"There are just two things to remember: Just be yourself , and keep smiling!"

On the other hand, I've been crazy about Barbara Feldon since her days as Agent 99 on TV’s Get Smart. Here, as the starchily efficient pageant supervisor, Feldon mines (as Mary Tyler Moore did in Ordinary People) the dark side of all those “perfect on the outside” types so commonly held up as ideal images of American womanhood. She's good in that way that so often happens when actors are creatively cast against type.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

My favorite part of any beauty pageant is the talent competition. In Smile, that still applies.

  Talent competition: Saxophone and voice, the accordion (of course), 

and how to pack a suitcase. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Ruce Dern plays Robert Freelander. Known to everyone in the town of Santa Rosa, California as “Big Bob,” Robert is a pillar of the community and one of the beauty pageant’s biggest boosters. A member of the JC and several fraternal clubs, Robert owns “Big Bob’s Motor Home City” where he optimistically sells gas-guzzling trailers and RVs during the oil crisis. His idea of a romantic getaway for him and his wife is to take a trip to Disneyland, and he is trusting and honest to the point of naiveté. Relentlessly cheerful, optimistic, and a firm believer that a little hard work will make everything OK, Robert is essentially America as it liked to imagine itself to be before Watergate.

Like America in the mid-'70s, Robert suffers a “crisis of confidence” when forced to confront the less-than-perfect realities of the world around him, and the uncertain value of all the things he’d heretofore convinced himself were valuable. As heavy-handed as this might sound, Smile shows its true mettle in how deftly it handles the thematic metaphor, and Bruce Dern is a little heartbreaking in how well he conveys Robert’s crestfallen bewilderment.

A Young American Miss must be cheerful, a perseverant, and show a genuine concern for others.

Recently I've been seeing these Alain de Botton / Anthony Burrill art posters around town which read: “Pessimism is not always deep and optimism is not always dumb.”  With a great deal of humor and sensitivity, I think Michael Richie’s Smile made that very same point some 37 years ago.

In 1986, Smile was turned into a flop Broadway musical by Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) & Howard Ashman (Little Shop of Horrors).

Copyright © Ken Anderson

THE MAIDS 1975

Let me tell you a fairy tale. Once upon a time there was a film producer who believed that movies didn’t have to appeal to the lowest common denominator or always chase the fastest buck. (I told you it was a fairy tale.) In all likelihood under the enchantment of some evil sorcerer, this producer was possessed of the radical notion that films could inspire tastes rather than follow trends, and that motion pictures, in spite of being a populace medium, held the potential for the broader exposure of culture and the arts. From such chimerical fancies was born The American Film Theater (AFT): a limited-engagement subscription series of films adapted from great plays. Over the course of a year these films would screen for one or two days only, two performances each (a matinee and an evening show), after which the films would be withdrawn from release (“Forever!” as the ads intoned). And they lived happily ever after.

OK...OK, we all know I’m not literally speaking of a fairy tale—but I might as well be, given the inconceivability of such an artistically altruistic idea even being broached in today’s Hollywood. The producer in question was the late Ely Landau (producer of the acclaimed 1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. documentary- King: A Filmed Record…Montgomery to Memphis), and The AFT, his cinematic vision of a cultural Camelot, lasted but a brief two years (1973 – 1975) , but managed to produce a lasting film legacy of 14 marvelous plays with once-in-a-lifetime casts.

Click to Enlarge

I was in high school in 1974 and remember wanting to buy a subscription to a season of AFT very badly. But as the films were screened on Monday & Tuesday evenings exclusively, the whole “It’s a school night!” issue rendered the entire matter a closed book as far as my parents were concerned. I did, however, have the AFT poster on my bedroom wall and made myself fairly miserable staring at the diverse catalog of filmed plays offered (A Delicate Balance, The Iceman Cometh, Luther, Lost in the Stars), imagining all that I was missing. 

The film I most wanted to see was the adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids; not because I knew anything about Genet, but because two of my all-time fave rave actresses: Glenda Jackson and Susannah York, were playing the leads. Well, it may have taken 29 years, but The Maids has finally been released on DVD, (in fact, the entire AFT collection - Click here for info: AFT on DVD ) and with it, my adolescent patience rewarded, at last.

Glenda Jackson as Solange

Susannah York as Claire

Vivien Merchant as Madame

With America's history so resolutely mired in slavery, institutionalized racism, and rarely acknowledged socioeconomic imperatives (the rich need the poor); we in the U.S. tend to prefer our domestics sentimentalized (think Shirley Booth in TVs Hazel, Alice on The Brady Bunch, Mr. French in Family Affair, or any TV program in which the "Just like one of the family!"message is reiterated). The social inequities of status or income are never addressed unless crouched in the most cloyingly emotional terms (US domestics work for love, not money...at least on TV), and any expressed resentment or hostility toward one's employer is thoroughly out of the question. The only time we Yanks seem able to relax and enjoy a thoughtful, honest depiction of the precarious servant/employer dynamic is when we're able to put an ocean between us, and even then, only when the events are safely ensconced in the past.

Does it interfere with our appreciation of beautiful surroundings, meticulously maintained,
to consider the lives of those who are paid to keep them that way?

Americans may find a film about white employers and black domestics uncomfortable, but few really expect anything else. Indeed, domestic workers of color are such an accepted cultural conceit that an entire film (1987's Maid to Order) was built around the satiric premise of a white family coveting the status symbol that comes from having a white maid (Ally Sheedy). Since the vast majority of major motion pictures produced in America are for and from the perspective of the white gaze; Stateside domestics (being people of color) are rarely given much emotional dimension. Their role is either to reassure and comfort audiences by being the grateful recipients of white largess, or be the non-complaining supporters of the status quo, happy in their lot. 

Because we reserve humanity for white characters, the oppressed class system hierarchy of European aristocracy in things like Downton Abbey, Gosford Park, or Upstairs, Downstairs, are the only environments in which we allow ourselves to listen to the voices of the oppressed from a humanist, non-political perspective. As a country, it seems we find it easier to identify and empathize with the subjugated masses when they're white.  

Although denied by the play's author, Jean Genet, The Maids is popularly believed to have been inspired by the notorious real-life crimes of Lea and Christine Papin; two maids who brutally murdered the wife and daughter of an employer in 1933 France.

If ever there was an artist about whom the words “non-threatening” and “comforting” most definitely do not apply, it is the late, great, poet/novelist/playwright/activist, Jean Genet. His theatrically incendiary play The Maids (written in 1946) and is an acerbic, absurdist treatise on identity and class struggle that plays out like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  and The Killing of Sister George crossed with Harold Pinter’s The Servant.

In the ornately fussy, Louis XV furnished apartments in the aristocratically ritzy Place Vendôme district of France, two embittered live-in domestics work out their hostility toward their mistress (and their own self-frustration for enduring such servitude) by routinely engaging in a ritualized pantomime whenever she is away. Alternately taking on the roles of employer and servant, the maids—Solange (Jackson) and her sister Claire (York)— literally lose themselves in this cathartic ceremony of (self)contempt and emancipation that strives, always unsuccessfully, to culminate in the make-believe murder of Madame.

Truth Games
Madame/Claire: "You only EXIST through me!"

As the film begins, the exaggerated passions of the playacting maids are running at a particularly feverish high, as it appears that their fantasy plotting has begun to take root in the real world. Emboldened by the early morning arrest of Madame’s lover (the result of incriminating letters anonymously mailed to the police by Claire) and invigorated by this small sign of efficaciousness in lives of servile invisibility; the maids determine on this day to make actual, the much dreamed-about, never consummated, death of their beloved/detested Madame.  

Claire: "Now I will order the world about!"

   

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Though not overtly fond of Theater of the Absurd, I do have a penchant for the manner in which art can thrust to the forefront that which is rarely spoken of and scarcely acknowledged about the human condition. Like so many of my favorite films (Robert Altman’s 3 Women, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan), The Maids is about masks, role-playing, and the flexible quality of identity. We each wear masks and play various roles throughout our lives. Often with such regularity and acuity that it can become difficult to remember just what it was the original mask was meant to conceal. Meanwhile the shifting power plays in our day-to-day lives and relationships only serve to reinforce the ever-alternating positions of supplicant and master we find ourselves in. The Maids cleverly uses the banal protocols of domestic servitude (where the feelings of contempt/gratitude/anguish ambiguously co-mingle) to dramatize the interdependent manner in which the way we are perceived by others can come to define the very selfsame ways we see and regard ourselves.

Solange: "When slaves love each other it's not love."
Claire: "No, but it's just as serious."

PERFORMANCES

The '70s was the era of the male "buddy picture," yet, paradoxically, it was also a time (albeit, short-lived) when interesting actors like Glenda Jackson and Susannah York could land major roles in fascinating projects like this. Certainly a film with an all-female cast (Madame's lover is briefly, wordlessly seen) is notable in any era, but because the '70s boasted such a remarkable breed of versatile, intelligent, and unique actresses (Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, Genevieve Bujold, Shelley Duvall), I'm especially thrilled that two of my favorites were paired in a feature. 

Playing sisters of different temperament (and I gather, intelligence) both Jackson and Susannah infuse their complex characters with considerable emotional depth, making palpable the pain behind the often high-flown language. Jackson is dynamic, as always, but the late Susannah York, with her despairingly throaty voice and wounded eyes is even better than she was in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

 Vivien Merchant (Alfie, Fenzy) manages to capture the conflicting characteristics of dominance, condescension, and vulnerability in the theatrically self-dramatizing character of Madame 

  

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

For all its perception, perhaps what’s most brilliant and surprising about The Maids is how terribly enjoyable it is. As a fan of bitchy repartee, I love the film’s near-poetic verbal battles of hurled invectives and raging hostilities. I also take great pleasure in how the film veers, with unexpected bite, into dark comedy. But what I most thoroughly enjoy and what brings me back to The Maids again and again is the finely-honed suspense and dramatic tension which propels the plot along its barely-tethered-to-reality course. There’s a considerable amount of anxiety mined from the current of madness and potential for violence that runs beneath the central conflict of The Maids.

"Naturally, maids are guilty, when madames are innocent."
As the predicament of the maids grows ever perilous, we find ourselves drawn into the paranoia of inanimate objects conspiring to betray them. It is a fact of a maid's day-to-day existence that the dust on the mantle and the unpolished mirror will stand as silent accusers of a job incomplete. When conspiring to kill one's employer, how many small details can be similarly neglected?

Class Distinctions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

There are so many ways for The Maids to be interpreted, so many levels upon which it works, it’s like watching a new film every time you come back to it. An intelligent, eccentric film, I can’t imagine it being to everyone’s taste (the intentional theatricality of the language and performances can prove distancing, if not confounding); but it is one of those films which rewards each visit with even more information and overlooked details. Both in performance and theme. I think it’s an absolutely brilliant, moving work made surprising accessible by the combined efforts of everyone involved in this film adaptation...chiefly the outstanding performances of Glenda Jackson and Susannah York. 

"The revenger is always born of the maids."

Playwright of The Maids, Jean Genet, passed away in 1986. A fascinating artist with an even more fascinating life, this is one of my favorites of his many quotable quotes:
"I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green."

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Signature of Susannah York received at a 2005 performance of her one-woman show, The Loves of Shakespeare's Women

Copyright © Ken Anderson