THE HIRELING 1973

As a huge fan of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey, I harbor a special weakness for romantically rendered, period-precise ruminations on the post-war decline of Britain’s aristocracy and the erosion of its class system. There’s that and much more in Alan Bridges’ (The Return of the Soldier) superb adaptation of L.P. Hartley’s (The Go-Between) 1957 novel The Hireling—wherein the tentative reformation of a shell-shocked England serves as backdrop and counterpoint to the unorthodox relationship forged between a hired limousine driver and his society-class employer.

Sarah Miles as Lady Helen Franklin

Robert Shaw as Steven Ledbetter

Peter Egan as Captain Hugh Cantrip

Elizabeth Sellars as Lady Franklin's Mother

The first time we see Lady Helen Franklin, she appears to be lost in an absent-minded daze, staring blankly out at a pond from behind a chain-link fence surrounding what looks to be a home in the British countryside (people peering from behind barriers will be a recurring motif in the film). It is indeed a home, of sorts, as it turns out Lady Franklin is a patient at a “rest cure” sanatorium for the rich and titled. It's a sprawling, mental-health facility whose tasteful opulence adheres to British “keeping up appearances” standards of discretion by not betraying its true function; the grounds more resembling a country estate than a hospital.

Lady Franklin is recuperating from a nervous breakdown and suicide attempt brought on by the deaths—suffered over a brief but unspecified period of time—of both her father and her husband. Deaths over which she feels so much guilt and remorse, life has virtually ceased to exist for her. 

Little is known of Lady Franklin at this point, but from our short acquaintance, it's clear this woman is among the walking wounded. A fragile, ragdoll of a figure who appears distant, distracted, and barely able to keep it together. In spite of all this, her doctor (Lyndon Brook) insists the time has come for her to return to “normal life,” and so with brusque solicitude, he discharges her into the temporary care of chauffeur service driver Steven Ledbetter (Shaw), the titular hireling enlisted by Lady Franklin’s mother (Sellars) to transport her daughter home to London.

It's in this scene that The Hireling’s narrative theme exploring the contrast of pragmatism vs. emotionalism as survival skills is first introduced. We first see it dramatized in the air of exasperated impatience the doctor and hospital staff displays toward their wealthy clientele. A gently condescending attitude indicative of the pervasive working-class belief that nervous breakdowns and the coddling of psychological maladies are luxuries only the well-to-do can afford.

Dr. Mercer (Lyndon Brook) expedites Lady Franklin's sanatorium release a little too eagerly

The drive to town—over the course of which, images of poverty and post-war squalor are glimpsed from behind the polished panes of Ledbetter’s pristine Rolls Royce—further emphasize the film’s themes of class division.

Foreshadowing later events, Ledbetter and Lady Franklin’s labored initial exchanges across the glass partition separating driver from passenger, display a sympathetic commonality, yet are fraught with caution and misunderstanding.

Ledbetter, a former sergeant major in the army, finds security and a sense of purpose in conforming to the arbitrary formalities of his station. Well-mannered and polite, he speaks only when spoken to, peppers his responses with “Milady,” and is not above fabricating a backstory (he lies about the scope of his driver-for-hire business and makes up a wife and children) if it results in engendering client faith in his stability.

Ledbetter’s unquestioning acceptance of his lot, indeed, his appearance to have made the most of it, appeals a great deal to the floundering Lady Franklin, who has come to view her society life as both directionless and empty. As they drive, Ledbetter’s matter-of-fact directness has the effect of bringing Lady Franklin out of her shell. Enough so that she has the bravery to request he drive past the cemetery containing the bodies of the two most important men in her life, and just enough to prepare her for her impending reunion with her flinty mother (Sellars).

Lady Franklin suffers another small breakdown, but her mother is more concerned
that the window washer will witness this unseemly lapse of decorum

Almost as a form of therapy, Lady Franklin hires Ledbetter to take her on drives twice weekly. His pragmatism inspiring in her a newfound independence, simultaneously, her taking him into her confidence serving to thaw his formal facade and disarm his firmly-rooted hostility toward the upper classes. Of course, their ostensibly professional arrangement is clearly one forged of a mutual rapport and affinity extending far beyond the boundaries of employer and hireling, yet it remains one neither party feels disposed to examine in depth until it’s too late.

Too late rears its head in the form of Lady Franklin’s emerging self-reliance colliding with Ledbetter's rapidly accelerating infatuation with her. Too late also manifests in the triangular intrusion into their twosome of the louche Captain Hugh Cantrip (Egan); a former political ally of Lady Franklin’s late husband and, naturally, a gentleman of more appropriate social stature for Lady Franklin's company. Like all the characters in The Hireling, Cantrip is struggling with readjustment to life after the war. But the ease with which he insinuates himself into Lady Franklin’s life (coupled with a level of deception inarguably more injurious than Ledbetter’s) underscores Ledbetter’s deepest resentment: that the wealthy classes have always had an easier go of it, and that he is doomed to forever be on the outside looking in.

Lady Franklin's unorthodox request to sit in the front seat with Ledbetter dramatizes both the casual familiarity the wealthy feel towards those in their employ, and the lack of equal license afforded the working-classes

In speaking of The Hireling at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973 (where it shared the Grand Prize with Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow), actress Sarah Miles described it as “A tragedy of miscomprehension.” And indeed, The Hireling is at its most compelling when exploring the ways in which the rigid constraints of Britain’s class system perpetuate emotional and sexual repression. Set in 1923, The Hireling presents a world in which human beings reach out to one another from within the socially imposed/self-imposed cages of class and station. Behavior and motivation are clogged up in ritual, and emotions are caught up in antiquated modes of conduct which make it next to impossible for anyone to authentically convey to another how they really feel. In situations where a person’s passions are as opaque and inaccessible internally as they are externally, human contact inevitably loses out.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What I find most enjoyable about The Hireling (as I do Gosford Park and Downton Abbey) is its evocation of a time when one type of world was on its way out, clumsily making way for a new way of living and interacting. Without becoming heavy-handed, The Hireling uses the interwoven lives of its three main characters—all of whom represent a faction of Britain’s walking wounded, readjusting to post-war existence—to comment upon the failings of the class system.
While our attention is called to the characters’ connection (Lady Franklin and Ledbetter ease each other’s loneliness) and contrasts (She’s more amenable to the dropping of class-based formalities than he); the film makes us subtly aware of the rigid inequities that always linger on the fringes: Lady  Franklin’s wealth and station afford her an interclass autonomy denied Ledbetter.

Lady Franklin asks Ledbetter to be her escort at an amateur boxing match

Time and time again it’s underscored that the working classes, when faced with tragedy and hardship, have no option but to be practical and “Get on with things, ” while the rich are tended to, sympathized with, and are afforded the luxury of breakdowns both emotional (Lady Franklin) and ethical (Capt. Cantrip). For example, Lady Franklin is ignorant of the fact that her maid, Mrs. Hansen (Patricia Lawrence), who appears to have been with her for some time, has a blind son; a fact of life never dwelled upon or grieved over by the devoted servant as she goes about her duties.

Patricia Lawrence as Mrs. Hansen

Similarly, as the film progresses, the once-fragile Lady Franklin comes to rebuild her life just as the life of the stalwart Ledbetter begins to unravel, yet she's not able to be there for him in the same manner he was there for her. Perhaps there is no real way in which she could be—for when presented with an opportunity to return his kindness, she does so very graciously and generously—but (to Ledbetter's dismay) at the cost of having to reveal she doesn't even know his first name. These sequence of events only further serve to solidify the perspective that Britain's post-war resurgence was achieved largely on the backs of its working classes, yet once the rich were reinstated and their lives returned to normal, little in the way of reciprocal attention was given to the labor classes and working poor who made it possible.

PERFORMANCES

I’m afraid I was a little too enamored of fellow Brits Julie Christie and Susannah York to have paid much attention to Sarah Miles during her brief heyday in the '70s. My strongest memory of her (outside of her endorsement of drinking her own urine twice daily as a kind of golden, pee-scented fountain of youth. I've seen recent pictures of her and she looks great, so maybe she's not just pissing up a rope, so to speak) is the hubbub during the filming of the otherwise forgettable 1973 Burt Reynolds western The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. It involved the mysterious circumstances surrounding the on-location death (murder?suicide?) of Miles’ personal assistant/lover. A scandalous event that not only ended her marriage to screenwriter Robert Bolt (Lawrence of Arabia), but successfully stalled her ascendancy as a leading lady of the 1970s.

Over the years I’ve come to enjoy Sarah Miles’ performances in The Servant (1963) and Ryan’s Daughter (1970) a great deal, but in my limited exposure to her work, The Hireling stands out as perhaps her best. 

I saw The Hireling for the first time only last year, but I know had I seen it in 1973, it would have been a lasting favorite. Miles displays an amazing range and brings a great deal of nuance and depth to a role in which her character’s true motivations and feelings are not always clear to herself. 

Two years before his iconic role as Quint in Jaws (1975) made him the late-7'0s man of the hour, Robert Shaw’s appearance in The Sting eclipsed his much finer work in The Hireling, released the same year. As Ledbetter, the brutish but sensitive chauffeur, Shaw carves out a complex figure of concealed motives and glowering resentments. In fact, much of The Hireling plays out like an emotional suspense film in trying to fathom the depth of Ledbetter’s sincerity or the objective of his deceptions. Shaw's is a surpassingly intense performance of brooding insecurity and tortured longing. 

Brooding Brute
Watching Robert Shaw's powerful performance, I couldn't help thinking that outside of Idris Elba and Daniel Craig, contemporary films are lacking in men and overpopulated with boys

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I really love the look of The Hireling, with its deceptively lush, romantic imagery and rich period detail. A sense of time and place is conveyed superbly, especially the attention given to differentiating the working-class locations and those of the wealthy. And in this, I mean that there is no heavy-handed condescension favoring the rich; intriguingly, the film captures both social strata in a manner emphasizing the ways in which the characters from both sides are trapped by their surroundings.

Indicative of the repressive nature of Britain's class system The Hireling frequently films the principals in surroundings emphasizing borders and separation. Mirrors, windows, and reflective surfaces abound, conveying characters' dual natures and motivations, along with the inability to sometimes see what is right in front of them.
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THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I've always entertained the theory that Americans eat up movies about class struggles in the UK because it allows certain factions of our population to enjoy narratives of class-based conflict without the guilt.
In America, we still have a long way to go towards being able to present our own class issues (aka racism) in ways that aren't wholly designed to assuage white audiences while reassuring them that things are not "really that bad."  In British films, because the downtrodden classes are white, they are afforded their humanity, allowed to express their rage, and even allowed not to forgive. At its core, The Hireling is pretty vicious to the aristocracy, and with good reason.

Those expecting The Hireling to be a Driving Miss Daisy-esque heartwarmer will be shocked to find it a dark, fairly scathing indictment of the upper class.

Here in the States, we aren't that evolved yet. It's still the duty of blacks in films to take the moral high road and never really express anger or resentment, lest they lose audience sympathy. The status quo can't be sufficiently criticized because business-as-usual in behind-the-scenes Hollywood is reflective of the culture as a whole. The lack of diversity assures that the same race/class fear narratives are repeated and reinforced. So, British films tend to be the spoonful of sugar that helps the class struggle/discrimination medicine go down on these shores.

Personally, I find it cathartic to see movies in which servants and oppressed classes are afforded the dimensionality to view their lot in life in ways far from noble or heroic. I love the potential for conflict presented by the fear the "haves" harbor should one day the "have-nots" get fed up with their lot. It's an opportunity to shed light on the curious symbiosis that exists between the rich and working classes, how one can't exist without the other in a strange and dysfunctional way. As drama it's certainly more authentic, and, as is the case of The Hireling, presents a far more layered and thoughtful examination of the emotional consequence of social structures that are designed to support commerce, labor, and the status quo; yet calls upon people to suppress all that's human and instinctual within themselves.

"We all have our place in life."

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2015

MAGIC 1978

Richard Attenborough’s atmospherically tense adaptation of William Goldman’s 1976 bestseller, Magic, doesn’t seem to come up much in conversation these days; although when it does, it’s inevitably in reference to those nightmare-inducing, kindertrauma TV ads that ran at the time of its release. There’s scarcely an adult of a certain age who can’t be reduced to a quivering mass of jelly upon hearing this poem recited (preferably in a shrill, nasal voice with a New Yawk accent):

Abracadabra,

I sit on his knee.

Presto chango,

and now he is me.

Hocus pocus

we take her to bed.

Magic is fun;

we’re dead.

Being 21-years-old at the time, I was (alas) too old to be frightened by those TV commercials. I only remember being so taken with the eerie effectiveness of the ad (even if you weren't watching the screen, that weird voice seriously sent chills up your spine), I could barely wait for the movie to open. 

A masterpiece of minimalism, the entire 30-second teaser-spot consisted of nothing more than a slow zoom into the face of an intensely demonic-looking ventriloquist’s dummy whose dead eyes stared maniacally into the camera as it recited the above poem in a high-pitched, not entirely human-sounding voice. Without showing a single frame of footage from the film, this unsettling confluence of dramatic lighting, ominous music, and the built-in necromantic creep-out of being confronted by an animate inanimate object, incited the outcry from concerned parents of traumatized tots across the nation, to have the ads taken off the air.

I’d read Magic sometime in college when it was still on the bestseller list, but only because I’d read in the trades that producer Joseph E. Levine (Harlow, The Carpetbaggers) had secured the film rights for the tidy sum of $1 million, enlisting Goldman to adapt his novel to the screen. What excited me was the early talk citing Roman Polanski as director and Robert De Niro starring as the magician/ventriloquist with the dark secret. After Polanski bailed, Steven Spielberg, Mike Nichols, and Norman Jewison were each attached to the project at various times, with actors as disparate as Jack Nicholson, Chevy Chase, Gene Wilder, and Al Pacino considered for the lead.

Ultimately, directing chores went to British actor/director Richard Attenborough (Séance on a Wet Afternoon), with the lead going to Welsh actor, Anthony Hopkins. After several years in the business, Hopkins was suddenly very hot stateside, appearing in several major films in rapid succession: Audrey Rose (1977), A Bridge Too Far (1977), and International Velvet (1978).

William Goldman has always maintained Magic’s central female character, high-school dreamgirl Peggy Ann Snow, was inspired by and written with Ann-Margret in mind. So when it came time to cast the film, I’m not sure if any other actresses were considered, but it didn’t hurt Magic’s boxoffice chances any that the '60s ingénue was experiencing a career resurgence at the time, thanks to her Oscar nominations for Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Tommy (1975). With Burgess Meredith (The Day of the Locust) on board as the Swifty Lazar-like talent agent (a role once slated for Laurence Olivier) and $7 million allocated for the budget, advance buzz on Magic augured a Hitchcockian psychological thriller with an A-list pedigree.

Anthony Hopkins as Charles "Corky" Withers 

Ann-Margret as Peggy Ann Snow-Wayne

Burgess Meredith as Ben Greene

Ed Lauter as Ronnie "Duke" Wayne

Fats

That 20^th Century Fox was able to successfully market Magic on the strength of a single, non-disclosive graphic, is only in part attributable to the popularity of Goldman’s bestseller. The other contributing factor was audiences already knew what to expect simply because the story involved a ventriloquist and his dummy. Magic’s boon and bane have always been the fact that any thriller with a ventriloquist at its center is bound to utilize one of two fairly standard and overused plot possibilities: 1) The deranged ventriloquist who schizophrenically imagines his dummy to be real (The Great Gabbo, Dead of Night); 2) The supernatural take on the same theme, in which case the dummy indeed proves to be a sentient being (Devil Doll, The Twilight Zone episodes, “The Dummy” & “Caesar & Me”) usually of malevolent motive. Magic falls into the former category. 

Corky Withers (Hopkins), a failed, personality-minus magician, finds success when he adds a foul-mouthed ventriloquist’s dummy named Fats to his act. An act in which the outspoken, self-assured Fats (who resembles a grotesque caricature of Corky) hurls comically lewd, X-rated invectives at the audience while his mild-mannered human half engages in minor feats of legerdemain.

When savvy theatrical agent Ben Green (nicknamed “The Postman” because he always delivers) lands Corky an opportunity to crack the big time, the sheepish showman balks at a TV network’s request for a physical exam and hightails it out of New York. He finds refuge and an indelible part of his past when he checks into a rundown Catskills lake resort belonging to unrequited high school crush, former cheerleader Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret), now a sad-eyed hotelier unhappily married to one-time high-school sports hero, “Duke” Wayne (Lauter).

15 years has served to narrow the gulf once dividing Corky and Peggy, mutual discontent now inflaming a mutual attraction brokered on the unexpressed hope of rescue and reclamation.

But for Corky’s long-nurtured, once-thought-impossible dream to come true, he has to overcome a few obstacles. Peggy’s husband isn’t a problem, for although he still loves her, Peggy has grown tired of his drinking, philandering, and verbal abuse. And Corky’s agent, nosy and over-protective though he may be, really only wants what’s best for Corky. Doesn’t he?  

No, there is really only one obstacle standing in Corky’s way...but it’s a big one.
Fats won’t like it.

Yes, Corky is mad as a hatter. And his schizophrenia has taken the form of seeing Fats as a separate, possessive entity out to control his life and force him to do very bad things.

"You can't believe how much people want to believe in magic."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Ventriloquist dummies are so inherently creepy I’m certain a fairly terrifying horror film could be made simply by training a camera on a roomful of them for 90 minutes. If you doubt it, try doing a Google Images search of “ventriloquist dummies” sometime. You’ll be sleeping with the lights on for a week. 

That’s why given Magic’s overall impressiveness as a taut psychological thriller wrapped in a character study; it’s so frustrating Attenborough & Co. weren’t better able to capture that unsettling aspect of magic and ventriloquy which seems to intentionally flirt with the bizarre and grotesque. Between the dark demons fueling Corky’s madness (the novel hints at Corky being a serial killer) and the mysteries shrouded in the truth/illusion world of magic, the story offers ample opportunity. But the filmmakers are content to rely on Fats’ spectacularly chilling puppet design to do all the heavy lifting, horror-wise.

In a way, Magic, by virtue of being yet another reworking of the predictable “ventriloquist with a split-personality” plot device, is forced to wring suspense out of audience concern over whether it will add anything new to the over-familiar mix. While Goldman’s script dutifully takes us through updates of dominant dummy vs. overpowered ventriloquist sequences we’ve seen countless times before; suspense is generated by a wishful certainty on our part that a cast this stellar and production values this first-rate cannot possibly yield a retread of material Michael Redgrave and his dummy, Hugo, fairly nailed back in 1945.

Yet that’s precisely what Magic does. I saw Magic when it opened in 1978, and when I first saw it, I tied myself in knots waiting for it to live up to those TV ads (it didn’t), and wondering how Goldman was going to handle the novel’s “big reveal” (It's jettisoned. The book is told from Fat’s perspective, so we don’t even find out until near the end that what we thought was a two-person narrative is actually a memoir). My expectation of what I hoped the film to be blinded me to what it was.

Only after returning to see Magic again was I able to appreciate how well William Goldman adapted his novel in cinematic terms. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s an engrossing--albeit familiar--story very well told and exceptionally well-acted. The Catskills setting has a chilly foreboding about it that is significantly enhanced by Jerry Goldman’s (Coma, The Omen) ingeniously spooky score, and the character conflicts are skillfully buttressed by several nicely-realized suspense set-pieces.

"Kid, I have lived through Tallulah Bankhead and the death of vaudeville. I don't scare easy."
After a string of eccentric roles, it was nice to see Burgess Meredith playing a regular person again

PERFORMANCE

Anthony Hopkins gives a remarkable performance in Magic, virtually flawless in its versatility and depth. He brings a modulated authenticity to a character we have to simultaneously dread and sympathize with. His character runs the emotional gamut from cripplingly shy to theatrically assured; from touchingly vulnerable to deviously maniacal. He has a full-tilt mental breakdown scene that could easily have veered into camp or ridiculousness, that instead becomes an object lesson in how to ground extreme behavior in something real (Faye Dunaway would have done well to take notes before doing Mommie Dearest).

All that being said, Hopkins is terribly miscast. Instead of casting for Corky’s stage persona and wresting a tortured performance out of a charming showman whose stage charisma blossoms in the presence of his wooden alter ego, Attenborough seems to have cast for Corky: the mental case. Hopkins is great as the haunted, hunted Corky, but I don't buy him for a minute as a successful stage performer. As Pauline Kael perceptively wrote, “Hopkins has no light or happy range and doesn’t show a capacity for joy.” Comics are often said to be exceedingly dark personalities offstage, but you never could guess it from watching their act. I think Magic would have been far more chilling were there a clearer sense of Corky having a deceptively light side to mask the dark.

One of the very few scenes in Magic to feature Hopkins smiling

When looking back and taking the entire film in, for me Magic's most valuable player is Ann-Margret. The role of Peggy Ann Snow may have been written expressly for the talented actress, but Goldman doesn't exactly give her a lot to work with. What she does with it is a thing of beauty.

In the manner of many male writers who betray with each female character they write, just how little they know about women; Goldman's way of letting us in on Corky's deep feelings for Peggy is to have him reference her physical beauty, ad nauseam. Her breasts, specifically. 

And true to the adolescent roots of Corky's/Goldman's infatuation, the breathtakingly lovely Peggy doesn't think she's beautiful at all and clings to male reassurance. Yeah, that happens a lot.

To make matters worse, an inordinate amount of Peggy's dialog is relegated to "girl-isms" like "Coffee's on!', "Do you want the asparagus tips or french cut green beans?" By the time she made reference to a bubble bath, I thought it would turn out that Peggy Ann Snow never existed at all, and that she was just a male fantasy figure...another one of Corky's delusions. 

In spite of these hurdles, Ann-Margret gives a movingly sensitive performance that transcends the inanity of her dialog. She turns a puerile fantasy of a woman into a living-breathing person, centering the genre pyrotechnics with an earthy naturalism and melancholy sadness.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
I wonder if young people seeing Magic today find the idea of a nationally-famous ventriloquist to be more far-fetched (and terrifying) than a wooden figure come to life? I grew up at a time when ventriloquist acts like Shari Lewis, Willie Tyler, Wayland Flowers, and Paul Winchell were staples of TV variety shows. As were borscht-belt comics with Corky Withers-type names like Shecky Green, Sandy Baron, and Morty Gunty. (I even had a ventriloquist's dummy as a child. I named him Eddie Arnstein because he looked like a cross between Eddie Cantor and Omar Sharif in Funny Girl.)

If magic is problematic on television because you can't misdirect the camera; ventriloquism in the movies always opens the question of post-dubbing.  Much was made at the time of Hopkins learning ventriloquism and doing the voice of Fats. Other sources have since cited Magic's ventriloquist consultant  Dennis Alwood as not only manipulating Fats, but serving as his voice as well.

I bring this up because I think my familiarity with this almost vaudevillian style of show biz act is what makes Magic's nightclub scenes so cringe-worthy for me. William Goldman is a talented writer but he's not a gag-writer. Anthony Hopkins is a great actor, but he has absolutely no comedy timing. This collision of limitations is fine when Corky is supposed to be awful, but when he's supposed to have struck paydirt with Fats, I found myself wishing Goldman had hired a genuine comedy writer to do these scenes. They just sit there...startling in their unfunniness. And the fact that the act is so lousy is only exacerbated by the film constantly cutting away from this terrible act that we can see with our own eyes, and having characters say (not laugh, but say aloud) "Now that's funny!"

I do have to say that Fats did make me laugh, but only once. When introduced to a TV executive wearing a very obvious toupee (David Ogden Stiers), Fats slips and accidentally-on-purpose calls Mr. Todson "Mr. Wigston." I'm laughing just thinking about it.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The set-pieces I made reference to earlier comprise my favorite Magic moments. The collaborative efforts of the actors; director Attenborough; cinematographer Victor J. Kemper (Xanadu, Eyes of Laura Mars); editor John Bloom (Closer); and composer Jerry Goldsmith; represent Magic at the top of its game.

Amateur Night Breakdown

Meeting of the Minds

"Make Fats shut up for five minutes."

The Thing in the Lake

In 1978, audiences were left disappointed by Magic not living up to the horror suggested by the commercials. The audience I saw it with left the film in frustration...all you heard as you filed out the exit was people ask one another "What did she say?"---the film ends on Ann-Margret's near-unintelligible closing line: [Delivered in a voice imitative of Fats] - "You may not get this oppor-fuckin-tunity tomorrow!”

Nowadays, thanks to cable and DVD, audiences no longer coming to the film from being terrorized by those TV commercials seem to appreciate Magic for its modest triumphs. As an entertainingly engrossing, mature thriller effectively employing the rote devices of the genre while providing a moving parable about the cost of using illusions to mask our vulnerability.

 THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Actor Jerry Houser, who made his film debut in The Summer of '42 (1971), plays the cab driver in Magic.



BONUS MATERIAL

The television spot that launched a thousand nightmares
(reportedly pulled from NYC TV stations after only one broadcast)

Serving as proof that the longstanding narrative tradition of associating ventriloquism with personality displacement has yet to hit dry dock, take a look at Kevin Spacey in the excellent 2012 short film The Ventriloquist.

Jay Johnson, who played ventriloquist Chuck Campbell on the 70s sitcom, Soap, read for the role of Corky in Magic when Norman Jewison was set to direct. And while I have no idea how serious a contender he was, I must confess I find Johnson to better conform to my mind-eye image of Magic's schizophrenic protagonist. Anthony Hopkins, although remarkable in the role, comes across as more than a little unhinged from the start. Johnson, on the other hand, possesses that faint quality of sadness and anger present in so many comics, shrouded by a cheery, superannuated boyishness capable of conveying outward charm masking all manner of internal conflict. I don't know if Johnson could have matched Hopkins' dramatic virtuosity, but I'm absolutely certain his stage act would have been a damn sight more entertaining.
Here's a clip of Johnson from his 2006 Tony Award-winning Broadway show, The Two and Only.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015

THE STRIPPER 1963

This forgotten little film has long been a favorite of mine and used to show up fairly regularly on late-night television when I was a kid. Until it resurfaced recently on YouTube, I can say it’s easily been 40 years since I last saw this last-gasp effort in Hollywood’s love affair with the works of Faulkner, O’Neill, Williams, & Inge.  

Adapted by Meade Roberts (The Fugitive Kind, Summer & Smoke) from William Inge’s little-known 1959 play A Loss of Roses, and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton, The Planet of the Apes, Sphinx); The Stripper is, like a great many of my favorite films from the '50s—especially those written in the Southern Gothic/Midwest Melodrama tradition—a heavy slice of mordant Americana served up with plenty of lost illusions and broken dreams on the side.

Joanne Woodward as Lila Green

Richard Beymer as Kenny Baird

Claire Trevor as Helen Baird

Robert Webber as Ricky Powers

Shot in somber black and white (then de rigueur for contemplatively downbeat movies), The Stripper is the so-familiar-you’ll-swear-you’ve-seen-it-before story of Lila Green (Woodward); a down-on-her-luck wannabe actress touring with a seedy theatrical troupe (The Great Renaldo & Madame Olga: Magic & Mirth Par Excellence). Abandoned mid-tour in a small Kansas town by her equally seedy boyfriend Ricky (Webber), Lila is forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. Not literal strangers, mind you, for this just happens to be the town where Lila grew up before a Betty Grable look-alike contest provided her with a second-class means of escape to Hollywood. No, the strangers Lila seeks out are merely friends from her past. Friends to whom Lila now appears as gaudy and out of place as a fur coat in July.

Kenny Thinks Lila Is Hot
And indeed, she is, for it's mid-summer in Kansas and Lila flounces about in a leopard fur coat.
Before settling on the grossly misleading The Stripper, other titles considered for this screen adaptation of A Loss of Roses were: Celebration, Woman of Summer, and A Woman in July

Lila secures temporary lodgings with Helen Baird (Trevor), a widow for whom she once babysat in her youth. Helen, now a full-time nurse pulling swing shift as a fault-finding, overprotective mother-hen to her only son Kenny (Beymer). Helen is initially glad to be of assistance to the prodigal cooch dancer, but she begins to doubt the soundness of her philanthropy when it becomes clear that the restless son she has such high hopes for has developed a major infatuation for the glamorous, at least ten-years-older new tenant in stretch pants.

Much in the same way the arrival of a train-hopping drifter shook up the small-town residents in William Inge’s Picnic, the emotional (and sexual) disruption instigated by the intrusion of Lila—a peroxided, emotionally-wounded, aging starlet with a squalid past and a childlike disposition—into the vaguely oedipal Baird household is the source of The Stripper’s central conflict.

For Lila, the return to the birthplace of so many of her unrealized dreams rekindles a desire to reclaim her lost innocence. For Kenny, irresolute in his manhood over failing to fill the idealized shoes of his late father; Lila’s age and superficially worldly charms are like a beacon of maturity. Helen, conflicted in wanting Kenny to grow up and stand on his own two feet, yet prone to clingy exclamations like "You're all I have to live for!" grows concerned when Kenny's intensifying infatuation with Lila turns to mutual attraction. 
Adding fuel to Helen's anxiety that Lila's bad influence will hasten her son's inevitable departure is the simultaneous concern that the flashy older woman will corrupt Kenny's interest in pretty Miriam Caswell (Carol Lynley), their "good girl" (aka, virginal) neighbor. In this environment, everyone seems to be looking to someone else for salvation, rescue, liberation, or redemption.

Carol Lynley as Miriam Caswell

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The Stripper is something of a “Best of” collection of what had become, by 1963, the over-familiar clichés in the Tennessee Williams/William Inge oeuvre (it was Williams’ The Glass Menagerie which inspired Inge to write his first play). Set in the fictional small town of Salinson, Kansas (the same town Kansas-born William Inge chose for his play, Picnic), The Stripper has it all: the emotionally fragile fallen woman; familial discord; small-town provincialism; sexual restlessness; Freudian psychology; and the eternal battle between idealism and truth. And, of course, heat and summer used as metaphors for passion.

Seeing the film again after so many years, it’s so clear to me why I was all over this genre when I was young. First, they were situationally accessible to my limited frame of knowledge and experience. Unlike James Bond movies which took place all over the world, or exotic action adventures featuring acts of derring-do and non-stop danger; these films took place in the familiar, low-tech settings of town and neighborhood. The drama was often operatically over-the-top, yet human-scale enough in that it concerned itself with relationships, family tensions, and the applicable-at-any-age struggle with how our character flaws work to keep happiness at bay. 

Legendary real-life stripper Gypsy Rose Lee as Madam Olga St. Valentine
Louis Nye as Ronnie "The Great Renaldo" Cavendish

On the more “entertaining” side, not only were these films “daring” and “sex-obsessed” in ways suitable to a young person’s comprehension level (aka, all talk and no action), but the main characters were invariably women who could just as well have been gay men. Overwrought, theatrically histrionic gay men. I of course wasn’t aware of it then, but due to the times, Williams and Inge (both closeted gay playwrights during a time when homosexuality was criminalized in most states) were only able to express their truth through their female characters. Thus, their female protagonists were often imbued with a depth and dimensionality lacking in most roles for women written during this period.

As a youngster, the stoic, heteronormative macho leading man never spoke to any reality I knew. But I did recognize parts of myself in the bruised, vulnerable, idealistic outsiders Inge and Williams wrote so empathetically about.

Dreamers
Lila shows Kenny her prized possession: Film clips of her failed Hollywood screen test
 for the 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As much as I enjoy this film, I’m inclined to agree when I encounter reviews labeling this movie “lesser Inge.” The Stripper has a lack of subtlety and obviousness of intent that made me think it was early William Inge (it's a little like an episode from one of those '60s anthology TV programs like Playhouse 90). In reality, it’s one of Inge's late-career career misfires. One of the playwright’s first Broadway flops following a string of unbroken successes starting with Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1945), Come Back Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), and Bus Stop (1955). 

Indeed, as A Loss of Roses signaled the beginning of a reversal trend in Inge’s career, the problematic play has a legacy of misfortune surrounding it rivaling that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Michael J. Pollard as Geoffrey "Jelly" Beamis
Pollard and Webber are the only members of the original Broadway cast to recreate their roles in the film

The first victim was Shirley Booth, who had previously won both a Tony and an Oscar for her work in Inge’s Come Back Little Sheba, and accepted the role in A Loss of Roses when promised the character of Helen would be made more prominent. Alas, Booth wound up quitting the show just days before its Broadway debut for the rumored reason that Inge was shifting the production to favor a Broadway neophyte he had developed a crush on: an actor by the name of Warren Beatty, making his Broadway debut.

The second victim was William Inge himself. For although he had faith in the play and expressed the belief that A Loss of Roses was a “sure thing,” the play opened to disastrous reviews and closed after a mere 25 performances. It was Inge’s first flop, and one that so devastated him, he never had another stage success again.

The third victim was Warren Beatty. For although his performance in the play garnered a Tony Award nomination, the experience was so unpleasant, it is said to be the reason he has never appeared onstage again. On the plus side, Inge's enduring crush on Beatty (when Jane Fonda met Beatty for the first time in New York, she thought he was Inge's boyfriend) gave the young actor a foot-up in Hollywood. He made his film debut in Inge's Splendor in the Grass, and starred in the Inge-penned All Fall Down, a 1962 film with an older woman/younger man theme similar to The Stripper.

Victim number four was 20^th Century Fox production head, Buddy Adler, who, on the strength of Inge's reputation and track record, purchased the rights to A Loss of Roses for a whopping $400,000 (in 1950s dollars, yet!) before it even opened on Broadway. As he told columnist Louella Parsons at the time: “Yes, we paid a big price, but Inge writes only hits. He wrote 'Bus Stop,' 'Picnic,' and 'Dark at the Top of the Stairs.' There were a number of producers trying to get 'A Loss of Roses' so we were lucky to get it.” 

Something's Gotta Give
As she strips, Lila sings the 1954 Johnny Mercer song Fred Astaire introduced in Daddy Long Legs--the movie she unsuccessfully screen-tested for. Ironically, the song is also the title (grammatically cleaned up as Something's Got to Give) of Marilyn Monroe's last film. The Stripper was released a year after Monroe's death in August of 1962, and the movie is loaded with reminders of its originally being a Monroe vehicle.

Victim number five was Fox Studios. Adler purchased A Loss of Roses for then-under contract Marilyn Monroe, and teen heartthrob Pat Boone (!). Both turned the film down. Monroe (who enjoyed great success with the film version of Inge’s Bus Stop in 1956) likely found the Lila character - a stripper with lousy taste in men, who at one time tried to kill herself and was institutionalized - a tad too close to home; while Boone objected on moral grounds, finding the illicit affair between the young man and slightly pathetic stripper all wrong for his image.

Victim number six was actor Richard Beymer. Boosted to leading man stardom after West Side Story (1961), The Stripper jinx apparently hit a bullseye, for this was his last major motion picture.

Finally, victim number 7, Joanne Woodward. An Academy Award winner for The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Woodward retired from the screen not long after marrying Paul Newman and having two children. The Stripper was to be her comeback vehicle, but its DOA performance at the boxoffice got her career reemergence off to a rocky start from which it never fully recovered.

Helen Interprets Kenny's Birthday Gift as a Gesture to Replace his Father
A great many of the unhealthier aspects of the mother-son relationship in
A Loss of Roses were excised when it became The Stripper

PERFORMANCES

While many found fault with Inge’s original play and Meade Roberts' considerably less sordid adaptation, critics were largely in agreement over the quality of Joanne Woodward’s performance. Overcoming a stiff, blonde, cotton candy wig that always appears to hover at least an inch above her scalp, Woodward has some really remarkable moments playing a character who’s part Blanche DuBois and part Charity Hope Valentine.

Looking pretty spectacular in her Travilla wardrobe (Monroe’s designer), Woodward occasionally falls prey to the gimmicky tricks of smart actors trying to play dumb (laying it on a bit thick). But she truly shines in the film’s final scenes and achieves several moments of heartrending poignancy.

"I want my roses back."
Promotional stills of several sequences not in the film suggest the already problematic storyline
of The Stripper underwent a significant amount of post-production editing.
Below, a segment of an 1891 Emily Dickinson poem quoted in the film: 

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us - don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

The rest of the cast is solid, if perhaps let down a bit by a script that doesn't offer supporting characters much beyond making a quick superficial impression. Richard Beymer is good as the juvenile, but never succeeds in getting me to understand Kenny's darker, brooding side. The always-welcome Claire Trevor is a standout as the mother who fills an empty life with overconcern for her nearly-adult son.
Carol Lynley doesn't get much of a chance to be anything but gorgeous in a thankless "girlfriend" role, and there really is far too little of the quirky Michael J. Pollard and the Auntie Mame-ish Gypsy Rose Lee. TV stalwart Robert Webber is convincingly oily.

In spite of the film's sensationalist title, Woodward makes for a very covered-up stripper.
Happily, the same can't be said for her co-star

THE STUFF OF FANTASY 

In all these years I have never forgotten The Stripper's opening, pre-title sequence. It's just that terrific. It promises a level of camp sleaze the movie never delivers, but how can you lose with a movie that opens with a shot of the original, iconic Myra Breckinridge showgirl billboard?

Bus Driver: "We are approaching the world-famous Sunset Strip. Here you will see in the flesh the great names of show business you've only watched on the screen before." 

Tourist #1: "Look! There's Jayne Mansfield!"
Tourist #2: "No it isn't, it's Kim Novak!"

Bus Driver: "No it isn't, lady."
Tourist #1: "Then who is it?"

Bus Driver: "Nobody."

BONUS MATERIAL
"The Stripper" Watch the complete film on YouTube. HERE

The Stripper's sole Oscar nomination was for the costume designs of William Travilla (Valley of the Dolls, Black Widow, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). 

"It's what I want more than anything. More than winning contests or being a movie star,
or anything like that. 'Cause if you know you've got one person who loves and respects you,
then you don't need love from a lot of people, do you?"

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2015