STRAIT-JACKET 1964

"I am big. It's the pictures that got small!" – Norma Desmond - Sunset Blvd.

That oft-quoted Gloria Swanson line has endured because it conveys so much Classic Hollywood truth. At least, it's true in the case of Joan Crawford. The Oscar-winning actress (with a capital-A) dubbed—with equal parts admiration and castigation—"The Ultimate Movie Star" of Hollywood's Golden Age, who saw her decades-long status as the last of the grande dames of the silver screen flounder as the larger-than-life scale of motion pictures shrunk to the size of a TV set. 

Getting kicked by Bette Davis in the anteroom of a decaying Hollywood mansion in 1962s, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was Crawford's last onscreen pairing with anyone even remotely able to keep in pace with her particular brand of old-school star wattage. Following that, every film role and episodic TV appearance only seemed to emphasize the Brobdingnagian degree to which the 5'5" actress towered over her second-rate material and dwarfed the lilliputian talents of her co-stars and directors.

Joan Crawford as Lucy Harbin (close-ups like this don't just happen, folks)

Diane Baker as Carol Harbin

George Kennedy as Leo Krause

John Anthony Hayes as Michael Fields

There's no denying that Joan Crawford was an actress given to theatrically histrionic excesses and a to-the-manner-born camera hog prone to mannered, over-stylized gestures and gimmicks that morphed over time into camp and self-parody. And sure, the severe, mannish extremes of her late-career physical appearance lamentably coincided with an accelerating artificiality and lack of concern for subtlety in her acting (which wasn't all that subtle to begin with) that caused her to come across more like a haughty female impersonator than one of the great beauties of Hollywood's Golden Age. But, however one may feel about Crawford, it's difficult to imagine anyone thinking the star of Mildred Pierce and A Woman's Face deserved the likes of William Castle; a charming, obviously sweet-natured guy, but arguably one of the most pedestrian movie directors ever to hoist a megaphone.

Rochelle Hudson and Leif Erickson as Emily and Bill Cutler

You'd think, what with my being such a devotee of entertainingly bad movies, I'd number myself among those who regard William  "King of the Bs" Castle as some kind of patron saint of schlock. I certainly can attest to having my favorites (those being: Strait-Jacket, Homicidal, and I Saw What You Did). And I even concede that the worst of them are often so inoffensively lightweight that they somehow manage to be curiously entertaining. If not always quite bearable. But beyond having a nose for bizarre and offbeat material, Castle has always struck me as a bit middle-of-the-road in his approach. He lacked the elemental vulgarity necessary for creating truly epic bad films. Something about him always seemed too bland and suburban, perhaps too decent or too sane, to ever really go to the dark places the topics of his films suggested.

William Castle was a showman, a producer, and an inveterate huckster. But as a director, he appeared to have no demons to exorcise, no overarching ambitions to surmount, and wholly lacking that spark of neurotic lunacy that made the films of directors like Ed Wood (Plan 9 From Outer Space), Bert I. Gordon (Attack of the Puppet People), and his idol, Alfred Hitchcock, so compelling...and weird. In fact, one of my chief frustrations with William Castle films is the nagging certainty that all of his movies would have been vastly improved had Castle stuck to producing, and had somehow been prohibited from directing them himself. (See: Rosemary's Baby).

When I was growing up, Joan Crawford's name was synonymous with B-horror movies. It was years before I knew her from anything other than Berserk, Trog, Strait-Jacket, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 

And while I maintain that an actress of Joan Crawford's reputation didn't deserve a director as mediocre as William Castle, there's also little question in my mind that, at this particular stage in her career, Joan Crawford (and her ego) desperately needed a director like William Castle. He respected her legacy and star status and tried to do her justice...in his own bargain-basement way. Indeed, from everything I've read, Castle was so beside himself at having actually landed a bonafide movie star for one of his on-a-shoestring horror opuses (blowsy Joan Blondell had initially been cast in Strait-Jacket) that he treated Crawford in a manner more befitting her days as MGM's reigning boxoffice darling than as the star of secondary roles in The Best of Everything (1959) and The Caretakers (1963).

Obsequiously conceding to her every whim (approval over script, cast, and cameraman; 15% participation in profits; hefty Pepsi-Cola product placement), Castle gave Joan her first sole leading-lady role since 1957s The Story of Esther Costello. So what if it was in another derivative, cut-rate homage/ripoff in Castle's tireless (tiresome) quest to duplicate Alfred Hitchcock's career? At least Joan and her falsies didn't have to compete with Bette Davis for camera time.

For Those Who Think Young
Crawford, "Star of the First Magnitude" and Pepsi-Cola Board of  Directors member,
was not above a bit of old-fashioned hucksterism

An original screenplay penned by Psycho's Robert Bloch, Strait-Jacket casts Crawford as rural hotbox Lucy Harbin ("Very much a woman, and very much aware of the fact"). First glimpsed in a 1944 flashback through a Vaseline haze we'll come to grow progressively more familiar with, 57-year-old Crawford (unconvincingly) plays 25-year-old Lucy as a superannuated Sadie Thompson driven to murder when she catches her faithless 2nd husband (Rock Hudson protégée Lee Majors making his film debut) in bed with another woman (Patricia Crest). Seizing upon a nearby axe as her weapon of choice, luckless Lucy is nevertheless favored with a rare crime of passion twofer: the raven-haired honky-tonk homewrecker lying next to her husband obligingly lies quietly, patiently awaiting her turn until after Lucy has completed vigorously bisecting her hubby's head from his bare-chested torso.

From the repeated, wild-eyed hacks taken at the now literally separated lovers, it's clear Lucy has been driven crackers by the night's events and is soon carted off to the funny farm wearing the film's titular item of clothing. But no matter how unfortunate Lucy's timing, winning by a landslide in the "worst evening ever" sweepstakes is Lucy's 6-year-old daughter Carol, whose world-class kindertrauma encompasses being left alone in a desolate farmhouse while her father barhops; being awakened by said father and local floozy, who then proceed to make out in front of her without benefit of a closed door. Finally, to have it all capped off by bearing witness to her axe-wielding mother going postal on the lovers while dressed in a garish, floral-print dress, cacophonous Auntie Mame charm bracelets, and tacky, ankle-strap shoes. It's up for grabs which was more horrific for the poor child, the bloody murder, or her mother's fashion sense. 

Vicki Cos as young Carol Harbin
Diane Baker wasn't required to play Carol as a child, but it's up for debate as to whether 25-year-old Baker would have made a more convincing 6-year-old than Crawford does a 25-year-old

Jump ahead twenty years: Carol is a lovely, well-adjusted (?), budding sculptress living on a farm with her uncle and aunt (Leif Erickson and Rochelle Hudson), about to embark on a new life with her rich fiance-to-be (John Anthony Hayes). The only monkey wrench in the works is that her mother, who has been institutionalized all these years, is scheduled for release. Will it be "I Love Lucy Harbin" or "The Snake Pit: Country Style"? Any way you cut it (heh-heh), the stage has been set for a doozy of a family reunion.

Ethel Mertz: "Are you insinuating that I'm daft, loony, off my rocker, out of my head?"
Fred Mertz: "Well, that covers it pretty well... ."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Two words: Joan Crawford. For fans of over-the-top Joan (that would be: everybody) who heretofore have had to content themselves with brief-but-welcome snippets of unbridled ham popping up in otherwise reined-in performances held in precarious check by watchful directors, Strait-Jacket—to use the hyperbole of old-movie publicity—gives you Joan Crawford as you want to see her…the Joan Crawford you love…the Joan Crawford whose take-no-prisoners approach to acting and total disregard for the performance rhythms of her co-stars sets the screen ablaze with the fiery passions of a woman's dangerous desires.

Smokin'

You'll never convince me that a director as uninspired as William Castle had anything to do with Joan Crawford's performance in Strait-Jacket. Hers is a performance culled from hours of self-directed rehearsals and meticulous attention paid to doing "something" every single moment the camera is pointed at her. In fact, to hear co-star Diane Baker tell it, Crawford was, for all intents and purposes, the director of Strait-Jacket; everything she wanted, she got. And for that, you won't hear me complaining. Without Crawford, Strait-Jacket would be as sluggish as most of Castle's other films, and indeed, all scenes in this film that don't include Crawford prove to be inert, exposition-heavy sequences shot in the bland "alking heads in medium shot" style of television.  

Pepsi-Cola Vice-President of PR, Mitchell Cox as Dr. Anderson

Maybe it was the contractually-mandated ice-cold sets she insisted upon (biographers have stated this was as much for makeup and skin concerns as keeping her energy up), or the vodka she laced her Pepsi with, but Crawford's scenes are substantially more "spirited" than anything else in the film. No wonder--outside of promotional cardboard axes handed out to theater patrons when it opened--Strait-Jacket is one of the few William Castle productions released without one of his trademark gimmicks. Who needs gimmicks when you have Joan Crawford?

Now, how did that get there?

PERFORMANCES

Evoking Charles Dickens' antithetical quote: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Strait-Jacket is one of Joan Crawford's worst films, yet strangely, also one of her best. Crawford is one of my favorite actresses, and with each new (old) film I discover, my appreciation and admiration for her grows. There's not another actor I can think of who is quite so good when they're bad. The joys to be had in watching Strait-Jacket is seeing Joan, the terrific actress, going mano-a-mano against Joan, the free-range ham.

Crawford is rather remarkable in being able to wrest genuine sympathy and pathos out of the sketchily-drawn character of Lucy Harbin. She does some of the finest acting of her career in the sequence in which she gazes at the youthful image of herself sculpted by her daughter (actually sculpted by artist Yucca Salamunich on the set of A Woman's Face in 1941). She's touching and very effective in conveying the character's melancholy and regret over the years lost and beauty faded. She completely outclasses the film in the sequence. As many biographers have suggested, had Strait-Jacket not so obviously worn the stamp of being a Z-grade exploitationer, the more quiet aspects of Crawford's performance (the early, post-asylum scenes are wonderful) would surely have been looked upon more favorably by critics.

On the polar-opposite end of the subtlety spectrum is the sequence that fans of over-the-top camp have made into Strait-Jacket's setpiece. In it, Joan's character undergoes a transformation akin to demonic possession when she gets a makeover that has her trussed up in clothes and makeup identical to that which she wore 20 years earlier. Guarded and hesitant before, Lucy instantly reverts to her (presumably) old ways and turns a polite meet-and-greet with her daughter's handsome fiance into the 1964 equivalent of a lap dance. 

The sight of a grotesquely-made-up Joan Crawford turning her man-trap wiles on a man young enough to be her son is more terrifying than anything Castle was able to accomplish with his fake-looking axe murders. In the 2002 book Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography, the authors state that Joan was quite taken with the good looks of actor John Anthony Hayes, and in response to an admiring comment made by someone alluding to Hayes mainly acting with his lips, Crawford is quoted as replying, "Yes, and such sexy lips, too!" All of which goes to set up, if not exactly explain, why Crawford's unique method of (wholly improvised) seduction during this sequence involves feeling about the actor's mouth like a Braille student and practically shoving her entire hand down his throat. Sexy.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
"Spot the Real-Life Parallels" is a game that adds zest to the viewing of any Joan Crawford film.

The Neatness Thing

"Is that the way you're going to do it?"
Judgmental Joan: No matter how hard you try, you know you'll never quite measure up

Daughter Issues

Joan always knew where to find the boys AND the booze

"Tina!! Bring me the axe!!"

"If she doesn't like you...she can make you disappear."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I've never fully understood why so many "bad" movies outdistance more accomplished films when it comes to sheer entertainment value, so perhaps that's why I treasure them so much. With boring and banal being the most frequent by-product of professional ineptitude, there's something serendipitous about discovering...what can you call it...the perfect "hot mess" that is an enjoyably bad movie.

Meeting the In-Laws
Edith Atwater and Howard St. John as Alison &Raymond Fields

Strait-Jacket is a veritable laundry list of filmmaking flaws: a terrible, ill-used music score; bland performances (although I really like Diane Baker and George Kennedy); unsure pacing; flat cinematography, and editing that appears calculated to enhance the artificiality of the violence; a cliche-filled script; and no distinct visual style beyond "Make sure they can see it" and "Make sure it's in focus." Yet it's a movie I can watch repeatedly and still find new things to enjoy. The breeziest 93-minutes of film you're likely to see. Of course, the one-of-a-kind force of nature known as Joan Crawford accounts for 90% of this.
But whether you watch Strait-Jacket for the talent or the travesty, it remains a movie that doesn't disappoint. If nothing else, it's a marvelous example of the kind of movies being offered big-time stars as the pictures started to get smaller.

Watch Your Step, indeed!

BONUS MATERIAL
The absolutely delightful "How to Plan a Movie Murder" featurette for Strait-Jacket with Joan Crawford, William Castle, and screenwriter Robert Bloch: HERE

Diane Baker enjoyed a good relationship with Joan Crawford. She appeared with the actress in The Best of Everything and Strait-Jacket. Still, according to Baker, that relationship soured during the making of Della (originally titled Fatal Confinement) an unsold 1964 pilot for a Paul Burke TV series called Royal Bay. 

Joan Crawford's wardrobe & makeup tests for Strait-Jacket HERE

1982 Interview with Steven Spielberg on working with Joan on Night Gallery HERE

Strait-Jacket opened in New York on Wednesday, January 22, 1964. First-nighters were treated to a personal appearance by Joan Crawford and co-star John Anthony Hayes. 

Pure William Castle
The Columbia Lady loses her head

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE 1962

If prostitution didn’t exist, Hollywood most certainly would have had to invent it. How else to surmount the troubling obstacle presented to screenwriters required to develop women characters not defined by the label of wife, mother, or girlfriend? How else to include as much sex, salaciousness, and female objectification as possible while still tent-poling the dual hypocritical obligations of have-your-cake-and-eat-too moralizing necessary to keep one step ahead of the censors, and the proper amount of after-the-fact, self-righteous finger-wagging to placate audience guilt?

America loves its sex, violence, and debauchery, but never really lets itself enjoy the fun it has rolling around in the gutter unless also afforded the opportunity to give itself a good slap on the wrist after it’s all over. This need to have one’s "sensitive adult material" served up with a healthy dose of religious dogma goes a long way toward explaining why a moralizing piece of Hollywood sleaze like Walk on the Wild Side is such an enduringly entertaining hoot.

Laurence Harvey as Doug Linkhorn

Jane Fonda as Kitty Twist (nee Tristram)

Capucine as Hallie Gerard

Barbara Stanwyck as Jo Courtney

Anne Baxter as Teresina Vidaverri

Published in 1956, Nelson Algren’s anecdotal, relentlessly downbeat, essentially unfilmable (at least in 1962) Depression-era novel A Walk on the Wild Side bears scant resemblance to the sanitized movie adapted from it, save for a few characters' names and the excision of the “A” from the title. 

The film version, rumored (quite remarkably) to be the work of no fewer than six writers, including playwright Clifford Odets (The Country Girl) and screenwriter Ben Hecht (Spellbound), strives to be a tale of lost souls seeking redemption through love on the sordid side of the streets of New Orleans.

Richard Rust as Oliver

However, the challenge of balancing sexual candor and social uplift becomes apparent in nearly every scene and dialogue exchange, ultimately proving far too unwieldy a burden for director Edward Dmytryk (Raintree County, Murder My Sweet), who, it is said, stepped in after the original director, Blake Edwards, was replaced. 

In the end, the movie promoted with the self-serving warning “This is an ADULT PICTURE - Parents should exercise discretion in permitting the immature to see it,” ended up being no more than another teasing Hollywood soap opera.

The composition of this shot pretty much sums up Walk on the Wild Side's major conflict 

The time is the 1930s (you’ll just have to take the film’s word for that; everything looks like 1962). After his sick father, an alcoholic, unordained preacher, dies, Arroyo, Texas farm boy Dove Linkhorn (Lithuanian-born Laurence Harvey) travels to Louisiana on a quest to find his long-lost love, Hallie (French-born Capucine), an amateur painter and sculptor. 

En route, he crosses paths with savvy runaway orphan Kitty Twist (Fonda), who teaches him the tricks of riding the rails and thumbing rides. Although Kitty has a few other tricks she’d like to teach him, Dove says no to hobo hanky-panky because his heart remains true to Hallie, whom he calls his religion. 

A brief stopover at the rundown café of Mexican head-turner Teresina Vidaverri (Baxter) brings out Kitty’s claws, resulting in her stealing from the proprietress out of jealousy. The morally offended dirt farmer sends her on her way and stays on at Teresina’s place as a hired hand.

The composition of this shot pretty much sums up Walk on the Wild Side's secondary conflict

Cut to New Orleans’ French Quarter and to the popular bordello known as The Doll House. Run by no-nonsense man-hater (aka, coded lesbian in '60s Hollywood screenwriter parlance) Jo Courtney (Stanwyck) and given assist by her devoted but ineffectual husband, former carny strongman Achilles Schmidt (Karl Swenson), who lost his legs in a train accident.

The Doll House, typical of most movie whorehouses, doesn't look like very much fun, but business appears to be booming. The big shocker (to the screenwriters perhaps, but certainly to no one with even a passing familiarity with soap opera plotting) is that Dove’s virginal and virtuous Hallie is the Doll House’s most desirable and sought-after prostitute… Jo categorically taking top honors as Hallie’s most persistent and ardent pursuer.

As Hallie, statuesque ex-model Capucine embodies the kind of regal, exotic glamour suitable to a high-priced escort ("Upscale and sophisticated enough to take anywhere!"). But, breathtaking beauty aside, the woman comes off as the least fun hooker you're likely to rent.

Of course, when Dove finally reunites with his wild Texas love, the woman with whom he shared his first kiss and more: “Afterwards, in the moonlight...we danced like we was celebrating a miracle. A crazy kind of dance. And then we sang and shouted...like it wasn't real!.” (of course, once we set eyes on the haughty, high-cheekboned regalness of Capucine, this already a laughable reminiscence now becomes surrealistically inconceivable). Alas, the romantically idealistic hayseed is a tad slow on picking up on how Hallie has managed to support herself all this time, and how she's able to afford all those expensive 1960s Pierre Cardin-designed frocks. When he does, his heartbroken disillusionment gives way to the usual macho possessiveness and proprietary protectiveness. 

The intense dislike Capucine and Harvey had for one another is the stuff of legend

At this point, we see that the film does not regard Hallie’s virtue as something that is her own damn business to do with as she pleases, but as something that has been taken from Dove. What Hallie feels about her life as a sex worker is secondary (well, really of no consequence to the screenwriter at all) to Dove, who acts like the wounded party in all this. Thus, he takes it upon himself to save and safeguard Hallie's body and soul, especially from the over-ardent attentions of The Doll House madam. 

Resorting to his father's bible-thumping ways, Dove proselytizes ... I mean, explains to an understandably exasperated Teresina (who I'm not entirely sure he hasn't been shacking up with all this time, but now is left to douse her torch in tequila) his philosophy and the film's narrative through-line:

 “In the Bible, Hosea fell in love with Gomer. She was a harlot. They got married, but she couldn't stay away from men. Hosea got mad and threw her out. Sold her into slavery. But he couldn't get her out of his mind, so he went looking for her. When he found her, he brought her back home. But it was no good. Before long, she was up to her old tricks again [literally, it would seem]. But he loved her anyway, and he couldn't give her up. So he took her into the wilderness...away from temptation. Away from other men. And that's what I have to do with Hallie.”   

If you think this sounds like he's talking about a child or a pet, not a grown woman with a mind of her own, then, like me, Dove won't look to you quite like the virtuous hero he and the screenwriters think he is. 

I'm sorry, but we're supposed to believe that these two stunning,
continental-looking creatures spent even one minute in dustbowl Texas?

The remaining bulk of Walk on the Wild Side occupies itself with being a romantic triangle-cum-spiritual tug-of-war between Dove (representing honest values and true love) and Jo (representing well-dressed depravity and perversion), with the magnificent but I’m-not-all-that-convinced-she’s-worth-all-this-trouble Hallie at the center.

Happily, by way of distraction, we have the welcome reappearance of Kitty, the former boxcar good-time-girl transformed into garter-snapping sexpot, as the newest employee of The Doll House. And then there's chipper Southern chippie, Miss Precious (the always terrific Joanna Moore, Tatum O’Neal’s mom), a Doll House resident who sleeps on a Confederate flag pillow and punctuates even the shortest sentences with “The Colonel always said…”. On the distaff side, there's the reptilian sexiness of short-tempered strong-arm man, Oliver (Richard Rust of Homicidal), who has an eye for the ladies and suede gloves to keep his hands nice and unbruised when he roughs them up. 

Inquiring Minds Want to Know
Menacing roughneck Oliver (Richard Rust) needs some answers from Kitty 

Posters for Walk on the Wild Side proclaimed: “A side of life you never expected to see on the screen!” Which is not altogether false, given you've got a 4-time Oscar-nominee playing one of the screen’s first lesbians (who lives to the final reel, yet!), and the daring-for-its-time setting of a New Orleans brothel. The rest, alas, is what Hollywood has always done: a) Offer up endless reworkings of the Madonna-whore dichotomy as soap opera and love story, b) attempt to shock and scandalize, but in the end, always heralding staunch conservatism and prudery.

Joanna Moore as Miss Precious
A personal favorite and incapable of giving a bad performance, this incandescent
 actress with the very sad life story is one of the bright spots in Walk on the Wild Side

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I'm not sure if the genre has been identified by any other name besides Southern Gothic, but I am a major fan of the overheated, sex-and-psychosis dramas of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Carson McCullers. And when these southern-fried potboilers are crossed with a touch of the soap-opera overstatement associated with Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann, and Sidney Sheldon ...well, I'm in 7th Heaven. Walk on the Wild Side has all the luridness of Williams, the pretentiousness of Inge, plus all the unintentional humor of anything bearing the stamp of Susann.

There's dialogue that sounds as though it were written by a robot; overearnest performances that are nevertheless as limp as a clothesline; the ever-present topic of sex that is hinted at and alluded to but never spoken of in even remotely direct terms; and clashing accents left and right: Texas drawl, Southern twang, Georgia singsong, French, British, and Spanish (sort of).

Riding the Rails
Jane Fonda looks a good deal like her father, Henry, in The Grapes of Wrath
in this shot of Dove and Kitty catching a ride in a freight car

Fans of the by-now-anticipated unwillingness and inability of '60s films to remain faithful to the era they depict will have a field day with Walk on the Wild Side's interpretation of the Depression-era South. Outside of a few automobiles and some distant dress extras, the look is 1962 through and through. A costume designer friend of mine once suggested that this practice is not an unintentional or careless phenomenon. As the makeup and hairstyles of an earlier era often look odd or unflattering to audiences, he suggested that the modern look of so many period films is just the industry's recognition that the stars of romantic films must appear "attractive" to their audiences, and very often that means adhering to contemporary styles in makeup and hair. 

Another inconsistency: we're asked to accept that Hallie, a woman who quotes T.S. Eliot
 and asks johns for Brancusi sculptures as gifts,
ever had anything to do with a man as "basic" (read: boring) as Dove 

When a studio is forking over big bucks for a glamorous star, they want the audience to "see" the glamour. The aesthetic concern is that the baggy fashions and severe makeup styles of the 1930s (such as thin eyebrows, bow lips, thick stockings, and figure-concealing frocks) will look odd or comical to 1960s audiences. A point well taken, I concede. But it doesn't address the jarring incongruity of seeing women with '60s bouffants and bullet bras stepping out of 1928 DeSotos.

The late-great Juanita Moore as Mama

PERFORMANCES

Where to start? To say that I enjoy all the performances in Walk on the Wild Side is not at all saying that many of them are any good. If anyone emerges from the chaos with their dignity intact, it's Barbara Stanwyck. An actor virtually incapable of giving a false performance, Stanwyck is not really called upon to deliver more than a professional, standard-issue, tough-broad routine, but she's nevertheless the most compelling character in the film for me. She wants Hallie, and I don't doubt it for a minute.

A rare shot of Barbara Stanwyck showing off her bust

Barbara Stanwyck was outed as a lesbian in two substandard books: The Sewing Circle by Axel Madsen, and one that got right to the point with its title-- Hollywood Lesbians by Boze Hadleigh. If either book is to be believed, Walk on the Wild Side was a film set with more closets than a Feydeau farce: leading man (Harvey), leading lady (Capucine), and co-star (Stanwyck).

You can say Jo Courtney wants to lead The Glamorous Life,
as in, She Don't Need a Man's Touch 

In this, Stanwyck's first film since 1957's Forty Guns, the very private Stanwyck was yet another classic-era star forced to embrace the burgeoning era of movie permissiveness and take on a role I'm certain at one time would have thought unsavory. Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons disapproved of Stanwyck taking on such a role, to which Stanwyck is said to have responded, "What do you want them to do, get a real madam and a real lesbian?"  On the bright side, at least the film she was featured in was a major Hollywood production. Come 1964, Stanwyck would be following in Joan Crawford's B-movie footsteps and appearing in William Castle schlock like The Night Walker.

The beautiful Capucine may not be much of an actress, but she's not helped much by a script that calls for her to behave like a non-stop pill from the minute she's introduced. Male screenwriters unfamiliar with how women actually think are often guilty of writing about "beauty" as though it were an actual character trait rather than a physical attribute. In the case of Hallie Gerard, so little of the character's much-talked-about passion, restlessness, or joy is conveyed that we're left to imagine she's fought over by Dove and Jo simply because she's so outrageously gorgeous. If the Hallie we now see is supposed to represent a broken woman whose life-force has been drained out of her by her having "Fallen down the well," as she puts it, the backstory we're left to fill in requires an actress substantially more skilled than the one we're given. You get about as much emotionally out of Capucine as a walking/talking entity as from one of her model photo shoots from the '50s.

Cheekbone Wars
Capucine circa 1922 and Faye Dunaway, 1974 vintage (in The Towering Inferno)
both rock twin towers of hair along with their Grecian-style gowns

For me, Jane Fonda gives the film's liveliest performance. Liberated from the lacquered, overly-mature look adopted for The Chapman Report and Period of Adjustment (both 1962), Fonda is sexier and looser here. Perhaps a little too loose in her early scenes. There's something about playing "earthy" that brings forth the inner ham in actors. Fonda, in her early scenes, can't seem to keep her finishing school refinement from creeping into her overly mannered interpretation of Kitty Twist, railway ragamuffin. Parts of her performance have the feel of an over-coached acting school scene. But, unlike some of her co-stars, she's never a dull presence and really comes into her own in the sequences in the Doll House. She looks fantastic as well. The cameraman obviously thought so too, for Fonda's shapely backside has arguably as many close-ups as her face. 

Laurence Harvey has always been a favorite of mine (owing at least in part to my tendency to develop matinee crushes on birdlike, Tony Perkins types), but he really seems out of his element here. The thoroughly engaging (and sexy) energy he brought to I Am a Camera (1955), or 1959's Expresso Bongo, is nowhere to be seen in his tediously virtuous Dove Linkhorn.

All of Anne Baxter's scenes are enlivened by her terrible Mexican accent ("Wha' hoppen?") 

In this instance, in Hollywood's long tradition of casting white actors as Mexicans, we can all be thankful Oscar-nominee Ann Baxter (All About Eve) hasn't had her skin cosmetically darkened, but LORD her accent! I can't even properly gauge her performance because every time she utters a word (in that familiar, husky voice of hers), I'm distracted by giggles. 

Like the little goof in Citizen Kane where no one is in the room to hear Kane's deathbed utterance of "Rosebud," this newspaper features a photo of Jo and her gang of thugs that absolutely no one could have taken, unless the news photographer was also in bed with Dove.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Is there some axiom that says the cooler the opening credits sequence, the more likely one is to be let down by the film? Outside of the brilliant and stylish art-deco title sequence for the 1974 screen adaptation of Mame, which got me all hyped-up only to then lead me down a path of soft-focus croaking, Saul Bass' snazzy, jazz-tinged title sequence for Walk on the Wild Side (assisted immeasurably by the Oscar-nominated Elmer Bernstein, Mack David theme music) sets one up for a film that never materializes.

Edward Dmytryk would go on to direct Richard Burton and Joey Heatherton in Bluebeard.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Walk on the Wild Side is, like the 1976 US/USSR collaboration that resulted in the dreadful musical mistake that was The Bluebird, a film whose backstory is infinitely more interesting than the movie itself. Conflict-of-interest deals were behind much of Walk on the Wild Side's grab-bag casting (Laurence Harvey was being promoted by the wife of the head of Columbia Studios, while Capucine was being promoted by producer Charles K. Feldman). The film was plagued by constant rewrites, deleted scenes (the internet is full of rumors regarding a curiously missing-in-action hairbrush spanking scene between Stanwyck and Capucine...be still my heart), costly delays, and a cast that was often openly antagonistic to one another as well as to the director.

Character actress Kathryn Card, fondly remembered as Mrs. Magillicuddy,
Lucille Ball's ditsy mother on I Love Lucy

The end result is a film that is a disappointment as both drama and love story, but a bonanza of unintentional humor and delicious badness. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a more enjoyable watchable film. Easy on the eyes and no strain on the brain, your biggest concern will be stomach cramps from laughing aloud at the dialogue. 

Four-time Oscar nominee Barbara Stanwyck (she won an Honorary Oscar in 1982) made only two films after Walk on the Wild Side: Roustabout with Elvis Presley, of all people, and the aforementioned William Castle thriller The Night Walker, both in 1964 

Woefully tame and coy by today's standards, Walk on the Wild Side maintains its historical notoriety as one of the earliest major motion pictures to feature a lesbian character. As the years have passed, the film has revealed itself to be a movie with a fairly high behind-the-scenes LGBTQ pedigree as well. The names of Laurence Harvey, Capucine, and Barbara Stanwyck have all been mentioned in various celebrity memoirs as being gay or bisexual, while Jane Fonda has written in her own autobiography about participating in bisexual three-ways with her husband, Roger Vadim.

Click on image to enlarge

Walk on the Wild Side opened in Los Angeles on
Wednesday, March 7, 1962, at the Stanley-Warner Theater in Beverly Hills

You'd think a little of that sexual democracy might have wound up on the screen, but no. At best, Walk on the Wild Side remains an entertaining yet tame timepiece and cultural curio for those interested in seeing what kind of film Hollywood thought it was ready to tackle during the early days of the Motion Picture Production Code's abandonment.

Clip from Walk on the Wild Side (1962)

OK, it's actually a Walk on the Mild Side

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2014