THE LOVE MACHINE 1971

The Waiting Is Over...The Love Machine is on the Screen!

So declared the graphically austere poster ads (a gold ankh against a simple black background) heralding the arrival of The Love Machine—sorry, Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine—to movie theaters in 1971. Hard to believe when looking at the film now, but there actually was a degree of anticipation attending the release of The Love Machine, the big-screen adaptation of Susann's 1969 best-selling follow-up novel to the phenomenally successful Valley of the Dolls.  

Much of the anticipation was due to so much having transpired in the four years since 20th Century Fox first released Valley of the Dolls to big boxoffice and a torrent of lousy reviews in 1967. First and most significantly, Jacqueline Susann had proven herself a viable boxoffice name in her own right, capable of selling tickets regardless of the project's relative artistic or critical merit. Secondly, movies themselves had grown increasingly permissive in terms of nudity and language since 1967 (Fox's own Myra Breckinridge had seen to that); thus, there existed, at least among Jacqueline Susann's broad fan base, the hope that the film of The Love Machine would have more overall license to be every bit as tawdry and smutty as the source novel.

Naughty, Naughty

At last, the newfound permissiveness in movies allowed gay characters to be acknowledged as such, and they weren't required to die before the final reel (although they usually did, anyway). For movies that sought to be daring and hip, the inclusion of gay characters—always depicted as stereotypically as possible—was shorthand for provocative, taboo decadence. Here we have David Hemmings, in full flame with a cigarette holder, as fashion photographer Jerry Nelson and his blow-dried inamorato, British Shakespearean actor Alfie Knight (portrayed by Clinton Greyn).

In the minds of many, there also existed the misguided belief that The Love Machine was going to be a better film than Valley of the Dolls. Why? Well, putting aside for a moment the obvious...that it would be hard to make a movie that could be worse, it was Jacqueline Susann herself (who had never made secret her dislike for the movie version of Valley of the Dolls ) who promised fans that both she and her husband, Irving Mansfield, were taking steps to guarantee that they both would have creative input in bringing The Love Machine to the screen. 

Indeed, thanks to a lawsuit filed by Susann against 20th Century-Fox and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)—that unofficial, unauthorized, non-sequel—Susann and Mansfield were able to take The Love Machine to the more lucrative and contractually friendly pastures of Columbia Pictures. Columbia paid Susann $1.5 million for the film rights and granted her a possessive author's credit for the movie's title (Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine). With her husband installed as executive producer (apt enough, given that he was a TV producer by profession and The Love Machine was set in the television industry), this time around, the Susann-Mansfield household held a slightly tighter grip on the creative reins of bringing Susann's bestseller to the screen.  

The Hitchcock of Coarseness
Jacqueline Susann makes another cameo appearance in one of her films.
(That's LA newsman Jerry Dunphy on the left)

Possessive film titles like Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine are almost always clumsy and invariably rooted in contract perks, ego-stroking, and product branding. But like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, an author's name attached to the title also implies that the film will be a more accurate, authentic realization of the writer's intent and vision. Well, as anyone can attest who's seen Stephen King's abominable self-penned 1997 TV-movie adaptation of his novel, The Shining (he disliked the many alterations and omissions in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film), an author's participation in the adaptation of their own work is in no way a reliable guarantor of anything resembling quality. Or even watchability.

John Phillip Law as Robin Stone

Dyan Cannon as Judith Austin

David Hemmings as Jerry Nelson

Jodi Wexler as Amanda

Maureen Arthur as Ethel Evans

The Love Machine tells the story of the swift rise and fall of Robin Stone, an ambitious local news anchor who ruthlessly muscles his way into the job of network television president. Despite looking thin, wan, and in desperate need of a blood transfusion, Robin is an irresistible ladykiller who leaves a trail of broken-hearted, blue-bathrobed lasses in his wake. A cad with Nielsen ratings and audience-share figures where his heart should be, Robin Stone is like a male version of Faye Dunaway's Diana Christiansen in Network (1976), crossed with Valley of the Dolls' Helen Lawson, with a little of Stephen Boyd's Frankie Fane from The Oscar (1966) on the side.

Like most of Jacqueline Susann's characters, Robin Stone is allegedly based on a real-life individual. In this instance, the late CBS TV executive James T. Aubrey—the man we can thank for The Beverly Hillbillies and a host of other fragrantly lowbrow moneymakers during the '60s. Like his movie counterpart, Aubrey is said to have been a calculatingly shrewd cookie who held the TV-viewing audience in the lowest contempt and made a fortune banking on the public's insatiable appetite for mediocrity. Judging by the popularity of today's Jersey Shore/Kardashians train wrecks, you can't say the guy wasn't something of a visionary.

The Love Machine
In all but the most archly ironic circumstances, Jackie Susann failed to get the public to adopt "dolls" as popular slang for barbiturates. Her efforts getting "The Love Machine" into the vernacular as slang for TV sets (because it "sells love, creates desire"...you see) fared even worse.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

My fondness for a specific brand of bad film is as difficult to explain as it is to defend. It's not like I just get off on making fun of them. On the contrary, most of these films are very professional, technically well-made films in every regard. What I think I respond to is that scary zone in the creative arts where the attempt fails to match the execution. That twilight zone where all the talent, creativity, and hard work on one end somehow yields the 100% opposite of what anyone intended. It fascinates me because it can occur at any moment, no matter how heavily the deck is stacked for success. For example, consider Marlon Brando putting cotton in his cheeks in The Godfather. That could have turned out disastrous, but instead became iconic. Or what about Al Pacino's Cuban accent in Scarface. What an enormous risk that was! It would have derailed the entire picture if audiences found it ridiculous and started to chuckle whenever he spoke.  

No,  this isn't a shot of Robin Stone visiting Pee Wee's Playhouse.
This is just a horrific example of chic '70s decor.

I'm pointing out that the collaborative art of film is often like a dance on a wire; fiasco or triumph is sometimes based on tiny, intangible miscalculations or moments of blind overconfidence. Something that might not even be visible until after the film is already in the can. Hindsight makes it seem like an overripe performance or a particular narrative miscalculation could somehow have been avoided, but that's not true. It's the whole crapshoot element of it all that fascinates me.

If it's true in life that we learn most from our failures, I also believe there are similar lessons to be gleaned for the film buff confronted with a well-intentioned mess. When you watch a film that costs millions, involves hundreds of decisions, hours of hard work, the collaboration of many talented individuals...and the result is sometimes deplorable, you're staring straight into the face of the elusiveness of excellence. That or perhaps hubris, too many cooks spoiling the broth, or maybe (worst of all) professional cynicism: films that don't really care if they're good, so long as they make money.

Ambitious Robin Stone goes head-to-head with network
programming executive Danton Miller (Jackie Cooper)

 The Love Machine tries to be a hard-hitting, cynical, claw-his-way-to-the-top drama along the lines of The Sweet Smell of Success and The Young Philadelphians, but for all its faddish clothes, bare bosoms, and cuss words, it's fundamentally a creaky Fannie Hurst melodrama. It strives hard to be sensational and daring, but its focus needs readjusting. The story is too shallow to be good character drama, and its depiction of the inner workings of the TV industry is too superficial and cliche-ridden to serve effectively as expose. Even with all this considered, The Love Machine still manages to be a curiously addictive viewing experience, if only due to its utter cluelessness as to how airless and old-fashioned it is. 

The real star of The Love Machine is Robin's collection of blue bathrobes.
It got so that I started to miss them if they failed to show up in a scene.

PERFORMANCES

The likeable late actor (and last-minute replacement) John Phillip Law portrays Robin Stone with startling ineffectualness. Last seen sporting angel's wings and a feathered diaper in Barbarella, Law, who by all accounts sounds like a terribly nice guy in real life, latches onto Robin Stone's closed-off, inexpressive side and gives a performance that's too stiff even for a character referred to as a machine. He's given no help from the script, whose risible dialog suits the actor's robotic delivery. I've read that Jacqueline Susann (ever the fantasist) wanted Sean Connery for the role.

John Phillip Law's somewhat lifeless performance is partly due to his stepping in at the last moment as a replacement for originally-cast Brian Kelly (star of TV's Flipper), injured in a motorcycle accident three weeks into filming. In several scenes, it's evident that Law is wearing ill-fitting clothes cut for the shorter-in-stature Kelly.

Dyan Cannon has always been a favorite of mine, but her performance here (no great shakes, but heads above the rest of the cast) is consistently undermined by the jaw-dropping, high-fashion get-ups she's called upon to wear. Given that she's not really provided a believable character to play, her bizarre fashion sense always takes center stage. According to a Jacqueline Susann bio, Cannon was so struck by a case of the giggles during a preview of The Love Machine (inspired by both her performance and the film) she had to excuse herself from the theater.

Whose idea was it to dress the lovely Dyan Cannon, playing the wife of a television executive, in a test pattern? The answer to that rhetorical question is Oscar-nominated costume designer (Giant, What a Way to Go!, Morituri, The Way We Were) Moss Mabry.

In the movie Barbarella, Jane Fonda's title character makes the sound observation, "A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming." I've an observation of my own that's equally on-point:

A good many bad movies feature fashion shows. A parade of Moss Mabry's coif-centric costume designs amusingly pad out The Love Machine's running time.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

For anyone finding the film hard going (it's relatively slow by today's standards), I beg you to stick around for the climactic "Hollywood party fight scene." Here Ms. Cannon (balancing 23 pounds of teased hair) finally abandons her heretofore starchy acting style and lets loose with that infectiously raucous laugh of hers, setting in motion a truly memorable free-for-all that should have become a camp highlight by now. Finally, in trying to top Valley of the Dolls' infamous wig-down-the-toilet scene, The Love Machine finally does something right.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

When The Love Machine was first released to theaters, I was a mere 13 years old. Too young to see the much-ballyhooed motion picture but old enough to take my mom's paperback novel to school and pore over the "dirty parts" with my schoolmates. I'm not sure what my problem was at such an early age, but I was very much taken with this sleazy novel. Particularly the iconography of the ankh ring Robin Stone wears on the paperback cover art. (In my defense, I grew up in San Francisco during the hippie era, and ankhs were all over the place.) I also unsuccessfully tried to persuade my sister to buy that Faberge "Xanadu" perfume that was cross-promoted in the film (ads for which recommended you mark "his" favorite spot with an "x").

Xanadu by Faberge
Samples were given away at many theaters showing The Love Machine

2021 update

Reader swag! A longtime reader of this blog who has since become a dear friend (although we've never met) gave me the shock of my life when she sent me this vintage Xanadu Cologne she unearthed online. So, thanks to a very kind gesture of thoughtful generosity, a tiny bit of The Love Machine movie premiere experience is mine some 50 years after the fact. 

In spite of my unseemly youthful preoccupation with this movie, I didn't actually see The Love Machine until I was well into adulthood. However, I'm happy to say that I wasn't disappointed. A little bored, perhaps (this movie takes itself WAY too seriously), but not disappointed. And while it's not nearly as much fun as Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine has more than enough in the way of over-the-top fashions, poky dialog, and questionable performances to rank high among my favorite guilty pleasures.

"...and when you put it on, you'll live forever. And love me forever."

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011

THE MATCHMAKER 1958

How long has this been going on? That's the Gershwin-inspired that ran through my head when I happened upon this heretofore-unknown-to-me comedy gem about ten years ago. As a self-avowed film buff who's devoted a considerable amount of childhood should-be-asleep time to watching old movies on The Late Show and The Late Late Show; how is it that this absolutely delightful little film managed to fly completely under my radar, undetected, all these years?

The Matchmaker is the 1958 screen adaptation of the 1955 Broadway play about a meddlesome matrimonial matchmaker (Shirley Booth) in 1880s Yonkers, New York who sets her sights on marrying her employer (Paul Ford). If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because the Thornton Wilder (Our Town,  Shadow of a Doubt) farcical comedy is the source material for the 1964 Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! and its overstuffed 1968 movie adaptation.

It took all of 60-seconds for me to know that I was going to be wholly captivated by The Matchmaker, which opens with an antique ink engraving of a New York street scene coming to life. To the accompaniment of a jaunty musical score by Adolph Deutsch, the film introduces us to the main characters; each taking the opportunity  to break through the fourth wall, addressing us directly and letting us know that they know they're all in a movie:

Shirley Booth as Dolly Levi
"Oh, hello! Are all of you people married?"

Anthony Perkins as Cornelius Hackl
"Are you alone? He's out getting you popcorn?"

Shirley MacLaine as Irene Molloy
(Catching camera lens focused on her legs) "You ought to be ashamed of yourself! (after a thought) Pretty, aren't they?"

Paul Ford as Horace Vandergelder
"Haven't you any better way to spend your money?"

Characters continue to speak to us throughout the rest of the film. Sometimes filling us in on the plot, sometimes offering commentary, sometimes offering drolly funny asides. The effect is hilarious and instantly winning.

Which is a rather odd conclusion for me to come to given that I have always held for Hello, Dolly! only a grudging kind of appreciation. I'm not sure if it's the Jerry Herman score (it strives for the robustness of The Music Man but lands at theatrical cheese); the actresses associated with the role (garish, drag-queen-like caricatures of women), or that irksome exclamation point in its title (grammatically appropriate, I know, but an exclamation point attached to a musical just seems to bring out the Grinch in me...I'll decide if I'm excited or not, thank you). But Hello, Dolly! has never struck me as anything more than an efficient, inoffensive entertainment of the sort perfect for dinner theaters and high-school productions. Not particularly funny or clever, and far too strenuously quaint.

I do admit, however, to harboring a fondness for (and deriving perverse pleasure from) the Barbra Streisand musical version, simply due to its vast size. Viewing it is like watching someone blowing up a balloon to ever-larger dimensions...you want to see how big it can get before it explodes under its own pressure. I also find Streisand's schizophrenic performance somewhat fascinating (she’s old/she’s young, she’s sexy/she’s prim, she’s Mae West/ she’s Fanny Brice…)...but The Matchmaker is another matter entirely.

Somehow everything that doesn't work in Hello, Dolly! works stupendously in The Matchmaker.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Chiefly, its scale. The Matchmaker succeeds because the simplicity of its presentation is utterly appropriate to the material. The overkill of Hello, Dolly! all but submerges the gentle charm of the plot, which is as simple as a fairy tale. In that miraculous way some comedies have, The Matchmaker lights on just the right tone, just the right balance of self-awareness and innocence, to make this delicate type of fluff just take wing and soar. When I first saw this film I was fairly flabbergasted that in virtually every instance where Hello, Dolly! made me groan, The Matchmaker gets it 100% right!

Vandergelder Hay and Feed apprentice Barnaby Tucker (l.) and chief clerk Cornelius Hackl (r); near-insufferable characters in the film Hello, Dolly!,  are brought to appealing life by Robert Morse and Tony Perkins in The Matchmaker

With a cast that knows its way around comedy, both physically and verbally, I found myself laughing at long-familiar dialogue that had never elicited as much as a smile from me before. The difference: it was delivered with skilled timing and in character. The screenplay surprises time and time again by revealing the real heart behind the gags, traditional mix-ups, and misunderstandings of farce.

The scenes between Paul Ford and Shirley Booth are like comic sparring matches.
Each manages to make their characters farcically funny, yet touchingly human. 

PERFORMANCES

I always enjoy films where even actors in bit roles are cast and directed to fit in as a valuable part of an ensemble. The cast of The Matchmaker fits seamlessly and are all rhythmically on the same page. Each plays it comically large, but real... like in those great old comedies of the '30s. I get a kick out of seeing the ridiculously young Shirley MacLaine paired with the surprisingly sweet and non-creepy Anthony Perkins. Both are just so likable, you root for their romance the first time you see them together.

Love, Turn of the Century Style

Of course, the top honors go to Shirley Booth, an actress whose work, both dramatic and comedic,  I greatly admire. I can't speak to Ruth Gordon's Dolly Levi (she originated the role on Broadway and won the Tony Award), but for my money, the role belongs to Ms. Booth. Along with being refreshingly age and appearance appropriate for the character (Booth was turning 60 when she made this film), she brings to the role a keen comic timing and inflection of delivery that imbues Dolly's busybody antics a touch of poignancy along with the humor. How she achieves this is beyond me, but I find Booth to be one of those actresses who can turn straw into gold. 

If a line of dialog is funny, she can make it uproarious; if it's only amusing, she has a way of bringing her voice, mannerisms, and facial expressions into play and arriving at something delightfully original and unexpected. She finds the authenticity in even the broadest comedy. Until I saw The Matchmaker, it never once occurred to me that there could be a human being behind that grating buttinsky known as Dolly "Gallagher" Levi. Just check out how Booth handles the big monologue Dolly has with her departed husband. I've seen it performed many times before, but Booth is the only one to make it genuinely moving.

Dolly Levi's Philosophy of Matchmaking
"Life is never quite interesting enough, somehow. You people who come to the movies know that.
So I rearrange things a little."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Those familiar with Hello, Dolly! will find it fun picking up bits of dialog that became songs, taking note of added and eliminated characters, and comparing the changes in acting styles. Me, I enjoyed seeing characters reduced to one-dimensionality in the musical revealed to be rather fleshed out in their original form. And when things are at risk of becoming too sweet or cute, the device of having the actors step out of character to address the audience always seems to add a knowing wink indicating that they are aware of playing parts in a dated - but terribly charming - little confection.

Shirley Booth and Shirley MacLaine appeared as mother and daughter in Hot Spell (1958)

Robert Morse originated the role of Barnaby Tucker on Broadway

Paul Ford was the master of the flustered double-take

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

It's always been my feeling that a comedy that works is that rarest of movie beasts. Everyone's tastes are different and I can easily imagine how Shirley Booth's grandmotherly appeal and the old-fashioned, light-as-gossamer style of comedy employed here won't be to everyone's liking. But for those, like me, who find nothing funny in the contemporary fascination with scatology, rudeness, and the bottomless wellspring of American male oafishness; well, The Matchmaker is a godsend. I may have missed this terrific little film for the many decades it was available to be seen, but since discovering it, I've more than made up for lost time. It's one of my favorite films. Witty script, clever execution, sharp performances, heart, sentimentality, and a moral to boot!

The cast of The Matchmaker bids us farewell

The chief concern of the advertising and marketing of The Matchmaker
appears to be concealing the fact that the story is set in 1884

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011

DEMON SEED 1977

Back in 1977 I recall asking a friend if she was as eager as I to see the new Donald Cammell film Demon Seed opening at theaters that week. Her reply: "Ugh! Hollywood just keeps thinking of new ways to rape women." I took that as a no.

Her response surprised me, but it really shouldn't have. Not if I'd given even two seconds' worth of thought to how the film's premise might sound from her perspective. 

My friend and I were classmates at film school, drawn together by a love of offbeat movies and a shared fondness for Cammell's remarkable directing debut, Performance (1970).  Given that Demon Seed was only Cammell's second film in six years, I thought my friend would find provocative the prospect of a director as artistically idiosyncratic as Cammell taking on a genre film. Indeed, in summary, the plot read like something better suited to William Castle or Roger Corman: a supercomputer imprisons a woman (Julie Christie) in her home, intent on impregnating her and creating a new life form.

I mean, how could my friend so oversimplify what was obviously sure to be some kind of meta-commentary on the uneasy relationship between man and machine. An ages-old conflict contrasting the life-affirming intellectual and emotional attributes of the contemporary woman vs. the cold, patriarchal dominance of technology? It was like someone saying Rosemary's Baby was just about a hell-beast raping a mortal woman. Certainly, my friend could see there HAD to be so much more to Demon Seed than the exploitative theme and the offensive premise. 

And what about the Julie Christie connection? Surely Julie Christie—that skilled, intelligent, serious-minded movie icon of the '60s, who publicly eschewed Hollywood stardom and cheesecake glamour for serious roles. Who turned her back on untold millions due to her level-headed, principled, proto-feminist disinterest in portraying helpless girlfriends and supportive male appendages. Surely SHE wouldn't participate in a film that degrades women! Would she?

Julie Christie as Dr. Susan Harris

Fritz Weaver as Dr. Alex Harris

Gerrit Graham as Walter

Robert Vaugh as the voice of Proteus IV

Well, here it is some 34 years and countless viewings later, and as far as I'm concerned the jury is still out on whether my friend's diminution of Demon Seed was a rash oversimplification or if she simply hit the nail on the head.

The marriage of child psychologist Susan Harris (Christie) and computer scientist Alex Harris (Weaver) becomes strained following the loss of their child to leukemia. Susan fears Alex has grown increasingly remote and unemotional, immersing himself in work she views as dehumanizing technology. Specifically, the creation of an organic super-computer named Proteus IV. Attempting a trial separation, Susan opts to remain alone in their spacious, fully-automated, fortress-secure home, run by an all-seeing computer named Alfred (a.k.a., Red Flag #1).

It's clear Alex is confronting his grief in the only way he knows how, by channeling his energies into Proteus IV discovering a cure for the kind of cancer that took the life of their child. And indeed, it is Alex's emotional involvement that prevents him from seeing that his colleagues and subsidizers are more interested in the financial and political potential of Proteus IV. 

But Proteus is an artificial intelligence with a moral code (warped as it is), a voice (Robert Vaughn), and a peculiarly masculine tendency to insist he's always right. Even in the face of blatant contradictions. When ordered to conduct research into an undersea mining operation that would disrupt the ecosystem, Proteus high-mindedly declares, "I refuse to assist you in the rape of the earth!"

A point well-taken were it not for the hypocritically nasty bit of business he/it feels perfectly vindicated in embarking upon just moments later; the raping and impregnation of Susan. What's the purpose of this violent act? So that he/it, Proteus IV, who seems to possess all the ignorance as well as the intelligence of mankind, can feel the sun on its face and achieve the kind of immortality that only an offspring can guarantee. Or something like that.

You see, the objective of Proteus' plan to procreate fluctuates from altruistic to despotic, depending upon whom he's speaking to and what it is he/it is trying to reason/intimidate them into doing.

And therein lies the paradox of Proteus IV. Perhaps intentionally, due to Proteus' inconsistent shifts from sadistic tormentor to world savior, we are never sure if we are meant to side with Proteus' rather logical, humane arguments (the Icon Industries money men are portrayed as villainous fat cats), or if Proteus IV is just a machine gone mad. Perfectly valid to have that point left ambiguous, but as the film is constructed, it feels less like food for thought and more like a lack of focus and sloppy storytelling. It certainly doesn't help that when it wishes to persuade, Proteus speaks in the soothing, calming tones of a meditation guru and shows trippy psychedelic lights. Yet when it wants to get its way, employs the emotional abuse tactics and psychological gaslighting games of an abusive husband ("Why do you make me do these things?").

The cerebral Alex is frequently photographed in cold, windowless surroundings.
The nurturing Susan is seen amidst sunshine and vegetation. 

Captive-women movies like The Collector (1965) and Tattoo (1981) always have a rough time justifying the amount of time they ask the audience to watch a woman brutalized for the sake of making a narrative point. For my taste, these films never successfully transcend their male-gaze oppressiveness, and after a couple of hours of rape and victimization played out for my horror entertainment, I'm usually left pretty numb to any moralistic point they profess to make at the eleventh hour. 

Demon Seed holds out hope because of the intelligence of Julie Christie's performance and the validity of the horror film/sci-fi thriller conflict as initially presented. But as much as I think of this as one of Christie's best performances, I can't shake the feeling that Donald Cammell's opaque direction is not as focused as a piece like this requires. It's weird to watch a movie like this, one that sparks so many internal debates about its themes, while wondering if the guy behind it all is even aware of its subtexts.  

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I'm not unduly fond of science fiction, but I do enjoy a good psychological thriller. Demon Seed does a lot of things wrong, but what it does particularly well is create a palpable sense of dread and tension from a situation that is the stuff of nightmares. Julie Christie's ability to convincingly take her character all the way from mild annoyance, defiance, rage, bewilderment, to abject terror is a thing to behold. It's largely Christie emoting in empty rooms, but in these melodramatic circumstances, her performance is so unforced and natural that we buy into the plot's absurdities.   

Indeed, the absolute smartest thing the makers of Demon Seed did was to hire Julie Christie. Without question she is the single reason the film works at all, her assured performance never once succumbing to the usual "helpless victim" clichés of the genre. It's a major asset that Christie is an actress of sensitivity capable of conveying a vulnerability that is at the same time very strong. The film is saved from being a tedious exercise in sadism by the fact that Christie comes across as a woman without a weak bone in her body. I can't think of another actress more believable as a match for, and worthy adversary of, a diabolical super-brain. 

As Mia Farrow's performance transcended the horror genre and elevated Rosemary's Baby to the level of a modern classic, Julie Christie achieves as much here, but the film surrounding her standout performance isn't up to the task. If anything, she's so good that she only calls attention to how weak the script is and how poorly she's served by it.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

There's no denying that Demon Seed has an intriguing premise that thought-provokingly meshes the techno-paranoia of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the body-invasion terror of Rosemary's Baby. But unlike either of those films, Demon Seed suffers from the feeling that it is perhaps a couple of story conferences short of fully understanding what it wants to say about it all.  

The computer technicians of Icon Industries
Fans of director Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise will remember Garrit Graham (foreground) as glam-rock star Beef, and Harold Oblong (right) as a member of the rock group, The Undeads.

Ira Levin & Roman Polanski mitigated a lot of potential criticism concerning Rosemary's Baby (misogyny, sensationalism, violence against women as entertainment) through the firm establishment of a consistent point of view: Rosemary's. It also had a defined moral perspective in having Rosemary's lapsed Catholicism serving to reflect the morally ambiguous tone of the events of the plot (i.e., at the conclusion, it's suggested that her love for her child may supersede her rejection of the immorality of evil). Most of all Rosemary's Baby expressed awareness and understanding of the story's larger social implications. The film's graphic depiction of the patriarchal dominance that religion and society have over women is countered by the very sympathetic attitude it has towards Rosemary. 

Demon Seed at times feels like the director sympathizes with Proteus IV.

Like Rosemary's Baby, Demon Seed has at its center, a vulnerable, yet smart and resourceful woman. But instead of heightening audience identification/empathy through the presentation of events from her perspective (an easy enough thing to accomplish given that we've all felt helpless to the whims of machines at one time or another),  Demon Seed keeps us at a remove and puts us in the distasteful position of sharing the voyeuristic eyes of Proteus IV. 

Seeing through the distorted lens of Proteus IV

In all the scenes with Susan engaged in a test-of-wills/battle-of-wits with Proteus IV, I kept hoping for the film to reconcile in some meaningful way its initial scenes emphasizing Susan's belief in the importance of feelings and expressing emotions. But the film ends without a viable justification, beyond genre entertainment, for asking us to endure the many protracted scenes of physical and psychological abuse perpetrated against Julie Christie for the bulk of the film.  

Nowhere is this more evident than in the mishandling of Demon Seed's final moments, which is staged for maximum dramatic payoff, but does so at the cost of shifting focus from Susan and placing the viewer in the shoes of the science-minded Alex (who registers about three seconds of concern for his wife before becoming near orgasmic at the thought of the scientific miracle in the basement). Yes, the audience is clamoring to see the baby at this point too, but a more skilled director might have taken precautions to prevent Susan from being shunted to the sidelines at the end of the film in which she has heretofore been front and center.

It's a gross miscalculation of the importance of audience identification, and one of the main reasons why, in the end, I think that Demon Seed is just not up to the task set forth by its premise.  

It succeeds as a more-thoughtful-than-usual sci-fi thriller, but trips itself up by failing to comprehend how uncomfortable (if not downright unpleasant) audiences are likely to find a film that asks one to bear witness to a woman's victimization all in service of an academic, techno-geek debate.

The triumph of technology over emotion?
Demon Seed ends on an ambiguous note, with Susan enigmatically studying her child/creation
from the sidelines. No embraces, no tears, no tenderness

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011