CLOCKWATCHERS 1997

It boggles the mind (to quote All About Eve’s Addison DeWitt, an admitted “dull cliché," especially since I don’t really know what a mind boggled is) how few people know about Clockwatchers; one of my absolute favorite workplace comedies.

Predating Ricky Gervais’ The Office (2001) and the cult film Office Space (1999) by several years, Clockwatchers is alarmingly unheard of, unknown, and rarely, if ever, talked about. How can this be? I’ve seen it many times and it never once ceases to make me laugh out loud at the accuracy of its satirically-rendered characters, dialogue, and situations. Clockwatchers is the most wickedly perceptive comedy-of-white-collar-manners I’ve ever seen. Even taking into account that my personal taste in movies can be a little bit off-beat (falling somewhere between Benny Hill overkill and Robert Altman blink-and-you'll-miss-it) I'm still surprised at how unknown and unappreciated this marvelous film is.

Toni Collette as Iris 

Parker Posey as Margaret

Lisa Kudrow as Paula / Camille La Plante

Alanna Ubach as Jane

Helen Fitzgerald as Cleo

The office workplace depicted as a soul-sucking vacuum of corporate trivia elevated to levels of monolithic significance is nothing new. Indeed, in these times of staggering unemployment, the characterization of standard-issue workplace drones as satirical archetypes has become a useful means of dealing with our anxieties. (Who minds being out of work when these are the kind of people one has to deal with?)
But if the colorless monotony of typing, filing, collating, and answering phones is a mind-numbing reminder of the probable meaninglessness of life, then Clockwatchers ups the ante by adding expendability to the mix. Clockwatchers is about temporary office workers—Temps: Individuals whose by-definition job description and title signify built-in impermanence, placing them at the very bottom of the corporate food chain.

"You're part of the corporate hierarchy. There's got to be a butt
in every seat or the entire infrastructure crumbles."

The clockwatchers at the center of director Jill Sprecher’s mordantly witty comedy (from a screenplay by Jill & Karen Sprecher) are four women of dissimilar backgrounds and temperaments, bound in friendship born of their mutually-shared outsider status as temps at the stultifyingly dull Global Credit Association (“Temps are like corporate orphans…we’re like corporate call girls!”). 

There’s dowdy Iris, (Toni Collette), timid to the point of invisibility; Margaret (Parker Posey), the sarcastic, office-savvy goldbricker; aspiring actress/man-hunter/chronic hair-flipper, Paula (Lisa Kudrow); and OCD perfectionist-in-a-Chanel suit, personal-phone-call addict, Jane (Alanna Ubach).

Together, this oddball quartet bravely weather the suspicious/hostile environment of 9 to 5 existence among the “permanents,” forging for themselves a kind of rebellious strength through solidarity. That is, until the unaccountably disruptive appearance of a mysterious new executive assistant named Cleo (Helen Fitzgerald). Cleo arrives like some kind of reluctant-to-make-eye-contact Greek Goddess of Doom whose mere presence triggers an ever-escalating series of reactions and events.
As unfocused suspicions give way to an honest-to-god workplace mini-crime wave, the film's second half dramatizes (in both comic and poignant terms) the tenuous nature of attachments. Attachment to a job you don't even like, because it at least gives you a place where you can pretend you're needed. An attachment to friends who feel closer than they really are because of the forced intimacy of 9 to 5, 5-days-a-week. 

Tedium, Inc.
(Clockwise from top left) Lisa Kudrow uses WhiteOut to French-Tip her nails, Jamie Kennedy 
seeks escape in the mailroom, Alanna Ubach pops bubble wrap, and Stanley DeSantis misses his rubberband ball.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Kurt Vonnegut, in speaking about the Nixon administration, made the following observation: “You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school—class officers, cheerleaders, and all." 

Debra Jo Rupp as middle-management worrywart Barbara

Anyone who’s worked for any length of time at an office job (make that ANY job) knows this to be true. I don’t care if we’re talking lawyers, doctors, dancers, or fast-food servers; it’s all the same. The petty hierarchies and cliques you thought you'd left behind in high school are, on a daily basis, the primary modes of social interaction in the adult workforce. Clockwatchers extracts a great deal of humor out of this fact, and in the best possible way: by merely allowing the almost surreal banality of office life play out just as it is.
The film understands how the repetitious monotony of office work induces a kind of obsession with order. An obsession so keen, even the tiniest deviation from pattern has the power to incite an almost existential loss of equilibrium in the corporate structure. Most importantly, the film understands how, when people work in environments where almost nothing anyone does seems to matter, everything begins to matter.

Petty Theft of Time

The inconsequential and petty rule the day. People fixate on mindless details and go in search of any kind of trivial distraction in which to lose themselves. In this way, Clockwatchers reveals its dark humor. It's finely observed, character and behavior-based humor that hits the same authentic-quirky stride of Robert Altman’s 3 Women. There, as in this film, it’s behavior that makes us laugh, not jokes. (My biggest complaints with the generally fine Office Space were that so many of the characters' actions seemed overly-burlesqued for the sake of landing a joke, and the plot veered unnecessarily close to forced, sitcom-level wackiness.)  

"I just want a desk by a window and a decent chair."

PERFORMANCES

All of the performers in Clockwatchers are top-notch, but Parker Posey is my favorite. An ensemble film in form, the main character of the story is the talented Toni Collette, who, with the film's least showy role, generously allows Posey to pack up the entire film in that recently-purchased briefcase of hers and walk off with it. Posey is one of those actresses who's able to make gems out of lines that aren't even supposed to be funny (she’s the reason I actually own a copy of Josie & the Pussycats). In Clockwatchers she’s playing the kind of individual I've met often in my occupational life: the entitled, barely-qualified slacker with the unearned cynicism who expends considerable brainpower and effort in avoiding doing the job they feel is so beneath their talents. 

Posey is ingenious in the subtle way in which she creates a character both instantly recognizable, yet 100% original. (Love how, whenever approached by anyone in the office, she instantly adopts this perky, vertical-eyebrows look of alert interest and helium-voiced affability.) Parker Posey does some remarkable things with comedy—the early scenes where she familiarizes the new temp to the office routine are just brilliant—and proves surprisingly affecting when required to show the darker demons haunting her character.

Producer/director/actor Bob Balaban (here as executive Milton Lasky) is a master at playing befuddled bureaucrats. One of my favorite character actors, Balaban  makes even the smallest roles 
memorable and funny (as he proved in Robert Altman's Gosford Park).

I also get a big kick out of Lisa Kudrow, who, in the years subsequent to Friends (a show I thoroughly hated, I might add) has become a personal favorite. Some of the best TV I've ever seen was her short-lived HBO series, The Comeback, and I binged on her hilarious internet series, Web Therapy. Like Posey, Kudrow is among the best and most resourceful of the comic character actresses around today (both would have been wonderful working with Robert Altman). Kudrow has a kind of “out there” comic inventiveness that makes her an appealingly unpredictable comedienne and always fun to watch. Clockwatchers finds her breathing new life into an overworked comedy archetype: the delusional actress wannabe.

By day, Paula may sabotage copy machines in order to put the moves on the hunky repairman, but by night she is aspiring actress Camille La Plante ("Drama's in my blood."). Here she proves to Iris that she's as skilled an actress as she is a typist.

Paul Dooley as Bud Chapman
As Toni Collette's father, Dooley, one of my favorite character actors, plays another
loving and supportive dad (Sixteen Candles) with his trademark easygoing naturalism.
His performances always have that lived-in authenticity that never shows the acting. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

I love the way Clockwatchers looks. The beautiful cinematography by Jim Denault is extremely responsive to the story. Bright and idiosyncratic for the early comedy scenes, claustrophobic and disquieting as the film's tone darkens. Much like the furtive activities of these cubicle-dwellers, Denault's lens seems always to be peering, hovering, and capturing odd details in close-up or at the outsides of frames. It’s like another character in the film.  

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I’ve been going on about how funny Clockwatchers is due to its unfailing ability to make me laugh is what comes first to mind. But the thing that makes this film such a favorite is because behind the satirical depiction of office life, there lies a great deal of compassion and understanding of the small things that become lost (or we allow to have stolen) as we try to stake our claim in the world.

The average workplace is where most people’s youthful idealism cruelly collides with unflinching reality. Everybody has dreams, but pragmatism dictates we all must do something to earn a living. The stuff of comedy or tragedy exists somewhere between the extent to which what we dream, and what we spend most of our days engaged in, fail to intersect.

Some knuckle under, satisfied to blend in with the masses, others self-destructively try to buck the system. In the grand scheme of things, we seem to spend an awful lot of time wondering if we belong and where we fit in. Frequently in the pursuit of finding meaning in our lives, we wind up neglecting or betraying the people and things closest to us. Perhaps too often, it's ourselves. 

Through comedy, Clockwatchers poses the question, “Is it that hard to find permanence?”

Through drama, it answers, “Sometimes.” 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

BONNIE & CLYDE 1967

Bonnie & Clyde is one of my “staple films.” A staple film being any movie that tops my acquisition list whenever technological advancements make it necessary for me to restock my film library. Back in the dark ages, when I got my first VCR machine, Bonnie & Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, and Midnight Cowboy were the first VHS movies I ever purchased. These same films also became the first DVDs I ever owned when video cassettes became obsolete. It wasn’t particularly planned that way, they were just the three films I was most excited about owning in disc format. As of yet, I haven’t jumped on the Blu-ray bandwagon, but if and when I ultimately make that leap, it’s a sure bet which three films will be essential to have...again.

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde is a film that has arguably become as legendary and folkloric as its real-life subjects. Released at the height of the hippie movement (ironically enough, in August of the Summer of Love) Bonnie & Clyde, in its myth-making depiction of two small-time Depression-era outlaws, managed to hit America right between the eyes.

What captured our imaginations about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in 1967 is most likely what captured the nation’s imagination in the 1930s. They were young (he was 21, she 19); women in crime were rare; as opposed to being a “gang,” Bonnie and Clyde were perceived as a “couple” and as such, suitable for romantic projection; and lastly, but perhaps most significantly, they were famous. Indeed, they are among the earliest American “celebrity” criminals: self-aware and image-conscious; knowledgeable of and taking delight in the notoriety and fame their criminal activity brought them.

Had Arthur Penn’s film been less artful, say, a Roger Corman exploitationer or an American-International cheapie like1958s The Bonnie Parker Story (an absolutely must-see howler starring  Dorothy Provine), no one would likely have batted an eye on its release. But Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde comingled French New Wave arthouse stylization with America’s romanticism of rebellion, preoccupation with violence, and attraction to mythmaking,  and in doing so captured the absolute essence of a particular moment in time. Not America in the 1930s, but America in the late 1960s.

Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow

Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker

Michael J. Pollard as C.W. Moss

Gene Hackman as Buck Barrow

Estelle Parsons as Blanche Barrow

I saw Bonnie & Clyde in 1968 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, and it absolutely blew me away. I was eleven at the time and I still recall the impact it had on me and the audience. As I headed for my seat, I vividly remember encountering this huge, literally life-size lobby display that totally freaked me out. It was the iconic poster art* featuring the eerily unsettling image of Dunaway and Beatty laughing behind a bullet-hole riddled windshield. Under this was written: They’re young…they’re in love…and they kill people. Yikes! I almost peed myself.

(I literally had no business being in the theater at that age, but precocious kids who make it their business to see movies too mature for their age can’t really complain about the subsequent nightmares and kindertrauma.) *I now own a framed Bonnie & Clyde poster which hangs where I can see it as I write. No longer a terrifying image, it inspires me and reminds me of the time when I thought movies were art and magic combined.

I had seen lots of crime dramas before this, but they were all pretty cut-and-dried, morally speaking. Crime didn’t pay, the good guys won, and the bad guys deserved what they got. I was not at all prepared for Bonnie & Clyde’s alternating tones of comedy, romance, lyricism, drama, and in-your-face violence used in telling the story of a duo many believed to have been little more than a couple of hayseed sociopaths.

Following Clyde's murder of an unarmed man, Bonnie, Clyde, and C.W. lay low in a movie theater. Clyde is visibly upset, C.W. is nearly in tears, but Bonnie is unaffected and absorbed in watching a musical number from "Golddiggers of 1933" (We're in the Money). My sister and I were just preteens when we saw Bonnie & Clyde and at this point in the film she leaned over and asked, "Is Bonnie supposed to be mentally ill?"

Years later, I read a review of the film by critic John Simon wherein he alludes to the scene as indicative of Bonnie being somewhat infantile and childlike. The seriousness of death and crime hadn't really sunk in for Bonnie. Like the kids today who wield guns in the playground and think of death and gunplay as nothing more serious than a 3D video game.

As embodied by the impossibly (implausibly?) beautiful and stylish duo of Beatty and Dunaway, Bonnie and Clyde are a pair of unsophisticated social misfits dreaming of a better life beyond the dustbowl Texas poverty that surrounds them. Warren Beatty’s Clyde is a kind of guileless, career-criminal with malice towards none (the film casts the Great Depression as the ultimate villain) who sees in Bonnie a yearning soul, not unlike his own. The film seems to allude that, possibly with education or opportunity, this pair might have made something useful of their lives. But lacking either and left with nothing but a nagging sense of the pent-up hopelessness of their lives, they made the choice of antisocial rebellion.

A pretty nice name for a murderous crime spree. 

And therein lay the cornerstone of the controversy surrounding Bonnie & Clyde when it was first released. Critics and audiences alike didn’t know what to make of a film that not only intentionally altered (some might say manipulated) historical fact for the purpose of dramatic effect, but cast its anti-heroes in a decidedly heroic, romantic light that to some negated the very real pain and suffering this real-life couple brought to others.

Director Arthur Penn has always maintained that he had bigger fish to fry in Bonnie & Clyde and had no interest in offering a documentary with a moral. In the wonderful but out-of-print volume, The Bonnie & Clyde Book by Sandra Wake and Nicola Hayden, Penn is quoted as saying: “I don’t think the original Bonnie and Clyde are very important except insofar as they motivated the writing of a script and our making of a movie. This is not a case study of Bonnie and Clyde; we don’t go into them in any kind of depth.”

Instead, Penn asserts that he intended Bonnie & Clyde as a kind of post - Kennedy assassination / Vietnam war–era take on the death of the American Dream as manifest in the nation’s fascination with violence and mythmaking, and the resultant anti-authority/anti-social rebellion.

The communal "Hoovervilles", "Hobo Jungles" and "Shanty Towns" of the Great Depression evoked the hippie communes that were springing up all over the country in 1967. The nomadic, anti-establishment rebel  lives of Bonnie & Clyde struck a chord with young audiences of the 60s  

So if turning a couple of remorseless murderers into a pair of sympathetic, glamorous, near-mythic tragic lovers was seen by some as amoral, young '60s audiences didn’t seem to care. While critics like The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther pilloried Bonnie & Clyde as “…a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly  Modern Millie,” young people across the country responded (as they would two years later to Easy Rider’s motorcycle-riding drug dealers) to the rebellious, anti-establishment spirit at the film’s core.

Disenfranchised '60s youth - targeted for the draft, denied the vote, lacking a social presence - identified with the Barrow Gang's attempt to create for themselves a non-traditional family 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Putting aside arguments of amorality, I really admire how Bonnie & Clyde captures something I find to be very true about human nature: that the villains and monsters of the world don’t necessarily perceive themselves to be such. Movies and pulp literature have taught us that bad guys are well aware of how evil they are; literally reveling in their wickedness and lack of conscience (to believe so is reassuring when you find yourself rooting for their demise). Yet life experience and election-year observations have led me to conclude that some of the most heinous people in our culture actually seem to maintain a perception of themselves as being basically good and “just folks.”  

So-called "respectable" and educated people today engage in all matter of pernicious behavior,  preaching and legislating hate and ill-will...yet feel, deep within their hearts, that they are good, decent people. The news is full of individuals who have killed, bombed, or marched about carrying signs spewing venomous hate; but in their own minds, they are good Christians, or defenders of family values, pro-lifers, or lovers of America and the American way of life. The conveyance of this sad-but-true cultural fact is where Bonnie & Clyde achieves a kind of brilliance and does something really remarkable with the gangster genre.

It makes perfect sense to me that neither Bonnie nor Clyde would ever see themselves as bad guys. Dunaway and Beatty’s scenes together depict the two as marginalized loners—zeroes in the eyes of the world—whose dead-end lives converge and create a kind of pitiful, doomed hope. They are a sadsack Romeo & Juliet made stronger and more significant in their union than they could ever be on their own.

Their world may be narrow and their thinking delusional, but they long for the same things we all do. We identify with their taking offense at the injustice of poor people being put out of their homes by banks, and we maybe even applaud their standing up for the “little people” in the small criminal ways they flout authority. Yet at the same time we are repulsed by their callous disregard for life. Or rather, a certain kind of life. In their world, the death of a lawman does not hold the same weight as the death of a loved one or average citizen. A trenchant twist on the way death is militarized by our “civilized society” (The death of an officer in battle does not hold the same weight as the death of a soldier; the death of a lawman in the line of duty does not hold the same weight as that of the average citizen, etc.) Small wonder that 60s youths - their lives valuable in terms of the draft, valueless when it came to the right to vote - found in Bonnie & Clyde a relevant parable for the times. Depicted as a pair of counterculture outlaws, at least Bonnie and Clyde were choosing to die on their own terms.

Gene Wilder (making his film debut) and Evans Evans appear briefly as unwitting provocateurs of the Barrow Gang. It's one of my favorite sequences in the film. There was a time when I would collapse into paroxysms of  laughter if anyone even whispered the phrase, "Step on it, Velma!"

PERFORMANCES

In some ways, the channeling of a specific, defined persona into role after role is the essence of what being a movie star (as opposed to an actor) is all about. Diane Keaton trademarked the lovable, semi-inarticulate ditz; Robert Redford the sensitive All-American jock; and Warren Beatty always seemed to play some variation on the not-very-bright, overgrown boy with big ideas (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Only Game in Town, Shampoo). Notwithstanding Beatty’s appealingly debauched beauty as a man, his screen persona has often left me wanting. Not so in Bonnie & Clyde. Here he mines the mother lode of his star charisma and is marvelously alive and interesting. Especially in the scenes where Clyde explodes into violent rages that erupt into a terrifyingly real physicality. Beatty playing aw-shucks humble has always been a little boring. Beatty as a temperamental nutjob  (Bugsy) is a sight to behold.

There’s a kind of wistfulness that comes over me whenever I see Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde. Part of it’s nostalgia because I fell in love with her in this movie; part of it’s due to her being so damned good that I’m forced to admit that I’ve let it become far too easy over the years to forget what a marvelous actress she is. You see her here and you know in an instant that there was no way this woman wasn’t going to be a star. Her Bonnie Parker is funny and tough and oh, so heartbreaking. Hers is a classic, one-of-a-kind performance and Dunaway OWNS the role as far as I’m concerned. Any planned remakes would do well to distance themselves from the Penn film and save all prospective Bonnies from the inevitable embarrassing comparisons to Dunaway. 

Impotent Clyde seduces Bonnie with a phallic substitute

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

While the sympathetic light Bonnie and Clyde are presented in represents an insurmountable hurdle for some (personally, I don’t see it as sympathetic so much as human. A moral imperative overrides everything that happens in the film), I find myself grateful for being allowed to take in the events of the story without being forced by the script to adopt an attitude about the pair until I’m ready.

One good example of this is the scene where Clyde says to a poor farmer whose house has been foreclosed upon, “We rob banks!” And in that split second, we see an aimless man giving his life purpose. A few scenes later Bonnie says these same words to gas attendant C.W. Moss, and in her delivery, we see that she at last has discovered an identity for herself, as well.

These two moments of empowerment for Bonnie and Clyde are perhaps pathetic and delusional to us, the viewer, but they are defining moments for the characters. What seems like the film striking an amoral stance is actually, I believe, the film merely establishing its point of view. The film presumes we are adult enough to be shown Bonnie and Clyde’s self-serving view of the world and themselves (misjudged folk heroes like Robin & Maid Marian) without insisting we accept it.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Or rather, the stuff of nightmares. In this, I’m referring to Bonnie & Clyde’s groundbreaking, much-discussed, heavily-debated, then-unprecedented depiction of violence. Modern audiences may find it tame (me, I still have a hard time watching the final ambush scene) but everything you’ve read about it is true when it comes to how it affected audiences on its initial release. I still can remember how ear-shatteringly loud the shots sounded in the theater, and how deadly quiet the theater was when the film was over. People walked out of the film like they were in a daze. Nobody knew quite how to take what they had seen. There were the obvious few, made so nervous that they had to start saying ANYTHING quick, but I remember my family and me leaving the theater and actually feeling afraid to say anything. As if in opening our mouths we weren’t sure what would come out…a cry or a scream.

Bonnie & Clyde: Laughing and dying
"The killing gets less impersonal and, consequently, less funny." Arthur Penn

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

SPARKLE 1976

Perhaps it's because I'm too old to know precisely what a Jordin Sparks is (it's not, as initially presumed, a small town in Virginia, but a recording artist). Still, I had no idea there was to be a remake of this cult-worthy 1976 Irene Cara film (slated to star said Ms. Sparks) until I began to do a little Internet research for this post.

Maybe this is a harbinger of some kind of covert Hollywood covenant to redo the entire Irene Cara oeuvre (we've already had a reboot of The Electric Company and a limp remake of Fame). If so, I'm going to seriously lose it if somebody announces a remake of 1985s Certain Fury—itself a kind of a gender-flip remake of Sidney Poitier's The Defiant Ones—which featured Oscar winners Tatum O'Neal and Irene Cara as a pair of mismatched ex-cons handcuffed to one another. (I kid you not.)

So now there's to be a remake of Sparkle…

If Hollywood is so concerned about piracy, you'd think they might first start "in-house" and set an example by ceasing this endless plundering of their own past successes and begin to cultivate a little originality. But I digress.

Sparkle. The place and time is Harlem/1958. The girl-group plotline evokes The Supremes and all they represent as conflicting symbols of Black upward mobility and crossover success. The small-time show-biz milieu of Harlem jazz clubs and the seedy R&B/soul circuit pay homage to the Black roots of rock & roll. And the songs prefigure the emergent voices of inner-city youth and the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement.

Irene Cara as Sparkle Williams

Lonette McKee as Sister Williams 

Dwan Smith as Dolores Williams

Philip Michael Thomas as Stix Warren 

Dorian Harewood as Levi Brown

Sparkle is a '50s girl group take on the oft-told show-biz saga of gifted performers from humble beginnings who discover, only too late, that the road to fame is paved with heartbreak and tragedy. "I want the big time!" conveniently asserts beautiful, self-assured, and headed-for-certain-trouble Sister Williams (Lonette McKee), one-third of the gospel-singing Williams sisters, consisting of woke, budding Black-Power radical, Delores Williams (Dwan Smith); and sweet-natured, self-effacing Sparkle Williams (Irene Cara)…i.e., the obvious heroine of the film.

With the help of neighborhood pals Stix (Philip Michael Thomas), a dreamer who longs to write songs, and Levi (Dorian Harewood), always on the hustle, this trio of starry-eyed schoolgirls dub themselves "Sister & the Sisters" and become virtual overnight sensations in a neighborhood nightclub.

But of course, since Sparkle is both a cautionary tale on the price of fame and a morality play on the importance of integrity, things go wrong in a big hurry. Cue in the drug abuse, dashed hopes, heartbreak, death, racketeering, and familial discord. Will Stix ever realize his dreams of becoming a songwriter? Will the tragedies visited upon Sparkle instill a newfound maturity in her singing? If you don't know the answers to these questions, you've likely never seen a rags to riches show-biz movie before.

Soul Sisters

Those looking to Sparkle for gritty, '70s-type urban realism will have to look elsewhere. Although released in the same year as Taxi Driver, Sparkle is more of a direct descendant of those old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney "Let's put on a show!" musicals, crossed with the inner-city slum dramas Warner Bros. specialized in during the '30s. Like Rocky, another film released in 1976, Sparkle is really just an updated old movie.

In fact, Sparkle's melodramatic, ultimately uplifting, plotline and virtually all-blast cast recall the heyday of the "Race Film." ("Race films" being independent motion pictures made between 1915 and 1950 that were created exclusively for, and frequently by, African-Americans. In the days of segregation, these films, popular in African-American neighborhoods across the country, featured all-Black casts and were the first movies to portray African-Americans in heroic and lead roles central to the plot.)

Sparkle's backlot depiction of Harlem, populated with characters going by the names "Stix," "Satin," and "Tune-Ann," harken back to The Harlem Tuff Kids (Black cinema's answer to The Bowery Boys), a pack of late 1930s comic delinquents with names like "Icky," "Stinky," and "Shadow."

Brownstone Socializing: (l. to r.) Levi, Dolores, Sister, Stix, & Sparkle

I wonder if the online commenters criticizing the so-called silly names of Sparkle's characters have the same problem with Grease's "Putzie," "Doody," & "Frenchy"; or Laverne & Shirley's "Squiggy"?

The '70s were certainly boom years for Blacks in film, but by 1976, I personally had grown weary of the decade's pimp & prostitute /Kung Fu-Badass Blaxploitation overkill. The fascination all those sassy Black female crime-fighters and morally dubious Super-Flys held for the white suburban male teens who filled the local theaters where these films played (was Quentin Tarantino among them?) was lost on me. Nor was I much fonder of the parade of noble slave dramas which seemed to represent the only other alternative view of Black life Hollywood seemed interested in exploring.

With '70s America deep in the throes of a nostalgia craze that romanticized the past as a simpler, gentler time (tellingly, devoid of people of color): The Summer of '42, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti, The Way We Were—the arrival of Sparkle on the scene felt like a small kind of miracle and a very welcome change of pace. The screenplay's approach to the material may have been a tad trite, the direction amateurish and ill-serving of its young cast, but Sparkle gave Black kids (the film was rated PG) a nostalgic taste of their own history for a change. It's not a perfect film, but even with the clichés stacked higher and higher with each scene, I find something irresistibly likable and naively charming about Sparkle.

Sparkle is at its best when it stops propelling its predictable plot forward and pauses long enough to provide keen-eyed details of African-American life in the late '50s. Growing up in a household with four sisters, I recall very well the Sunday evening ritual of hair straightening with a hot comb.  

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

As a fan of musicals, Sparkle's primary appeal for me has always been Curtis Mayfield's catchy musical score and the sleek, '60s girl-group choreography of Lester Wilson. Mayfield's songs are pop/funk, '70s-style riffs on the early R&B/Soul sound of Motown, while Wilson's choreography captures the stylized, often witty, gesture/posing dance style that became an identifying staple of girl-group performances for years.
The songs, as sung by the film's cast, are all so well-performed that there was an outcry from fans when the soundtrack album for Sparkle was released, with Aretha Franklin taking over the vocals exclusively. Although I've read conflicting accounts over the years as to the whys of this decision, and while I personally prefer the film's cast interpretation of the songs, one has to imagine that, to the studio, the financial prospects of an Aretha Franklin album must have appeared a great deal more lucrative than that of a soundtrack album to a modest film with no stars in its cast.

Choreographer Charles "Cholly" Atkins
Exclusive Motown choreographer whose routines for musical acts like The Supremes and The Temptations were the inspiration for Lester Wilson's work in Sparkle

PERFORMANCES

Although the delectably fresh-faced Irene Cara emerged the bigger star in later years as actress, recording artist, and Academy Award-winning songwriter (for "Flashdance…what a Feeling"), it's Lonette McKee who gives my favorite performance in Sparkle. She is so electrifyingly good that the temperature of the film drops several degrees for every minute that she's off-screen. A more intuitive director than Sam O'Steen (editor of Rosemary's Baby, making his feature film directorial debut) might have sensed how strongly the prolonged absence of the film's most dimensional and dynamic character would have on Sparkle's overall impact. Indeed, had Lonette McKee been given the opportunity to be the kind of dominant presence in the film as she is in the lives of her sisters, I think the audience would have found itself mourning her absence along with the characters on the screen. McKee's sad eyes and nicely rendered tough-girl stance carry with them a kind of authentic emotional gravitas. Without McKee, Sparkle becomes a little too light for its own good.

Mary Alice as Effie Williams

On the subject of meeting her daughter's new suitor, small-time gangster Satin Struthers (Tony King)-
Effie: "He's just gonna drag you to the gutter with him."

Sister: "The gutter? How can you say that? He's as big-time as you can get."

Effie: "I've lived in Harlem all my life…I know a rat when I see one."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

In the impressive array of talent (both young and veteran) that appear in cameo and bit roles, Sparkle pays homage to pioneer African-American entertainers:

Veteran comic actor Don Bexley (best known as Bubba on the TV show Sanford & Son) appears in Sparkle as a the raunchy emcee for the Simmons Hall amateur contest

Legendary comic Timmie Rogers as the M.C. of the Shan-Doo Club where Sisters & The Sisters make their debut.
Back in the days when African-American comics habitually appeared in blackface, spoke in dialect, and wore sloppy clothes; Rogers was the first to appear in a tuxedo, as himself, and daring to speak directly to white audiences (a practice unprecedented in Black comics during the 40s ).
He was my father's favorite stand-up comedian.

Tony Award-winning choreographer Michael Peters (Dreamgirls) also created the iconic dances for Michael Jackson's Thriller and Beat It music videos. In Sparkle, he appears as an outrageous R&B singer in the style of Screamin' Jay Hawkins

The performer shown briefly in Sparkle, portraying a singer in the mode of Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker, is Renn Woods. Woods portrayed Dorothy in the 1976 National Tour of The Wiz and appeared in the films Hair and  Xanadu

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Sparkle is set in the late '50s, but the film's footing is too unsure for me to be sure whether the fact that it plays like a movie literally made in the 1950s is wholly intentional. If I have any complaint, it's that Sparkle's plot is so determined to get to where it needs to go that it rushes the characters along. Nevertheless, the film is a lot of engaging fun in its small, slice-of-life moments. The mother ironing in the living room; the kids having to change out of their "school clothes" when they come home; the ever-present neighbor lady who constantly butts into other people's business; the young men sporting "conk" hairstyles (relaxed-hair pompadours).

Black American Graffiti
 As earlier stated, Sparkle is at its best when just showing us glimpses of life in late-'50s Harlem

All of the above are more compelling than the straight-as-an-arrow course that Sparkle's conventional rags-to-riches storyline  races us through (I've seen the film many times and I'm still unclear as to how long the girls get to enjoy their success before things start to go wrong. It feels like a week.) Watching Sparkle - written by Joel Schumacher and Howard Rosenman - I'm left with the feeling that it would be a much better film had the characters and their behavior been allowed to move the plot forward...not the other way around. Too bad. The people populating Sparkle seem like folks I would be interested in getting to know better. I just wish they'd been fleshed out a bit more.

Where Sparkle's footing feels more assured is in its atmospheric depiction of the squalid glamour of the Harlem nightclub scene. These sequences and the attendant musical numbers give the film the kind of moody grit lacking in the screenplay. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees (Night Moves, Lenny) paints Sparkle with a dark, Gordon Willis-like palette of claustrophobic shadows which make for some of the most atmospherically seedy nightclub sequences since Cabaret.

(This is one seriously DARK movie; almost unwatchably so on VHS. Now with HDTV and digitally remastered DVD, Sparkle looks better than ever. I recall reading that this was due to the cinematographer's inexperience with lighting people of color.)

Sparkle was released in 1976. The same year as The Omen, King Kong, A Star is Born, Family Plot, and Marathon Man; all films with advertising budgets that probably exceeded Sparkle's entire production costs. I stood in lines to see each of the above films, but I was practically the only person in the San Francisco theater where I first saw Sparkle. As a PG-rated, small-scale period musical drama with a Black cast of virtual unknowns and but a few easily-exploitable elements (no kung-fu mamas or jive-talkin' daddies to promote); a film as atypical as Sparkle was a hard sell in the '70s market.

I have no idea if Sparkle was successful enough to ever show a profit, but I've read that it has become something of a cult classic over the years. I certainly hope so. Because, flawed as it is, Sparkle is a rarity. Not only in being a female-centric Black film, but the first to dramatize the formation of an R&B girl group, using the formative years of the African-American music scene as a narrative backdrop. Since no film before this had ever tackled the subject matter, it's my guess that in some small way Sparkle went on to inspire the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls. 

Although the current track record for remakes is pretty shabby, I'm going to keep an open mind about the Sparkle remake and wish it well. If nothing else, it's sure to bring more attention to the original.

ADDENDUM: January 20, 2014
Watched the 2012 remake of Sparkle on DVD. Because this is a blog devoted to movies I love, perhaps the kindest thing I can say about the remake is that, by comparison, it makes the original look like a classic on every count. I actually couldn't believe how weak an effort it was. I loved seeing Whitney Houston but was dismayed by the fact that with $17 million and thirty-plus years of advanced motion picture technology, they couldn't produce a film with even a fraction of the competence of a low-budget feature from the '70s. A seriously depressing endeavor on so many fronts.


AUTOGRAPH FILES: signatures of Phillip Michael Thomas and Lonette McKee I got way back in 1978 and 1980, respectively.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012