THE FAN 1981

At a time when most of her industry peers were retired, forgotten, or guesting on episodes of Fantasy Island and The Love Boat, 56-year-old Lauren Bacall was enjoying a career resurgence and public visibility rivaling that of her 1940s heyday when she was known as “The Look.”  The year 1981 saw Bacall headlining in the Broadway musical Woman of the Year; topping the bestseller charts with the paperback release of her 1978 memoir By Myself; shilling everything from jewelry to cat food in TV and print ads; and, most remarkably in those pre-Meryl Streep/Helen Mirren years of elder-actress marketability, starring in a nine-million-dollar major motion picture release.

The Fame Game

The Fan, a suspense thriller based on Bob Randall’s 1977 epistolary novel about an aging Broadway star stalked by an obsessive fan, gave Bacall arguably the biggest role of her career. Certainly, the first to require her to carry an entire film on her own.

Filmed on location in New York from March to July of 1980, The Fan was poised for release at the most opportune time to take marketing advantage of Bacall’s already-in-motion Broadway and bookshelf publicity. Unfortunately, as The Fan’s PR-friendly release date of March 15, 1981 neared, several real-life, obsessive fan-based tragedies occurred (targeting John Lennon and then-President Ronald Reagan), conspiring to make this fame-culture melodrama seem more an exercise in bad taste than a film of ripped-from-today's-headlines relevance.

Lauren Bacall as Sally Ross

Michael Biehn as Douglas Breen

Maureen Stapleton as Belle Goldman

James Garner as Jake Berman

Hector Elizondo as Inspector Raphael Andrews

Kurt Johnson as David Barnum

If musical theater geeks, Glee habitués, and folks capable of making it through an entire Tony Awards broadcast ever longed for an '80s slasher film to call their own, then The Fan more than fills the Playbill. This unappetizingly bloody, yet oh-so delectable/derisible blend of backstage musical, 1940s career-woman soap opera, slasher-flick, and woman-in-peril melodrama, is high-camp movie nirvana. An upscale cousin of the hagsploitation genre of the '60s, The Fan might have substituted seasoned glamour for the usual grotesquery, but in keeping with the requirements of the sub-genre, The Fan's raison d'être remained the prolonged persecution and victimization of a mature star from Hollywood's Golden Era. 

When The Fan opened in theaters in the spring of 1981, the film...to borrow a line from one of the hooty Louis St. Louis (Grease 2) showtunes sung in the film..."Got no love” from either audiences or critics. Patrons old enough to be enticed by the film's elder cast risked having their blue rinses turn stark white at the sight of the movie's copious bloodshed and some of the blunt, Bogie-wouldn't-stand-for-this dialog: “Dearest bitch, see how accessible you are? How would you like to be fucked by a meat cleaver?” Similarly, the teen demographic ordinarily drawn to slasher films weren't quite sure of what to make of a movie set in the middle-aged, Sardi's and cigarettes world of New York legitimate theater.  A wholly uninspired publicity campaign only added to the film’s troubles

The stark graphic design of the poster had a generic slasher film look
that did nothing to sell the film to the public. 

Had The Fan been a play, it would probably have closed in Boston. Whisked off screens within weeks of its release, The Fan resurfaced with some regularity on cable TV venues like HBO and Showtime throughout the '80s before ultimately disappearing into relative obscurity. Obscurity so complete that Robert De Niro's unrelated but same-titled 1996 sports-themed film has totally eclipsed Bacall's The Fan in the public's memory.

Happily, The Fan's recent release on DVD has rekindled awareness of this very '80s curio. A glimpse back at a New York still atmospherically seedy. A vision of a world populated with record stores, typewriters, payphones, legwarmers, and heavy smokers. All with nary a Starbucks in sight. And while it's no undiscovered classic, The Fan does have its merits (most of them camp-related, I'm afraid) that make it a movie worthy of rediscovery. Not the least of them being Lauren Bacall, a smoking, drinking, tough-as-nails star of Broadway and the silver screen, playing a smoking, drinking, tough-as-nails star of Broadway and the silver screen. And convincingly, too!

The intersect of stardom and fandom

"And the audience LOVES me! And I love them. And they love me for lovin' them and I love them for lovin' me. And we love each other. And that's 'cause none of us got enough love in our childhoods. 

And that's show biz, kid!"  - Fred Ebb

No low-budget, body-count slasher flick featuring nondescript teens stalked by a masked phantom, The Fan was conceived as a stylish, A-List, Hitchcockian thriller along the lines of Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). The latter, a sleeper hit that garnered '50s sexpot, Angie Dickinson, some of the best notices of her career. 
At least that's how things started.

Produced by movie/music mogul Robert Stigwood on the downturn side of a '70s winning streak that included youth-centric films like Jesus Christ Superstar, Saturday Night Fever, and Tommy; The Fan was Stigwood’s most expensive film to date and first stab at cracking the grown-up ticket-buying market. To this end, he amassed a distinguished cast of New York actors and pedigreed Broadway composers (Marvin Hamlisch and Tim Rice collaborated on two–fairly terrible but nonetheless irresistible–original songs). On the production end, he secured the talents of up-and-coming first-time director Edward Bianchi (from TV commercials and music videos) and choreographer Arlene Philips (Can’t Stop The Music, Annie).

If you've ever seen a Lauren Bacall musical, you know that her being lifted and carried about is a choreography requisite. I was surprised at the number of online reviews that questioned Bacall's "believability" portraying a Broadway musical star in The Fan. Reviews that later expressed surprise upon learning that she was indeed a musical theater star in real life. Bacall was the Best Actress Tony Award winner for both Applause - 1970 and Woman of the Year - 1981.

But as the saying goes, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and somewhere between screenplay to movie-house, The Fan transmogrified into a film beset by:
1) Bad decisions -  Friday the 13 became a hit during The Fan's post-production, prompting Paramount to order reshoots to ratchet up the violence. 
2) Bad timing and bad decisions - Three months before The Fan's release, John Lennon was killed by an obsessive fan outside NY’s Dakota apartments (as it happens, also the home of Lauren Bacall), after which it is said the film's original downbeat ending (if true to the novel) underwent some 11^th-hour tinkering and reshoots.
3) Bad luck -  Bacall's idea of promoting The Fan was to express to the press her disappointment in the finished product. Making matters worse, three weeks into The Fan's less-than-illustrious release, an attempt was made on President Reagan's life by a Jodie Foster-obsessed fan. Suddenly, a film very few people were interested in in the first place began to look to everyone like an exercise in exploitation and bad taste.

Bacall the Buzzkill
Bacall: "The Fan is much more graphic and violent than when I read the script."
Anna Maria Horsford (who appeared in Stigwood's Times Square in 1980) as detective Emily Stolz

Stigwood severely scaled back his usual bombastic pre-release publicity for The Fan (STD results have been released with more fanfare), while Paramount added a disclaimer to its theatrical trailers claiming The Fan was in no way inspired by the tragic death of John Lennon. The latter decision prompting the outspoken Bacall to declare to People magazine: “I think it’s disgusting, revolting, and exploitive!”

In the end, it didn't really matter, for The Fan wound up being one of those rare films capable of offering audiences simultaneously contradictory experiences–none of them satisfactory. Stylishly shot, overflowing in chichi urban gloss, and embellished with a chilling Pino Donaggio score (Carrie, Don’t Look Now) The Fan ultimately failed to find an audience because it clearly didn't know who the hell that was. Classic movie fans familiar with Lauren Bacall thought the film was too classy to be so trashy; slasher fans thought the film wasn't trashy enough. Gays had their own problems with the film.

Strangers in the Night

The Fan did itself no favors by alienating the very audience most receptive to a film offering up ample doses of musical theater, backstage drama, show tunes, tight male bodies in various states of undress, and Lauren Bacall in full Margo Channing mode. On the heels of Windows (1980), a stalker thriller about a lesbian psychopath, and Cruising (1980) a crime thriller about a gay psychopath; many members of the gay community felt The Fan's closeted theater-queen stalker was one gay psycho too many.

None of that applied to me, however. I was a presold audience in and of myself. I’d read The Fan back in 1978, intrigued by the way the book used the thriller genre to comment on the odd love/hate relationship between stars and their adoring public. I was also a longstanding fan of Lauren Bacall from her old movies with Bogart on The Late Show, Applause (the 1973 TV broadcast, anyway), and Murder on the Orient Express; so I was thrilled when I heard she'd been cast.  

Dana Delany making her film debut

Feiga Martinez as Elsa

Adding to my anticipation was the fact that Edward Bianchi was hired to direct and Arlene Phillips was to do the choreography. Bianchi & Phillips had collaborated on a series of eye-popping Dr. Pepper commercials in the late '70s for the advertising agency Young & Rubicam. Commercials I had been inspired by and borrowed from for a couple of my film school projects. When I also learned that Broadway great Maureen Stapleton had joined the cast and that Bacall’s rumored real-life paramour, James Garner, was also on board, The Fan swiftly became one of the most eagerly-awaited films of the year...for me, anyway.

I saw The Fan on opening day at Grauman’s Chinese Theater where the smallish audience of young people in attendance (clearly in search of a good scare) was underwhelmed. I, on the other hand, felt as though I’d died and gone to camp film heaven. Not since Eyes of Laura Mars had I seen such a slick-looking thriller. One capable of being enjoyed on so many levels at once. I wound up seeing it a total of three times before it disappeared from theaters.

Shot on location, The Fan provides many great glimpses of 80s-era New York.
Here the famed Shubert Theater is the site for Sally Ross' opening night in Never Say Never; the fictional musical providing The Fan with so much of its camp appeal

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What brings me back to The Fan time and time again are its many sequences depicting the behind-the-scenes creation of the fictional Broadway musical Never Say Never, which is to be star Sally Ross’ singing and dancing debut. What with its use of recognized Broadway dancers, NY locations, and knowing attention to procedural detail; the feel is very authentic, very 80s, and very stylishly evoked. I find these scenes a bit camp to be sure (what with all those legwarmers and Arlene Philips' trademark Hot Gossip choreography), but I have to say all of it contributes to giving us a refreshingly novel backdrop for a suspense thriller. Silly as they may be, they are also terrifically fun. Of course, it doesn't hurt that I saw this film during my early days as a dancer, or that in 1983, when I took my first trip to New York, I studied dance at Jo Jo's, the studio featured in the film.

That's Kurt Johnson providing literal backup to Lauren Bacall as she sings " A Remarkable Woman," one of two Marvin Hamlisch/Tim Rice compositions introduced in the film

UK Choreographer Arlene Phillips wouldn't actually choreograph for
Broadway until 1987's Starlight Express

All The Boys Love Sally
Broadway dancer Justin Ross (l.) appeared in the film version of A Chorus Line, and dancer Reed Jones (r.) originated the role of Skimbleshanks in the original Broadway production of Cats 

 PERFORMANCES

If you’re going to make a film about the kind of old-school, glamorous, show-biz diva capable of inciting the flames of obsessive fandom, you couldn’t do much better than landing all-around class-act, Lauren Bacall. Her gravitas as a full-fledged movie star from the golden era gives The Fan a shot of instant legitimacy every time she appears. In one of the largest roles of her career, Bacall is not always filmed as flatteringly as you'd expect, but the effect is rather refreshing. Her face looks terrifically lived-in, and her still-striking looks serve as a welcome change from the botoxed mannequins we've grown used to. Playing a role that isn't perhaps much of a stretch, awfully good. So good in fact, that I kept wishing the film would just allow the story's natural character conflicts (an aging star grappling confronting loneliness, self-doubt, and vulnerability) play themselves out minus all the genre machinations.

Bacall's appearance on Garner's TV show The Rockford Files in 1979, followed by their re-appearance in Robert Altman's HealtH (1980) and yet again here in The Fan, really had gossip-columnist tongues wagging about a romance between the two

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The '80s come vividly alive in the film's Broadway musical sequences, which are sort of Solid Gold meets Can't Stop The Music. As would be the case with the Broadway musical numbers in 1983s Staying Alive, it's near-impossible to imagine just what kind of Broadway this could be, as the numbers look more appropriate to a Las Vegas revue. But they left me wanting more, not less. (I feel safe in saying I'm likely the only person who felt that way.)

A Remarkable Woman

More Like Hot Flash, Baby, Tonight
I saw The Fan the night it opened at Mann's Chinese Theater in L.A., and I swear,  the entire audience did a collective spit-take when Ms. Bacall launched into this hilariously inappropriate disco-ditty.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I've never considered The Fan to be as bad a film as its reputation has led people to believe. Its screenplay is clichéd to be sure (the stage doorman is actually named “Pop”) and the violence needlessly gruesome for such a visually distinguished and stylish film (Bianchi’s music video background is in full evidence), but with a provocative theme and talented cast, The Fan has quite a bit going for it even with its flaws. 

Griffin Dunne a few years before his breakout
role in Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985)

Celebrity and fan obsession is a compellingly intriguing topic for a thriller. The whole codependent, love/hate, need/resent, fear/envy aspect of the “relationship” between the famous and the adoring public is ripe fodder for film treatment. The connection between celebrity and fan is a "relationship," by design and necessity, doomed forever to be one-sided: the fan feels an intimate kinship with someone who doesn't know they exist. Perhaps because of this imaginary, essentially hungry, connection, it's no surprise then how quickly fawning fandom can change to bilious hate if the fan’s attentions are even marginally rebuffed.

I’m reminded of a scene in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (a marvelously dark black comedy about fan obsession that would make a great double-bill with The Fan) in which talk-show host Jerry Lewis is walking down the street. When asked by a fan at a public phone to say a few words to her friend on the line, he politely demurs, claiming that he's running late. At this point, the seconds-ago adoring fan flips to bile-spewing enemy, shouting “You should only get cancer! I hope you get cancer!” Yikes! 

But such is the mercurial, frighteningly delicate line between love and hate that is fandom and celebrity obsession. Had The Fan set its sights on examining this already terrifying dynamic in the form of a strict psychological thriller, it had the potential for providing an insightful, genuinely chilling look at our increasingly celebrity-obsessed culture. In going the slasher/stalker route, The Fan cheapens and sensationalizes the material, making the events appear more remote and unlikely than in reality they are. 

"It's better than pot. It's better than booze. A shot of applause can stamp out the blues."
Lyrics from the title song of Bacall's first Broadway musical "Applause"  

Anyone who has ever attended a celebrity autograph convention or looked at the crowds outside of a movie premiere knows how Day of the Locust-like and unnerving celebrity-worship feels. There are so many things The Fan does right (depicting the many ways in which the famous are vulnerable to the public, conveying how the promise held forth by fame-culture fuels a never-to-be-satiated hunger in fans) but in not trusting the inherent, subtle creepiness of the material as is, misses a terrific opportunity to scare us with a bracing look at ourselves.

When it comes to The Fan, one might have wished for a little more finesse in the areas of motivation and character, but I seriously have a soft spot in my heart for this movie...mostly centered around the Broadway setting, the images of a still gritty and grimy New York, and reminders of my early years in dance. And, of course, it really is great to see late-career Bacall–with that amazing Gena Rowlands-like mane of hair–command the screen once more. Who was it that said, "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be"?

Clip of legwarmers in action in "The Fan" (1981) 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2012

THE RITZ 1976

Three distinct memories spring to mind when I think of the movie version of The Ritz, Terrence McNally’s gay liberation-era Broadway farce that won Rita Moreno the 1975 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play: 

1) I was 18 years old and attending college in San Francisco when The Ritz had its West Coast premiere there. I recall the local papers running photos of Moreno posing on a special The Ritz cable car surrounded by a phalanx of attractive young men in tight-fitting “The Ritz” t-shirts, ready to be transported to the film’s screening, and later, if memory serves, to a disco after-party held at one of the city's more popular gay bathhouses. Movie premieres were rare in San Francisco, and everything about this one (disco-themed, gay-centric, hip, and a little kinky) encapsulated all the things I associate with that particular time and place.

2) The Ritz was released in the summer of 1976. America was caught up in Bicentennial and Olympics fever, and me...I was swept up in a fever of a different kind. One resulting from prolonged exposure to the pervasive and persuasive ad campaign for that other summer '76 release, The Omen ("You are one day closer to the end of the world!"). I went bonkers for that movie and saw The Omen at least four times that summer, never getting around to seeing The Ritz even once (although, in my defense, The Ritz performed so poorly that it was in theaters only a short time). 

3) Curiously, while I couldn't be troubled to see the film itself, I did make the effort to go to the theater where The Ritz was playing just so I could buy myself a "The Ritz" t-shirt. It was this very cool (for 1976, anyway) European-cut white shirt with the film’s title in black art-deco lettering on the front and Al Hirschfeld’s poster art caricatures of the film’s cast on the back. I absolutely loved that shirt!  It lasted all through college and survived for many years until finally disintegrating in the wash sometime in the mid-'80s.

Even the usually reliable Ebay has proved fruitless in searching for another one of these T-shirts. I knew I should have bought two of them when I had the chance back in 1976

When I finally got around to seeing The Ritz on cable TV in the late-'70s, I found I enjoyed it a great deal, and it instantly became one of my all-time favorites. I was so impressed with the attempt to create a kind of modern Marx Brothers comedy of chaos —a classic farce full of broadly pitched performances and McNally's irreverent send-ups of everything from homophobia to show business, gay culture to gangster films. 

The raw material is a great deal of outrageous good fun that could have perhaps benefited from that intangible, crazy "something" that Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich brought to Young Frankenstein and What's Up, Doc?, respectively, but while The Ritz never reaches the heights of comic lunacy necessary to make this kind of comedy really soar, it nevertheless has a tremendously funny freneticism to it that throws new things at you so fast that even if you're not laughing, you're rarely, if ever, bored. 

Rita Moreno as Googie Gomez

Jack Weston as Gaetano Proclo

Jerry Stiller as Carmine Vespucci

Treat Williams as Michael Brick

F. Murray Abraham as Chris

Kaye Ballard as Vivian Proclo

One of the things that most struck me about seeing The Ritz for the first time, just a few short years after its initial release, was how swiftly it had become a period piece. Not in the superficial things like clothes and disco, but in reflecting an emerging liberalism that was already about to have the lid shut on it. In the intervening years since the glory days of the sexual revolution (the days of porno chic, Erica Jong, key clubs, wife-swapping, and Plato's Retreat —lest we forget that sexual recklessness was not the sole province of gays in the '70s) fundamentalist nutjobs like Anita Bryant, the AIDS crisis, and the burgeoning conservatism of the '80s conspired to render The Ritz's pro-sex, pro-acceptance, live-and-let-live egalitarianism something for the history books.

I always regret that I didn't first see The Ritz back when the climate of the times better reflected the optimistic spirit of healthy hedonism depicted on the screen. This out-and-proud retooling of the classic bedroom farce was one of the earliest (if not the first) mainstream examples of gay sexuality presented as normal, fun, and every bit as prone to comical chaos and misunderstanding as heterosexual sex. Gay characters are introduced in a non-tragic, comic milieu where for once, the humor derives from their personalities. Being gay is merely a part of who they are, not the source of a joke. I can only think of a handful of films from that era (Saturday Night at the Baths, A Very Natural Thing, Some of My Best Friends Are) that successfully portrayed gay people in a gay-specific environment that was neither defined nor impacted by hetero acceptance or disapproval. 

The fictional  bathhouse in The Ritz is modeled on New York's The Continental Baths, the infamous '70s recreational sex venue that boasted a pool, gym, cafe, disco, and most popularly, a cabaret where stars like Bette Midler, Barry Manilow, and Peter Allen got their start 

Summarizing a farce's plot in print is thankless and the written equivalent of a tongue-twister: you know what you intend to say, but it often sounds garbled. But I’ll give it my best (and briefest): Cleveland sanitation company president Gaetano Proclo (Weston) has a hit put out on him by his mafia-connected brother-in-law (Stiller), and mistakenly picks a N.Y. gay bathhouse to hide out in. 
Hoping to just lay low for the duration, Proclo finds himself the unwitting target of an amorous chubby-chaser (Paul B. Price), a blackmail-minded private detective (Williams), and a monumentally untalented Puerto Rican cabaret singer (Moreno) who mistakes him for a producer. Of course, everything that can go wrong does, and complications escalate to a delightfully silly pitch, all leading to the anticipated chase/free-for-all finale. 
Taking place over the course of one frantic evening, The Ritz is a door-slamming, identity-mangling, towel-snapping, man-chasing, gun-wielding, lunatic comedy of absurdly subversive sexual politics. Behind all the hilarity is a nifty little commentary on how hard it is to pin labels on people when everyone’s dressed in only a towel.

Oscar-winner F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus) leapfrogs over what could have been the unendurable cliches written into the character of Chris, a befuddled bathhouse regular swept up in a comic case of mistaken identity 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Depending on the critic, the film legacy of director Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night, Petulia, The Three Musketeers) has been categorized as either varied or uneven. But that which has been most consistent in all of his work—a talent for brilliant bits of staged pandemonium—is well-suited to this screwball fish-out-of-water burlesque that mines traditionally uncomfortable gay/straight confrontations for laughs.
In comedy, all is forgiven if you just come through with the funny, and on that score, Lester, with just a few minor lags in pacing, succeeds in keeping things moving at the requisite frenetic pace. Lester's confident handling of the dizzying particulars of so many characters, doorways, and complications never gets in the way of his Broadway-trained cast (Moreno, Weston, Stiller, Abraham, and mustachioed chubby-chaser, Paul B. Price all reprise their stage roles), each of whom is allowed their moment to shine.

Devoted fat-fetishist Claude Perkins (Paul B. Price) puts the moves on a badly-disguised Gaetano Proclo (Jack Weston)

PERFORMANCES
Before talent-free, self-deluding, fame-whores became a staple of show-biz (thanks, reality TV), they were the deserving targets of satirical derision. After years of American Idol, Rita Moreno’s Puerto Rican bombshell, Googie Gomez, doesn’t seem nearly the awful performer she’s supposed to be (she sings only marginally worse than, say, Katy Perry), but the loony, comedic brilliance of Moreno’s performance hasn't waned a bit. Like the late Madeline Kahn, Moreno is an actress capable of being outrageous and natural at the same time. Fabulously sexy, Moreno imbues Googie with a comic lunacy that steals every scene she's in. 
Legend has it that Terrence McNally wrote The Ritz for Moreno after seeing her perform the character of Googie at parties. If so, the man should be commended for resisting the impulse to place this dynamically colorful character at the front and center of the play. As a peripheral but indispensable element of crazy in The Ritz’s party mix, she is the film's spice;  The Ritz offers just enough Googie ineptitudes, tantrums, and malaprops to leave you wanting more.

Googie Gomez launches into a grievously misguided rendition of "Everything's Coming Up Roses"

Every member of The Ritz’s gamely peripatetic ensemble cast is worthy of accolades (this film must have been a continuity nightmare), but Jack Weston is my personal favorite. A rubber-faced master of the double-take with all the corpulent grace of Oliver Hardy, Weston makes me laugh aloud time and time again over his incredulous reactions to the not-so-fine mess he’s gotten himself into.

Googie tries her hand at seduction

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The Ritz is about as New York as you can get in terms of setting, subject, and humor, but was filmed, most likely for financial reasons, in the UK (the illusion is shattered less than a minute into the film when the actress cast as Jack Weston’s daughter delivers the line, “I want to go back to Cleveland” with a pronounced British lilt). What fascinates me about The Ritz is how British and Carry On-ish it all feels despite hewing so faithfully to the stage show and employing a largely Yankee. Director Richard Lester may be American by birth, but in having made England his home since 1956, I think he brings something to The Ritz that makes me wonder if perhaps there isn’t something to the widely held belief that there are really subtle and not-so-subtle differences between British and American humor.

In farce, all beds are made for hiding under, and situations are never as they seem

A curious thing about The Ritz, something that Kaye Ballard mentions in her memoirs, is that for a film set in a gay bathhouse, the movie is woefully low on male pulchritude. The Ritz has been cast with a straight male's detachment from (or fear of) his appreciation of male beauty. Lester found a way to include (in the burlesque tradition) a bevy of sexy females in 1966's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but clearly didn't think turnabout was fair play in this wholly appropriate male atmosphere. A peroxided Treat Williams (hilarious and endearing as the private eye with the helium voice and boyish nature) is pretty much it when it comes to beefcake.

"See something you like, buddy?"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Given that the heaviest topics can be lightened through levity, humor has always been one of the most pain-free ways to broach controversial subjects on film. With The Ritz, audiences otherwise loathe to spend 90 minutes watching a movie set in an environment as alien and potentially disconcerting as a gay bathhouse can galvanize around and have their latent homophobia assuaged by the more traditionally accessible comedy targets: sexism - the sexually rapacious heterosexual female; xenophobia - Googie's Puerto Rican assault on the English Language (I think Al Pacino studied Moreno her for his accent in Scarface); and irony - Googie's deluded belief in her own talent.
And if laughs are hard to elicit from viewers unsure of what to make out of a nonjudgmental look at an establishment where men gather to have anonymous, promiscuous sex with other men, then Gaetano Proclo’s exaggerated Alice Through The Looking Glass sense of bemused amazement provides the perfect outlet for all that nervous tension building up inside.

If, however, at film's end, audiences are left with their presumptions challenged, replaced with only the awareness that one has spent 90 minutes in the presence of a bunch of zany, eccentric characters, each unique and yet somehow the same...sympathetic, misunderstood, likable;...well, to me that's one small blow for the power of comedy.

Three Gay Caballeros

The Ritz is not perfect, but it IS a funny film, and there are more genuine laughs to be found here than in a great many more well-regarded comedies out there. It's a forgotten gem that has garnered a well-deserved cult following.  
The Ritz was revived on Broadway in 2007 for a limited run and featured Rosie Perez as Googie.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2012

SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON 1964

This film was first brought to my attention by a friend in a discussion on The Stepford Wives and director Bryan Forbes. Informed that the stylistically uneven and nepotism-prone director (wife Nanette Newman appears, by contract, it would seem, in virtually every one of his films) had really scored a hit with the noir-ish kidnap caper film Séance on a Wet Afternoon, I was eager to get a look at this well-regarded British thriller that seems to have fallen through the cracks a bit here in the U.S. Well, rather obligingly, TCM recently screened Séance on a Wet Afternoon and I must say, I was seriously floored and thoroughly impressed. What a marvelous, wholly satisfying surprise! If, as I suspect, Forbes was hired to helm The Stepford Wives on the strength of this film, I fully understand why. Where has this movie been all my life?

Séance on a Wet Afternoon is a claustrophobically tense suspense thriller/crime drama about a kidnap plot hatched by an eager-for-fame trance medium (Kim Stanley) and her dominated husband (Richard Attenborough).

Kim Stanley as Myra Savage

Richard Attenborough as Billy Savage

Nanette Newman as Mrs. Clayton

Patrick Magee as Superintendent Walsh

Mark Eden as Mr. Clayton

Possessed, since childhood, of a psychic gift granting foresight through communion with spirits in other dimensions, Myra Savage has always known she was “different,” but has sustained herself with the notion that she is also "special." But an adult existence of workaday mundanity (she supports herself and her unemployed, asthmatic husband by conducting once-a-week séances in the gloomy Victorian home they share) and lingering remnants of a past tragedy have conspired to render her gifts, if not wasted, then of minimal consequence. Determined to right fate's wrongs and fulfill her arrogate destiny, Myra prevails upon her weak-willed husband to carry out the "borrowing" of the daughter of a wealthy businessman so that a charade might be enacted wherein, after ransom is demanded and the press alerted, Myra can gain notoriety by way of what she calls  "The lie that reveals the truth": the feigning of psychic intervention in leading the grieving parents to the whereabouts of the daughter and the discovery of the ransom.  

Of course, the Gothic turn of the screw in Séance on a Wet Afternoon is Myra’s obvious mental instability (raising doubts about her claim of psychic talent) and the peculiar, Lady Macbeth-ish influence she wields over her apprehensively compliant, yet devoted husband Billy.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 
I have a fondness for films about crime capers that go terribly wrong. Whether due to human error (some character’s “fatal flaw”) or merely faulty planning, it always strikes me as a marvelously theatrical dramatization of the folly and arrogance of mankind ever thinking it has control over the outcome of anything. The rather deranged motivations that set in motion Séance on a Wet Afternoon’s kidnapping plot are unsettlingly compounded by the codependent master/slave relationship shared by Myra and Billy. 

Many shots in the film are composed to place Myra in positions of looming dominance over her passive husband 

In an ambiguous interplay that recalls the dysfunctional dynamics of George and Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the “gifted” Myra, the family’s sole breadwinner and whose inherited house they share, clearly dominates Billy. But Billy’s brow-beaten silences have an air of weary condescension. One senses that he has learned that it is easier to suffer his wife’s erratic behavior and cutting invectives than to challenge them. Billy relates to Myra as one might a person suffering from Alzheimer’s. In scenes where Myra appears to forget or has re-imagined some event from the past, Billy either recants or hesitates at revealing the truth (e.g., when Myra turns off the blaring Victrola only moments later to accuse Billy of doing so, he doesn't contradict her). 

Myra visits the parents of the kidnapped girl to offer her services as a "professional psychic"

PERFORMANCES
Kim Stanley’s screen appearances may have been infrequent, but in each instance (most notably Paddy Chayefsky’s The Goddess- 1958) she seriously came to clean house. This woman wasn't fooling around! In portraying the escalatingly unhinged mastermind of a spiritually mandated kidnap-for-fame scheme, Stanley creates and inhabits a character of mesmerizing and terrifying complexity. Both fragile and steely, Myra Savage is a role so inherently distasteful that marketable stars Simone Signoret and Deborah Kerr declined it outright. Yet Stanley imbues Myra with such a mercurially shifting palette of conflicting emotions that she emerges never exclusively a villain or victim; merely a frighteningly authentic incarnation of the internal desolation that is madness. Stanley's performance garnered an Oscar nomination, and rightfully so.

Billy - "We're mad, you and me. Both mad."

I never thought I could ever forgive Richard Attenborough after what he did to A Chorus Line (1985), but after seeing his chilling turn in 10 Rilllington Place (1971) last year, and now Séance on a Wet Afternoon…well, I can see that the man is quite prodigiously talented when kept in front of the camera. As the somewhat infantilized spouse (there’s an emasculating absurdity in this well-past-middle-aged man being referred to as “Billy”), Attenborough’s quiet anguish is well-matched with Stanley’s showier display of insanity. Not allowed a “backstory” as to how he came to be so cowed by his wife, Attenborough’s surprisingly expressive eyes convey the defeated compromise and devotionally loving tolerance that binds this obviously intelligent man to a delusional woman determined to lead them both toward tragedy.

Portraying a largely silent character, Richard Attenborough's eyes betray a past of torturesome sorrows

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Atmospheric and loaded with dramatic tension, Séance on a Wet Afternoon nevertheless might be too procedural and talky for some people’s tastes. Indeed, the screenplay, as adapted by director Forbes from the 1961 novel by Mark McShane, could easily be turned into a stage play with few alterations. (In the year 2000, Séance on a Wet Afternoon was remade as a Japanese horror film titled, Séance, and in 2009 it was made into an opera composed by Wicked’s Stephen Schwartz.) 

The unpleasant topic of a child being terrorized has been said to have accounted for the film's mild reception upon its release. Here, schoolgirl Amanda Clayton (Judith Donner) attempts to thwart her abduction by Billy Savage by locking him out of the car (Richard Attenborough) 

Personally, being a tad weary of the flash cut, ADD, CGI stuff of today, I enjoy seeing a film so deliberately paced. It's nice to have a film that trusts an audience to allow events to unfold as they need to, not just in a way dedicated to providing a thrill-a-minute. The time spent in allowing us to know and understand the characters on a more substantial level has the remarkable effect of creating empathy for both the villains and the victims. I found myself simultaneously rooting for and against the kidnappers' detection.  
Note* Based on several reviews and summaries I've read online, it seems there exists the possibility of misunderstanding what occurs during the film’s gripping conclusion if one fails to pay close attention. What is spoken is so important during these crucial final moments (and alas, the DVD release comes without a “captions” option) an unheard word or two is apt to leave you walking away with an entirely different impression of how this film really ends.

The Savages - as unsavory a couple as ever appeared in a film.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Shot in exquisite black and white by cinematographer Gerry Turpin and employing all the deep-focus/high-contrast flourishes of the best of film noir and mid-'60s thrillers, Séance on a Wet Afternoon makes a great companion piece to those similar exercises in bloodless terror: The Innocents (1961) and The Haunting (1963). I very much liked the hauntingly sinister score by the late, great John Barry, and Bryan Forbes' methodical buildup of suspense was especially to my taste. It’s often difficult to know specifically what a director is responsible for in a film, but in comparing The Stepford Wives with Séance on a Wet Afternoon, I’m leaning towards investment in character over plot. Both films kept me riveted because the characters came alive for me in such complex, deeply flawed (human) ways, I cared about what happened to them. For a film to succeed in drawing the viewer into the emotional reality of a film, seems the most thrilling special effect of all.

The bleak Victorian London home where most of the film's action takes place. A house haunted by more than ghosts

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012