COMA 1978

Coma, one of my favorite '70s thrillers, has recently been given the TV miniseries treatment. And while I wish it luck (ever the bullheaded traditionalist, I didn’t watch it and don’t plan to), I can't stop thinking, "What's the point?"

Like counting the rings of a tree, there will likely come a day when a person’s age can be calculated by the number of films released in that individual’s lifetime that have fallen prey to the dreaded remake. The list of classics given nobody-asked-for-that remakes increases with each passing year (Carrie, The Shining, The Stepford Wives, Psycho, et al.), proving that when it comes to organ harvesting, hospitals have to take a place in line behind the movie industry's longstanding practice of idea harvesting.

This iconic image of coma patients eerily suspended by wires was used extensively in the promotion of the 1978 film. Today, what I find most shocking about this photo is how impossibly fit all the patients are. It's like they're harvesting the organs of the US Olympic Team.

Coma benefited from being one of the last of the post-Watergate paranoid thrillers of the '70s. What works about it — addressing issues of corporate mistrust and institutionalized sexism — feels very much a part of a specific time and place in our culture. 

Seriously…can any remake ever hope to replicate, in any dramatically meaningful way, that transcendent feminist moment in American cinema when heroine Geneviève Bujold doffed her wedged espadrilles and pantyhose before crawling through the bowels of Boston Memorial Hospital in search of the cause of all those suspicious coma cases? 

Perhaps this is difficult to imagine if you didn't grow up in the '60s, but after years of women in thrillers and horror films falling victim to their feminine finery (running in heels and twisting an ankle being the genre standard), this small act of practicality was such a revolutionary repudiation of a sexist genre cliché that on the opening weekend screening of Coma I attended back in February of 1978, the audience I saw it with actually broke into applause.

Genevieve Bujold as Dr. Susan Wheeler

Michael Douglas as Dr. Mark Bellows

Richard Widmark as Dr. Harris - Chief of Surgery

Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Emerson

Rip Torn as Dr. George

Lois Chiles as Nancy Greenly

Tom Selleck as Sean Murphy

Ed Harris as Pathology Resident #2 (film debut!)

The plot of Coma, like many a good thriller, is marvelously simple: at prestigious Boston Memorial Hospital, a higher-than-normal percentage of routine surgery patients are ending up in irreversible comas. Resident surgeon Dr. Susan Wheeler (Bujold) grows suspicious after both her best friend and a recently admitted healthy male patient slip into comas after standard procedure operations. Yet no one else at the hospital seems to share her concerns. What follows is a mystery thriller that plays on our basic fears of hospitals and our vulnerability in the face of the sometimes callously impersonal medical profession.

Coma opened in Los Angeles on Wednesday, February 8, 1978
 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

The post-Watergate years may have been depressing as hell, but all that resultant disillusionment and cynicism was a bonanza for the suspense thriller genre. The pervading sense of skepticism and uncertainty that was the cultural by-product of such a large-scale political betrayal fueled and found catharsis in a great many America-confronts-itself films of the '70s. We had thrillers about conspiracy theories  –  The Parallax View (1974); morally uncertain private eyes – Night Moves (1975); and personal privacy paranoia  – The Conversation (1974). Coma remains one of my personal favorites because it ratchets up the tension of the basic conspiracy-theory thriller format by combining it with the combative feminist-era sexual politics of The Stepford Wives.

Dr. Wheeler's run-ins with the hospital's patronizing male staff can be viewed as a broader commentary on society's vulnerability to patriarchal institutions, which assume they know what's better for us than we do ourselves 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and Klute all rank high on my list of classic thrillers because each is a genre film that, by drawing upon an urgent or pressing element of the cultural zeitgeist, manages to mine something unexpected and chilling within genres often noted for their rigid traditionalism. The medical mystery at the center of Coma is intriguing enough (are patients deliberately being put into comas, and if so, why?), but the paranoia is amplified by having the usual disbelieved protagonist be a woman doctor in a field where women number in the minority and their concerns are often summarily dismissed by patronizing superiors. 

The Men's Club
Coma uses a woman's frustration with the "invisible" devaluation of
institutionalized sexism as a subtextual paranoia angle 

The day-to-day condescension Geneviève Bujold’s Dr. Wheeler faces from her male co-workers takes on an increasingly ominous air when her growing anxiety and rational concern that something nefarious is afoot at Boston Memorial is met with “Don’t bother your pretty little head about it” disregard from her superiors. Especially the creepily paternal Chief of Surgery (Richard Widmark), who treats a serious professional discussion with Dr. Wheeler as if he's Andy Hardy's father, asked to give a heart-to-heart.

It’s established early on in the scenes between Dr. Wheeler and her professionally ambitious boyfriend, Dr. Mark Bellows (Douglas), that she is hypersensitive to the sexism and lack of respect she's expected to just accept as part of the price of working in a semi-hostile, all-male environment of professional medicine. The film makes a point of showing us scenes where the in-hospital workplace talk is full of men making casually demeaning comments to or about women. 

If Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives gave us a paranoid thriller born of male anxiety about feminism, Coma takes the female perspective and devises a thriller in which female alienation from a male-dominated world fosters self-reliance and resourcefulness.

Much like in Rosemary's Baby, where Rosemary’s concern about her pregnancy is diagnosed and dismissed (by men) as the source of her paranoia about her neighbors, Dr. Wheeler’s feminism and relationship troubles are viewed as being at the heart of her perceived-as-hysterical suspicions about the male staff at her hospital. As her frustration mounts from not being able to convince anyone that there is something to be concerned about, reactions from the male staff (she seems to be the only woman doctor there) range from flat-out dismissals to bristling at the audacity of a woman daring to challenge the knowledge and last word authority of men. It's a wonderful add-on device that lends to Coma a subtext that fuels paranoia with extra layers of workplace frustration born of women not being taken seriously in male-centered spaces. 

The best paranoid thrillers have a way of making the ordinary look really creepy

PERFORMANCES

I had the grave misfortune of having my first-ever exposure to Geneviève Bujold occur with the movie Earthquake (1975); a film whose most terrifying image was that of the lovely French-Canadian actress canoodling with the Skeletor-like countenance of Charlton Heston. In the ensuing years, I’ve enjoyed her performances in several notable films (1988's Dead Ringers is a must-see), but I guess I have a special place in my heart for Coma. As her first real solo starring venture, I thought it would be the film that launched her to stardom. As I’ve said in a previous post, Bujold embodied the direction I thought films were taking in the '70s regarding leading ladies. She was quirky, radiated intelligence, conveyed a self-possessed depth, and embodied a non-traditional beauty coupled with remarkable acting skills. As the '80s fate of Debra Winger attested, Hollywood still preferred its leading ladies to be vapid and pliable, so Bujold's promise was never realized (at least to my satisfaction).

In a nice reversal of the "supportive partner" role usually allocated to women in motion picture thrillers, Michael Douglas, fresh off four years on the TV series The Streets of San Francisco, plays Bujold's allocated-to-the-sidelines boyfriend. 

Still, Bujold is terrific here, spunky and sharp with that great throaty voice of hers and those darkly intelligent, inquisitive eyes. She adds so much dimension to her role that she keeps the character and motivation at the forefront, preventing Coma from becoming mired in its medical-thriller plot. Unlike the kind of actress usually cast in roles like this (I call your attention to Lesley-Anne Downs’ implausible Egyptologist in Sphinx, another film based on a Robin Cook novel), Bujold is actually believable as a physician and (refreshingly) is not required to scream every 15 minutes.

At the Ballet
Fans of A Chorus Line might recognize the short-haired brunette at the front of Bujold's dance exercise class as Kay Cole, the original Broadway production's "Maggie." By odd coincidence, Coma co-star Michael Douglas would go on to star in the woefully misguided 1985 film adaptation of  A Chorus Line

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Unable to convince anyone of her suspicions, Dr. Wheeler's quest takes her to the architecturally foreboding Jefferson Institute. The scenes at this futuristic chronic care facility (whose actual purpose I won't reveal here) are Coma's big set pieces, and they really don't disappoint. A concrete and steel variation on the typical thriller haunted house, the Jefferson Institute scenes are notable not only for the poetic-nightmare images of roomfuls of bodies suspended in techno limbo, but also for the unforgettably bizarre performance of Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Emerson, the Institute's equivalent of a gargoyle at the gate. 

By Coma's midpoint, when the film's well-established atmosphere of tension is just about sunk by an interminable "romantic weekend" montage, Ms. Ashley appears and revs the film back up to high gear. Her introductory scene with Bujold is a classic that I remember had the audience laughing in a way that brought them even more into the film. You want to know if she's a real person or a robot. As the unblinking and inscrutable head of the Institute, Ashley carves an indelible impression and is one of my favorite characters in the film.

The Jefferson Institute
Coma is aware that in real life, a large, impersonal medical building
like this is far more terrifying than any Gothic castle.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

No matter how clever the plot, a suspense thriller has to have thrills. Coma mines the already fertile creep-out atmosphere of hospitals for all its worth. It does so by allowing us to witness (to great effect, I might say) the day-to-day casualness with which doctors, nurses, and anesthesiologists regard that which is unnervingly life-and-death to us patients. If there is a level at which Coma scores its biggest points as a thriller, it's in giving the audience the impression that hospitals regard patients as a mechanic would a car on a lift: a bunch of billable parts in need of fixing. 

"You'll be getting a bill from each of us in the mail."

And then, of course, Coma has plenty of the good, old-fashioned kind of thrills, too.

Remakes get a bad rap, but for every totally pointless rehash of a classic (Straw Dogs), there's a film like 1978's marvelous Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a retread that's really a re-imagining. I'm not sure what the remake of Coma will seize upon as a justification for its existence (the feminist subtext - which to my way of thinking is more relevant than ever - might be perceived as being dated), but unless it devotes itself to correcting some of this film's flaws (a few loose narrative threads, that mysterious hired killer), I think I'll stick to this imperfect but ever-so-satisfying relic from a time when even genre films felt that it was also important to comment on the world we live in.

Clip from Coma (1978)

AUTOGRAPH FILES

In 1982, I had the opportunity to see Elizabeth Ashley co-star on Broadway with Geraldine Page and Carrie Fisher in the play Agnes of God. As one might imagine, the experience was electrifying. Although very faded, Ashley's signature is on the bottom of the Playbill above.

To read more about Coma:
Another informative and fun post on "Coma" at Poseidon's Underworld

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2008 - 2012

THE BIRDS 1963

Like most people my age, the first time I saw The Birds was when it had its broadcast television premiere on NBC back in 1968. Then only 10-years-old, I had never seen an Alfred Hitchcock movie before, but he was familiar to me, if not by reputation, then most certainly by that corpulent profile featured so prominently on his weekly anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I knew he was a film director but my strongest impression was of his being “The fat Rod Serling,” or “The scary Walt Disney”; a household-name TV host in the vein of Dick Powell and Loretta Young whom I associated with suspense programs like The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond, and Thriller.

Tippi Hedren as Melanie Daniels
(always loved how "naturally" she holds that cotton swab to her head)

Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner

Jessica Tandy as Lydia Brenner

Suzanne Pleshette as Annie Hayworth

Veronica Cartwright as Cathy Brenner

Sir Alfred

My fondness for what in syndication was called The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (“The Unlocked Window” episode scared the hell out of me then and is still the one I consider the best of the series) combined with the kid-friendly, “Creature Features” accessibility of its title, made The Birds must-see television as far as I was concerned. And indeed, in spite of seeing it on a small black and white set with all those commercial interruptions, my first experience of The Birds was an appropriately terrifying one. Sure, Tippi Hedren’s lacquered San Francisco socialite inspired, no, make that invited, giggles, while Rod Taylor’s lantern-jawed “Let the men handle it!” heroics was a horror film cliché already wearing thin (if I had a dollar for every time a woman is told to go make coffee before, during, and after a disaster…), but for sheer tension and hands-over-my-eyes thrills, I couldn't have asked for a better introduction to the cinema world of Alfred Hitchcock.

A class act in every way, The Birds was the first horror film I ever saw that didn't have the feel of the bargain-basement about it. Beautifully photographed, breathtaking special effects, suspense deftly metered; The Birds is simply a marvelous example of a thriller that understands how much an audience enjoys being taken on a thrill ride. Nowhere near as mean-spirited as some of Hitchcock’s other films (his Frenzy is one of the ugliest, most misanthropic films I've ever seen), I liken the experience of watching The Birds to being a participant in an adult version of the old “peek-a-boo” game one plays with an infant: I may get scared when the film goes “Boo!”, but I delight in the jolt and I sit there in gleeful anticipation of the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

And should Hitchcock’s predilection for fake-looking sets and feeble rear-screen projection mar this stylish enterprise with the cheesy-looking scene or two (I still can’t get over that sequence on the hill overlooking the children’s birthday party - it looks like a set from a high-school production of Brigadoon); or Evan Hunter’s script occasionally defy the normal patterns and rhythms of human speech; The Birds ultimately more than makes up for it in the near-genius technical rendering of the bird attacks and the kind of virtuoso storytelling that’s becoming all-too-rare in films today.

Throughout its evolution from late-career Hitchcock embarrassment, to affectionately derisible camp classic, straight on through to its current revisionist acceptance as a masterpiece of suspense and terror, The Birds has never once ceased being a favorite of mine.

Torch-Carryin' Annie has to listen to the Effortlessly Elegant Melanie make inroads with 
The Man That Got Away

I've not devoted much space on this blog to writing about some of the more popular and well-known films that rank among my favorites (for example: The Godfather, The Wizard of Oz, and Citizen Kane). This having to do with a sense that these titles are somewhat oversaturated subjects of cinema analysis and a nagging uncertainty that I have anything new to add to the dialog. On that topic, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds certainly fills the bill (a little ornithological humor there…heh, heh), what with everybody from François Truffaut to Mattel® to Camille Paglia weighing in on the film over the years. But after a recent glut of cable TV airings and one particularly laugh-filled evening watching the movie at home with my partner, I’ve decided that The Birds is a movie too near and dear to my heart not to be included in this, my internet film diary.

The plot of The Birds is so well-known it doesn't even require summarizing. The fan and casual viewer is just invited to settle down and enjoy the ride, perhaps indulging in a little "Spot the Hitchcock trademark" as the film unspools. I think all of them are present: the icy blonde, the suggestive banter, the sinister brunette, the precocious child, the female in eyeglasses, the glib discussion of murder, the domineering mother, the victimized female.

If that's not to your liking, you can ponder non-pertinent, yet nagging elements like: that scary portrait of Mitch's father (he doesn't look like a man who "had the knack" of entering into a kid's world). Or maybe the huge discrepancy in age between Mitch and his sister, Cathy (the wonderful Veronica Cartwright, stealing scenes even then!). Or why those two little moppets being traumatized at the diner aren't in school.  And while you're at it, ask yourself why Annie Hayworth's class is the only one held in that big old schoolhouse. Don't they have teenagers in Bodega Bay?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

We’ve all seen it or heard stories: A woman walks past a man -- man makes a comment (usually vulgar) about her attractiveness. Said woman ignores both comment and commenter only to find herself the object of a stream of hurled invectives from the man, all blatantly contradicting his earlier “compliments.” Standard operational procedure in misogyny: man places woman on fetishized pedestal only so he can knock her off of it. In many ways, The Birds plays out like the world’s most expensive and elaborate ugly-guy revenge fantasy against beautiful women (a mantle taken up several decades later by Joe Eszterhas with the craptastic Showgirls). There are times when it feels as if Hitchcock devised the entire multi-million production for the sole purpose of mussing Tippi Hedren’s meticulously sculpted coiffure.

Haters Gonna Hate
When it comes to disapproving glares from strangers,
Melanie Daniels doesn't have any fucks to give

Not since an excitable James Stewart ran obsessively roughshod over Kim Novak’s shopping spree in Vertigo can I recall a movie preoccupying itself so all-consumingly with a woman’s appearance. The first hour or so of The Birds is a virtual valentine to all things Tippi. Hitchcock records her in loving closeup, ogling long shots, and to the adoring exclusion of all else that’s going on around her. And when she’s not being subjected to the camera obscura equivalent of a wolf-whistle, The Birds makes sure it captures every leering, appraising gaze she draws from the males she crosses paths with.

But of course, the glamorization/objectification of leading ladies is nothing new. What makes The Birds the perverse and ultimately camp-prone curiosity it is, is the degree of enthusiasm with which the film approaches the task of dismantling all that it has so meticulously set up. Hedren’s Melanie Daniels is involved in each of the film’s recorded bird attacks and seriously gets the worst of it in the by-now-classic finale, but the movie doesn't ask that we relate to her character so much as hope that each successive attack will knock a bit of the starch out of her.

By the end, when the self-assured, independent, and superciliously smug Melanie Daniels from the early scenes has been reduced to a cowering, needy, child/woman, I have the nagging feeling that the film (Hitchcock) views this as some kind of triumph. As if Melanie needed something to jolt her out of her smug self-assurance, and her breakdown has ultimately reawakened her humanity and made her more worthy of compassion. While there’s no arguing that Melanie was a bit of a pill before, was it really necessary to strip her of all of her spirit to make her into a sympathetic character?

PERFORMANCES

It sounds very ungallant of me to say so, but a great deal of the enjoyment I’ve derived from The Birds over the years has been at Ms.Hedren’s expense. To be fair, it must be said that it’s difficult to tell whether I'm responding to the limitations of the actress herself or the made-to-look-ridiculous-on-purpose character of Melanie Daniels. 

Venus in Furs
Melanie Daniels' high-style glamour is made to look absurd when contrasted
with the more practical environment of Bodega Bay

I've always been fascinated by Tippi Hedren's hands in this film. Her tapering long fingers and ostentatiously elegant gestures involving a pencil, cigarette, or telephone cord make for some of the most unintentionally sensuous footage Hitchcock has ever shot.

In either event, it's nice to report that the years have been kind to both Hedren and The Birds. Looking at the film today, one is made aware of how difficult a role it must have been, and I find myself admiring Hedren's performance more and more. She is limited, to be sure, but in several scenes (such as Melanie's first encounter with the suspicious Annie Hayworth) Hedren displays a marvelous subtlety. If you don't believe me, try watching the French dubbed DVD of The Birds (if you're like me, you already know most of the dialog, anyway). You'd be surprised how significantly Hedren's performance improves when her thin American voice (her greatest drawback) is replaced by a sonorous Gallic one.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

After all these years, the scene of the bird attack at the Tides Cafe is as powerful as the first time I saw it. It is one brilliant, breathtaking piece of filmmaking! I tell you, no amount of expensive CGI wizardry is ever going to take the place of simple creativity and knowing how to use the visual medium of film to tell a story. I hate bandying the word "genius" about, but Hitchcock hit it out of the ballpark with this sequence. For me, it beats the shower scene in Psycho. (Although this scene never made me need to sleep with the lights on.)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

If in this post I sound guilty of succumbing to the kind of revisionism that spins vintage cinema straw into nostalgia-laced gold, it's only because I've been around long enough to have taken note of what I perceive to be a certain downward trajectory in films. In the independent/foreign-film-influenced days of my youth, it was generally assumed that movies like The Birds were on their way out, and it was fashionable to mock their solid, old-school (read: Establishment) professionalism. 

In this shot from the opening scene of The Birds, the traffic signal indicates WALK, but on the right of the screen, you can see a strong-armed "extra wrangler" preventing a clearly befuddled little old lady from crossing the street and spoiling Hitchcok's introduction shot of his leggy star, the lovely Ms. Hedren. I told you I've watched this movie a lot. 

Jump ahead to the present day. We now have an industry run by lawyers and populated with techno-geeks churning out obscenely expensive comic book movies and CGI video games disguised as films for a subliterate demographic that bullies the boxoffice through their Twitter accounts. 

All of a sudden, old-fashioned things like story, character, pacing, and maturity seem positively revolutionary. I've always liked The Birds, but I never considered it a classic. I think that opinion has changed. I don't think there's a director working today who can pull off what Hitchcock does in this flawed masterpiece, I really don't. It's a movie both smart and silly that never once falls prey to what is near-standard in horror films today: stupidity. It takes its time, it gets us to care about its characters, and the power of the shock effects comes from our engagement in the narrative. The Birds is not Alfred Hitchcock's best film by a long shot, but its obvious skill, artistry, and simple entertainment value make much of what passes for motion pictures today look like chicken feed.

Clip from "The Birds" (1963)

BONUS MATERIAL
A couple of terrific essays on Hedren and "The Birds" can be found HERE at the site of fellow blogger, Poseidon's Underworld.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

BURNT OFFERINGS 1976

I’m not sure what a sociologist would make of it, but the '70s (that post- hippie “Me” decade of Watergate, the energy crisis, and the close of the Vietnam War) seems to have spawned more than its share of movies and novels about malevolent domiciles. The Amityville Horror (1979), The Sentinel (1977), and The Shining (1980) are all films based on popular '70s horror-fiction novels that sought to update the traditional haunted house story.

Burnt Offerings, Robert Marasco’s 1973 novel chronicling the gradual dissolution and ultimate destruction of a family after they take up temporary residence in a large house possessed of a deadly supernatural force, predates Stephen King’s similarly-themed The Shining by four years. I read Burnt Offerings back in 1975, as soon as I’d heard that it was to be adapted into a motion picture reuniting Karen Black with Dan Curtis, the director of the popular TV-movie, Trilogy of Terror (1975).

"There's no such thing as fun for the whole family" - Jerry Seinfeld

The involvement of Dan Curtis—the man behind the long-running Gothic TV soap-opera Dark Shadows, and a TV-based director/producer who never met a horror-cliché he didn’t like—was considerably less promising to me than the possibilities presented by the top-drawer cast assembled (always such a rarity in horror films). Karen Black, red-hot at the time, was cast as the wife; Ken Russell alumni Oliver Reed, fresh from the success of Tommy (1975), was the husband, and veteran star Bette Davis was rescued from TV-movie hell to bring her What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? / Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte scream-queen gravitas to the small role of Aunt Elizabeth. Rounding out the intriguing cast were Oscar-winner Eileen Heckart and indefatigable hambone Burgess Meredith as the eccentric owners of the parasitic (vampiric?) summer rental at the center of the story.

Karen Black as Marian Rolf

Oliver Reed as Benjamin Rolf

Bette Davis as Aunt Elizabeth

Lee H. Montgomery as Davy Rolf

Eileen Heckart as Roz Allardyce

Burgess Meredith as Arnold Allardyce

On its release, I was happy to find Burnt Offerings to be a serious-minded, slavishly faithful adaptation of the book (with the exception of a more cinematic, crowd-pleasing ending) that avoided the usual post-Exorcist bombast and instead concentrated on mood and atmosphere. It's one of those rare films that can give you a good, solid scare when you watch it alone, yet provide plenty of unintentional laughs when you watch it with friends. Contemporary audiences are likely to find the film predictable, slow, over-reliant on tried-and-true clichés (there should be a moratorium on rainstorms in haunted house movies), and hampered by the kind of empty ambiguity that often signals poor storytelling. But those who saw Burnt Offerings when they were very young (the film was rated PG) or before The Shining and the Amityville series drove the genre into redundancy, tend to recall the film with the most fondness today.

The Face That Launched a Thousand Bad Dreams 

Few knew the name of the ghoulishly grinning chauffeur (Anthony James) but no one ever forgot the face. 

A film critic once compared the horror genre to pornography (a '70s film critic...long before the genre's decline and the arrival of those wretched "torture porn" movies) making the point that no matter the flaws, porn films work if you find them exciting, and horror films work if they are scary. Is Burnt Offerings scary? Had I seen it as a ten-year-old, I would say most emphatically yes. Seeing it as an adult, I can't say it scared me so much as it entertained me in a way that encouraged my suspension of disbelief to just sit back and have fun with it all. Perhaps it's due to Curtis having developed his "style" from years working in television,  but the PG-rated Burnt Offerings feels less like a feature film and more like an expanded episode of the TV show Night Gallery (a program Curtis criticized for its poor writing). Burnt Offerings is more a well-told mood piece than a good scary movie. (Perhaps the scariest and most unsettling thing is how this family considers it a "vacation" to spend their entire summer working harder than most people do all year. Even before the house starts acting up, all they do is clean!) However, ask someone who saw Burnt Offerings as a kid and they'll tell you it was the scariest film they ever saw...the stuff of nightmares.

Karen Black discovers that a long-neglected greenhouse has blossomed overnight

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of my favorite things about Modern Gothic is when the horror is portrayed as an external manifestation of some form of inner turmoil in the characters. As in The Shining (and more successfully, if in a slightly different vein, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby), Burnt Offerings nicely grafts familial dysfunction onto the conventions of the haunted house genre to create an eerie sense of tension both supernatural and psychological. When one really watches how the Rolf family interacts, it's easy to imagine that perhaps the "right people" the Allardyces seek for the house are ones living under a pressure cooker of repressed frustrations and barely constrained hostilities.

From the very first moments we meet the Rolfs, one gets a sense that all is not exactly well with this family. Pragmatic Ben and over-ardent Marian don’t really EVER see eye to eye before things begin to rapidly go awry between them. What is made explicit in the book (her domestic dissatisfaction, his creeping fear of mental illness) is only hinted at in the film, but the keen performances by Oliver Reed and Karen Black shore up the sense that the house doesn't really change these people, it merely amplifies that which is already there.

Unseen Terror

PERFORMANCES

Always one of my favorites, screen legend Karen Black may not have been able to sustain the kind of career she once had at the peak of her '70s popularity (the partial blame for which she subtly lays at the feet of Burnt Offerings director Dan Curtis in the comically discombobulated DVD commentary for this film), but there are few actresses who can boast of having starred or appeared in as many films that have gone on to attain classic or cult status.

Black’s boom years were 1974 to 1976, a period in which it was near-impossible to avoid her on the big screen or television (her performance of Big Mama Thornton's “Hound Dog” on The Tonight Show is burned in my brain to this day).  The uniquely glamorous, off-beat, unofficial face of The New Hollywood, the ubiquitous Karen Black appeared in a staggering 10 feature films and TV-movies in these three years, among them, some of the biggest and most high-profile releases of the era: The Great Gatsby (1974), The Day of the Locust (1975), Nashville (1975), and Family Plot (1976). And of course, one cannot forget Airport 1975, a film so iconically silly that the line of dialogue “The Stewardess is Flying the Plane!” was made into the title of a book about films of the 1970s.

Bring on the Crazy
The eminently watchable Karen Black is the main reason I love this film. Even when her performance veers into the eccentric (and let's face it, they always do), she is so obviously coming from a perceived place of truth for her character that she wins you over through sheer conviction.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The central gimmick of Burnt Offerings is that the house renews and repairs itself with every injury, drop of blood, or instance of physical or spiritual decline it can extract from its inhabitants. Dan Curtis’ television-trained penchant for close-ups and tight framing robs the film of the kind of visual scope necessary to make the scenes of spontaneous regeneration really pay off, but his claustrophobic eye is well suited to building a sense of dread out of a million little isolated details. Not all of them followed through with or given a payoff.

A history of violence is suggested by the discovery of a vintage pair of eyeglasses with a discomforting hole through the center of one lens.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm

Oliver Reed reacts to discovering all the clocks in the house have miraculously wound themselves

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Because I so enjoy a good scare at the movies, I’m almost ridiculously willing to suspend my disbelief if it better ensures a solid payoff at the conclusion. On that point Burnt Offerings delivers mightily; it has a great final act. But a movie has to work with me. I can accept the most outlandish plot machinations if a character's actions and motivations follow even a marginally identifiable pattern of a recognizable human behavior. As soon as characters go off doing patently stupid things just to advance the plot, well, then you lose me. 

To its credit, Burnt Offerings plays it smart most of the time. For example: to better counterbalance the swift susceptibility of the Karen Black character (who is sympathetic, if ultimately hard to relate to) and get the plot moving despite everything about the initial setup screaming, “Don’t rent that house!”, Oliver Reed’s dialog mostly has him giving voice to every doubt the audience is thinking. This is a great device that subtly pulls you in with presuming that if a character at least acknowledges something smells fishy, you're more likely to stick it out when they inevitably start disregarding common sense and doing all the wrong things.

Slightly annoying son Davy proves to be something of a disaster divining rod when it comes to who's to be the target of several "attacks" by the house in its attempts to destroy the Rolf family

Burnt Offerings is not a great horror film, but it's a good one that I enjoy rewatching a great deal. Not scary so much as eerie, Burnt Offerings plays like a supernatural parable on the risks of being controlled by one's possessions. Anyone who's ever owned a car, a home, or property can relate to feeling at times as if repairs, taxes, upkeep...the whole desire to acquire things.... can easily dominate one's life. That one is living one's life at the will and behest of the things we sought to possess, but which ultimately come to possess us.

The mysterious photograph collection of vaguely startled looking people 

The Dunsmuir Estate in the Oakland Hills (near my parent's house!) was used for the Allardyce mansion. It looks considerably less creepy now.

BONUS MATERIAL

Oh, and as for my Karen Black obsession: in spite of her having filmed Burnt Offerings near my family's house in Oakland, and the previous year filming Hitchcock's Family Plot in San Francisco where I attended college, I never once made the effort to catch sight of her on location. Thirty years later, in Los Angeles in 2007, I finally had the opportunity to meet the object of my teen fascination when I went to see her in her self-penned musical play Missouri Waltz. When it came time for the post-performance meet and greet in the lobby, she was a real sweetheart, and I was near speechless. But boy, you should have seen her face when someone held out a poster of The Day of the Locust for her to sign (not her favorite movie), it was like one of those looks she shoots Oliver Reed when she has to rescue him from the attacking vines!

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2012