HOT RODS TO HELL 1967

Well, if you’re going to hell, I guess a hot rod is as good a means of transportation as any.

1967 was a banner year at the movies for me. I was just ten years old, but in that single year I saw Casino Royale; Valley of the Dolls; Bonnie& Clyde; Wait Until Dark; Far From the Madding Crowd; To Sir, With Love; Up the Down Staircase; Barefoot in the Park; Thoroughly Modern Millie; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?; and The Happening. Barely a kiddie movie in the bunch! Each was a film I was dying to see, and each, save for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, has become a lifelong favorite. (Good intentions notwithstanding, that movie really hasn’t aged well for me. 108 minutes of watching human paragon, practically-perfect-in-every-way, Sidney Poitier having his feet put to the fire for the privilege of marrying, as one critic put it, “vapid virgin” Katharine Houghton, begs a tolerance of a sort different from what that movie was endorsing.) 

On the Road
Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac...or an unreasonable facsimile thereof

These days, I’d consider it a small miracle if I see even TWO memorable films in the same year, much less the bumper crop of greats 1967 yielded. But thanks to the lax admission policies of movie theaters in those pre-ratings code days, I was able, in spite of my tender years, to see practically any film I had a mind to…and usually did. But no matter how mature I imagined myself to be at the time, I was still only a kid, so on occasion, my budding aesthetics didn't always steer me toward the quality stuff. For example: in spite of my weakness for movies with mature themes that were way over my head, The Graduate, Two for the Road, and Reflections in a Golden Eye – films I now consider to be among the best that 1967 had to offer – held absolutely no interest for me during their initial theatrical runs. Instead, my imagination and attentions were seized by two Drive-In caliber B-movies that were being given the big push on TV back then: Born Losers and Hot Rods to Hell. 

Get Your Kicks on Route 66

Why, you ask? Well, for starters, the commercials for Born Losers (Tom Laughlin’s biker flick that marked the debut of his Billy Jack character) prominently featured a girl on a motorcycle in a bikini and go-go boots (Elizabeth James) who looked a lot like Liza Minnelli (oddly enough, a crush of mine even at that early age). While Hot Rods to Hell had, in addition to that simply irresistible title, commercials showcasing a screaming teenager (Laurie Mock) who bore a strong resemblance to another one of my preteen, gay-in-training crushes, Cher. Unfortunately, both films came and went from the local moviehouse so quickly that I never got to see them until many years later. 

Psycho-Chick

While my interest in Born Losers dissipated as Billy Jack grew into a pretentious vigilante franchise during the '70s (I finally got around to seeing Born Losers on TCM a year or so ago, and while it’s a lot of lurid fun - especially full-figured gal, Jane Russell, in a small role – once is definitely enough), Hot Rods to Hell, which I was lucky enough to see at a revival theater in Los Angeles sometime in the 80s, was well worth the wait. An example of Grade-A, Drive-In kitsch at its finest, Hot Rods to Hell-arious is a camp hybrid of 1950s drag race exploitation films and those reactionary, youth-gone-wild, juvenile delinquency social problem flicks - all with a suburban midlife-crisis “reclaim your manhood” domestic melodrama thrown in for good measure. It’s a gas!

Dana Andrews as Tom Phillips

Jeanne Crain as Peg Phillips

Laurie Mock as Tina Phillips

Mimsy Farmer as Gloria

After suffering a spinal injury in a nasty Christmas season auto accident, Boston traveling salesman, Tom Phillips (Andrews), emerges a broken and shaken man (“It all came back to me. The horns blowing, the lights, the brakes… ‘Jingle Bells’…”). On the mend from his external injuries, Tom nevertheless carries within him an ugly, shameful disease. A pitiable malady bordering on the abhorrent if discovered, even in minuscule traces, within the stoic, bread-winning, man-of-the-house, post-50s suburban macho American male.
That disease is insecurity. Yes, folks, Tom’s self-image and the entire foundation of his '60s-mandated nuclear family teeter on the verge of collapse under the strain of Daddy actually having an emotional reaction to almost losing his life in an auto accident. How dare he! Men just don't DO that! 

Passages of Hot Rods to Hell's screenplay reads like a Ward Cleaver lecture on the perils of middle-class/middle-aged men having their masculinity usurped due to the enfeebling act of having feelings. To make his humiliation complete, not only is it his wife Peg who decides to make the move to California, but en route (*gasp*), she does all the driving! 

The subtext of this film seems to be that this nation is going to hell in a hot rod because manhood is under threat.

Boss Finley Can't Cut the Mustard
Or so wrote Miss Lucy in lipstick on the ladies room mirror at the Royal Palms Hotel in "Sweet Bird of Youth." The topic then was sexual impotence, and Tennessee Williams couldn't address it with any more candor in 1963 than this 1966 TV movie (Hot Rods to Hell was originally intended to be a television release). There's a lot of talk about Tom's bad back, but it's pretty clear that there's also some trouble up front. Here Dana Andrews uses his semi-stiff, trembling hand as a metaphor for his underperforming man parts. Jeanne Crain's look sums it up.

Under the advisement of his physician to take things easier (“What does the doctor think he is, a MENTAL case?” bellows Tom’s compassionate brother), Tom agrees to leave Boston and assume management duties at a thriving motel in the small desert community of Mayville, California. On board with the whole relocation thing are supportive wife, Peg (Crain), and freckle-faced, “all-boy” towhead son, Jamie (Jeffrey Byron). The sole holdout is daughter Tina: an early prototype of the sullen, eye-rolling Goth teen and walking Petrie dish of festering hormonal agitation. "All the kids drag, Dad!" she spews, with typical adolescent bile, in reference to short-distance car racing, not (as I'd hoped) an unknown to me '60s trend in teenage cross-dressing. 

Little Jamie's dominant character trait is taking frequent
 passive-aggressive swipes at his father's masculinity

With everyone loaded into their pre-seatbelts station wagon, the Phillips' motor cross-country to Mayville. We aren't shown anything of the first leg of their road trip, but things take an instant turn for the melodramatic once they hit California. Depicted as a vast landscape of open roads devoted to car culture and thrill-seeking teens, 1960s California takes on the feel of the Old West once the Phillips’ gas-powered covered wagon catches the attention of a trio of exceptionally clean-cut juvenile delinquents (they all come from "good" wealthy families).

The Mild Bunch
Gene Kirkwood as Ernie / Paul Bertoya as Duke

What follows is a comically escalating game of cat-and-mouse where what began as high-spirited, run 'em off the road kicks (“Everybody’s out for kicks. What else is there?”), gets rapidly out of hand. Soon the road-hogging hot-rodders make it their business to see that Tom Phillips and family never reach their destination (square Mr. Phillips plans to crack down on the "fun" once he takes over that motel) or get the chance to squeal to the police (or “Poh-lease” as Dana Andrews peculiarly intones).
Passions flare, dust flies, tires screech, rock music blares, and everybody either overacts shamelessly or unconvincingly. Meanwhile, many questions arise: Will Peg ever stop treating Tina like a child? Will good-girl Tina succumb to the skeevy lure of bad boys? Will little Jamie’s respect for his father ever be restored? Does Tom still have the ol’ poop, or has he lost it forever? The answers to these, and several other questions you don't really care about, are answered in Hot Rods to Hell.

I don't know what backlot was used, but the hospital Dana Andrews convalesces in (top) pops up in a lot of '60s television shows. Here it plays a High School in the "Ring-A-Ding Girl" episode of The Twilight Zone -1963

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Hot Rods to Hell is based on the 1956 Saturday Evening Post short story "The Red Car / Fifty-Two Miles to Terror"  by Alex Gaby), and every frame feels like it comes from a fifties mindset. Adapted from a story written at the height of the mid-50s juvenile delinquency panic that spawned Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, Hot Rods to Hell elicits laughs and inspires giggles because it feels so out of step with the more motorcycle-centric late-'60s. It comes across as the kind of programmer Mamie Van Doren would have starred in ten years prior. 

George Ives (giving the only decent performance in the film) as motel proprietor, Lank Dailey 

There once was a time when feature films and TV sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver promoted male patriarchy, suburbia, and middle-class values as the American ideal. This attitude shifted significantly by the late-'60s. So much so that this becomes one of the more glaring reasons Hot Rods to Hell feels so curiously out of step--it has to be one of the last movies of the era to depict the "establishment" set as heroes. 

In 1967, movies like The Graduate and You’re a Big Boy Now were starting to reflect a youth-centric worldview in which uptight, staunchly judgmental, suburbanite “squares” like Hot Rods to Hell’s Tom and Peg Phillips were regarded with suspicion. By 1968, the onscreen glorification of youth was so prevalent that anarchic scenarios: a la  Angel, Angel, Down We Go and Wild in the Streets --would normalize outlaws and make heroes out of the kind of teens that Hot Rods to Hell sees only as troublemakers. 

Judging You
The dramatic stakes of Hot Rods to Hell are seriously undermined by the pleasure to be had
in watching this smug suburban family being taken down a notch. 

PERFORMANCES
If you've never seen veteran actors Dana Andrews or Jeanne Crain in a film before, I beg you, don't start with this one. Hot Rods to Hell will leave you wondering how they ever had careers in the first place. This is their fourth film together (State Fair - 1945 / Duel in the Jungle -1954/ Madison Avenue -1962), and to say the photogenic duo went out with a whimper would be a gross understatement. Andrews, hampered by a makeup artist who must have been trained during the days of the silents, is so unrelentingly stiff and gruff, he's a figure of derision long before his character has a chance to be made sympathetic. Hammily scowling and grimacing in his Sansabelt slacks, this is far from Andrews' finest hour, but he's awfully entertaining.

The Saga of an Emasculated Male

In this artfully composed shot worthy of Kubrick, Tom nurses his bad back 
while being silently mocked by his wife's handbag

Tom threatening to scratch out the eyes of his tormentors?

Personal faves are B-Movie starlets, Mimsy Farmer and Laurie Mock, each playing yin and yang ends of the exploitation movie female spectrum (they would reunite with co-star Gene Kirkwood in 1967s Riot on Sunset Strip). As actresses, both are severely limited, but what they lack in talent they more than make up for in their grasp of knowing exactly what kind of overheated histrionics a movie like this requires. Farmer in particular (who would reinvent herself as an arthouse and Giallo darling in a few years) gives her discontented small-town teen the kind of edgy Ann-Margret overkill that's the stuff of bad-movie legend.

Showing respect and giving props to her homegirl

But a special Oscar should have been awarded to Jeanne Crain, who not only looks lovely in her matronly Sydney Guilaroff coiffure, but overacts so strenuously she takes the entire film to a level of hilarity unimaginable without her devoted contribution. Let's take a moment to pay tribute:

It's A Grand Night For Screaming

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Aside from the creaky source material, what further contributes to Hot Rods to Hell feeling like a movie made at least ten years earlier is the fact that its 55-year-old screenwriter, Robert E. Kent  (co-writer of Dana Andrews' vastly superior 1950 film, Where the Sidewalk Ends) was probably drawing his knowledge of teenage behavior from screenplays he wrote for a slew of early 60s / late-50 rock & roll exploitation films. Movies with sound-alike titles (and look-alike plots): Twist Around the Clock (1961), Don't Knock the Twist (1962), Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Don't Knock The Rock (1956). All containing portrayals of teenage life firmly entrenched in the Eisenhower years. Similarly, Hot Rods to Hell's potential for even a moderately authentic depiction of teen behavior was no-doubt hampered by having a director in his 70s at the helm (John Brahm, surprisingly, the man behind the marvelous 1944 version of The Lodger).

Burlesque star, cult figure (John Waters' Desperate Living) and mobster sweetheart, Liz Renay appears all-too-briefly as a bar patron. 

The many decades of behind-the-camera moviemaking experience involved in Hot Rods to Hell lends the film a professional gloss frequently at odds with its small-budget incompetence. The film's poorly executed day-for-night effects play havoc with the time-frame continuity of the film's third-act action setpiece. What time of day is it actually - is it dawn...is it dusk...is it midnight?

Random sexual assaults are pretty much regulation for '60s exploitation movies 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
A prime ingredient for the enjoyment of any bad film is often the degree of earnestness displayed by those involved. Like Joan Crawford in the Grade-Z cheapie, Trog, I don’t believe anyone in Hot Rods to Hell had any illusions about the caliber of film they were making, yet that didn't prevent them from pulling out all the acting stops and carrying on as though they were appearing in The Grapes of Wrath. Professional ineptitude without some kind of artistic aspiration or pretension is simply boring, so what qualifies Hot Rods to Hell as one of those top-notch bad movies I can watch over and over again is the sense that everyone in it is clearly giving it all they've got...and THIS is the best they were able to come up with.

Mickey Rooney Jr (right) & His Combo contribute several (un)memorable rock tunes 
to the soundtrack,  here they perform that timeless classic,  "Do the Chicken Walk"

As stated, Hot Rods to Hell has long been a favorite of mine, but an extra layer of enjoyment has emerged now that I'm almost as old as Dana Andrews when he made the film. It cracks me up when I catch traces of my own reactions to today's youth in the humorless outbursts of our stuffed-shirt hero (don't get me started on teenagers and their smartphones). Happily, my fussing and fuming are mostly internal harangues or confined to the relative safety of social media. These days, not only has road rage grown to be a more dangerous game to be bullied into (no one in this movie brandishes a firearm), but traffic here in Los Angeles is so congested that any hot rodder would be hard pressed to find ANY stretch of rod where they could open up at all. 

BONUS MATERIAL

A great review of Born Losers can be found HERE

Mickey Rooney Jr. guests on the pop music variety show SHINDIG HERE

Hot Rods to Hell opened in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 17, 1967. 

It had opened in Los Angeles four months earlier.  

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 -  2014

MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY 1993

I've had a kind of love/hate relationship with the films of Woody Allen since my teens. The love affair originated in the early 1970s, when Allen’s films were largely comedic and he was at the height of his popularity as the mainstream darling of the campus arthouse set. Things started tilting toward the hate end of the spectrum when, in the latter part of the decade, pretentiousness began to seep into his work to the degree that a film like Interiors (1978) had me seriously wondering if all that WASP solemnity was meant to be taken as an intentionally poor parody Bergman. When I realized he was in earnest, my mind flew to Alvy Singer’s line in Annie Hall: “What I wouldn't give for a large sock with horse manure in it!” 

As a director whose work tends to vary most significantly in terms of quality, not content (theres a good reason no one ever asks "What's it about?" when you say you're going to see a Woody Allen movie), Allen is perhaps one of the most safely reliable directors around. I’ve seen virtually every film Woody Allen has ever made, struggling through his sometimes grueling attempts at significance (Stardust Memories - 1980), and reveling in his deliriously inspired comedies (Love and Death - 1975). Although my admiration for Allen palled considerably after his very public, more-than-I-wanted-to-know, full-tilt-disclosure breakup with Mia Farrow (try as I might, I can’t enjoy the icky May-December “romance” of Manhattan anymore); I find I still can’t help but be impressed by how he has managed, lo these many decades, to remain the last of the true auteur filmmakers of the '70s. An independent director/writer/actor, whose amazingly prolific output has kept me, if not always entertained, most certainly intrigued for over 40 years. 

Murder, She Read

Of course, the problem inherent in absorbing so much of a single director’s work (especially one as fond of covering the same territory, film after film, as Woody Allen) is the gradual over-familiarity one develops with said director’s favored themes and tropes. In Woody Allen’s case, this invariably means: the city of Manhattan—Allen's all-white version of it, anyway—as a participating character in the narrative; flimsy philosophical theorizing; rampant psychoanalysis; labored homages to personal idols Ingmar Bergman and Charlie Chaplin; and stories centered around affluent, neurotic, Jewish/Anglo pseudo-intellectuals occupying a New York curiously underpopulated with people of color, but with an overabundance of “brilliant” men, and “beautiful” women insecure about not being “smart enough” for elfin, elderly, serial-worriers.

When Allen uses these recurring leitmotifs as fodder for satire, no one can touch him. But when he dons his “Woody Allen: Deep Thinker” cap and tries for wisdom and tortured insight into the human condition (and BOY does the effort show), he can come off as woefully out of his depth—his insights are often shallow and self-serving—the results, frequently insufferable.

House Party
Elderly couple,Paul and Lillian House (Jerry Adler, Lynn Cohen,l.) get chummy with their neighbors, the Liptons (Allen & Keaton)

Happily, in what was initially intended as another Allen/Farrow onscreen pairing, Woody Allen followed up 1992's squirmingly autobiographical Husbands and Wives (which plays much better now, thanks to the healing distance of time) with the hilarious Manhattan Murder Mystery; a splendid return to the Woody Allen I discovered in the '70s: the funny Woody Allen.
But as happy as audiences were for the return of Woody-lite, Farrow’s departure and the ugly reasons behind it almost proved an insurmountable PR roadblock for the film before the very engaging Diane Keaton stepped in to take Farrow’s place. Keaton and Allen, last paired in 1987s Manhattan (she had a lovely cameo in Radio Days - 1987), co-starred in just four films (Farrow and Allen appeared in seven films together, but not always as a couple), but to many, they were the beloved Bogart and Bacall of contemporary comedy. The unofficial reuniting of Annie Hall and Alvy Singer engendered so much nostalgic goodwill that the recent damage to Woody Allen’s image was temporarily eclipsed (and softened) by the welcome return of Diane Keaton, the actress with whom Woody Allen arguably shares the best onscreen chemistry.

Woody Allen as Larry Lipton

Diane Keaton as Carol Lipton

Alan Alda as Ted

Anjelica Huston as Marcia Fox

The plot of Manhattan Murder Mystery is playfully simple. When the wife of an elderly neighbor dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances, a middle-aged couple worried that their marriage has settled into a comfortable routine (Allen & Keaton) soon find themselves caught in circumstances where life imitates art. That is, if the art in question is Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, and Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo. Reluctantly donning the cloak of amateur sleuths, our neurotic Nick & Nora of the '90s embark on a comic investigation into a possible murder which winds up unearthing more than a clue or two about their own marriage.  

Like the best of those old Bob Hope or Abbott and Costello comedies which successfully combine mystery with outlandish slapstick, Manhattan Murder Mystery is a consistently funny comedy—laugh out loud funny, at times—that still manages to sustain a satisfyingly puzzling and suspenseful (if implausible) murder mystery at its core.

Mystery Incorporated
Looking like the cast of an AARP-funded version of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, Carol and Larry enlist the help of friends/rivals Ted and Marcia (Alan Alda and Anjelica Huston) in unraveling a mystery.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I saw Manhattan Murder Mystery when it premiered in Los Angeles in 1993. And although the film opened with a rendition of Cole Porter’s “I Happen to Like New York” by society supper-club crooner Bobby Short that nearly had me running for the nearest exit before the film had even begun; my fortitude was rewarded by being treated to one of the funniest, most entertaining Woody Allen films I'd seen in a long while. Following the uneven Alice (1990) and the largely terrible Shadows and Fog (1991), Manhattan Murder Mystery proved to be the kind of silly character-comedy I had begun to doubt Allen was still capable of producing. 

Manhattan Murder Mystery is a genuine throwback to the Woody Allen of old, and is, at least as far as I’m concerned, his last really funny film to date. What works for me is that it’s one of those comedies wherein a significant part of the humor is derived from seeing characters associated with one kind of film (a Woody Allen neurotic comedy) forced to contend with the plot-driven constraints of a specific genre (the stylized film noir or suspense thriller). Peter Bogdanovich achieved something like this with What’s Up, Doc?, when he dropped laid-back '70s actors into the center of the controlled anarchy of a '30s screwball comedy; but it's perhaps Love and Death (my absolute favorite Woody Allen film) that best exemplifies this kind of anachronism-derived humor. 

Manhattan Murder Mystery takes two of cinema’s most famously jittery individuals and posits them within the cool-as-a-cucumber universe of the suspense thriller. Instead of hard-boiled heroes unfazed by danger, or fearless femme fatales impervious to menace; we’re given a talky, excitable, slightly dowdy middle-aged couple unable to stop analyzing their lives and emotional insecurities, even in the face of impending danger. No one does high-strung hysteria like Keaton and Allen, and Manhattan Murder Mystery gets funnier in direct proportion to the degree of jeopardy they face. Comic high points: the malfunctioning elevator scene, and the telephone sequence with the synchronized tape recorders.

Woody Allen pays tribute to the classic "hall of mirrors" scene from Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai

PERFORMANCES

I really adore Mia Farrow, and under Woody Allen’s direction, she gave some of the best screen performances of her career. That being said, outside of the total character transformation she affected in Broadway Danny Rose which revealed a heretofore-unexplored brassiness in the preternaturally waifish actress that contrasted nicely with Allen’s sweet-natured talent agent; I can’t say I’ve ever much cared for Mia Farrow and Woody Allen’s onscreen chemistry.

In that transference that seems to happen with any actor appearing in an Allen film more than once, Mia Farrow began to adapt Woody Allen’s patterns and rhythms of speech so thoroughly that (compounded by their shared pale and thin countenances) she became more like his female doppelganger than costar. In their scenes together, there was no contrast for either to play off of…it was just Woody Allen whining in stereo.

Diane Keaton, on the other hand, is perfection. While she still strikes me as being too pretty for him (although not in that stomach-turning, Julia Roberts way of 1996's Everyone Says I Love You), Keaton is so innately likeable that she sufficiently softens Allen’s sometimes-annoying persona enough to make him and his overarching self-involvement bearable. They blend together seamlessly and have an easy rapport that radiates from the screen. As good an actress as she is, I have to say that, outside of the unsurpassed work she did in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), I've rarely enjoyed Keaton in any of her films to the degree I've liked her in the ones she has made with Allen. Keaton seems to bring out the best in Allen as no other co-star has before or since.

The ceaselessly stylish Anjelica Huston is always a pleasure to watch. Disregarding the scenes where she's called upon to make blunt overtures to the grandfatherly Allen (they play out like a science fiction movie), I get a real kick out of the way Huston's self-assured cool is contrasted with Keaton's diffidence. Far left, that's 18-yr-old Zach Braff making his film debut.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Murder mysteries aren't easy to pull off under the best of circumstances, a comedic murder mystery-cum-homage to The Greats of the genre…even less likely. But in Manhattan Murder Mystery, Allen’s comic detour into Agatha Christie territory manages to be a first-rate mystery of considerable twists and surprises. And, mercifully, none of it is the least bit Scandinavian or Bergmanesque. In fitting with the tone of the genre, Allen keeps the dialogue witty and the plotting brisk, most of it serving to support its sweet subtext regarding growing older and the fear of losing one’s taste for adventure. 

In this, the second of three films he made with Woody Allen (Crimes & Misdemeanors, Everyone Says I Love You), Alan Alda plays a divorced playwright harboring an infatuation with Diane Keaton

No matter what names they go by, the characters Keaton and Allen play in Manhattan Murder Mystery are Annie Hall and Alvy Singer. And that's fine by me. As someone who fell in love with Diane Keaton in his teens and laughed through the "nervous romance" of Annie Hall more times than I can count; seeing these characters 16 years later (albeit in the guise of Larry Lipton, publishing editor, and Carol Lipton, wannabe restaurateur), looking all rumpled and lived-in, yet still relating to one another with the same spark of undeniable affection and magnetism...well, it just takes me down a nostalgic road I can't help but feel is entirely the film's point.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Of the Woody Allen films I number among my favorites: Annie Hall, Love and Death, Radio Days, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Bullets Over Broadway, Cassandra’s Dream, Broadway Danny Rose, Everyone Says I Love You, September, Blue Jasmine—Manhattan Murder Mystery ranks somewhere near the top. I know many of his films are tighter, smarter, and funnier, but this is the closest Allen has come to making a comfort food kind of movie for me. In deference to the plot-driven machinations of the suspense genre, Allen's darker obsessions take a back seat to his lighter anxieties (avoidance of physical pain, losing sleep, etc.), and the entire enterprise just leaves me smiling and satisfied. It's Woody Allen at his most accessible (meaning tolerable), with Diane Keaton the perfect sardonic foil. They create a kind of movie magic together, the kind that keeps me returning to rewatch Manhattan Murder Mystery long after the mystery of the murder has been solved.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

I got Diane Keaton's autograph back in 1981 when I working at Crown Books on Sunset Blvd. Given how much I adore her, it puzzles me how little I remember of this encounter. All I recall is that I was standing behind the cash register and there was Annie Hall standing in front of me with a pile of books. I have no memory of asking for her autograph or even gushing "Gee, Miss Keaton, I just love all your movies..." or some such nonsense. I must have passed out and woke up with this pinned to my shirt.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

BILLIE 1965

A favorite little-known Patty Duke film sandwiched innocuously between her Oscar-winning turn in The Miracle Worker (1962) and the near career-killing ignominy of Valley of the Dolls (1967)—the movie which has become, most assuredly, THE film she’ll be most remembered for—is Billie: a sprightly, featherweight teen musical about a tomboyish track and field dynamo struggling with gender-identity issues. 

Patty Duke as Billie Carol

Jim Backus as Howard G. Carol

Jane Greer as Agnes Carol

Warren Berlinger as Mike Benson

I won't kid you, the above description, as brief as it is, makes Billie sound considerably more substantial than it is. Point in fact, clocking in at brisk 87 minutes, Billie is so lightweight it’s barely there. This teen-culture tidbit (filmed in a swift 15 days!) feels like an expanded TV sitcom episode. Filmed just before the start of the third and final season of her weekly series The Patty Duke Show (1963 - 1966), Billie was made to capitalize on Duke's considerable TV visibility as a teen sensation, and newfound popularity as a recording artist (Billie was released while Duke's first single "Don't Just Stand There" was still in the top 40). And although the movie is the kind of breezy affair ideal for a summer Drive-In playoffs alongside the lucrative Beach Party musicals, Billie came out in the fall of 1965 to better take advantage of the crossover publicity opportunities afforded by the start of the new TV season (like having Duke sing one of the songs from Billie "Funny Little Butterflies" on an episode of her own show as well as on the teen variety show Shindig).  

But even back then, audiences must have gleaned that Billie was less a motion picture than a TV sitcom padded out to feature film length with musical numbers and what easily has to be 15-minutes worth of reaction-shot cutaways to Clown, the expressive family sheepdog. 

Such a Face!
In lieu of a laugh track, Billie relies on reaction shots of this adorable Old English Sheepdog to punctuate the comedy and facilitate what feels like the natural pauses in the narrative to insert TV commercials. Curiously enough, the first season of The Patty Duke Show featured a sheepdog named Tiger who was nowhere to be found in the second season. Perhaps Tiger and Clown are one and the same and he left TV to pursue a career in motion pictures.  

As is so often the case with '60s sitcoms, the plot of Billie hinges on a single, silly gimmick. In this instance, instead of talking horses, mothers reincarnated as automobiles, or identical twin cousins, we have an average teenager who, thanks to a bit of a mind flip called “the beat”—the ability to hear a rhythm in her head and transfer that percussive tempo into athletic prowess—is able to outrun, out jump, and outperform every male member of her high-school track team.

Billie's got the Beat!
(more accurately, Patty Duke's got a running platform attached to the back of a camera truck) 

If you're scratching your head wondering how, unless the story is set in Downton Abbey, a feature film’s worth of comic/dramatic conflict can be wrung from a non-issue like a female athlete in 1965; it helps to know that Billie is adapted from a wheezy 1952 stage play by Ronald Alexander titled Time Out for Ginger, and, save for the substituting of track & field for the play’s intergender football premise, makes it to the screen with its outmoded sexual politics intact. It also helps to know that as contrived as the plot sounds, in real life, athletic programs for girls were a very low priority in many high schools in America before Federal sex discrimination laws were passed in 1972.

The plot of Billie has Mayoral candidate Howard Carol (Backus) residing in a house full of women, yet runs his political campaign on a “Return to Gentility” anti-women’s-rights platform. Agnes (Greer), his long-suffering wife, is one of those wisely sardonic housewives typical of '60s sitcoms: she's genuinely smarter than her husband, but regularly defers to his oafishness out of love and an understanding of the fragility of the male ego. Eldest daughter Jean (Susan Seaforth) is the ultra-femme apple of her father's eye and the veritable poster girl for non-threatening '60s womanhood. Not only does she look exactly like a younger version of her mother, but at age 20 she wants nothing more from life than to quit college, marry, and get down to the business of making babies. Remarkably, goals her character has already achieved by the time she’s introduced.

That Girl's Ted Bessell and Days of Our Lives' Susan Seaforth-Hayes
contribute to Billie's large cast of recognizable TV faces

This leaves 15-year-old Billie (Duke), a self-professed “lonely little in-between” wrestling with puberty and grappling with anxiety over her gender identification (not sexually. At least not yet. At 15 she's merely an outdoorsy, athletic girl showing little interest in what girls are "supposed" to be interested in 1965). Billie's feelings of otherness are compounded by sensing she is also a disappointment to her father by falling just outside of what he ideally wants in an offspring. Liking his women traditional and old-fashioned, he clearly favors Billie's pretty and feminine older sister. But he also lets it known that he longed to have a son. And in this painful exchange, accidentally lets slip how he really feels about his youngest female offspring:

Father- “From now on, try to remember that you’re a girl!”

Billie- “I wish I was a boy…”

Father- “So do I, but you’re not!”

Ouch! I understand the title for the sequel is: Time Out for Therapy. 

When Billie is later recruited by the high school track coach (“…to shame the boys into trying harder”), her newfound notoriety as the team’s most valuable player not only threatens to alienate her sweet but chauvinist potential suitor Mike Benson (Warren Berlinger) but also derail her reluctantly supportive father’s run for mayor. What's a girl who wishes she was a boy to do? 

"I should have been a boy, but here I am a girl!"
Billie decides to throw herself a Pity Party and sings
 "Lonely Little In-Between" to her stuffed animals

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Unless, like me, you're a nostalgia-prone boomer who grew up on white-bread, middle-class, suburban family comedies of the '60s and nursed a prepubescent crush on cute-as-a-button Patty Duke, you're apt to find Billie's contrived plot and dated sexual politics more trying than entertaining. 

True to its genre origins and obviously tight shooting schedule, Billie is a movie devoid of visual style and is as straightforward as moviemaking gets. The cinematography records the action and makes sure everyone remains within the frame and stays in focus. The editing is of the ping-pong variety, cutting back and forth to medium shots of whoever is talking. There's not even much to say about the acting either, as the cast of TV and movie veterans all deliver professional, wholly serviceable, competent performances of their sketchily written characters. 

Given all this, you might wonder what it is that I actually enjoy about Billie. 

Well, it comes down to the fact that each time I revisit it, its surface simplicity begins to look more complex.

Like a great many family-oriented films that haven’t aged particularly well (particularly those that peddled conformity, tradition, and gender role rigidity in a propagandist fashion) Billie has evolved over the years into one of those cult-worthy, meta-movies that, when viewed through the prism of contemporary mores, can't help but operate on several different levels simultaneously. Most of them, inadvertent. All of them more interesting than the film as originally conceived.

The simplistic gender politics of Billie are either/or.
You're either a track star or a girl...you can't be both

One level of Billie is a high-school musical and puberty allegory about a tomboy teetering on the brink of womanhood who bristles at having to fit into society's narrow definition of femaleness. On another level, Billie operates as an insincere social-conflict farce that pays lip service to women's equality, yet in its heart really believes that men and women are just happier occupying traditional gender roles. Then there's Billie as a "very special episode" of the ABC Afterschool Special about a transgender male teen struggling with internally identifying as male while outwardly presenting as female (the most persuasive layer for me). And finally, Billie operates on a level that is like a "be yourself" Glee episode about the growing pains of a latent lesbian high-school track star (Duke's resemblance to Ellen Degeneres adding yet another layer).

One potential unexplored level is one that mental health advocate Patty Duke would likely attest to as uncannily in character with the trend of her early career and its real-life parallels in living with bipolarism. In her memoirs, Duke references how often she was cast as characters dueling with opposing, contradictory natures. 

Billie, post-makeover

PERFORMANCES

Thanks to the availability of The Patty Duke Show on DVD, I've had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with what a charming and natural comedienne Patty Duke can be. Her Patty Lane may not have been as glamorous as the teens Elinor Donahue (Father Knows Best) and Shelley Fabares (The Donna Reed Show) played on their respective shows, but what Duke lacked in adolescent elan she more than made up for in likeability and energy. (Patty Lane was quite the scrappy little toughie. Episodes highlighting her character’s selfish, bossy side show signs of a budding Neely O’Hara.)

Boyish Warren Berlinger was 27 years old to Duke's 18. The athletic field used in Billie is at
John Marshall High School in Los Feliz, Ca. Recognizable to fans of Grease as Rydell High. 

The talented Patty Duke is undeniably the glue holding Billie together (She co-produced. The film is credited to Chrislaw/Patty Duke Productions. Chrislaw being the Peter Lawford-headed production company responsible for The Patty Duke Show), but her trademark vitality feels strangely subdued and the film doesn't always make the most of her talents. Saddled with a character who spends the majority of the film feeling wounded, confused, or bewildered, Duke is left shouldering all of the film’s dramatic weight (which she handles capably), a lot of its singing (Duke's real voice gets a healthy assist from Lesley Gore-style overdubbing), some of its dancing (as with her track scenes, doubles are occasionally used), but very little of the film's comedy. Granted, there really isn't that much to go around.

Regrettably or fortunately--depending on your fondness or antipathy toward the character actors in question--the lion's share of Billie's comedy falls to the supporting cast. Represented by a bevy of TV-familiar faces, these actors are great but provide no surprises. Each is cast to give the same stock comedy schtick they've delivered on sitcom after sitcom for years.

Clockwise from top left: Richard Deacon, Dick Sargent, Charles Lane,
and Billy De Wolfe. If you've ever seen any of these actors before,
you already know what you're getting from them in in Billie

I must admit that the pleasure of having the great Jane Greer appear in Billie (one of the all-time great film noir femme fatales: Out of the Past and The Big Steal) is mitigated significantly by seeing her lethal brand of smoldering insouciance reduced to playing the placatingly sweet housewife to a blowhard husband. Jim Backus' character is just the kind of chauvinist sap one of Greer's film noir incarnations would have tossed into the trunk of a car sent hurtling off a cliff without batting an eyelash.

Strong female characters of the sort Jane Greer built her career on in the 1940s were almost nowhere to be found by the 1960s. I suspect it was difficult for mature actresses to be cast as anything BUT housewives during this time.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Between Billie's rote comedy complications and contrived misunderstandings, I'm always able to console myself with the dancing. Having grown up watching TV musical variety shows targeting the teenage crowd like Shindig and Hullabaloo, the numbers in Billie resonate as welcome nostalgia. 

Choreographed by Elvis/Beach Party movie stalwart David Winters in that curiously self-mocking, frenetic style that looks like a hybrid of '60s go-go and traditional musical comedy jazz (popularized in Broadway shows like Promises, Promises and Applause), these numbers are lively and a great deal of fun in their unabashed silliness. 

Making her film debut (and serving as the film's co-choreographer) is A Chorus Line's Donna McKechnie, showing impeccable form in the red-and-white rugby stripes. She, along with director/mentor Michael Bennett, were dancers on the teen variety show, Hullabaloo. Several of the dancers in Billie are recognizable from '60s-era films like West Side Story and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. A triple-bill of Bye Bye Birdie, Billie, and The Cool Ones would serve as a terrific primer on the effect pop music had on contemporary choreography.

The robust and amusing musical number "The Girl is a Girl is a Girl" is one of my favorites. Wittily staged in a high-school locker room, the rousing routine features lots of chorus boys dancing with each other while adopting (none too convincingly) macho attitudes and extolling the virtues of the fairer sex. The song includes the lyric "And who can complain when she looks so terrific in shorts?"

Looking at this scene, I'd say that's a male-gaze pendulum that swings both ways.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

While it's hard to imagine that Billie did Patty Duke's reputation as an Oscar-winning actress any good, I think it's fair to say it didn't do it much harm, either. In fact, I was surprised to learn that Billie was actually a modest hit when it came out. 

The dress...

Patty Duke's managers (about whom much has been written) obviously had a vested interest in milking Duke's teenage appeal for as long as they could, so putting her in a disposable pop confection like this must have appeared, if perhaps a bit short-sighted (Duke was fast approaching adulthood), nevertheless expedient and profitable. Personally, I would love to have seen her take on Inside Daisy Clover (released the same year as Billie), a film not only better suited to her talents, but one which might have eased her into adult roles a little more gracefully than Valley of the Dolls. 

Billie was directed by Don Weis, who had an extensive career in television and directed one of my favorite classic-era MGM musicals, I Love Melvin.

Quad-City Times.  Sept. 12, 1965 

BONUS MATERIAL

As much as I enjoy this movie, the enduring popularity of Ronald Alexander's play, Time Out for Ginger, truly baffles me. At various times in its revival history, the play has attracted the talents of Liza Minnelli and Steve McQueen! Go figure. As far as I'm concerned, it's Patty Duke, the '60s music, the dancing, and the time-acquired abstract levels of camp and multiple interpretations that make Billie's thoroughly run-of-the-mill plot even remotely bearable.

By the way, for the benefit of any Rosemary's Baby fans out there, playwright Ronald Alexander is also the author of Nobody Loves an Albatross.

Watch Jack Benny in a 60-minute TV adaptation of Time Out for Ginger from 1955 HERE 

Watch the unsold pilot for a 1960 TV series based on Time Out for Ginger  HERE 

If you're unfamiliar with actress Jane Greer, you owe it to yourself to check out this brief TCM clip on Out of the Past (1947) HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013