OLIVER! 1968

Lest frequent readers of this blog (and bless you all, every one!) assume the entirety of my childhood was spent watching only age-inappropriate movies that bore the tag “Suggested for Mature Audiences,” I present as Exhibit A: Oliver!; a G-rated favorite that not only stands as testament to my occasionally allowing the odd kid-friendly film to crack my self-styled precocity, but as proof that, at heart, I'm really a big, gooey, sloppy sentimentalist of the highest order.

Mark Lester as Oliver Twist

Ron Moody as Fagin

Jack Wild as Jack Dawkins, aka The Artful Dodger 

Shani Wallis as Nancy 

Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes

Oliver! (oh, how I loathe exclamation points in musical titles) is the big-scale movie adaptation of Lionel Bart’s Tony Award-winning 1963 Broadway musical version of Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel Oliver Twist. A show that, having premiered to great success in London’s West End in 1960, is credited with being the first modern British musical to be transferred successfully to Broadway. 

Taking place in the by-turns poverty-stricken/opulent-wealth areas of London in the early 1830s, Oliver! relates the parable of workhouse orphan Oliver Twist (Lester) who, after running away from an abusive apprenticeship, is taken under the wing of streetwise pickpocket, the Artful Dodger (Wild), and finds a home of sorts with paternal petty thief, Fagin (Moody) and his motley crew of larcenous street urchins.

As befitting any Dickens story, we have a plenitude of scruffy, colorful, supporting characters. A maternal strumpet (prostitute Nancy played with winning charm by Shani Wallace), a brutish villain (the positively terrifying Oliver Reed), and the usual fateful quirks of coincidence and heredity (this time in the form of victim-turned-benefactor/possible blood-relation, Mr. Brownlow [Joseph O’Conor]) offering the only glimmers of hope in lives ruled by class and position.

Joseph O'Conor as Mr. Brownlow

That I fell in love with a big, splashy, arguably over-produced musical is no surprise; that said musical featured swarms of singing and dancing children marked Oliver! as something of a departure for me. For in spite of being a mere kid myself —I was 11-years-old when I saw Oliver!—I was inclined to find child actors a distinctly insufferable breed (a point of view that hasn’t altered much over the years). They’re either trying too hard to be cute, tugging too aggressively at our heartstrings, or so grotesquely artificial and self-consciously “on” that they come across as pocket-size adults. That I never got around to seeing either The Sound of Music or Mary Poppins until I was well into my 30s is due largely to the fact that for many years I went out of my way to avoid movies that even hinted at the presence of adorable tykes. Generally, I prefer onscreen depictions of children to hew more closely to how they appear to me in real life: i.e., Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed or Jane Withers in Bright Eyes.

I suppose Oliver! conforms to my flinty worldview by being faithful to Dickens’ customary juxtaposing of unapologetic sentimentality with harsh social realism. An alliance which, happily, leaves little room for cute. In fact, the angel-faced Oliver may be the story’s catalyst, but everyone knows the real stars are Fagin, The Artful Dodger, and the ragtag gang of East End reprobates that hang out at The Three Cripples Tavern. Making his musical film debut, director Carol Reed (Odd Man Out, The Third Man) is to be credited for his deft balancing of the brutal with the bathetic, granting the somewhat softened events and characters of Dickens' novel with just the right amount of edge to keep the still-and-all jaunty musical from slipping into mawkishness.

Oliver!’s scruffy band of street urchins are well-cast and well-directed, convincing in their overall grubbiness and commitment to staying in character. Contrast this with John Huston’s 1982 film adaptation of Oliver!’s sex-change musical doppelgänger, Annie: a film where the affected, stagy performances of the orphans hint at a premature vocational enrollment that nevertheless fails to prevent them from staring directly into the camera lens at regular intervals.

Peggy Mount and Harry Secombe as Mrs. & Mr. Bumble
The harshness of Dickens' characters is leavened considerably by these roles assayed by comic actors  

Oliver! is one of my favorite period musicals. And by period, I mean the mid to late 1960s; that brief but prolific moment in time when movie theaters across the nation were full of the sound of music (as opposed to today, where all you hear coming from cineplexes is the whoosh of superhero capes). A time when movie studios, in hopes of unearthing another durable cash cow on the order of Julie Andrews’ nuns and Nazis romp, were falling over themselves buying up the film rights to any and all Broadway musicals. Sometimes before the shows had even opened. For example: the 1968 Burt Bacharach musical, Promises, Promises, a musical version of Billy Wilder's The Apartment, in spite of several stabs at treatments over the years—one to which John Travolta was briefly attached—never did make it to the big screen.

In 1968 alone, Oliver! duked it out at the boxoffice against Funny Girl, Finian’s Rainbow, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Julie Andrews’ Star! (those exclamation points again…). All elephantine musicals of disparate merit, but each conceived as a roadshow attraction and each boasting studio-bankrupting budgets. Of that roster, only the twin Columbia Pictures releases Funny Girl and Oliver! emerged bonafide hits; Funny Girl besting Oliver! at the boxoffice, but Oliver! topping Funny Girl’s eight Oscar nominations with a whopping eleven, culminating in a 6-award sweep for that film, including Best Director and Best Picture. The latter bit sticking most in the craw of classic film fans.

The Artful Dodger welcomes Oliver into the fold in the rousing show-stopper "Consider Yourself"
The influence of Oliver! on musicals of the era can be seen in the films: Bedknobs & Broomsticks, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Scrooge, Mr. Quilp, and of course, the aforementioned Annie

Although the recipient of near-unanimous praise on its release (even Pauline Kael gave it a rave), virtually no one happening upon Oliver! today seems able to fathom how a pleasant, inarguably professional, but decidedly old-school and unremarkable musical entertainment like Oliver! managed to walk off with Best Picture and Best Director awards in a year that featured both Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (a truly galling bit of trivia, as it wasn't even nominated).

While Rosemary's Baby gets my vote as Best Picture of 1968, but if I have to stick to those films actually nominated, Oliver! would be my personal choice. What was it up against? - The Lion in Winter—Peter O’Toole yelling for two hours while Katherine Hepburn did her Katherine Hepburn thing; Funny Girl—aka, The Streisand Show;  Rachel, Rachel—Paul Newman gives wife Joanne Woodward a 10^th Anniversary present; Romeo & Juliet —hippified, youthquake Shakespeare mitigated by codpieces.

The problem seems to be that although beloved by many, the passing of time hasn’t been particularly kind to Oliver!. So in failing to be embraced by the same cloak of nostalgic revisionism that came to redeem onetime kiddie-flops like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; Oliver! tends to show up on “Least-deserved Best Picture Oscar winners” lists, unfairly lumped together with genuine head-scratchers like Shakespeare in Love and The Greatest Show on Earth.

Trouble in Mind

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Notwithstanding the fact that I’m probably the only person ever to get all blubbery and teary-eyed upon just hearing the first notes of “I’d Do Anything” (hands-down favorite song in the entire score, everything about that number just floors me), Oliver! is mostly just a film I enjoy a great deal, not one whose themes resonate with me on some broader, deeper level (like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol). 

Apart from it being my absolute favorite screen adaptation of Oliver Twist ever, capturing the look and feel of Dickens in an appealingly light/dark storybook fashion, I just think Oliver! is one of those solid, wholly enjoyable, escapist movies that so successfully accomplishes what it sets out to do, and does so in a manner that makes it all look so effortless, I’m afraid it has become a victim of its virtues. It’s become too easy to take the skill, talent, and craft behind Oliver! for granted. Which is rather surprising given how comfortable we seem to have grown with musical mediocrity: i.e., the film adaptations of Nine, Dreamgirls, and Mamma Mia ! (there’s that punctuation again…).

Oliver! turns orphan Oliver Twist into something of a co-star in his own story, so my emotional involvement in the film has always been limited to Nancy's maternal concern for the boy and the lengths she goes to protect him. On that score, Shani Wallis' performance is a real standout.

Oliver! is far from a perfect film, and in a way, I fully get how people can admire it and respect it, yet still not find it to be their cup of tea (insert British joke here). I relate this to my own feelings about the film version of My Fair Lady, a perfectly wonderful musical of its kind, but one I can barely tolerate. If you're not already fond of musicals, Oliver! is one so traditional in form, content, and execution that it's unlikely to produce many converts. The opening scenes at the workhouse, stylized and theatrical, take some getting used to, and by the time they launch into the sing-songy title tune, non-fans are likely to be heading for the exits. The only part that drags for me is the ballad "As Long as He Needs Me," a song well-performed by Wallis, but so sung to death on variety shows during the '60s that all it inspires in me is a Pavlovian need to take a restroom break.

Hugh Griffith as The Magistrate

PERFORMANCES

As is often the case with films, the best roles in Oliver! belong to the villains. Thus it’s hardly a surprise that Ron Moody’s Fagin and Jack Wild’s Artful Dodger were the performances singled out for Oscar nods. Personal favorite, 15-year-old Jack Wild, the real breakout star of Oliver!, is like a Cockney Cagney, commanding his scenes with an assurance and star quality that easily justified his short-lived tenure as a '70s preteen heartthrob and star of the preternaturally weird TV show, HR Pufnstuf.
As Yul Brenner so embodied the King of Siam in The King and I that thereafter, I could never picture anyone else in the role, such is true of Ron Moody's Fagin. His may not be the sinister character of the book (Alec Guinness' grotesque performance and makeup in David Lean's 1948 version of Oliver Twist may be closer to what Dickens had in mind, but I seriously can't even watch it) but Moody's hammy take on Fagin as a harmless, self-interested charlatan is more to my liking.

Beating out possible contenders Peter Sellers, Peter O'Toole, and (God help us) Dick Van Dyke, relative unknown Ron Moody had the opportunity to recreate the role he originated on the London stage

Oliver Reed (nephew of Oliver!'s director, Carol Reed) is unsurpassed at playing brooding heavies, and his Bill Sikes is no exemption. Indeed, to hear surviving cast members tell it, Oliver Reed was every bit the holy terror his reputation made him out to be during filming, “He got one of my dancers pregnant!” blurted out choreographer Onna White during a 1998 Oliver! screening Q & A when asked about whether or not Reed was "difficult.” 

Something that could never happen in today's all-access, Internet environment, for years Columbia Pictures was able to keep secret the fact that the angelic singing voice coming out of  9-year-old Mark Lester was actually that of 22-year-old Kathe Green, daughter of Oliver!'s Oscar-winning music arranger, Johnny Green.

It's as easy to see why sweet-faced Mark Lester (who readily concedes to being tone-deaf and uncoordinated) was cast, just as it's easy to overlook his understated contribution to the film. His is a reactive and sympathetic role, and on both fronts the appealingly natural actor triumphs by somehow not getting on everyone's nerves. If you think that's a small issue, check out the little boys cast as Patrick Dennis in Auntie Mame and Mame, sometime.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

You'd have to have lived as long as I and bore witness to the gradual decline in all things musical and terpsichorean (don't get me started ... Rob Marshall/Glee/animated musicals) to understand the feelings of relief and gratitude which converge within me when I watch a film like Oliver!. What a miracle just to see a live-action musical that actually holds together! To have a cohesive plot that doesn't insult intelligence; tuneful songs staged and choreographed with variance (some intimate, some large-scale, some comedic) and innovation; actors who (by and large) can sing, dance AND act; British roles assayed by actual British actors; and, most importantly, a director with a cinematic eye who knows how to use film to tell a story.

I love Oliver!'s whimsical art direction and set design

Second-Act opener "Who Will Buy?": Probably one of the best large-scale choreographers of her day, Onna White (Bye Bye Birdie) pulls out the stops in Oliver!'s massive musical set pieces

Example of the amazing work by cinematographer Oswald Morris (The Wiz) 

 Jack Wild, Shani Wallis, Mark Lester, and Shelia White as Bet (Nancy's younger sister)

"I'd Do Anything" (above): a perfect example of a musical number that could have ground the film to a halt, but director Reed and choreographer Onna White keep it light and amusing while using it as a device to reveal character and relationships. The song is performed as an unwitting parody of the kind of life Oliver is actually born to, but beneath the lyrics of exaggerated romantic fealty and behind the spoofing of formal airs and graces, the characters are revealing their genuine familial attachment to one another. Nancy and Bet being the surrogate mothers, Fagin, the stern (but ultimately playful) father. We see the origin of Nancy's protectiveness toward Oliver (she sees right away that he's not like the others), and get to contrast this more humane communal environment for wayward boys with that of the government-run workhouses. The entire number is marvelously conceived and shot (check out how many camera angles they squeeze out of that small set), the song is adorable, and I can say it's honestly my favorite sequence in the entire movie.

A favorite unsung character in Oliver! is Bill Sikes' faithful dog, Bulls Eye 

Oliver Reed in Life magazine 1968: “Every actor knows better than to appear with animals or children, so here I am with a bloody dog and all these kids!” 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
While I think I've made a pretty good case for Oliver!, cataloging its merits apropos my fondness for it, I’d be less than honest if I didn't also reveal that no small part of the soft spot I harbor for this film are tied to the nostalgia and sentiment I attach to the time, place, and circumstances by which I first came to know of it.

Oliver! premiered as part of a Christmas season roadshow/reserved ticket engagement at San Francisco’s Alexandria Theater in 1968, but as there were five of us in our household and therefore too pricey, we had to wait a few months later when it opened wide (“At popular prices!”), sans overture, intermission, and exit music. It played for weeks at my beloved Embassy Theater on Market Street – site of so many of my fondest early moviegoing memories – and I returned every weekend. I think I saw Oliver! about six times. But the best thing about seeing Oliver! for the first time was that my mom went with us.

My mom and dad were divorced at the time and my mom was several years from meeting my stepfather-to-be, so as a single, working mother of four, she counted on me and my three sisters going to the movies on Saturdays as a way to get a little peace and quiet around the house. However, on this occasion we managed to talk her into going with us, and I'll never forget how much fun it was seeing her lose herself in the movie. She was smiling, laughing, and in general acting just like one of us. My mother loved musicals (one of my sisters is named after June Allyson) and if you could have seen her that day you'd have sworn she'd transformed into a teenager right before your eyes. At one point during the "Consider Yourself" number I thought someone had kicked my seat, only to soon realize that the entire row was moving due to my mom bouncing in her seat and tapping along with the rhythm! One of my happiest memories of that day is the picture I have of my hardworking mother—seen out of the corner of my eye—softly singing along with the music, looking like the happiest little girl in the world. 

Sadly, my mom passed away just last year this month, and in knowing that Oliver! was one of her favorite movies, I guess I can't help but associate it with very happy memories.  

BONUS MATERIAL

Clip from "Oliver!"  1968

Childhood ain't what it used to be.

You can read about the sad circumstances of the late Jack Wild's adult life online. Take a look at this interview from 2002 (he passed away in 2006) in which he talks about his career and Oliver! YouTube

See Jack Wild sing "Pronouns" from the TV program H.R. Pufnstuf 

Turning in a wonderful dual performance in 1977's "The Prince and the Pauper" [titled "Crossed Swords" in the US] - Mark Lester kept a pretty low profile in his post-Oliver! days (he's an osteopath now) only to emerge from obscurity in 2013, alleging to be the sperm-donor father of Michael Jackson's kids (!!!) HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE 1962

If prostitution didn’t exist, Hollywood most certainly would have had to invent it. How else to surmount the troubling obstacle presented to screenwriters required to develop women characters not defined by the label of wife, mother, or girlfriend? How else to include as much sex, salaciousness, and female objectification as possible while still tent-poling the dual hypocritical obligations of have-your-cake-and-eat-too moralizing necessary to keep one step ahead of the censors, and the proper amount of after-the-fact, self-righteous finger-wagging to placate audience guilt?

America loves its sex, violence, and debauchery, but never really lets itself enjoy the fun it has rolling around in the gutter unless also afforded the opportunity to give itself a good slap on the wrist after it’s all over. This need to have one’s "sensitive adult material" served up with a healthy dose of religious dogma goes a long way toward explaining why a moralizing piece of Hollywood sleaze like Walk on the Wild Side is such an enduringly entertaining hoot.

Laurence Harvey as Doug Linkhorn

Jane Fonda as Kitty Twist (nee Tristram)

Capucine as Hallie Gerard

Barbara Stanwyck as Jo Courtney

Anne Baxter as Teresina Vidaverri

Published in 1956, Nelson Algren’s anecdotal, relentlessly downbeat, essentially unfilmable (at least in 1962) Depression-era novel A Walk on the Wild Side bears scant resemblance to the sanitized movie adapted from it, save for a few characters' names and the excision of the “A” from the title. 

The film version, rumored (quite remarkably) to be the work of no fewer than six writers, including playwright Clifford Odets (The Country Girl) and screenwriter Ben Hecht (Spellbound), strives to be a tale of lost souls seeking redemption through love on the sordid side of the streets of New Orleans.

Richard Rust as Oliver

However, the challenge of balancing sexual candor and social uplift becomes apparent in nearly every scene and dialogue exchange, ultimately proving far too unwieldy a burden for director Edward Dmytryk (Raintree County, Murder My Sweet), who, it is said, stepped in after the original director, Blake Edwards, was replaced. 

In the end, the movie promoted with the self-serving warning “This is an ADULT PICTURE - Parents should exercise discretion in permitting the immature to see it,” ended up being no more than another teasing Hollywood soap opera.

The composition of this shot pretty much sums up Walk on the Wild Side's major conflict 

The time is the 1930s (you’ll just have to take the film’s word for that; everything looks like 1962). After his sick father, an alcoholic, unordained preacher, dies, Arroyo, Texas farm boy Dove Linkhorn (Lithuanian-born Laurence Harvey) travels to Louisiana on a quest to find his long-lost love, Hallie (French-born Capucine), an amateur painter and sculptor. 

En route, he crosses paths with savvy runaway orphan Kitty Twist (Fonda), who teaches him the tricks of riding the rails and thumbing rides. Although Kitty has a few other tricks she’d like to teach him, Dove says no to hobo hanky-panky because his heart remains true to Hallie, whom he calls his religion. 

A brief stopover at the rundown café of Mexican head-turner Teresina Vidaverri (Baxter) brings out Kitty’s claws, resulting in her stealing from the proprietress out of jealousy. The morally offended dirt farmer sends her on her way and stays on at Teresina’s place as a hired hand.

The composition of this shot pretty much sums up Walk on the Wild Side's secondary conflict

Cut to New Orleans’ French Quarter and to the popular bordello known as The Doll House. Run by no-nonsense man-hater (aka, coded lesbian in '60s Hollywood screenwriter parlance) Jo Courtney (Stanwyck) and given assist by her devoted but ineffectual husband, former carny strongman Achilles Schmidt (Karl Swenson), who lost his legs in a train accident.

The Doll House, typical of most movie whorehouses, doesn't look like very much fun, but business appears to be booming. The big shocker (to the screenwriters perhaps, but certainly to no one with even a passing familiarity with soap opera plotting) is that Dove’s virginal and virtuous Hallie is the Doll House’s most desirable and sought-after prostitute… Jo categorically taking top honors as Hallie’s most persistent and ardent pursuer.

As Hallie, statuesque ex-model Capucine embodies the kind of regal, exotic glamour suitable to a high-priced escort ("Upscale and sophisticated enough to take anywhere!"). But, breathtaking beauty aside, the woman comes off as the least fun hooker you're likely to rent.

Of course, when Dove finally reunites with his wild Texas love, the woman with whom he shared his first kiss and more: “Afterwards, in the moonlight...we danced like we was celebrating a miracle. A crazy kind of dance. And then we sang and shouted...like it wasn't real!.” (of course, once we set eyes on the haughty, high-cheekboned regalness of Capucine, this already a laughable reminiscence now becomes surrealistically inconceivable). Alas, the romantically idealistic hayseed is a tad slow on picking up on how Hallie has managed to support herself all this time, and how she's able to afford all those expensive 1960s Pierre Cardin-designed frocks. When he does, his heartbroken disillusionment gives way to the usual macho possessiveness and proprietary protectiveness. 

The intense dislike Capucine and Harvey had for one another is the stuff of legend

At this point, we see that the film does not regard Hallie’s virtue as something that is her own damn business to do with as she pleases, but as something that has been taken from Dove. What Hallie feels about her life as a sex worker is secondary (well, really of no consequence to the screenwriter at all) to Dove, who acts like the wounded party in all this. Thus, he takes it upon himself to save and safeguard Hallie's body and soul, especially from the over-ardent attentions of The Doll House madam. 

Resorting to his father's bible-thumping ways, Dove proselytizes ... I mean, explains to an understandably exasperated Teresina (who I'm not entirely sure he hasn't been shacking up with all this time, but now is left to douse her torch in tequila) his philosophy and the film's narrative through-line:

 “In the Bible, Hosea fell in love with Gomer. She was a harlot. They got married, but she couldn't stay away from men. Hosea got mad and threw her out. Sold her into slavery. But he couldn't get her out of his mind, so he went looking for her. When he found her, he brought her back home. But it was no good. Before long, she was up to her old tricks again [literally, it would seem]. But he loved her anyway, and he couldn't give her up. So he took her into the wilderness...away from temptation. Away from other men. And that's what I have to do with Hallie.”   

If you think this sounds like he's talking about a child or a pet, not a grown woman with a mind of her own, then, like me, Dove won't look to you quite like the virtuous hero he and the screenwriters think he is. 

I'm sorry, but we're supposed to believe that these two stunning,
continental-looking creatures spent even one minute in dustbowl Texas?

The remaining bulk of Walk on the Wild Side occupies itself with being a romantic triangle-cum-spiritual tug-of-war between Dove (representing honest values and true love) and Jo (representing well-dressed depravity and perversion), with the magnificent but I’m-not-all-that-convinced-she’s-worth-all-this-trouble Hallie at the center.

Happily, by way of distraction, we have the welcome reappearance of Kitty, the former boxcar good-time-girl transformed into garter-snapping sexpot, as the newest employee of The Doll House. And then there's chipper Southern chippie, Miss Precious (the always terrific Joanna Moore, Tatum O’Neal’s mom), a Doll House resident who sleeps on a Confederate flag pillow and punctuates even the shortest sentences with “The Colonel always said…”. On the distaff side, there's the reptilian sexiness of short-tempered strong-arm man, Oliver (Richard Rust of Homicidal), who has an eye for the ladies and suede gloves to keep his hands nice and unbruised when he roughs them up. 

Inquiring Minds Want to Know
Menacing roughneck Oliver (Richard Rust) needs some answers from Kitty 

Posters for Walk on the Wild Side proclaimed: “A side of life you never expected to see on the screen!” Which is not altogether false, given you've got a 4-time Oscar-nominee playing one of the screen’s first lesbians (who lives to the final reel, yet!), and the daring-for-its-time setting of a New Orleans brothel. The rest, alas, is what Hollywood has always done: a) Offer up endless reworkings of the Madonna-whore dichotomy as soap opera and love story, b) attempt to shock and scandalize, but in the end, always heralding staunch conservatism and prudery.

Joanna Moore as Miss Precious
A personal favorite and incapable of giving a bad performance, this incandescent
 actress with the very sad life story is one of the bright spots in Walk on the Wild Side

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I'm not sure if the genre has been identified by any other name besides Southern Gothic, but I am a major fan of the overheated, sex-and-psychosis dramas of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Carson McCullers. And when these southern-fried potboilers are crossed with a touch of the soap-opera overstatement associated with Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann, and Sidney Sheldon ...well, I'm in 7th Heaven. Walk on the Wild Side has all the luridness of Williams, the pretentiousness of Inge, plus all the unintentional humor of anything bearing the stamp of Susann.

There's dialogue that sounds as though it were written by a robot; overearnest performances that are nevertheless as limp as a clothesline; the ever-present topic of sex that is hinted at and alluded to but never spoken of in even remotely direct terms; and clashing accents left and right: Texas drawl, Southern twang, Georgia singsong, French, British, and Spanish (sort of).

Riding the Rails
Jane Fonda looks a good deal like her father, Henry, in The Grapes of Wrath
in this shot of Dove and Kitty catching a ride in a freight car

Fans of the by-now-anticipated unwillingness and inability of '60s films to remain faithful to the era they depict will have a field day with Walk on the Wild Side's interpretation of the Depression-era South. Outside of a few automobiles and some distant dress extras, the look is 1962 through and through. A costume designer friend of mine once suggested that this practice is not an unintentional or careless phenomenon. As the makeup and hairstyles of an earlier era often look odd or unflattering to audiences, he suggested that the modern look of so many period films is just the industry's recognition that the stars of romantic films must appear "attractive" to their audiences, and very often that means adhering to contemporary styles in makeup and hair. 

Another inconsistency: we're asked to accept that Hallie, a woman who quotes T.S. Eliot
 and asks johns for Brancusi sculptures as gifts,
ever had anything to do with a man as "basic" (read: boring) as Dove 

When a studio is forking over big bucks for a glamorous star, they want the audience to "see" the glamour. The aesthetic concern is that the baggy fashions and severe makeup styles of the 1930s (such as thin eyebrows, bow lips, thick stockings, and figure-concealing frocks) will look odd or comical to 1960s audiences. A point well taken, I concede. But it doesn't address the jarring incongruity of seeing women with '60s bouffants and bullet bras stepping out of 1928 DeSotos.

The late-great Juanita Moore as Mama

PERFORMANCES

Where to start? To say that I enjoy all the performances in Walk on the Wild Side is not at all saying that many of them are any good. If anyone emerges from the chaos with their dignity intact, it's Barbara Stanwyck. An actor virtually incapable of giving a false performance, Stanwyck is not really called upon to deliver more than a professional, standard-issue, tough-broad routine, but she's nevertheless the most compelling character in the film for me. She wants Hallie, and I don't doubt it for a minute.

A rare shot of Barbara Stanwyck showing off her bust

Barbara Stanwyck was outed as a lesbian in two substandard books: The Sewing Circle by Axel Madsen, and one that got right to the point with its title-- Hollywood Lesbians by Boze Hadleigh. If either book is to be believed, Walk on the Wild Side was a film set with more closets than a Feydeau farce: leading man (Harvey), leading lady (Capucine), and co-star (Stanwyck).

You can say Jo Courtney wants to lead The Glamorous Life,
as in, She Don't Need a Man's Touch 

In this, Stanwyck's first film since 1957's Forty Guns, the very private Stanwyck was yet another classic-era star forced to embrace the burgeoning era of movie permissiveness and take on a role I'm certain at one time would have thought unsavory. Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons disapproved of Stanwyck taking on such a role, to which Stanwyck is said to have responded, "What do you want them to do, get a real madam and a real lesbian?"  On the bright side, at least the film she was featured in was a major Hollywood production. Come 1964, Stanwyck would be following in Joan Crawford's B-movie footsteps and appearing in William Castle schlock like The Night Walker.

The beautiful Capucine may not be much of an actress, but she's not helped much by a script that calls for her to behave like a non-stop pill from the minute she's introduced. Male screenwriters unfamiliar with how women actually think are often guilty of writing about "beauty" as though it were an actual character trait rather than a physical attribute. In the case of Hallie Gerard, so little of the character's much-talked-about passion, restlessness, or joy is conveyed that we're left to imagine she's fought over by Dove and Jo simply because she's so outrageously gorgeous. If the Hallie we now see is supposed to represent a broken woman whose life-force has been drained out of her by her having "Fallen down the well," as she puts it, the backstory we're left to fill in requires an actress substantially more skilled than the one we're given. You get about as much emotionally out of Capucine as a walking/talking entity as from one of her model photo shoots from the '50s.

Cheekbone Wars
Capucine circa 1922 and Faye Dunaway, 1974 vintage (in The Towering Inferno)
both rock twin towers of hair along with their Grecian-style gowns

For me, Jane Fonda gives the film's liveliest performance. Liberated from the lacquered, overly-mature look adopted for The Chapman Report and Period of Adjustment (both 1962), Fonda is sexier and looser here. Perhaps a little too loose in her early scenes. There's something about playing "earthy" that brings forth the inner ham in actors. Fonda, in her early scenes, can't seem to keep her finishing school refinement from creeping into her overly mannered interpretation of Kitty Twist, railway ragamuffin. Parts of her performance have the feel of an over-coached acting school scene. But, unlike some of her co-stars, she's never a dull presence and really comes into her own in the sequences in the Doll House. She looks fantastic as well. The cameraman obviously thought so too, for Fonda's shapely backside has arguably as many close-ups as her face. 

Laurence Harvey has always been a favorite of mine (owing at least in part to my tendency to develop matinee crushes on birdlike, Tony Perkins types), but he really seems out of his element here. The thoroughly engaging (and sexy) energy he brought to I Am a Camera (1955), or 1959's Expresso Bongo, is nowhere to be seen in his tediously virtuous Dove Linkhorn.

All of Anne Baxter's scenes are enlivened by her terrible Mexican accent ("Wha' hoppen?") 

In this instance, in Hollywood's long tradition of casting white actors as Mexicans, we can all be thankful Oscar-nominee Ann Baxter (All About Eve) hasn't had her skin cosmetically darkened, but LORD her accent! I can't even properly gauge her performance because every time she utters a word (in that familiar, husky voice of hers), I'm distracted by giggles. 

Like the little goof in Citizen Kane where no one is in the room to hear Kane's deathbed utterance of "Rosebud," this newspaper features a photo of Jo and her gang of thugs that absolutely no one could have taken, unless the news photographer was also in bed with Dove.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Is there some axiom that says the cooler the opening credits sequence, the more likely one is to be let down by the film? Outside of the brilliant and stylish art-deco title sequence for the 1974 screen adaptation of Mame, which got me all hyped-up only to then lead me down a path of soft-focus croaking, Saul Bass' snazzy, jazz-tinged title sequence for Walk on the Wild Side (assisted immeasurably by the Oscar-nominated Elmer Bernstein, Mack David theme music) sets one up for a film that never materializes.

Edward Dmytryk would go on to direct Richard Burton and Joey Heatherton in Bluebeard.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Walk on the Wild Side is, like the 1976 US/USSR collaboration that resulted in the dreadful musical mistake that was The Bluebird, a film whose backstory is infinitely more interesting than the movie itself. Conflict-of-interest deals were behind much of Walk on the Wild Side's grab-bag casting (Laurence Harvey was being promoted by the wife of the head of Columbia Studios, while Capucine was being promoted by producer Charles K. Feldman). The film was plagued by constant rewrites, deleted scenes (the internet is full of rumors regarding a curiously missing-in-action hairbrush spanking scene between Stanwyck and Capucine...be still my heart), costly delays, and a cast that was often openly antagonistic to one another as well as to the director.

Character actress Kathryn Card, fondly remembered as Mrs. Magillicuddy,
Lucille Ball's ditsy mother on I Love Lucy

The end result is a film that is a disappointment as both drama and love story, but a bonanza of unintentional humor and delicious badness. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a more enjoyable watchable film. Easy on the eyes and no strain on the brain, your biggest concern will be stomach cramps from laughing aloud at the dialogue. 

Four-time Oscar nominee Barbara Stanwyck (she won an Honorary Oscar in 1982) made only two films after Walk on the Wild Side: Roustabout with Elvis Presley, of all people, and the aforementioned William Castle thriller The Night Walker, both in 1964 

Woefully tame and coy by today's standards, Walk on the Wild Side maintains its historical notoriety as one of the earliest major motion pictures to feature a lesbian character. As the years have passed, the film has revealed itself to be a movie with a fairly high behind-the-scenes LGBTQ pedigree as well. The names of Laurence Harvey, Capucine, and Barbara Stanwyck have all been mentioned in various celebrity memoirs as being gay or bisexual, while Jane Fonda has written in her own autobiography about participating in bisexual three-ways with her husband, Roger Vadim.

Click on image to enlarge

Walk on the Wild Side opened in Los Angeles on
Wednesday, March 7, 1962, at the Stanley-Warner Theater in Beverly Hills

You'd think a little of that sexual democracy might have wound up on the screen, but no. At best, Walk on the Wild Side remains an entertaining yet tame timepiece and cultural curio for those interested in seeing what kind of film Hollywood thought it was ready to tackle during the early days of the Motion Picture Production Code's abandonment.

Clip from Walk on the Wild Side (1962)

OK, it's actually a Walk on the Mild Side

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2014