YOU'LL LIKE MY MOTHER 1972

Spoiler alert: This is a critical essay, not a review. Pertinent 

details and plot points are referenced for the purpose of analysis.

The suspense thriller is one of my favorite movie genres, but some films age better than others. The Patty Duke starrer You’ll Like My Mother had already been branded a word-of-mouth “sleeper hit” when it opened in the San Francisco Bay Area in December of 1972, having already built a momentum of respectable reviews and favorable public response during its East Coast engagements earlier in the fall. By the time this minimally-publicized release from Bing Crosby Productions made its way out West (BCP's low-budget horror-thriller Willard had enjoyed a similar surprise success in 1970), the advance buzz about the film was considerable. Public interest in the film received a significant leg-up when up-and-coming co-star Richard Thomas became an overnight household name as the star of TV’s The Waltons, which had premiered that September. 

Additional free publicity (though hardly favorable) was generated by the tabloids making much of  Patty Duke's real-life Mamma Mia!-like paternity scandal. The Oscar-winning actress had recently given birth to son Sean, whose father was potentially one of three men: May/December fling Desi Arnaz, Jr (Duke was 24, Arnaz 17); quickie 13-day ex-husband Michael Tell*; or current husband (wed just 4 months at the time) John Astin. The fan magazines ate it up, and in spite of the potential public backlash, Universal Studios didn't seem to mind, given how often the word "mother" had to be used in each article. *In 1994 Sean Astin had a DNA test to determine Tell as his biological father. 

Patty Duke as Francesca Kinsolving

Rosemary Murphy as Mrs. Kinsolving

Richard Thomas as Kenneth Kinsolving

Sian Barbara Allen as Kathleen Kinsolving

Although my subscription to Rona Barrett’s Hollywood had kept me abreast of all the aforementioned Patty Duke daddy drama, I’d somehow avoided hearing a single thing about You’ll Like My Mother before catching sight of the poster for the film at Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome during our family's Christmas Season visit to Los Angeles. Looking at the poster now, it reveals a graphic heavy-handedness and lack of confidence in its audience I would later find to be characteristic of the film itself; but at the time, I was so intrigued by those scissors and all those exclamation points, I couldn’t wait to see it. 

Lest someone get the wrong idea and mistake it for a bit of homespun wholesomeness like TV's The Waltons, the film was marketed with the words "a thriller" in large type and in such close proximity, it appeared to be part of the complete title

Francesca (Duke) is the enormously pregnant wife of an Army pilot recently killed in Vietnam. Having met and wed in a whirlwind, Francesca and husband Matthew hadn’t been married long, nor even knew that much about the other, but during their brief time together Matthew would often say to his bride, “You’ll like my mother.”

On the strength of that endorsement, Francesca, widowed and without family of her own, braves a 3-day winter bus journey from Los Angeles to Minnesota to visit her mother-in-law; a woman she’s never met, never spoken to, or knows anything about.  

A snowstorm greets Francesca’s arrival at her destination, a small, remote town far from anything but snow, snow, and more snow. But the storm is like a day at the beach compared to the frosty response she receives from townsfolk whenever she mentions her husband's family name: Kinsolving...red flag number one. With weather conditions preventing vehicle transportation to the doorway of Kinsolving home, Francesca, ill-dressed for the occasion and looking every day of her clearly-advanced state of pregnancy, has to trudge through Zhivago-levels of snow to make it to her mother-in-law's home--a large, imposing estate possessing all the coziness of The Overlook Hotel. 

The Kinsolving home is actually the Glensheen mansion in Duluth, Minnesota. In real life, the location gained notoriety in 1977 as the site of the shocking Congdon heiress double murder

If at first glance the Jacobean-style architecture of the Kinsolving mansion appears lacking in the sort of eerie ornamentation one comes to expect from Gothic melodramas like this, fear not, for Francesca’s knock on the door summons forth a true flesh-and-blood gargoyle: Mrs. Kinsolving herself. Frostily disdainful of her uninvited guest from the get-go (“Why did you feel you had to come here?”), Mrs. Kinsolving’s internal Frigidaire setting hits glacier-level when the sight of her daughter-in-law’s filled-to-bursting state of pregnancy fails to inspire grandmotherly concern. Rather, it triggers she's-trying-to-horn-in-on-the-inheritance apprehension—"Since I didn’t acknowledge [you] the first time as Matthew’s wife, I saw no reason to applaud the progress [you’ve] made.”

Adding further to Francesca’s newfound family tree fun is the double-barreled discovery that Matthew has an intellectually-disabled, virtually non-verbal sister he never told her about, plus a distant, clearly homicidal cousin named Kenny who currently just so happens to be on the loose and wanted for a brutal murder.
When Francesca makes the wise decision, there and then, to hightail it out of Kinsolving Place as fast as her belly and boots will allow, she can hardly be blamed. But alas, her departure is waylaid by a stalled car, a disconnected phone (along with no TV, houses like this never have working phones), and an encroaching blizzard. When snow-clogged roads turn an awkward overnight stay into an acrimonious open-ended sojourn, Francesca's guest status soon takes on the appearance of imprisonment.   

Mrs. Kinsolving allows Francesca to stay in Matthew's old room

Thus far, an irresistible (if a shade familiar) stage has been set in having unforeseeable circumstances (a storm) force Francesca to confront a suspicious situation rife with questions both she and the viewer are asking: Why do the townsfolk react like horses hearing the name Frau Blücher whenever Francesca mentions the Kinsolving family? Why is Matthew’s mother so blatantly hostile and why did she lie about not receiving a telegram announcing her son’s marriage? Why hadn't Matthew told Francesca about weird cousin Kenny and kept his sister a secret? Is there someone else in the house? Mystery and viewer-identification are intensified from initially only knowing as much as Francesca knows. Later, when more information is disclosed, suspense springs from knowing...long before it dawns on Francesca...precisely the degree of real danger she's placed herself in.

The element of time becomes a suspense factor as well, as Mrs. Kinsolving needs to get Francesca out of the house before the unwanted visitor has time to unearth the secrets everyone in the household is so invested in keeping hidden.  Meanwhile, tension mounts as Francesca’s any-minute-now delivery date render an escape on foot an impossibility, while also leaving her vulnerable to Mrs. Kinsolving’s inclination (she’s a registered nurse) to drugging her and giving her shots without consent.

You’ll Like My Mother is a nifty, PG-rated (thrills are on the effective-but-tepid side), woman-in-peril suspenser in the classic tradition of all those paperback Gothics with covers featuring a woman in a long flowing gown running away from a sinister-looking mansion looming in the distance. Well-acted, atmospheric, but populated with stock characters and rarely deviating from formula; it’s a film that plays well on first viewing but whose plot doesn’t withstand the scrutiny of repeat visits.

Dennis Rucker as Red Cooper

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I enjoy You’ll Like My Mother a great deal, but the disparity in my response to seeing it in 1972 and now is rather jarring. For the longest time, I harbored memories of it being this incredibly intense moviegoing experience…a nail-biting, suspenseful thrill ride I treated myself to four times over that Christmas holiday. Part Rosemary’s Baby (1968), part captive-damsel-in-distress/hag-horror Gothic à la Tallulah Bankhead’s Die! Die! My Darling! (1965); I remember being thoroughly gripped by Patty Duke’s predicament and startled by each new plot twist and character revelation. Because virtually no one else at school had even heard of it, I sang the film’s praises to any and all as this undiscovered gem they simply had to see.

When I watch the film now—seeing it through a nostalgia prism which takes into consideration my having been a 15-year-old at the time and not very well-versed in the clichés of the women-in-peril genre—I’m still able to access certain things I responded to so favorably long ago. For instance, I continue to be impressed by Rosemary Murphy’s iron butterfly take on motherhood, the shivery Minnesota setting, and the plot overall retains its bizarre quirkiness. But by and large, I find myself a little bemused when confronted with just how little it took for a movie to scare me in those days.

Sparsely populated, over-reliant on close-ups, with nearly every plot device spelled out for even the slowest on the uptake, You’ll Like My Mother plays more like your better-than-average made-for-TV movie than a major feature film. This is no doubt due to the film being helmed by veteran television director Lamont Johnson (That Certain Summer -1972) who directed Patty Duke to her only Emmy Award win in 1970s My Sweet Charlie. 

Though only 92-minutes long, You’ll Like My Mother is paced in that deliberate way characteristic of a great many ‘70s films, but in this instance the leisurely unfolding of the film's minimal action (once Duke is in that house, she's IN that house) calls attention to the many holes in the plot while inviting the viewer to remain always one step ahead of the familiar storyline.

Pray for Francesca's Baby

In the final analysis, nostalgia aside and divorced from any expectation for the film to live up to my teenage experience of it, You'll Like My Mother measures up as a fine, low-wattage suspense thriller that feels perfectly scaled for the small screen. Devoid of the clockwork shock cuts and audience-pandering excesses of so many of today's thrillers, I found myself appreciative of the film's direct, no-frills approach to the material. The performances still hold up--a little less so in regard to Sian Barbara Allen's Golden Globe-nominated turn. But the film benefits from a lack of Neely O'Hara overplaying on the part of from Patty Duke, and from an effectively offbeat (make that downright weird) story. While no edge-of-the-seat thrill-ride, I was surprised to find  You'll Like My Mother still crazy after all these years.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

In the language of the studio pitch meeting, You’ll Like My Mother really is Rosemary’s Baby meets Die! Die! My Darling!, with perhaps a little bit of Psycho mother-fixation on the side. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as narratively assured as Polanski’s classic, nor as agreeably camp as Bankhead’s cinema swan song. But the mother-son stuff measures up as appropriately creepy.

Most obviously, You’ll Like My Mother evokes memories of Rosemary’s Baby in that a major thrust of the story is how Francesca’s pregnancy and baby are placed at risk. For not only is Francesca constantly lied to and given mysterious drugs in drinks, but her own predicament and the potential fate of her child is metaphorically foreshadowed when she arrives at the Kinsolving home just as her mother-in-law has drowned a litter of kittens. Mrs. Kinsolving’s pointed explanation to her daughter-in-law is that her beloved and pedigreed feline “Forgot herself and mated with an alley cat. The kittens were no good of course.” 

A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother
Mrs. Kinsolving's relationship with creepy Kenny has a Norman & Mrs. Bates quality to it

Because they share a guest-as-captive-prisoner theme, You’ll Like My Mother most closely resembles the less well-known Die! Die! My Darling!. Both films featuring large, isolated estates without phones--although in Mother that plot point is something of a red-herring--lorded over by imperious,  loony, matriarchs with unconventional surnames (Bankhead’s is Mrs. Trefoile) suggesting great wealth and closets full of skeletons. The films share the central dramatic conflict of a young heroine locked in a room at the mercy of a rancorous old woman who blames the girl for the death of her son and the alienation of maternal affection. I’m not sure why developmentally disabled household help was such a staple of the genre, but in the Bankhead film, the pathos duties assigned to Sian Barbara Allen are assumed by a young Donald Sutherland. 

PERFORMANCES

After the blissful debacle of Valley of the Dolls, Patty Duke worked almost exclusively in television, making only one other film before this one--1969s Me, Natalie for which she won a Golden Globe. Duke has said that it took years for her to appreciate Valley of the Dolls for the beloved camp classic it eventually became, but by her superb work in Me, Natalie, and her muted, underplaying performance here, it appears it didn't take her very long to learn the lesson of less is more. Duke gives a persuasive, intelligent performance here, displaying a subdued naturalism that would keep her working continually in television and film until her untimely death in 2016 at the age of 69.

Although their in-law relationship is antagonistic in You'll Like My Mother, Rosemary Murphy
and Patty Duke went on to play mother and daughter in the 1979 TV movie Before and After 

Not being a fan of The Waltons, my only awareness of Richard Thomas at the time was as one of the sociopathic teenagers in Frank Perry's disturbing Last Summer (1969), so his being cast as a possible rapist and serial killer didn't shock me as much as those who associated Thomas with the angel-faced John-boy Walton. Thomas is very good here, his malevolent boyishness creating the nightmare impression of a grown-up Dennis the Menace.
Actress Sian Barbara Allen gets an "introducing" credit in You'll Like My Mother, and her performance garnered near-unanimous praise along with the aforementioned Golden Globe nomination as Most Promising Newcomer. Although I still find her performance to be very touching and sympathetic, I must confess it was more effective when I was younger. These days I'm distracted by the fact that her characterization reminds me so much of Mia Farrow in Joseph Losey's Secret Ceremony -- all downcast cow eyes and dark hair cascading over her features. At the time, Allen and Thomas were quite the romantic item.

However, it's character actress Rosemary Murphy who makes the film for me. She's a credible villainess; ruthless, but not heartless. And she never once goes over the top or turns her character into a caricature. Her cool bearing hides a steely determination that makes Mrs. Kinsolving's motives unreadable and her actions all the more frightening.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Genre films are bound by a paradox that demands originality and freshness while still adhering to form. Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park (1969) or even Julie Christie's sci-fi curiosity Demon Seed (1977) stand as good examples of creative variations/subversions of the "captivity" melodrama. You’ll Like My Mother, which intentionally hews close to classic Gothic tradition, may not offer much in the way of novelty, but in being written by women, it bears the distinction of a female perspective. The original 1969 novel is by Naomi A. Hintze, its setting featuring an overflowing river instead of a snowstorm. Hintze's book was adapted for the screen by Jo Heims, the female screenwriter credited with writing the story for Clint Eastwood's directing debut - 1971’s Play Misty for Me.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009

THE VELVET VAMPIRE 1971

“Susan, have you ever noticed how men envy us?”

“Envy us, how?”

“The pleasure we have that only we can have. We can’t help it. It’s just our nature, the way we are. And in their secret hearts, they hate us for it because they can never know what it’s like.”

I was never much into vampire movies growing up. That I’ve managed to see so many of them…Dracula, his brides, sons, and daughters included…is due to my older sister; a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan who used her size and age advantage to make sure that every Saturday night the family TV was tuned to Channel 2’s Creature Features, a double-barreled parade of classic and (mostly) not-so-classic horror and sci-fi flicks hosted by the bespectacled Bob Wilkins. Since it was either vampires or go to bed early on one of the few nights I was allowed to stay up, the Gothic bloodsuckers invariably won out.

My feelings about vampire movies weren’t rooted in anything specific, merely that they failed to capture my imagination because I never found them to be very scary. Monsters being more to my taste back then, to my way of thinking vampire movies were essentially just Gothic romances where the “necking” was taken to its literal extreme. (I do recall having had this weird, neat-freak reaction to the way vampires in movies always allowed the blood to run down their faces after feeding. Here they were, these genteel, over-refined Counts turned out in fastidious Victorian finery, yet dribbling blood down the sides of their mouths like babies without bibs. What were all those lace handkerchiefs for? Weren’t there any anal-retentive, OCD vampires?)

But whatever the reason, it was clear my personal indifference to vampires was out of step with the timbre of the times. The most vivid example is the whole Dark Shadows craze that swept through my high school in 1971. For the unversed, Dark Shadows was a popular Gothic daytime TV soap opera about a lovesick vampire who couldn’t remember his lines. Each weekday, kids by the hundreds would race home from school to catch its 4pm broadcast, the following day devoting entire lunchtimes to recounting to one another the sundry supernatural exploits of Barnabas Collins and the rest of the blooper-prone denizens of Collinwood.

Dark Shadows and vampire mania hit my best friend Smedley particularly hard (I attended a Catholic boy’s school where, for some reason, we all addressed one another by our last names), he being so enamored of the show that he took to wearing a cape to school in our Sophomore year. Decades before the term cosplay even existed, Smedley could be seen striding around campus, cape billowing in the wind behind his blue jeans and Adidas sneakers.
The 1972 release of Blacula, the first African-American vampire, emboldened Smedley to add to his ensemble: a heavy wooden cane with a polished silver skull handle, a pentagram pinkie ring with a glass eye in its center, and a black, wide-brimmed hat. Alas, the school’s principal, who’d heretofore proved uncommonly tolerant of a kid wandering the halls of a Catholic school looking like the Prince of Darkness, ultimately intervened, putting a halt to Smedley’s sartorial shenanigans the minute he began taking on the appearance of a teenage Super Fly. Besides, there were no lockers big enough for that hat. 

The Lady in Red Stalks Her Prey

But the Dark Shadows phenomenon was just one aspect of the vampire renaissance of the 1970s. Following a decline in popularity during the sci-fi/atomic monster craze of the ’50s, vampire movies received a much-needed genre transfusion when relaxed censorship regulations in the late-1960s granted filmmakers broader latitude in the depiction of violence and the display of nudity. Free to render explicit all the sexual metaphor and eroticism heretofore only hinted at in previous vampire flicks; there appeared a rash of fang & coffin features virtually awash in Technicolor blood and upholstered with acres of exposed flesh.
Along similar lines, shifts in the ‘70s cultural landscape (race relations, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, gay rights) precipitated occasionally ingenious–but mostly silly–reimaginings of the traditional vampire myth.

Blacula’s William Marshal was cinema’s first African-American vampire, but there were also Kung Fu vampires (The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires – 1974), swashbuckling vampires (Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter – 1974), and hippie vampires (Let’s Scare Jessica to Death – 1971). But most popular of all…for reasons both subversive and prurient…was the female vampire.

Among the glut of horror films about female vampires that flooded the market at the time, films with heavy-breathing titles like Vampire Lovers (1970), Vampyros Lesbos (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), Daughters of Darkness (1971), and Twins of Evil (1971), only The Velvet Vampire had the distinction of having been directed by a woman.

Celeste Yarnall as Diane Le Fanu

Michael Blodgett as Lee Ritter

Sherry Miles as Susan Ritter

Vapid young couple Lee and Susan Ritter (Michel Blodgett & Sherry Miles, both looking as though they’d just wandered in from a Sun-In© hair lightener commercial) meet vampy vampire Diane Le Fanu (Celeste Yarnall) at a Los Angeles art gallery (The [Bram] Stoker Gallery...wink, wink). Though the couple has been married only two years, the reptilian Lee begins coming on to the raven-haired Diane almost instantly. Diane, whom we’ve just seen overpower and kill an assailant on her way to the gallery (a girl’s gotta eat), responds favorably, meanwhile, Susan struggles hard to process…well, everything.

When Diane invites the blank-eyed pair to spend the weekend at her villa in the Mojave Desert, Lee, ever the horndog, leaps at the offer, while worrywart Susan harbors serious, poorly-articulated misgivings before ultimately acquiescing. Their drive through the desert to Diane's house is plagued with blazing heat, a curious absence of other drivers on the road, engine trouble, and weirdly hostile locals—all ominous harbingers and portents of danger signaling to our hapless couple (imagine a debauched, significantly denser Brad and Janet from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) to turn back. But a horny husband is nothing if not determined, so the dull-witted pair soldiers on, heedless of their setbacks, until their car finally stalls out completely, stranding them on a deserted stretch of desert road. But, lo and behold, out of nowhere appears Diane to the rescue in her canary yellow dune buggy!

Yes, although covered from head to toe in the kind of mod, midi-skirt-and-boots ensemble favored by Ann Marie during the final season of That Girl, Diane is clearly a vampire who doesn’t crumble into a heap of dust in the glare of the sun. Similarly, we were shown earlier that she is also a vampire capable of casting a reflection in a mirror; thus it's fair to assume that the gender of our predatory protagonist is not going to be the only deliberate genre subversion The Velvet Vampire has up its cape. 

Diamonds...Daisies...Snowflakes...That Ghoul

  

The trio’s arrival at Diane’s remote desert domicile sees more Gothic clichés upended, as the sun-drenched villa and barren surrounding landscape stand as the living (if one can use that word when speaking of the undead) antithesis to the gloomy castles and foggy moors of Transylvanian legend. Yet the occasional nod to vampire tradition can still be found. For example, there's the nearby, well-populated cemetery harboring a dark, heavily-guarded secret: and by way of a Renfield stand-in, Diane has a devoted Native-American manservant named Juan (Jerry Daniels) who supplies his mistress with victims...but shows no evidence of personally having a taste for rodents or insects.

Having lured the prey to her lair, Diane embarks on an aggressive but ill-defined course of action involving dual seduction, voyeuristic stalking, and mutual dream invasion (Lee and Susan share the same surreal nightmare in which Diane is seen as a dissevering entity…but to what purpose?). The latter point supplying The Velvet Vampire’s only suspense, for we’re as in the dark about Diane’s intentions for the couple as they are. Because her ambiguous objectives have to be carried out before the weekend is over (or before our slow-on-the-pickup newlyweds catch on), the element of time factors in as a source of narrative tension, but there's precious little else. 

Juan (Jerry Daniels), the vigilant vampire valet, catches Susan snooping around

The plot of The Velvet Vampire shares similarities with the far-superior Belgian erotic vampire film Daughters of Darkness, in that both involve sexually-fluid female vampires who become obsessed with a married couple in a less-than-satisfying relationship. Indeed, remove the vampire element, and The Velvet Vampire even foreshadows the aforementioned The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) in its often-humorous depiction (both intentional and un) of the ease with which bland innocence can be corrupted by sophisticated evil.

Daughters of Darkness may even have played a part in The Velvet Vampire poor box-office performance and rapid retreat from theaters in 1971 due to their overlapping release schedules. Both sought to hit the Halloween market by coming out in October, in the SF Bay area, Daughters of Darkness (marketed to the arthouse crowd) was released a full two-weeks before The Velvet Vampire, making the latter look like a bargain-basement, Drive-In imitation by comparison.

above: The Velvet Vampire / below: Daughters of Darkness

In both films, a beautiful female vampire insinuates herself into the lives of a handsome couple. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Produced by the legendary Roger Corman as one of the earliest releases from his recently-formed New World Pictures, The Velvet Vampire lives up (or down) to just what you’d expect from the prolific exploitation producer/director known as the “King of the Bs.” There’s stilted dialog, cut-rate production values, clumsy staging, unconvincing special effects, erratic pacing, and some really monumentally bad acting. All of which goes toward making the film both rousingly entertaining and something of a must-see howler for fans of unintentional humor.

"Diane doesn't turn me on. She's a desert freak!"

That being said, The Velvet Vampire is also a film--against all odds and wholly within the restricted confines of exploitation and its own prohibitively modest budget--that nevertheless works. And rather spectacularly.
What gives it distinction and spares it from being just another one cheapie horror entry driven by Corman's grindhouse axiom: “The men are killed, the women are raped,” is that this horror film bears the rare, indelible stamp of having been directed and co-written by a woman: Stephanie Rothman.

Director of one of my favorite off-brand beach party movies- It’s a Bikini World (1967), Corman protégé Stephanie Rothman clearly hasn’t a lot to work with in The Velvet Vampire in terms of either money or onscreen talent; but evident in nearly every frame of the movie is her humor, artistic vision, creative ingenuity, and feminist commitment to subverting as many of the overused tropes and sexist clichés associated with horror movies as possible. All while satisfying the requirements of the genre itself: to supply a higher degree of sensationalized violence and nudity than available in most mainstream films of the time. 

Rothman in a 1973 interview: "I'm very tired of the whole tradition in western art
 in which women are always presented nude and men aren't."

PERFORMANCES

There’s a slick professionalism to the look of The Velvet Vampire that’s hard to deny (the cinematography is by onetime Claude

In this priceless exchange, Diane tells Lee that if he's willing to take the time to warm up
 her dune buggy properly, he can ride it as long and as hard as he likes

Third-billed Celeste Yarnall is really the film’s chief asset as the sensuous vampire who may or may not be simply a delusional woman suffering from a rare blood-craving disease. She doesn't have a lot of range, and the role doesn't call for it, but she can act, knows her way around a funny line, and gives the film's most assured performance. Something that can't be said for the rest of the cast. Heavy-lidded Michael Blodgett might be the most high-profile member of the cast, having achieved an immortality of sorts as the leopard-skinned-bikini-wearing gigolo Lance Rocke in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), but he’s an inert presence and practically sleepwalks through his role...which, in a way, suits the film’s subtext pertaining to passive men and resourceful women.

However, the worst offender (thus, my personal favorite) is Sherry Miles, an attractive actress who, when other characters are speaking, always manages to look like she’s translating their words from English into Mandarin Chinese, then back again to English in her head. Possessed of vacant eyes and Dallesandro-flat line delivery, she gives an astonishingly awful performance of the sort that sends MST3K fans into wild ecstatics. I've never seen Miles in anything else, so I can't tell if her flawless depiction of a whiny California bubblehead is comic brilliance or simply doin’ what comes natur’lly. But either way, I treasure every moment she's onscreen.

Interviews with the director and DVD commentary by Celeste Yarnall affirm that Miles, a former teen model who'd achieved a level of success on TV, was "difficult" during the filming. The most startling disclosure of all is that she actually had her acting coach (!?) on set and consulted with them frequently

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Movies being what they were, Hollywood being what it is, and heterosexual men being what they are, the whole Lesbian Vampire Craze was but a ‘70s pop-culture mashup of age-old sex and violence tropes customized for the Sexual Revolution and the Women’s Movement. Facing criticism for their violent victimization of women and routine depiction of them as passive targets of male aggression, horror films hoped to make amends by turning the tables and reassigning the strong-but-sexy femme fatale paradigm of film noir to the vampire genre. In this context the woman is allowed to both propel the plot and be an agent of violent action while still pandering to the conventional male perception that women possessing such qualities (strength, aggression, self-preservation) are essentially dangerous, to be feared, and not actually "real" women.  

The lesbian vampires in these films were seldom (if ever) really lesbian, rather, they were the usual projected male fantasy: women of such voracious sexual appetite that they are drawn to both sexes equally. If a female preference was shown by the vampire, it was invariably conveyed in ways which reinforced butch/fem - dominant/passive stereotypes.

But this was the '70s, and during the era of the buddy-picture, the anti-hero, and all the many male-centric movie trends of the time; the image of woman as self-directed predator was not only a refreshing change of pace, but this female-centric angle brought about the welcome introduction of the heroine who is capable of saving herself, or, better still, rescuing the hero.

The Velvet Vampire largely plays by the genre rules, but from its haunting and surreal dream sequences to its subtle feminist self-awareness, it remains a very watchable film that uses the feminine gaze to play fast and loose with what we've come to expect from a horror movie.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS

It wasn’t until I was in film school and saw F. W. Murnau’s brilliant Nosferatu (1922) that my antipathy towards vampire movies underwent a change. That was about 1976. I became a full-fledged convert when I saw Werner Herzog’s mesmerizing remake of Nosferatu in 1979. Since then I’ve come to appreciate vampire movies for their atmosphere and sensual mystery. I no longer felt they had to be "scary" in order to be effective.

Murnau's and Herzog's films inspired me to better appreciate was the nightmarish, melancholy side of what a vampire curse suggested. To be doomed to an eternity of unappeasable longing (for blood and for love, as vampires are often linked to some kind of romantic yearning) is to forever be forced to confront and live with the loss of hope. It’s a dreadful fate to contemplate, but one so humanly compelling that vampire films that even tangentially address this issue (The Hunger- 1983 and The Addiction -1995, come to mind) tend to become favorites.

In order to meet the more sensational requirements of the exploitation genre, Rothman's screenplay (co-written with Maurice Charles and her husband Charles S. Swartz) had minimal opportunity to address the side of the story relating to Diane's loneliness and bereaved longing for her (very, very) late husband

The Velvet Vampire is not on par with either of the above-mentioned films by any reasonable aesthetic comparison, but in terms of the capturing a feminine perspective and breathing new life (there’s that word again) into the vampire mythos, I’d say Stephanie Rothman’s film is a more than worthy member of the genre sisterhood.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT 1972

"Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, 

and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke!"

                                                                                                   -Alexander Portnoy

The sexual revolution, at least as far as its depiction in motion pictures, caught American culture with its existential pants down. Nothing in our country’s repressed, Puritan past was designed to support the normalizing of human sexual desire, nor encourage its free expression as a thing of joy and beauty. Advancements in science may have given us “The Pill,” evolving social mores gave rise to Women’s Liberation, and the ‘60s Youth Movement challenged traditional codes of sexual conduct; but these progressive winds of change were no match for the profound, overarching influence of the moral dogma of organized religion.

The paradox of American culture has always been that while we are a peculiarly sex-obsessed nation, we nevertheless hold deeply-rooted, firmly-ingrained mindsets conjoining sex with sin, fun with shame, and feeling good with being bad. Currently, shamelessness is holding firm as America's defining social characteristic, but for the longest time, the country's most thriving industry and chief export has been guilt.  

Catholic Guilt: Fear that you're disappointing God
Jewish Guilt: Fear that you're disappointing your mother

When Hollywood jumped on the sexual revolution bandwagon, it did so with predictable results. It embraced the movement’s most marketable, superficial characteristics (nudity, profanity, sexual explicitness) while failing to adopt its corresponding philosophy of self-acceptance and self-love. Thus, in a surprisingly brief span of time, we were treated to a rash of hip, youth-oriented films cloaked in the timeliness of the “new permissiveness,” yet possessed of the age-old “no sex without guilt-induced moral compensation and/or punishment” mindset.

By way of example: during the early bloom of the sexual revolution, and later, during its waning days, two major movie studios released controversial, big-budget, high-profile films dealing with sexual liberation vis a vis the dilemma of religious guilt; the first (ostensibly) comedic, the second, tragic. In 1972 Warner Bros. released Portnoy’s Complaint, a curiously humorless comedy examining male compulsive sexuality through the prism of Jewish Guilt. In 1977 Paramount released Looking for Mr. Goodbar, an unrelentingly grim look at female compulsive sexuality through the prism of Catholic guilt.

Two films very different in tone, yet uniquely similar in reflecting our society’s insistence on using religion as a tool to punish ourselves for our natural, healthy interest in sex. A dilemma about which a Mr. Alexander Portnoy would like to lodge a complaint.

Richard Benjamin as Alexander Portnoy

Karen Black as Mary Jane "The Monkey" Reid

Lee Grant as Sophie Portnoy

Jill Clayburgh as Naomi

Jeannie Berlin as Rita "Bubbles" Girardi

Alex Portnoy’s diagnosed complaint, briefly stated, is that at age 33, he finds it near-impossible to reconcile his intellect and strong social conscience (he’s a NYC lawyer who works to help the poor) with his compulsive preoccupation with sex…the more perverse, the better. Worse, it’s a libidinous obsession from which he derives virtually no pleasure due to overpowering feelings of guilt and the certainty that, in the end, he is bound to be punished for his impure thoughts and deeds. Faulting his early home environment as the source of his “What’s so bad about feeling good?” anxieties, adolescent Alex resorted to obsessive masturbation and erotic fantasy as a means of coping with his controlling, suffocating mother (who wanted him to be the Perfect Son), and his fault-finding, perpetually constipated dad (who wanted him to be the Perfect Jew).

“Doctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wang was all I really had to call my own!” 

D.P. Barnes as Alex's silent analyst, Dr. Spielvogel

When Alex meets Mary Jane Reid, an equally oversexed fashion model who earned the nickname the Monkey after inventing a unique sexual position (the details of which we’re mercifully spared), he thinks he has at last found the shikse girl of his pornographic dreams. But alas, their relationship reaches an impasse upon the realization that, outside of the bedroom, it’s their spiritual fetishes that cause all the problems. Mary Jane nicknames Alexander "Breaky"...in reference to his being her breakthrough boyfriend. You see, Mary Jane, who suffers from low self-esteem, is looking for a man of intelligence and refinement to rescue and reshape her; in essence, treat her like an ongoing renovation project. Meanwhile, Portnoy is merely looking for a woman self-loathing enough to be his enthusiastic partner in self-degradation.

Alex reacts to Mary Jane moving her lips as she reads

On the printed page of Philip Roth’s controversial 1969 bestseller (written as a monologue relayed by Alexander to his analyst), Portnoy and his attendant complaint played like the impudent heterosexual answer to the homosexual audacity of Gore Vidal’s 1968 bestseller Myra Breckinridge. Both novels used satire to assault late-60s sexual sensibilities, their sacred prose justifying their profane subject matter. On the screen, however, their respective film adaptations suffered considerably in translation. Chided for being made by directors apparently selected for their ability to completely misinterpret the original texts, both films were resounding bombs at the box office, but for polar-opposite reasons: the X-rated Myra Breckinridge was considered too vulgar; the R-rated Portnoy’s Complaint was criticized for not being vulgar enough.

While the whole “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” stuff surrounding Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film of Nabokov's novel was before my time (Oh, I was around,  just too young to remember it); I fully recall the hubbub surrounding the unlikelihood that anyone could make a movie of Portnoy’s Complaint. When the film was released (perhaps a year too late in terms of public interest), fans of Roth’s novel, likely anticipating something combining the comic coarseness of Mel Brooks with the satirical wit of Woody Allen, were shocked to discover that one of the most talked-about books in American literature had been neutered and watered-down to such a degree that it resembled nothing more daring than a particularly smutty episode of Love, American Style. A coy, almost circumspect R-rated adaptation devoid of nudity, unless you count 33-year-old Richard Benjamin’s prominent man-boobs.

I'm not sure any recreation of the novel's notorious scene where Alex masturbates to his sister's brassiere would ever work, but having 33-year-old Richard Benjamin play the teenage Portnoy kills the comedy and replaces it with cringe-creepy 

Critics lambasting the film found blame easy to affix, for acclaimed screenwriter Ernest Lehman (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, North by Northwest, Hello Dolly!, The Sound of Music, Sabrina) pretty much did everything: he served as producer, writer, AND director (his debut/swansong).

With Benjamin playing himself as a teen, it was necessary for other disconcertingly "mature" actors to be cast as his boyhood chums. Here we see horny Mandel (Lewis Stadlen) and lascivious Smolka (Kevin Conway) check out neighborhood "fast girl" Bubbles Girardi. 

The talented Jeannie Berlin somehow manages to escape her thankless bit role as Bubbles Girardi with her dignity intact. Berlin, who previously appeared in The Baby Maker, is the daughter of Elaine May, who for a time was up for the role of Sophie Portnoy.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

While my adolescent moviegoing memories are peppered with age-inappropriate films I was granted access to thanks to the lax enforcement of the motion picture code at my neighborhood theater, Portnoy's Complaint doesn't number among them.

I was able to get away with seeing X-rated 1969 releases like Midnight Cowboy and Last Summer largely due to my recently-divorced mom’s busy work schedule (she welcomed any opportunity to get my sisters and me out from underfoot), and my ability to convince her that not only was I mature beyond my years, but that these films were Oscar-caliber important works of cinema art. Alas, by 1972 my mom had remarried, so along with having another individual policing my comings and goings, I also had a mom who had more time to read.

Thus, as was the case with the equally-forbidden Myra Breckinridge, my mom having read Portnoy’s Complaint guaranteed that there was no way in hell she was going to allow me to see it. I was in no position to press the point, lest they catch on that for at least a year (I was 14 at the time) I’d been sneaking their hardback copy of Roth’s jaw-dropping book to the bathroom for “inspiration.”

When I finally saw Portnoy’s Complaint at a Los Angeles revival theater sometime in the 1980s, I was pleasantly surprised to find the film to be far better than its reputation had led me to believe. Granted, it fails to capture the tone of Philip Roth’s book almost completely, so on that score, I’d call the film an unqualified misfire. But seeing it so many years after all the smoke of controversy had cleared; long after the typecasting redundancy of Richard Benjamin and Karen Black had faded from memory (both were playing roles to which each practically held the patents during the ‘70s), I for one was extremely grateful for Ernest Lehman’s reserved approach to the material.

I don't know if it's a case of Richard Benjamin being far too old or Lee Grant
being far too young, but this mother and son look more like husband and wife

There aren’t many of Portnoy’s exploits I’d have the stomach to see rendered in widescreen color and enacted by Richard Benjamin, so the fact that Lehman resorts to so many modesty-concealing devices in a film almost entirely about sex may seem hypocritical, but it’s perfectly fine with me. What’s less easy to take is its depiction of women (seen from Portnoy’s gynophobic perspective, they’re either objects or grotesques), and its leaden humorlessness. Claims of anti-Semitism aside, the biggest crime committed to Roth’s novel is that Lehman, while maintaining much of the book's dialogue, somehow had the laughs surgically removed. Were not for Lee Grant’s amusing take on the Jewish mother stereotype, Portnoy’s Complaint would be an entirely laugh-free affair for me.

Portnoy’s Complaint is not perfect by a longshot, but the minute Karen Black appears (at the 38-minute point) it morphs, right in front of my eyes, into a movie worth watching. All at once, Portnoy’s Complaint stops feeling like a broadly-played TV sitcom thanks to Black's ability to find the humanity in a character written as the punchline to a Playboy magazine dirty joke. Suddenly, in exploring Alex’s relationship with Mary Jane, the film feels at last like it has something to say about the crippling effect of selfish love (the infantilizing Jewish mother) and the dehumanizing side of the sexual revolution (the empty pursuit of physical pleasure as a substitute for emotional intimacy). Lehman’s Portnoy’s Complaint is not Philip Roth’s (you can tell from the lush, jarringly incongruous Michel Legrand score), but it’s Lehman’s sincere attempt to tell an Inability To Love Story.

Unkind critics were quick to point out that after Goodbye, Columbus (1969) Richard Benjamin had made a career out of being a Philip Roth surrogate. Similarly, it was not lost on many that after garnering an Oscar-nomination for Five Easy Pieces (1970), Karen Black never met a trollop role she didn't like.

PERFORMANCES

Not many people associated with the making of Portnoy’s Complaint look back on the film with fond memories. Ernest Lehman has said he was disappointed in the outcome, and Lee Grant in her memoir I Said Yes to Everything not only recalls the occasion of having to throw Lehman off his own set for acting like a tyrant (Grant, who became an award-winning director soon after, took over the directing chores of her hospital scene that day), but remembers how seeing the final result made her “...shrink back in horror. It was not a good reflection of Jewish Family Life.” 

The Portnoys
Lee Grant and Jack Somack as Alex's overdramatizing parents.
Grant was only 13 years older than Richard Benjamin 

Grant’s "I said yes to everything" philosophy—born of having spent 12 unemployed years on Hollywood’s McCarthy era blacklist—may account for her appearance in the film, but she really has nothing to be ashamed of. Scenes written as broad as a barn are salvaged by the anxious energy behind Grant’s delivery and timing. Her Sophie Portnoy may be a hysterical neurotic whose clinging over-concern emotionally scars her son for life, but she’s never a monster. Besides, her behavior, as we learned from the immortal words of Belle Rosen (The Poseidon Adventure) “Comes from caring.” 

Paul Mazursky's Next Stop Greenwich Village (1976) is a good example of how to affectionately depict Jewish family life. Roger Ebert thought Shelley Winters would have made a great Sophie Portnoy, and seeing her here with the late Lenny Baker it's not hard to imagine what a marvelous Alexander Portnoy he would have made.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

To read Portnoy’s Complaint is to realize the significant role imagination and ingenuity must have played for sexually curious adolescents raised before the days of Playboy, television, and mass-market porn. When I watch the film adaptation, I’m reminded of the degree to which sex and sexuality were the predominant cultural templates of adulthood when I was growing up. The ‘70s were so flooded with pop-culture references to the new sexuality that a defining trait of my adolescence was a race to grow up due to the nagging sense that I was missing out on something.

I read Portnoy’s Complaint (in installments, see above) at an age when I was far too young to know what it was really about. But Roth’s frank and explicit descriptions of adolescent sexual desire and self-experimentation were so true and on-point, it crossed gender, ethnic, and sexuality lines. It was hard to read that book without feeling in some ways embarrassed—if not exposed—that ANYONE else entertained (let alone wrote down) obscene scenarios and vulgar imaginings of the sort I’d barely acknowledged to myself.

"You're nothing but a self-hating Jew!"
"They're the best kind in bed."
Alex's sole encounter with a Jewish woman (a fake-tan Jill Clayburgh with a really bad Israeli accent) finds him confronted with the unavoidable fact that unless he can sexualize and objectify them, he has absolutely no idea how to relate to women.

In re-reading the novel before writing this essay, what strikes me now, some 46 after my first encounter with Portnoy and his neurotic concerns, is that the single most shocking thing about Portnoy’s Complaint is not its language or the particulars of the activities described: it's the honesty. It’s Philip Roth speaking about the reality of life (his life, anyway) without concern for decency, religious propriety, respectability politics, or perpetuating the lie of pornography that airbrushes away the unpleasant details in order to sell us the consumer-ready result.

As someone raised Catholic, I relate to Portnoy’s struggles with his Jewish identity. I relate to the guilt, the issues of religious contradictions, the "good boy" syndrome, and the attempt to breach the dichotomy on matters relating to sex and sexuality. It’s also clearer to me now that there was a method to Roth’s madness. The much-discussed language and snickered-about “dirty stuff” weren’t for sensation, it was an assault on sexual hypocrisy. It’s what many people today fail to grasp about revolution and resistance: in order to overthrow a dominant social order, you need honest assault and confrontation. There’s no room for civility. 

"Why is every little thing I do for pleasure in this life immediately illicit -
while the rest of the world rolls around laughing in the mud!"

During the film's final act, when Alex has a reckoning with himself and is banished to a life of impotence by The Judge (Alex's conflicted conscience voiced by John Carradine. And for the record, the same fate meted out to Jack Nicholson's equally floundering sexual basket-case in Carnal Knowledge), I have to admit that Richard Benjamin is exceptionally good, as is the writing (mainly belonging to Roth). The very real confusion over how to navigate one's way through the influences and injuries of one's past, why it hurts so much to be human, the sad inevitability of having to look at yourself in order to change...it has the ring of impassioned truth and it succeeds in being a very moving moment in a film with very few traces of recognizable humanity beyond Karen Black's performance.

It's too bad Portnoy's Complaint performed so poorly, for many missed out on one of my favorite Karen Black performances. Her Mary Jane Reid is a close cousin to the many vulnerable, not very bright women that made up Black's screen resume. But no matter how sketchily these characters were written, Black always found a way of making you care about what happens to them

Before it morphed into the commodified alienation of the singles bar scene dramatized in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the sexual revolution was (albeit briefly) a legitimate effort to wrest sex away from the chains of guilt and repression. A call to a newfound spiritual and physical freedoms presented a challenge for us to be moral beings in a world of moral relativity.

To live through the sexual revolution only to arrive at a time when the prepackaged, bullshit Disney-porn lie of something like E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey passes for sexual liberation, is to understand that the true legacy of Philip Roth’s novel is its brazenly honest look at the human condition, not its profane reputation.

The movie...not so much.

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Click on the link to see Philip Roth speaking briefly about the films made from his novels

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