NASHVILLE 1975

Nashville's unique title sequence recalls a popular style of 70s TV commercial for Greatest Hits record collections
70s K-Tel Record Commercial

A perhaps apocryphal story goes that Fox Television's insanely funny sitcom, Arrested Development was not more popular in the ratings and ultimately canceled because its rapid-fire jokes and almost subliminal sight-gags required viewers to actually pay attention. Whether true or not, it's a theory hard to dismiss when applied to the career of Robert Altman (a director a little over-represented on this blog, I know, but it's his fault, not mine. He was just too damned good). In a career as varied and immune to meeting expectations as Altman's, I don't think it's coincidence that his most straightforward, structurally conventional films—M*A*S*H, The Player, Popeye—have been his biggest hits, while his most intriguingly imaginative works have been critic's darlings but largely ignored by the populace at large.

Altman's fondness for multiple storylines, character-based films with large ensemble casts and overlapping dialogue just demanded a level of audience engagement that was rapidly going out of style with American moviegoers. (2001's Gosford Park, which fit the above criteria, was a huge success for Altman. An occurrence attributable to the fact that by then the 76-year-old director and his trademark style had grown as cozily familiar and commodified as Hitchcock's.) 

In 1975, American movie audiences - smarting from Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, and the Vietnam War - showed its first signs of wearying of Hollywood's "auteur" era and its films which strove to straddle the broad chasm of commercial and art. It took the blockbuster success of Jaws (released the same summer as Nashville) to unceremoniously put an end to America's brief love affair with "difficult" films that challenged and/or affronted; and audiences, speaking with their boxoffice dollars, made it known that they were in the mood to be reassured and comforted at the movies again. Whether it be with imaginative retreads of familiar genres of the past (Star Wars, Rocky) or remakes of past successes (A Star is Born, King Kong), America was just sick and tired of being asked to think and pay close attention at the movies all the time.

Ronee Blakley as Barbara Jean

Henry Gibson as Haven Hamilton

Lily Tomlin as Linnea Reese

Keith Carradine as Tom Frank

Karen Black as Connie White

Nashville, Robert Altman's kaleidoscopic vision of America as reflected through the interconnected stories of 24 characters over the course of 5 days in America's country music capital, was filmed in 1974, the year Richard Nixon resigned from the Presidency; and was released in 1975, one year before the U.S. Bicentennial—which also happened to be an election year.  

With one foot planted in an era of scandal and disillusionment, and the other poised on what could be the threshold of a renewed optimism and nationalistic stock-taking; Nashville (unquestionably one of the most timely films ever made) rather ambitiously set about giving the country an eyeful of itself. No one was expecting a red, white, & blue love letter from cinema's most acerbically cynical liberal, but Nashville's equating of politics with the phony, image-conscious flimflammery of show biz (the familist, piety-spouting, grassroots show biz of country music, at that) was a cautionary "Not so fast, America" hand raised to the nation's looming steamroller of ego-bolstering, rah-rah, Bicentennial back-slapping.

A constant visual and aural presence throughout Nashville is the campaign for fictional Presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker

The traffic jam that opens the film and the political rally that closes it are the only sequences that gather all the main characters of the film together in one site.

BBC journalist, Opal (Geraldine Chaplin)- " I need something like this for my documentary! I need it!
It's so...American! Those cars smashing into each other and all those mangled corpses...!"

In 1975, Opal's glaring incompetence and unsuitability for journalism was obvious. Today, she would probably be a member of a Los Angeles morning TV news broadcast, or a top reporter for TMZ.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Nashville may not be THE view of America, but it's most certainly A view of America, and like it or not, it's a vision that proves itself more prescient and relevant with each passing year. The first and best of Altman's films to use the multiple-plot format he would later employ in A Wedding, H.E.A.L.T.H., Short Cuts, Pret-a-Porter, and Gosford Park, Nashville is staggering in its deft handling of the myriad shifts in tone and changes in focus required of this genre. I can't think of another director capable of balancing such disparate elements in a free-flow mélange of comedy, drama, tragedy, and social satire.

Some of the more affecting story threads:

The monumentally untalented Suleen Gay (Gwen Welles) would most certainly be a contestant on "Nashville Star" or "American Idol" today. In an early draft of the Nashville screenplay, it was Suleen who would die at the end of the film (suicide).

Linnea (Tomlin in her Oscar-nominated film debut), the only Caucasian in an African-American gospel choir, sharing a family moment with her husband Delbert (Ned Beatty) and their two deaf children (Donna Denton and James Dan Calvert).

Runaway bride Albuquerque (Barbara Harris) and loner Kenny (David Hayward) commiserate on the road.

PERFORMANCES

Of all the terrific performances in Nashville, Karen Black as Country Western queen (and Barbara Jean rival) Connie White is my favorite. The goody-goody, over-coiffed prom queen look of so many country stars of the era —and typical of every female performer on The Lawrence Welk Show— has always seemed too calculatedly homespun to me, so I love that screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury envisions Connie White... all cotton candy hair and sweet as sugar smiles...as a steely, professional phony with a rapier-sharp competitive streak. Although her role is one of the briefest, the ever-resourceful Karen Black does some wonderful things with the smallest moments. She's hilarious but never less than spot-on authentic in every move she makes (check out how she avoids acknowledging the gift Barbara Jean's husband tries to give her). Watching her is like taking an actor's master class in bringing a character to life.

Connie White sizes up visiting movie star, Julie Christie (playing herself).
Connie, disbelieving Haven's assertion that Christie's actually a famous Oscar-winning star-  "She can't even comb her hair!"  A characteristically bitchy Connie White remark improvised by Karen Black

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The music in Nashville is so good and plentiful that it's a pity a full, complete soundtrack album has never been released. You don't have to be a fan of country music to enjoy the witty and sometimes surprisingly beautiful songs that play wall-to-wall throughout the film (many of which were composed and performed by the film's cast). In fact, so much of country music seems knowingly self-parodying that it's hard to tell the songs that are gently poking fun at the genre (like the self-serving moralizing of Haven Hamilton's "For the Sake of the Children") from the ones that sound like they could be the genuine article (Barbara Jean's rousing [but technologically dated] "Tapedeck in his Tractor").

Troubled married duo, Mary (Cristina Raines) and Bill (Allan Nicholls) perform "Since You've Gone." a superb song composed by actor Gary Busey that never made it onto the Nashville soundtrack album.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
When it comes to a film like Nashville, there can never be too much of a good thing. I can barely stand to dwell on the fact that some 16 hours of footage was originally shot and whittled down to 159 minutes. My only hope is that some company will make good on the long-promised DVD that will feature deleted scenes and omitted songs.

Opal, the easily distracted BBC journalist.
In a filmed sequence that didn't make it into the final cut, it was revealed that Opal is a fraud and was only posing as a journalist.

What I find fascinating about Nashville is that no matter to what degree the passage of time dates the fashions, furnishings, cars, and music, everything else about the film is disconcertingly up-to-date and of the moment.

I think it speaks well of the brilliance of everyone's work involved that you can extract any single character or situation and find a contemporary correlative. When I look at Nashville, it surprises me how much Altman's intimate style and respect for what is extraordinary in the ordinary person, anticipates today's fascination with reality TV. Similarly, the lure of pop stardom (Sueleen and Albuquerque) and the very American desire to re-invent oneself (Shelley Duvall's airheaded changeling, L.A. Joan, nee Martha) find their modern parallel in image-based celebrities like Lady Gaga and assembly-line superstar factories like "American Idol."

Without question, the most dispiriting evidence of Nashville's ahead-of-its-time/up-to-the-minute grasp of cultural zeitgeist is in its foreshadowing of an era where the line between celebrity and politics becomes inextricably blurred.  A time when the senselessness of assassination (a heinous but somehow socially assimilated atrocity due to its exclusive connection to political, religious, or ideological motives) spills over to include any public figure (John Lennon, tragically) so long as it serves to propel the assassin to worldwide notoriety. As we keep learning from TV and the Internet, each of us Americans has a God-given right to be famous. At any cost.

Haven- "This isn't Dallas! This is Nashville!"
As the political rally erupts in tragic violence, a wounded Haven Hamilton loses his toupee and his composure.

Nashville is a movie held in very high regard, yet it's one of those classic films that rarely airs on television. Which is odd, seeing how Altman's layered use of sound is tailor-made for today's advanced sound systems, and his eye for detail and full, busy frame compositions are perfect for all those super-sized  HDTVs. I sure would hate to think that this great film is so seldom screened because it just demands too much of our attention.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

I got these autographs from Tim (Keith Carradine) and Mary (Cristina Raines) back in 1979 when I was working at a Honda dealership in Los Angeles (hence the grease-stained paper given to Raines).

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011

XANADU 1980

8/8/80. These cryptic numbers jumped out at me from posters, billboards, and newspaper ads all over Los Angeles during the summer of 1980. Was it apocalypse? Armageddon? Well, yes and no. The numbers represented August 8th,1980: the theatrical release date of the roller disco movie musical, Xanadu.  

The tale of a legwarmer wearin', sundress rockin', rollerskatin', glow-in-the-dark muse (the heavenly Olivia Newton-John) who comes to earth to inspire a disillusioned artist (the uncomfortable-appearing Michael Beck) and retired bandleader (the ever-charming Gene Kelly) realize their dream of opening a roller rink/disco/nightclub; Xanadu is like nothing I've seen before or since. It's a law unto itself.  

The cast of Xanadu recreates the reaction of the nation's film critics in the summer of 1980

Widely panned on its release, the detonated bomb that was Xanadu had a catastrophic effect on the screen careers of its promising young stars, temporarily decimated the musical legitimacy of its composers, and single-handedly lay waste the roller-disco fad; all in one fell swoop. Yet, like a phoenix rising from the ashes (or a zombie that refuses to die even after you've fired a bullet into its brain), Xanadu has gone on to become a genuine camp/cult classic and is perhaps the most beloved bad film since Valley of the Dolls (which, by the law of averages, really should have been turned into a stage musical by now).

Olivia Newton-John is Kira

Gene Kelly is Danny McGuire

Michael Beck is Sonny Malone

Given the lengths to which the film's participants and Universal Studios have gone to distance themselves from it over the years, many would be surprised to learn that back in 1980, Xanadu was released with the kind of massive advertising blitzkrieg usually only afforded sci-fi & action films. Ostensively poised as the next Grease (a film I absolutely loathed that surprised everybody by becoming the largest grossing film of 1978), Xanadu was almost obnoxiously ubiquitous.  

Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

On the contrary, the glut of TV specials, radio promos, magazine articles, comic books, merchandising tie-ins, and cross-promotions mirrored my own excitement when I learned that my favorite rock group of all time (The Electric Light Orchestra—the preferred band of all the stoners at my high school) would actually be collaborating with Little Miss "Have You Never Been Mellow", Olivia Newton-John (arguably the most white-bread singer on the charts next to Debbie Boone).

This was before the days of pop stars changing their images with each new album release, so the prospect of the new-and-improved, 1979 model ONJ of "Totally Hot" (the terrific album that prompted a music critic to cite: "The tight pants Olivia wore at the end of Grease must have gone to her head") cutting loose in an original movie musical scored by a band known for its deliriously theatrical bombast, had me thinking that Xanadu had the potential to be another cinematic mind-blower like Ken Russell's film of The Who's Tommy. To say I was stoked to see Xanadu is a monumental understatement. I was so excited I practically gave myself a nosebleed.

Starry Eyed
One of the things I liked most about Xanadu was its sweetly optimistic vision of the 80s as a multi-generational, cross-cultural utopia where differences are accepted and originality encouraged. Lady Gaga would be proud.

I saw Xanadu on opening night at Mann's Chinese Theater with an audience that apparently hadn't read the reviews telling them that they weren't supposed to be having a good time. The theater was packed and the air was full of the excitement of attending an event. Every musical number was met with thunderous applause, catcalls and whistles greeted various names during the closing credit crawl, and (probably for the first and last time) only the intentional humor got laughs. 

As for me, I had passed through the looking glass somewhere around the time Gene Kelly, age 67, danced on an oversized pinball machine, displaying a beatific smile and the same effortless grace of that young man who made his screen debut in For Me & My Gal (1942).

I don't know what hit me (perhaps I was kissed by a muse myself), but I left the theater that night a different person from the one I was when I went in.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It's ironic that the dominant design motif in a movie as unwieldy as Xanadu is the sleekly economic elegance of Streamline Moderne. Real and studio-enhanced examples of Streamline Moderne architecture appear throughout Xanadu, as befitting the film's blending of music and design styles from the 40s and 80s.

Both critics and audiences were at a loss to figure out what Sonny Malone's dream of being a serious artist had to do with the opening of a roller-disco nightclub. The script drops the ball in making this clear, but close inspection of the film reveals that Sonny's artistic dreams come imaginatively true in his designs for Xanadu.

The model of the Hollywood Bowl "Muse" fountain in Sonny's apartment...

...becomes a fountain for real-life muse, Kira, to dance in front of in the realized Xanadu of Sonny's dream

One of Sonny's earlier discarded sketches (top) is realized as a modernist Greek column (behind Beck in the photo above) in his final design for Xanadu.

The Streamline Moderne appliances in Sonny's apartment (top) find whimsical expression in Xanadu's metallic chairs (center) and the oversized waffle-iron stage that Ms. Newton-John is perched on above.

PERFORMANCES
Save for Gene Kelly's, there are no performances to speak of in Xanadu, so I'd rather not waste space by bashing the leads. There are plenty of sites online for that. What I would like to address is the matter of onscreen chemistry (or the lack of it) which provides Xanadu with many of its unintentional laughs and much of its homoerotic subtext. First off, not since Can't Stop the Music has a film worked so strenuously to establish the heterosexuality of its hero.

Perhaps the filmmakers thought Kira's neutered sexuality (until the smoking-hot finale where she sings something like 28 songs in succession) and Sonny's penchant for tight jeans and skimpy shorts, made Xanadu even gayer than it already was (not possible really, but let's go with that); so within the film's first half-hour, we have every third line of dialog reminding us that Sonny is a babe-magnet who's irresistible to women. Friends offer to fix him up, women flirt outrageously, and for the really slow-witted, an annoying co-worker (just the sort who would be the first to be killed off were this a horror film...which it kinda is) just comes out and flatly makes a comment to that fact. Later, when Sonny meets up with a buddy whose van he painted, the friend is given insipid post-dubbed dialogue relating to the sexual allure of mini-van murals --Hey, and the chicks love it!"-- calculated to dispel all viewer suspicion that muscular guys in short shorts roller skating along the Venice boardwalk are anything but skirt-chasing, sexually hyperactive heteros. 

Real Men Roller Skate

What throws a monkey-wrench into all this over-emphatic machismo is the fact that Beck and Newton-John exhibit zero screen chemistry, while Beck's scenes with Gene Kelly fairly crackle with magnetism and unintentional sexual innuendo. While everybody was making sure that every female in the cast was hailing Sonny Malone as some kind of roller-skating Super Fly, someone failed to notice that they gave Gene Kelly too many lines that make him sound like a genial sugar-daddy on the make. As Beck and Kelly develop an across-the-generations friendship, Kelly has one line after another where he's comparing business partnerships to marriage or sex. And wouldn't you know it, Michael Beck and Gene Kelly have an easier, more natural screen rapport than Beck has with his fluorescently glowing love interest.

Sonny and Danny, moments before yet another ill-timed interruption from Kira

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

It's no accident that Xanadu's soundtrack album took on a life independent of the failure of the film. The music by John Farrar and Jeff Lynne is some of the best ever composed for a musical. "All Over The World" is a lasting favorite (it always makes me feel happy inside) and the much-anticipated (by me) teaming of ONJ and ELO on the song "Xanadu" makes for one of the best pop singles to come out of the 80s. The unique musical qualities of each artist seem to bring out the best in both. ELO's soaring, overreaching orchestrations have always cried out for a voice as ethereally sensual as Olivia's, and Lynne manages to get her to shed some of the saccharine from her voice to deliver a solidly virtuoso pop performance. Nobody could maneuver the rhythmical twist and turns of this elaborately arranged piece the way Olivia Newton-John does. I think it's the best vocal performance of her career.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

August 8, 1980, is a date that has more significance for me than the release of a lovably awful musical that nevertheless captured my heart and imagination back when I was a young student filmmaker hoping to break into the movie business.

8/8/80 represents the day I decided I was going to become a dancer.

A revelatory decision made all the more astounding when taking into account that, after studying film for nearly 4 years and being exposed to some of the greatest cinematic works ever created, the motion picture that inspired me to change the course of my life at age 22 was none other than that much-maligned muse of a musical, Xanadu. (This should give hope to producers of flops the world over.)  Maybe it was the music, the choreography, the visual style, or maybe the film's theme about the importance of following your dreams...who knows? It makes me ask myself: is the emotional experience of seeing a "good" film more valid than the emotional experience drawn from seeing a "bad" one, and should it matter so long as they make us feel something? Whatever the reasons, I left the theater that night convinced that there couldn't be a life more blissful or fulfilling than a life spent dancing.

The dancers beckoned, and I said YES!

Briefly summarized, I wound up quitting film school and threw myself into several intense years of dance training. Never looking back, nor regretting the decision, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I have been a professional dancer for over 25 years now and I'm happy to say that it has far exceeded my expectations of what I thought it could bring to my life. I never before believed that dreams could come true like they did in the movies. And like it or not... Xanadu is the film I have to thank for it all. Although I must confess that I wasn't as happy about that fact as I am now. Until about the year 2000, it really wasn't "cool" to say you liked Xanadu. Whenever anyone would ask me about the Xanadu license plates on my car, I would lie and say it was in reference to Citizen Kane. Such disloyalty!

I'm in my 50's now and still dancing. And I only hope that should I be lucky enough to make it to my 67th year, my heart contains even a glimmer of the joy that Gene Kelly's smile radiated in that pinball sequence that still knocks me for a loop after all these years. It's funny.. who'd ever guess that one of the worst films ever made would lead me to my very best life? Worst film ever made? Don't you believe it.

You Have To Believe We Are Magic

*Footnote: To coin the title of another Olivia Newton-John hit, in an odd "Twist of Fate," I was invited to appear and tell my story in the retrospective documentary "Going Back to Xanadu" included as a special feature on the 2008 Xanadu DVD release. Talk about full circle. Me on the DVD of the movie that changed my life, talking about how it changed my life! You can't tell me that a muse didn't have a hand in all this...Magic indeed!

I participated with Don Fields of the Xanadu Preservation Society in the "Xanadu" 40th Anniversary podcast via "Stuck in the '80s."

Xanadu's Impact on My Life

Hollywood Bowl Muse Statues

The Pan Pacific Auditorium

Further Proof of Xanadu's Lasting Impact on My Life

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2013

ANDY WARHOL'S BAD 1977

Back in my dating days, I had what I call my "Taste Test Films" (two such films, in fact: Robert Altman's 3 Women and Andy Warhol's BAD). These are films for which my appreciation is so intensely personal and self-defining that I used them as a gauge in determining the compatibility of my tastes with those of potential partners I felt I might be getting serious about. Both films are so completely my aesthetic, humor, and world view, I reasoned that if someone didn't "get" these movies and their appeal to me, they likely wouldn't "get" or understand me, either. Similarly, if you were the kind of guy who appreciated the idiosyncratic allure of these films (spanning the rather broad spectrum between acute human empathy to outrageous, misanthropic black comedy), it was a pretty safe bet that you'd be my kind of fella.

3 Women is such a thoughtful, intriguing film that most anyone I was interested in was likely to find something to like in it, but Andy Warhol's BAD (directed by Jed Johnson, but a delirious mash-up of those camp/trash geniuses, John Waters and Paul Morrissey) was definitely the litmus test.

Carroll Baker as Hazel Aiken

Perry King as L.T.

Susan Tyrrell as Mary Aiken

Charles McGregor as Detective Hughes

Bridgid Polk as Estelle

Hard-as-nails Queens housewife Hazel Aiken (a perpetually pissed-off Carroll Baker) operates an electrolysis business ("Six-Hundred and Fifty hairs an hour!") out of the home she shares with her ailing mother; ineffectual, unemployed husband; and whiny daughter-in-law (Susan Tyrrell) and grandson. To make ends meet and subsidize her cache of furs, jewelry, and perfumes, Hazel also runs a dial-up, all-girl hit squad. The dispassionate efficiency of her bloody all-female enterprise is compromised when circumstance necessitates the reluctant taking on of a slow-witted punk (Perry King).

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Strange as it may seem, Andy Warhol's BAD reminds me of a simpler, gentler time in America. Back when there was really such a thing as a "counter-culture"; back when movies designated as "underground" or "independent" actually were; and back when standards of morality and decency were observed by enough members of the population that they could be burlesqued in a film like this. Today we live in a country where ignorance is rewarded (thank you, Jersey Shore), bad behavior is commonplace (Arnold "The Sperminator" Schwarzenegger), and nobody denounces the hamburger for posing as steak (calling all Kardashians). Andy Warhol's BAD, once thought outrageously offensive enough to warrant an X-rating, is positively quaint and remarkably moral in comparison. You can't poke fun at tacky, suburban aspirations towards upper-class chic in a world that can't distinguish class from trash.

French Provincial Luxury- Hazel, enjoying the fruits of her labor

Viewing this film feels like having front-row seats to the end of an era. You just can't make a film like this anymore. When the lowbrow and sleazy becomes the cultural standard, there's nothing left to satirize. It used to be that you had to seek out underground films from Warhol or John Waters to enjoy comically amateurish performances and flat, monotone line readings. Now, you need look no further than the multimillion-dollar multiplex crowd-pleasers from Michael Bay and Vin Diesel. Andy Warhol's BAD tries very hard to be nasty and mean-spirited - the ever-present TV is forever spewing out bad news, people perform the most heinous atrocities without batting an eye - but the entire film is kinder and more humane than any 10 minutes of The Bachelor.

Hit-girls, Marsha (l.) and Glenda (r.) flank the misanthropic Estelle as she plots revenge on a neighbor.

Estelle: "I'm telling you, people stink. All they do is eat, fuck, and watch TV!"
Marsha: "I know. The more you smell, the more they stink."
Estelle: What's that supposed to mean?"

PERFORMANCES

To her credit, Carroll Baker held no illusions about Andy Warhol's BAD providing her with any kind of American film comeback (It was her first American film since leaving the country in 1965). Quoted as recently as June of 2011 on working on the film:

"It had nothing to do with film-making, it had nothing to do with any other experience I ever had. It was like working on the moon. But he (Warhol) wanted me, he cast me in it, I wanted to do it, and it was such a big hit in Europe."     Carroll Baker  New Journey Journal

Baker's level-headedness serves her well in Andy Warhol's BAD, for she creates in Hazel Aiken (the role was originally offered to America's Ethel Mertz, actress Vivian Vance) one of cinema's most memorably twisted villains. Devilishly deadpan in her single-minded belief that she is just doing what has to be done ("I like to help people!"), if Beaver Cleaver's mom was an avaricious sociopath, she'd be something like Hazel. A woman so lacking in decency she cheerily accepts calls in her kitchen for contract killings and views Polaroids of gruesome slayings as if they were vacation slides. The only remotely competent person amongst a menagerie of slackers and oddballs, Hazel's near-constant exasperation finds amusing subtext in Carroll Baker; an Academy Award-nominated, Method actress, working alongside Warhol's "actors"... many of whom sound as if they learned their lines phonetically.

(Substantiating my theory that big budgets sap the imagination of indie-filmmakers, John Waters, with a budget more than ten times that of Andy Warhol's BAD, mined similar material in 1994's Serial Mom, but it wasn't half as funny.)

Mary - "What kind of a grandmother are you? Having baby-killers in the house with a baby? She'd kill any baby!"
Hazel - (Indignant) "She would not! She only does what she's paid to do. You wouldn't pay her, so she wouldn't do it!"
Mary - "You're crazy! You're really not all there!"

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

All-girl hit squads were a camp/pulp staple of 70s exploitation flicks (and, my personal fave—the 1967 James Bond spoof, Casino Royale) but the women in Andy Warhol's BAD are something else again. These girls don't kill for kinky thrills, they seem to do it just because they're bored. Funniest by far are Marsha and Glenda (real-life sisters Maria & Geraldine Smith): the Laverne & Shirley of Murder Incorporated. Armed with thick New York accents and a canny sense of comic timing, their scenes are among the sharpest and off-the-chart hilarious in the film.

Dressed to Kill
Looking like models in a Laura Mars photoshoot, Marsha (brandishing the stiletto) and Glenda lie in wait for their next victim.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Andy Warhol's BAD is a darkly comedic satire on the banality of evil; a topic that's fascinated me since Rosemary's Baby (1968) posed the provocative notion that a harmless group of elderly New Yorkers could unleash the living Devil into the world. We movie fans find it reassuring when our monsters can be  easily identified—usually as crazily hateful maniacs and criminally unbalanced psychopaths. Perhaps that's because it's so unsettling in real-life to be offered evidence on a daily basis (most of which we prefer to ignore) that unspeakable evil is often perpetrated by the so-called "normal" members of our society.

Hazel Aiken's cockeyed ethical standards, which are played for absurdist laughs (a proud capitalist, she willingly kills man, woman, or child for a fee, but draws the line at vulgar language and keeping stolen property in her home), underline what is so scary about most truly evil people: they consider themselves to be the most normal of all.

All In A Day's Work
Amidst the trappings of middle-class domesticity, Hazel gets a call for another contract killing

Hazel, with all her pragmatic speeches about personal responsibility, work ethics, and doing what has to be done because nobody else will do it, reminds me a lot (too much, actually) of the fear-goading political candidates, flag-waving radio commentators, and defenders of family values who cloak themselves in "normalcy" to rationalize philosophies of hate.

The 1965 film The Loved One, which satirized the L.A. funeral industry, was promoted with the slogan "The motion picture with something to offend everyone!"  Twelve years later, Andy Warhol's BAD promoted itself with the New York Post review quote: "A picture with something to offend absolutely everybody." The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Hazel - "You're really sensitive, aren't you? Well, I can't afford the luxury to be sensitive because I have to do everything myself!"

I find it interesting to note that today, neither of these films, which had their battles with the censors and were met with much hand-wringing over the declining state of the world, is really very offensive at all. Indeed, in failing to in any way glamorize the lives and behaviors of its principals, Andy Warhol's BAD is, as I've indicated above, very moral in its view of the world. It presents the characters as the bottom-feeders they are, and even throws a bone of hope to the audience when the lunkhead, played so nicely by Perry King, reveals that as bad as he is, he isn't prepared to do anything for money. 

What's ironic are the number of safe, family-friendly entertainments of yesteryear (classic films, Warner Bros. cartoons, TV sitcoms) that, due to blithely accepted attitudes of sexism and racism, I consider to be blisteringly offensive today. (One example: an entire episode of the "feminist" 60s sitcom That Girl actually attempts to extract laughs from the far-from-hilarious plot point of a husband breaking the jaw of his loudmouth wife with an ashtray.)

Talk about the banality of evil.

"Looks aren't everything."

Oh, and for the record, both of my "Taste Test" films have been officially retired. I showed them to a fellow I was dating who not only loved them as I did, but, on a single viewing, opened my eyes to insights and jokes contained in both films that I had never seen before. Understandably, I couldn't let a guy like that go. That was 16 years ago going on 17, and we still get a kick out of re-watching these films together. Even after all these years, we can make each other laugh just by uttering the raging Estelle epithet: "O'Reilly O'Crapface."

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011