CARRIE 1976

Joan Rivers: "I wasn't invited to the prom. I invited the guy and I had to buy my own orchid. 

Carrie had a better time at her prom than I did." 

That Carrie can be referenced in the punchline of a joke without benefit of clarification is a testament to how deeply rooted in our cultural consciousness Brian De Palma’s 1976 film (vis à vis Stephen King’s 1974 novel) has become. Indeed, contrary to the circumstances of her character in the film (she’s such a non-entity at her school that the principal repeatedly misidentifies her as “Cassie”) and the teaser ads for the forthcoming sequel (You Will Know Her Name); I'd say that by now, everybody knows exactly who Carrie is.

Sissy Spacek as Carrie White

Piper Laurie as Margaret White

Betty Buckley as Miss Collins

Amy Irving as Sue Snell

William Katt as Tommy Ross

Nancy Allen as Chris Hargensen

John Travolta as Billy Nolan

I was just starting college the year Carrie was released and (cinema snob that I was) I really couldn't have been less interested in it. 1976 was an absolutely amazing year for movies, and the films that preoccupied my mind, my time, and my interest were the more high-profile releases: Taxi Driver, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Hitchcock’s Family Plot, Fellini’s Casanova, Marathon Man, Rocky, King Kong, A Star is Born, Polanski’s The Tenant, Network, The Last Tycoon, Burnt Offerings, Sparkle, Lipstick, Logan’s Run, Bertolucci’s 1900, Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and Bergman’s Face to Face. I hardly saw daylight the entire year!

And then there was the woefully under-hyped Carrie. Here we had a film by a director whose only other work I’d seen at the time -Phantom of the Paradise - I remembered primarily for Paul Williams' music, and whose sole marketable cast member, John Travolta, was a fledgling teen idol from the execrable sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (his whispery pop single, “Let Her In,” had turned the summer of ’76 radio-listening into an absolute nightmare for me). Everything about Carrie, from its no-name cast to its over-explicit poster art, gave me the impression it was strictly drive-in fare; a movie suitable for a double-bill with one of those low-budget releases from AIP or Crown International about Bigfoot or small-town redneck serial killers.

Eve was Weak
Margaret White's religious fanaticism adds an effectively ominous overlay of sin, sacrifice, and retribution to the story of an awkward teen and the coming-of-age awareness of her powers of telekinesis.

It was only through the persistent badgering of my best friend that I even came to see Carrie at all. My friend, a sci-fi / Dark Shadows buff, had already seen Carrie and used the excuse of wanting to see it again as an opportunity to call in his marker for the time I’d pestered him into attending a screening of Barbarella with me. As I took my seat in the packed San Francisco movie theater where Carrie was playing, I seethed with resentment over what I perceived as my friend extracting a particularly mean-spirited payback for what, the heinous crime of exposing him to the sight of a naked, zero-gravity Jane Fonda? However, some 98 minutes later I emerged from the theater, red-eyed (from crying- that Sissy Spacek really gets to me in this movie...even today) and overwhelmed. Wow! I had NOT been expecting that!

Macabre Martyrdom

Anticipating at best a run-of-the-mill horror movie, what I got was a surprisingly sensitive character drama that morphed into a kind of a nightmarish Grimm's fairy tale. A blood-splattered religious allegory of sin and redemption that's a near-poetic parable on the inability of a legacy of pain and cruelty to beget anything other than more pain and cruelty. Just out of high school myself (an all-boys Catholic School, but let’s face it, high school is high school) it felt more than a little cathartic to see a film that depicted everyday schoolyard torments with the graveness of Greek tragedy, meting out suitably catastrophic retribution to the guilty.

I was sold by Carrie’s first five minutes - the volleyball game and the gym shower, both of which established: a) the then-atypical horror film setting of a high school; b) the female-centric thrust of the story, wherein the concerns, agency, and motivations of the women in the film appeared essential to propelling the plot forward; and c) the obvious subjective perspective the film was going to take regarding Carrie herself. Carrie absolutely floored me. I saw it three more times that month, and it has since remained one of my all-time favorite movies. A motion picture I’d readily list among the best horror films ever made.

Brian De Palma is known for his employment of the literal split-screen, but Carrie is also full of sequences in which the natural framing of a shot encourages the audience to take note of the dual /conflicting experiences of the characters as they occupy the same space.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Given that adolescence was a living hell for the vast majority of us, there’s something conceptually ingenious about a horror film set in an American high school—a “house” as haunted by the ghosts of the tortured and tormented as the dungeon of any Gothic mansion. The hierarchy of school cliques and the day-to-day cruelties teens inflict upon one another seem to be perfect subjects for a meditation on the banality of evil; a concept explored in many of the films that have proved most influential in the horror genre (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

School Days, School Days

Carrie was made at a time when "bullying" was seen mainly as kids-just-being-kids behavior

Unlike Stephen King’s novel, which expands the scope of Carrie to include news and science investigations into what happened at the prom, De Palma’s film wisely maintains a much narrower subjective focus (few things happen outside of the scope of the high-schoolers), heightening our identification with and empathy for Carrie and her rather tragic existence. I’m reminded of a review of Carrie that made the insightful observation that it was so fitting for Carrie to have only destroyed her high school in the film (as opposed to half the town in the novel); because to an adolescent, high school IS the world to a teenager. I honestly think the intimate scale of De Palma's Carrie is what makes it work so well. Carrie's nightmare is merely every adolescent's anxieties (public humiliation, social ostracism, the desire to fit in) writ in blood.

Adolescent trauma meets Grand Guignol

PERFORMANCES

Defying accepted Hollywood logic that holds horror films don’t get Academy respect, the two (and only) Oscar nominations afforded Carrie were for the impossible-to-ignore performances of Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. Taking wildly divergent acting paths—Spacek playing her keyed-up naturalism off of Laurie’s idiosyncratic stylization—the actresses share a symbiotic chemistry in their scenes together which elevates Carrie far above what is usually considered possible in a horror film. (Never cut any slack to anyone who tries to get a poorly made horror film off the hook with the excuse, "Nobody goes to horror films for the acting. They just want to be scared!" - we horror fans are not often rewarded on that score, but solid performances in horror films contribute more to the "scare" than some directors seem to realize.)
Spacek's Carrie doesn't amp up the cliche acting signals that would indicate an outcast character. Instead, Carrie's awkwardness appears to emanate not out of any innate strangeness (she's actually better adjusted than most of her peers) but out of perhaps an overabundance of feelings she doesn't understand and lack of emotional outlets. Carrie's slowly developing telekinesis is a perfect metaphorical representation of what happens when emotions are repressed.

Born Into Sin

And Piper Laurie...what risks she takes! And she makes them work! Grounding her performance in a reality alien to normal behavior yet familiar and accessible to the deeply disturbed character she plays, Laurie inhabits this monster of a woman and finds a way of tapping into a kind of twisted truth. I wind up not only believing in this broadly-drawn woman, but recognizing her. Her religious fanaticism comes from a genuine source, and Piper Laurie's performance makes Mrs. White a truly terrifying character. One who makes you shudder even when her eccentricities are making you laugh (Ruth Gordon pulled off a similar miracle in Rosemary's Baby).

One of the great unsung performances in Carrie is that of Betty Buckley as the sympathetic gym teacher. De Palma must have really appreciated her incisive portrayal, because he always seems to leave the camera on her just long to capture the brief flickers of emotion that play across her face at the end of scenes where she's forced to be tougher than she'd like to be, or when she's saying something she hopes to be true, but doesn't really trust in.  Ironically or inevitably, depending on how you look at it, the sweet-natured Buckley assumed the role of Carrie's mother in the ill-fated 1988 Broadway musical of the film.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The trademark Brian De Palma bag of tricks: slow motion, swirling camera, split-screen, complex tracking shots, subjective sound, Bernard Herrmann-esque scores, Pino Donaggio's sensual music used as violence counterpoint, copious bloodletting--have never been put to as effective use as in Carrie. And no sequence in Carrie better illustrates the seamless blending of visual style with narrative theme than the bravura prom sequence. One of the most amazing bits of film as storytelling as you're likely ever to see.

Last Dance

A tour de force sequence that conveys tenderness, romance, joy, pathos, suspense, and terror in an uninterrupted flow that's close to operatic. Like my favorite scene from Hitchcock's The Birds --the Tides Restaurant bird attack--the climactic prom at Bates High School is a sequence that has retained every bit of its impact over the years. It's such a marvelously effective scene. It grabs me each and every time.  

Contemporary filmmakers (especially those enamored of the horror genre's tolerance of excess) who strive to blow us away with the spectacle of sadism or a reliance on CGI,  can take a lesson from De Palma here. Were this sequence all about the destruction and blood, I think Carrie would have gone the way of obscurity long ago. Carrie endures because De Palma has taken the time to bring us into Carrie's dream come true before he turns it into a nightmare.

Grand Grotesquery 
The eruption of the "curtain of fire" is one of my favorite film moments. It is so horrifically beautiful...I recall getting goosebumps when I saw it on the big screen.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS NIGHTMARES
In speaking of Rosemary's Baby, director Roman Polanski is fond of saying that his intent was to make a horror film that looks like a Doris Day movie, yet reveals itself to be something dark and sinister. To me, Carrie works in a similar fashion: it starts out resembling one of those teen-empowering After School Specials of the day (a series of TV movies targeted to adolescents in the '70s and '80s), only to throw us a nasty curve as the heretofore reassuring ugly-duckling wish-fulfillment fantasy turns into a bullied teen's worst-case scenario. 
I wish the 2013 remake a lot of luck, but just as Mia Farrow is and always will be the one and only Rosemary Woodhouse; I've got a hunch that Sissy Spacek's touchingly raw performance will wind up being impossible to beat. Perhaps there only needs to be...and only ever will be...one true Carrie.

"If only they knew she had the power."

Movie poster tagline

2013 ADDENDUM: 
Saw Kimberly Peirce's Carrie remake. I found it forgettable and unnecessary, albeit better acted than I expected. The big prom scene finale trades De Palma's poetically nightmarish spectacle for protracted explicitness. It's a well-done if artless sequence; the underlying, deeply-felt tragedy of the first film being replaced by the superficially cathartic pleasure of seeing the guilty parties punished. De Palma's Carrie has haunted me for a lifetime. I struggled to remember the details of Carrie 2013 a week after seeing it.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

CACTUS FLOWER 1969

Thinking back to that time in the late '60s when Old Hollywood (all overlit studio sets, name stars, and conventional genres) begrudgingly made way for New Hollywood (auteurism, non-linear storytelling, and emphasis on youth), it’s easy to forget how gradual and awkward a transitional period it was. Film history can make it sound like Hollywood was churning out The Sound of Music on a Monday, then by Friday, it released Bonnie and Clyde. But closer to the truth is that the old guard was very slow in passing the torch to the younger generation, and the strain frequently showed.

Some Flowers Blossom Late But They're The Kind That Last the Longest
Ingrid Bergman admires her metaphor

During what I call the movie industry’s “Last Gasp” phase—a period wedged awkwardly between the studio system excesses of the late-60s and the emergence of the American New Wave in the early-'70s—Hollywood released a glut of wheezily old-fashioned films it attempted to pass off as “with it” and “now” entertainments that sought to reach out to the young. These woefully middle-class, middle-aged, and formulaically sitcom-y films strove to reflect a youthful perspective, but were at a loss for what that actually meant. This led to the token insertion of self-consciously “hip” templates like rock music (which, to the septuagenarian ears running the studios meant muzak-type stabs at the contemporary sound by veterans like John Williams and Henry Mancini); a smattering of profanity and skin; aggressively mod costuming and art direction; and at least one cast member under the age of 40.

The Kids Are Alright
Bergman gets in touch with her inner MILF

The worst examples: In 1969 Lana Turner starred in the psychedelic freakout The Big Cube, and Oscar-winner, classy lady Jennifer Jones looked adrift in the has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed Angel, Angel, Down We Go. Both films alienated audiences, young and old alike, by thrusting past their prime and obviously uncomprehending members of Hollywood Royalty smack into the center of exploitative, youth-pandering tales of drugs, sex, and depravity. By and large, most of these late-to-the-party efforts were just forced and artificial overtures to the youth market which, when dramatic, could only look at youth through the prism of struggling-to-adapt adults (The Arrangement and The Happy Ending ),  or when comedic, settled into a kind of out-of-touch smarminess that mistook smirking sleaze for daring: a la Prudence and the Pill and The Impossible Years, both released in 1968.

One of the better films to emerge from this cross-generational limbo is Cactus Flower; a farcical bedroom comedy that in less capable hands could have come off as little more than an expanded episode of the TV program Love, American Style (whose brightly-lit look it shares). However, this somewhat routine generation gap comedy (a cousin of the tepid but similar in tone 40 Carats) avoids that fate chiefly through the efforts of its appealing and talented cast. Truly, this film is a shining example of how charismatic and resourceful actors can turn run-of-the-mill dross into gold.

Walter Matthau as Julian Winston

Ingrid Bergman as Stephanie Dickinson

Goldie Hawn as Toni Simmons

Jack Weston as Harvey Greenfield

Rick Lenz as Igor Sullivan

To keep from giving his much-younger girlfriend, Toni (Hawn), any matrimonial ideas, confirmed middle-aged bachelor Julian (Matthau) pretends to be the married father of three. When a suicide attempt (always good for a laugh) prompts the Park Avenue dentist to propose, Julian asks his devoted nurse Stephanie (Bergman) to pose as his wife and reassure Toni that she is not a home-wrecker and that their divorce is mutually desired and amicable. Of course, this being a farce, nothing goes as planned and all manner of Neil Simon-esque comic complications arise before the not-unexpected happy fade-out.

Walter Matthau and Goldie Hawn are each so adorably asexual that their May/December romance (there's a 25-year age difference) never crosses over into gross-out territory. The rubber-faced Matthau is one of my all-time favorite actors and I just think he's hilarious in this film. The inherent likability of the actor goes a long way toward preventing his character from coming across as loathsome as written

Based on the 1965 stage hit which provided Lauren Bacall her Broadway debut, Cactus Flower is an artifact from the “tired businessman” era of theater when breezily escapist musicals and plays were concocted for the benefit of NYC businessmen seeking to avoid the rush hour crunch of the trains to the suburbs. Dating back as far as 1952's The Seven Year Itch, these shows offered mindless laughs and tame titillation by way of middle-aged wish-fulfillment fantasies envisioning a world populated by bland professional men on the prowl pursued by bevies of beautiful young women who live only to be wed. That marriage is presented as the end-all and be-all symbol of happy-ending bliss has always struck me as positively perverse given how prominently deception, serial adultery, and lying figure into the courtship rituals of the characters in these so-called sexually sophisticated comedies.

To my way of thinking, America in the very repressed and sexist early-'60s had a particularly ugly concept of what constituted sexy and funny in motion pictures—Under the Yum Yum Tree; The Marriage-Go-Round; Boeing, Boeing; Any Wednesday…ick! Is it some heterosexual coping mechanism that, even to this day, makes it necessary to perpetuate an image of romantic courtship as an intricacy of calculated lies and tricks leading to the altar? Only to be followed by a state of matrimony wherein the “domesticated” male can’t wait to stray, and the clinging female is depicted as an emasculating killjoy? Every time I hear that pathetic “sanctity of marriage” argument in today’s same-sex marriage battle, my mind goes to all those comedies and sitcoms that came out of this “simpler, more innocent time.” All of which treated adultery like some kind of frolicsome lark.

So she got herself all dolled up in her satins and furs,
 and she got herself a husband...but he wasn't hers
Very-married diplomat Arturo Sanchez (veteran character actor Vito Scotti) romances dental assistant Stephanie Dickinson, whose last big love affair was with a married man. What with Toni's year-long involvement with a man she thinks is married, Cactus Flower is like one long, pro-adultery infomercial.

Having so far lodged a case as to why Cactus Flower should be at the top of my list of most reviled films; I state here and now that no one is more surprised than I that this film ranks among my favorite comedies of the '60s. It’s a sweet-natured, laugh-out-loud, absolute delight… almost in spite of itself.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Say what one will about old Hollywood, when it was at the top of its game, no one was better at turning out these types of frothy, intricate farces. Cactus Flower has the undistinguished yet delectable visual gloss of a Doris Day movie; a sardonically funny screenplay (adapted from Abe Burrows' play) by Some Like it Hot’s I. A. L. Diamond; snappy, keep-the-action-moving direction by Gene Saks; and, most advantageously, a cast of newcomers and veterans who all know their way around a punchline.

The premise of Cactus Flower is silly in the extreme, but it’s inconceivable to me that anyone could ever devise a journey that I wouldn't want to be taken on by Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, Jack Weston, and Ingrid Bergman. What an absolutely amazing cast! Just the fact that they're all in the same film should qualify Cactus Flower for classic status, but watching their sublime comic sparring is like taking a master class in chemistry and timing. Their scenes fairly crackle with inspired bits of acting magic. Each is so deft and gifted a performer that together they infuse Cactus Flower with spark and wit. Maybe even more than it deserves.

Another Cactus Flower odd couple is Jack Weston and statuesque Eve Bruce (she played the Amazonian streetwalker in The Love Machine), both of whom add hilarious support to the increasingly complicated proceedings

PERFORMANCES

As Goldie Hawn’s nomination and win for Cactus Flower is the only Oscar recognition the film received, it’s a fact worth mentioning, but as an indication of merit...I'm not so sure. In considering her win over Susannah York in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Dyan Cannon in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and Catherine Burns in Last Summer; one has to keep in mind we’re talking the Academy Awards here: an organization that first weighs in on sentiment, politics, publicity, and popularity before it ever gets around to considering performance excellence.
Hawn was the blonde "It" girl of the moment, and the public's affection for the bubble-head she portrayed on TV's outrageously popular Laugh-In factored heavily in her win. Apparently, the voting bloc of the Golden Globes felt the same, for Hawn also took that award home. I don't mean to sell Hawn short, however, for in this, her first major film role (in 1968 she appeared in Disney’s creaky musical, The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band in a giggly blond role E.J. Peaker probably turned down for Hello, Dolly!), Hawn radiates genuine star quality and holds her own against veterans Matthau and Bergman. In fact, the publicity surrounding Hawn's debut somewhat stole the thunder of Bergman's return to American screens after a 20-year absence.

Old Hollywood meets New Hollywood

With her enormous eyes and Betty Boop voice, it is difficult not to watch Hawn every second. She's so excitingly kinetic a presence she single-handedly blows the cobwebs off of Cactus Flower's rather stale bedroom humor. I think she does a marvelous job with a deceptively difficult role. She has to make Toni sweet and waiflike enough to care about, but strong and resilient enough so that Julian doesn't come off as a total jerk.

The talent and chemistry of Oscar winners Ingrid Bergman and Walter Matthau elevate Cactus Flower to high-style farce. Dick Van Dyke had initially been considered for the Matthau role, and when Bacall was passed over (or declined) there was talk of casting Lee Grant as the film's late-blooming leading lady.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Goldie Hawn's character is a clerk in a Greenwich Village record store, and the scenes that take place amongst the shelves of albums (featuring artists like Lou Rawls, The Beatles, Buck Owens, and Petula Clark) and walls of psychedelic blacklight posters feel as distant and of another time as any episode of Downton Abbey. They make me feel so nostalgic...and so old. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Because there’s so little about Cactus Flower that actually reflects the year in which it was made, I think it plays better now than it did in 1969. In the year of Woodstock, the Stonewall Riots, Charles Manson, and the Vietnam War, America could certainly use a few laughs, but Cactus Flower's mid-life comedy must have seemed a tad out of touch. Today, it's a film that fits snugly into the vague, pop-culture mashup that is the entire decade of the 1960s (on a double-bill, Cactus Flower would not look out-of-date with 1963's Move Over, Darling), and feels charmingly corny and just a tiny bit camp (what with references to “love beads” and those stodgy Muzak-style arrangements of songs by The Monkees and Boyce & Hart playing on the soundtrack). The dialog makes me laugh, the performances are great fun to watch, and if I don't dwell too long on the whole lying-your-way-to-love subtext, I have a wonderful time watching it. This is rom-com done right.

By the way, given my oft-voiced disdain for all things Adam Sandler, it's not likely I'll be checking out the loose 2011 remake of Cactus Flower titled Just Go With It. Although I'm curious to see if they are able to update the casual sexism of the original material, I'm not curious enough to subject myself to both Adam Sandler AND Jennifer Aniston...quick, call the bomb squad!


THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Inscription reads: "Ken, See how old and mean you get if you hang around long enough."

Back in 1995 I had the pleasure of being Walter Matthau's personal trainer (a fact which amused the legendary sloucher no end). I liked him a great deal and found him to be every bit as funny (he told the best dirty jokes!) and sweet as he appears on screen. With all the anecdotes he shared about working in Hollywood, I should have been paying him. He's very much missed.

One of the Goldie-centric newspaper ads for Cactus Flower

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

SHOWGIRLS 1995

Philosophically speaking, if the bad times in our lives help us to better appreciate the good; perhaps bad movies work the same way. Watching a staggeringly inept, epically-bad film like Showgirls really makes me aware of all the things I take for granted when I watch a movie. Things like coherence, consistency, believable characters, understandable motivations, or even human-sounding dialog. There's not a lot of good that can be said about Showgirls, except maybe that it's possessed of an uncanny ability to make most any other film, by comparison, look like Citizen Kane.

I recall how Showgirls was released to a lot of hoopla and self-aggrandizing fanfare back in 1995. Director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (perpetrators of 1992’s Basic Instinct) were promising to deliver to the world a gritty and boob-filled update of All About Eve set in the "glamorous" world of Las Vegas showgirls. It was to be an NC-17 backstage musical that held the promise of doing for pasties and g-strings, what Singin’ in the Rain did for umbrellas.

Of course, when Showgirls ultimately did hit the theaters, audiences found themselves more shocked by the film’s overarching vulgarity and incompetence than by its sexual explicitness; the latter tending to incite giggles more than arousal. The $45-million film tanked at the boxoffice and virtually overnight, Showgirls became a “Bad Films We Love” cult favorite. In one fell swoop, a single misguided movie waylaid careers, reputations, and legitimacy. Investors lost their shirts (appropriately enough) and hopes were dashed, but fans of craptastic camp cinema were thrown the biggest and most riotously silly chunk of cheese since Faye Dunaway had them rolling in the aisles with: "Barbra, PLEASE! PLEASE, Barbara! Leave us alone, Barbara! If you need anything, ask Carol Ann!"

I am a huge, huge fan of Showgirls -- a  fact that doesn't cloud my awareness that it is also, in every significant detail, an almost irredeemably terrible film. And no amount of revisionist Beyond the Valley of the Dolls /The Room 11th-hour damage control (“It’s a satire! It’s supposed to be bad!”) could ever convince me otherwise.

But Showgirls is so loopy and over-the-top in its attempts to be daring and sexy that watching it winds up being quite a lot of good, mean-spirited fun. Its desire to really be "about" something is almost touching in its naivete. And it's certainly more watchable than a great many more competently-made motion pictures. I never know just why it is that some bad films are ones you can barely sit all the way through, while others, every bit as bad, are entertaining as hell and become lifetime favorites you can watch again and again.
Whatever the reason, Showgirls has been a so-bad-it's-good favorite of mine since the year it was released, and no matter how many times I see it, I keep finding new atrocities to gasp and delight in. It's a perfect storm of blessed dreadfulness.

Elizabeth Berkley as Nomi Malone / Polly Ann Costello
"I used to love Doggy Chow, too!"

Gina Gershon as Cristal Connors
"You are a whore, darlin'!"

Gina Ravera as Molly Abrams
"I can barely thread a needle!"

Kyle McLachlan as Zack Carey
"Nomi's got heat!"

Glenn Plummer as James Smith
"I have a problem with pussy!"

 *(The exclamation points are my own because dialog this ridiculous fairly demands them. Seriously folks, Eszterhas was paid upwards of $2 million for this stuff.)

As Showgirls is set in Las Vegas (the Las Vegas of Joe Eszterhas’exceedingly puerile imagination, anyway), let me take a moment to talk about gambling. The business of making movies is always a gamble. No matter the genre, subject matter, or star, when it comes to knowing how the public is going to respond to a film, screenwriter William Goldman’s famous “Nobody knows anything” quote is still the law of the land. I suspect that one of the chief reasons there was so much anticipation surrounding Showgirls' release, and why the nearly-unanimous negative public response caught the filmmakers so off guard, was because...from a purely marketing standpoint...Verhoeven and Eszterhas appeared to have had such a sure thing on their hands. Sex, violence, nudity, strippers...they must have thought it was a slam-dunk.  

Run, Nomi, Run!
I have a theory that the crazy-eyed casino change-girl (Jean Barrett) Nomi encounters when she has her first (and only) stroke of luck in Vegas is actually a Nicholas Cage-like harbinger of evil.

Showgirls was essentially being peddled as Flashdance meets Basic Instinct (two massive boxoffice hits, both penned by Eszterhas). Hollywood, a town that lives by the motto: "If they liked it once, they'll love it twice," was more than happy to pump millions into a project that promised to deliver all of the most marketable elements of those films, only bigger, louder, gaudier - and a lot more naked- plus, music by Prince!

"Fucker! Fuck off!"

Reasoning perhaps that if one crass, misogynist male fantasy can produce a blockbuster, there should be no earthly reason for an even crasser, more sexually-explicit misogynist male fantasy not to do even bigger business; Basic Instinct's non-dynamic duo of Verhoeven and  Eszterhas were reassembled and given carte blanche to create the most expensive, sexually graphic, mainstream motion picture ever made. And of course, the rest is history...or, more accurately, infamy.

Yes Sir, I Can Boogie

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

To the chagrin of trash movie fans the world over, changing tastes and the decline of the Hollywood studio system sounded the death-knell for a certain kind of bad film. This once-plentiful genus of awful had once proved a reliable source of cult-worthy camp, but began to disappear with the youth-oriented 60s. I speak of the overheated, overproduced, self-important melodrama. Those high-gloss soap operas made by Douglas Sirk, Ross Hunter, or Joesph E. Levine starring lacquered starlets and lantern-jawed heroes. These films boastfully paraded their pretensions and allusions to loftier purpose while erroneously labeling their crass, commercial vulgarism as glamour and high style. Invariably, upon release, these films were branded instant laughingstocks due to the ofttimes jarring discrepancy between intent and execution.

I must have missed that musical where Ann Miller tells June Allyson she likes having nice tits 
"Showgirls is a throwback to movies in the '40s while combining Bob Fosse and a twist of the Marquis de Sade," said a touchingly delusional Elizabeth Berkley in a 1995 interview.

In my personal roster of the best of the worst, The Oscar (1966) and Valley of the Dolls (1967) signify the apex of the nadir of the 60s. For the 70s, nothing can touch Lost Horizon (1973) for blissful wrongheadedness; and in the 80s, the notorious Mommie Dearest (1981) has to be the gold standard.

Checking out the Competition
All too often Showgirls feels like a film made by men who have never had a conversation with a woman that didn't start with "How much?" or "You're not a cop, are you?"

By the 90s, as mainstream movies settled into a kind of uniform, bland mediocrity born of trying to reach as broad a demographic as possible, I thought the age of the so-bad-it’s-good fiasco had passed. Well, thank God for Showgirls! A grandiose grotesquerie that made even a jaded, seen-it-all, trash-addict like me sit up and take notice. Fully deserving of all the critical brickbats and backhanded compliments hurled its way since its release, the astonishing thing about Showgirls’ unique brand of terrible is that it is entertaining as hell. Not even one minute of the film is ever less than a demoralizing humiliation for all involved, yet unlike other cult classics that suffer from the occasional lag in pacing (Sextette, Myra Breckinridge, Can’t Stop the Music) Showgirls mines a vein of profound godawfulness that pays consistent dividends. There's never a dull moment!

An equal opportunity offender, Showgirls makes galling use of the "Magical Negro" stereotype in the character of Molly, Nomi's ridiculously selfless and self-sacrificing friend, confidante, and 'round-the-clock rescuer

PERFORMANCES

I recently watched Goodbye, Columbus and The Last Picture Show and found myself struck by how clearly protective and watchful the directors of those films (Larry Peerce and Peter Bogdanovich, respectively) were in shaping the remarkable screen debuts of their novice stars (former models, neither Ali MacGraw nor Cybill Shepherd had ever acted before). Alas, after watching Showgirls, it becomes equally obvious that the same can't be said for Paul Verhoeven's direction of Elizabeth Berkley.

Switchblade Sister

With nearly ten years of television experience behind her by the time she made Showgirls (most notably, Saved by the Bell), Elizabeth Berkley is far from being a novice, but she's certainly not what anyone would call an actress. Giving a frenetically undisciplined performance better suited to a Russ Meyer movie, the very game Berkeley (perhaps too game, in retrospect) would have benefited greatly from some real guidance in modulating her emotive intensity, and was in dire need of a director more determined to show her off to her best advantage and less dedicated to shining a spotlight on her shortcomings. Berkley's 100% commitment to each scene is more embarrassing than laudable, and it's hard to think of someone as red-hot sexy when you feel sorry for them.

Attempting perhaps to pay homage to that weird scene in the 1981 musical, Pennies from Heaven where Steve Martin bullies wife Jessica Harper into indulging his fantasy of having her apply lipstick to her nipples, Showgirls inexplicably has Nomi go through the same ritual just prior to opening up a jumbo-sized can of whoop-ass on heartthrob/rapist Andrew Carver

On the other hand, Gina Gershon as Cristal, the Texas Tassel Twirler, fares much better. She plays Cristal as if she were a drag queen, which proves to be an insight into character wholly appropriate to the depth of Eszterhas' script. Although a considerable amount of her performance seems centered around her rather dangerous-looking mouth (I'm reminded of how Joan Collins was always biting into something [or someone] for evil emphasis on Dynasty), and the script conspires to make her and every other woman in the cast look as foolish as possible at all times; Gershon nevertheless is an exceptionally fun and campy villain and is, throughout, consistently better than the material she's given.  It's almost impossible not to go around calling everybody "darlin'" for a day or two after seeing her in Showgirls.

Irresistible Force...Say Hello to Immovable Object 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Perhaps my favorite source of unintentional comedy in Showgirls is the dancing. It’s plentiful and the professional dancers in the cast are certainly talented, but it kind of reeks. There's a great deal of fun to be had at the expense of “Goddess,” the appropriately cheesy and strangely atonal Las Vegas topless revue that signifies Nomi moving up the sleaze ladder. From appearances, the review is all glitter and g-strings and seems to be comprised almost exclusively of the dancers chaotically running about, gnashing teeth, and letting go with frenzied head-releases.

And then there’s the freestyle dancing that Nomi engages in that’s supposed to reveal her fire and passion, yet looks more like she’s being attacked by a swarm of bees. And then there is the artistic, high-minded dancing promoted by choreographer-hopeful, James Smith (Glenn Plummer), Las Vegas’ shortest nightclub bouncer and Showgirls’ baldly hypocritical voice of moral outrage. Unfortunately, the actor portraying James (“I studied in New York…Alvin Ailey!”) clearly can’t dance a lick, and the “artistic” choreography attributed to him looks suspiciously like the lap dancing he berates Nomi for doing.

Which brings us to Showgirls’ raison d’être: the T&A triumvirate of lap-dancing, stripping, and pole-dancing. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that sexy never looked so unsexy, and unsexy never has, and never will again, look so deliriously ludicrous.

Over the course of my career as a dance instructor here in L.A, I've had a few Showgirls cast members take my class: Gina Gershon (Cristal); Michelle Johnston (Gay Carpenter, "Goddess" line captain and brown rice & vegetables pusher); and Gina Ravera (Molly). But back when I was just a student and learning to dance, there was one surprising member of the Showgirls cast who used to attend beginning jazz class with me at the now defunct Dupree Dance Academy... 

You guessed it. None other than tough-guy, former Bond villain, Robert Davi (as Al, the oafish but fatherly manager of Cheetahs topless lounge). Yes, I've seen Al in spandex. And surprisingly, he's actually a better dancer than Showgirls' Alvin Ailey disciple, Glenn Plummer!

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

There’s an old Hollywood axiom that says, “No one starts out intending to make a bad movie.” But take even a casual glance at Showgirls and you're likely to be left with the nagging impression that making a monumentally bad film had to have been a part of Verhoeven’s and Eszterhas’ strategic purpose.

What's My Line?
One of these men is sleazy Showgirls screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and the other is actor William Shockley, who portrays Showgirls' sleazy pop star, Andrew Carver. Or maybe they're both the same person? Know me...Nomi...Malone...Alone...it's all starting to make sense

A flop upon release, Showgirls, through DVD sales and savvy marketing that made peace with the film's overriding incompetence by embracing its cult-classic status, has, at last, become a bona fide hit.This reversal of fortunes doesn't alter Showgirls' quality (except perhaps in Hollywood, where the only bad film is one that fails to make money) but it's nice to know the audience for magnificent cinematic trainwrecks didn't die out with the 60's, the studio system, or Mommie Dearest.

FAVORITE SHOWGIRLS MOMENTS
1. James Smith's lead-footed "dancing" at the Crave Club.
2. The allegedly hetero male dancer in Goddess" threatening another dancer with the line, "You want a knuckle-sandwich?" Really? What is he, one of the "Dead End" kids?
3. The absurd insistence that Suzanne (Somers?), Latoya Jackson, Janet Jackson, or Paula Abdul would appear in a tacky, topless Vegas revue. OK, Latoya would, but the others? C'mon!
4. The exaggerated force and sound of the roundhouse punches delivered during the Crave Club brawl. Every jaw would be dislocated. It's like a Popeye cartoon.
5. Nomi's reaction when called "Pollyanna" which she mistakes for someone calling her by her real name (Polly Ann).
6. I may be alone in this, but I think Zack has a waaaay nicer butt than Nomi. Verhoeven should have exploited this angle more. Certainly would have helped keep me from laughing so much.
7. Am I the only one who thought that much-discussed "Ver-sayce" dress was kinda putrid? Like something Mariah Carey would wear.
8. Zack's haircut reminds me a lot of Liza Minnelli during her "Results"/Pet Shop Boys phase.
9. Those two little kids backstage who are shocked by the use of "The F word," but not by seeing their mom in a g-string amongst an ocean of exposed boobs and naked butts.
10. Nomi's "intensity" when she dances (aka, scowling and baring her teeth), eats, has sex, sits.

"Showtime."

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2012