THE APPLE 1980

The BIG Science Fiction Romantic Rock Opera of the '80s

                                                                           Movie poster tagline

It comes as a bit of a surprise to me when I realize that after so many years heralding the relative merits of often inarguably awful movies (and we're talking MAJOR bombs, mind you); this piece on Cannon Films’ dystopian glam-rock musical The Apple will be my first hate-watch movie post.

What do I mean by hate-watch? Well, when it comes to bad movies, whether unabashed camp-fests like Girls Town, Kitten With a Whip, and The Oscar, or pedigreed stinkers like Audrey Hepburn's Bloodline or Barbra Streisand's A Star is Born, there’s not a single terrible film I’ve disparaged and poked fun at on these pages for which I don’t also harbor genuine feelings of affection. Even if that affection is merely gratitude for all the hours of enjoyment they've given me at their expense.

Call it an affinity, call it a connection…, but if I'm going to watch a movie for the sole purpose of laughing at its ineptitude and wrongheadedness, I have to have at least a tiny soft spot for it in my heart. Otherwise, the experience feels only mean-spirited and snarky.
I call it hate-watching when I'm masochistically drawn to watch a movie that, for whatever reason, I already know I don't like all that much. What I expect to get out of such an experience is hard to parse out, but I'm gonna guess that self-flagellation, schadenfreude, and misanthropy play into it.
All of the above and more are to be found in schlockmeister director Menahem Golan's notorious 1980 musical misfire, The Apple.

"First you sell it, THEN you make it. That's marketing!"
The line of dialogue above is from The Apple, a movie set in the world of music. But it could just as easily stand as the business model for Cannon Films under the auspices of the producing/directing team of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. A company that never met a misleading ad it didn't like. There's a very good chance this trade ad began appearing (cobbed from the wishful-thinking likeness of John Travolta's 1978 Time Magazine cover) long before a screenplay was written or a dime of funding secured for this $8-10 million miscalculation

The Apple, if known at all, is widely considered one of the worst musicals ever made. A credential it exhaustively earns and defends in every sequin-encrusted, spandex-encased frame. But movies dismissed by the masses invariably end up as prime candidates for cult adoration, and The Apple is no exception (although it took some 24 years to bring that about). Today, The Apple is enthusiastically embraced for the very things that, in 1980, brought the World Premiere audience at the Montreal Film Festival to its feet in a chorus of boos. The Apple swiftly disappeared when the film's limited American release yielded a groundswell of less demonstrative but no less unfavorable critical response. So few people saw it that over time, The Apple's must-be-seen-to-be-believed awfulness became the stuff of myth.

Despite my fondness for cinema dogs and movie turkeys (fittingly, The Apple's L.A. release was a week before Thanksgiving), I failed to catch The Apple during its initial theatrical release. Not because I accidentally missed it... for some reason, I just had no interest in seeing it. Which is grossly out of character for me. A guy who dotes on disco, is mad for musicals, and who ordinarily can't get enough of craptacular cinema. 

Catherine Mary Stewart as Bibi Phillips

George Gilmour as Alphie

Vladek Sheybal as Mr. Boogalow

Grace Kennedy as Pandi

Allan Love as Dandi

Ray Shell as Shake

The Apple is a pseudo-Biblical Faust allegory set in a hyper-futuristic vision of America in 1994 that frequently betrays its true setting: Berlin, 1979. Taking significant liberties with the Book of Genesis, the film presents us with an unreasonable facsimile of Adam and Eve hailing from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan (a colorless folksinging duo with the Teletubby names of Alphie & Bibi) tempted by fame and lured into the Mephistophelian clutches of one Mr. Boogalow, the head of an entertainment megacorporation known by the acronym BIM (Boogalow’s International Music).

But much like Disney or The Kardashians, BIM has very little actual interest in entertainment itself, its primary interest being global mind control and the deployment of its far-reaching pop culture tentacles for world domination. Mr. Boogalow's fiendish plan--as far as I could make out, anyway---has something to do with weakening people's will through the forced exposure to tacky, Vegas-style glitter-rock-cum-disco revues performed by substandard talent. Enter Alphie & Bibi. 

The Bland Leading The Bland
Flavorless heterosexual folk music in a Eurovision-style face-off against spicy, gay disco  

Boogalow schemes to hornswoggle the naive, soporific duo into a restrictive recording contract, replacing his current BIM Stars Dandi (Allan Love) and Pandi (Grace Kennedy). After the high-minded Alphie has a premonition of disaster (the film’s premiere, no doubt), he refuses to sign with Boogalow but is unsuccessful in persuading the soft-headed...I mean, soft-hearted Bibi to do the same. So, while Alphie beats as hasty a retreat as his extraordinarily tight pants will allow, Bibi signs away her soul for stardom, a crimped hair makeover, and a pair of perilously high, pointy-toed thigh boots.  

I've Seen the Future, and it's Starburst Filter Lenses
The Apple frequently looks as though it were shot by a film school student given
an assortment pack of camera filter lenses they're dead-set on making use of 

Leap ahead an indeterminate amount of years (or is it days?): a despondent Alphie is learning that sanctimonious soft-rock doesn’t sell; Bibi has become a literal howling success (“Speeeeed!”); and America/Berlin has fallen under the despotic, fascist way of BIM and Mr. Boogalow. Beset by state-mandated dancing, compulsory mylar sticker-wearing, and the micromanaging of individual behavior, the country has been transformed into a soul-killing, dystopian glitterscape oddly reminiscent of some six months I spent back in the mid-‘90s working for fitness guru Richard Simmons.

The National BIM Hour of Exercise

The power of love ultimately proves more potent than the power of bad music, and it isn’t long before Bibi starts questioning her fashion choices and Alphie embarks on a quest to rescue his lady love from the evils of multiethnic nonbinary pansexuality. It's at this point, for reasons known only to the drug suppliers of The Apple's creative team, that Alphie and Bibi’s musical odyssey takes an abruptly ecclesiastical turn, complete with superannuated hippies, rapid-growth offspring, and a celestial visitation that made me think Janis Joplin was way ahead of her time when she asked God to buy her that Mercedes Benz.

BIM pop stars Dandi & Pandi (she's the one dressed like Ami Stewart)
Seriously, what's with these names?

Adding further to The Apple's compendium of crazy is a litany of undistinguished pop songs; a Deus ex machina character named Mr. Topps who pops up out of nowhere; future BAFTA-winning actress Miriam Margolyes as a chicken soup-wielding Jewish stereotype; and costumes and sets that evoke memories of the Dolly Parton quote, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

Yes, every descriptive detail pertaining to The Apple confirms its reputation as a Grade-A, four-star disasterpiece.

BIM Headquarters
Alphie forgets to check his package at the door

Following the success of Tommy (1975), Grease (1978), and 1977’s Saturday Night Fever (not a musical, but its #1 soundtrack album revolutionized the movie marketing tie-in), studios everywhere rushed pop/rock musicals into production. The megabudget flops of The Wiz (1978) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) signaled a potential shift in public tastes, but by then, the soundtrack-driven musical juggernaut was already too far underway.

1980 alone saw the release of Fame, The Blues Brothers, Can’t Stop the Music, Xanadu, Coal Miner's Daughter, The Jazz Singer, and Popeye. Hit hardest were Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu, two high-profile musicals that went into production at the height of disco mania and hoped to capture its white-hot, up-to-the-minute urgency. Of course, by the time they hit the screens, both movies looked hopelessly dated and old-fashioned. The Apple (which would have had its work cut out for it no matter the cultural climate) was initially slated for Easter release, giving it the jump on most of the year's other youth-oriented musicals. Alas, The Apple arrived at the very tail-end of the year. By that time, movie musical oversaturation and public impatience with disco, legwarmers, shiny fabrics, and glitter had all reached the point of no return.

Harbinger of Doom: The Apple opened in Los Angeles on November 21st, 1980 at the Paramount Theater on Hollywood Blvd. The same theater where Can't Stop the Music flopped so resoundingly just six months earlier. This newspaper ad promotes the opening day soundtrack giveaway that is said to have resulted in less-than-thrilled patrons hurling the LPs at the screen like Frisbees.

Although I wasn’t all that crazy about its dull poster art and no-name cast, I didn’t want to see The Apple because of my familiarity with Cannon Films. Even before its purchase by Golan-Globus, I associated the studio exclusively with Charles Bronson and schlocky low-budget action movies. Alas, later, when I'd read the flood of terrible reviews The Apple received, it crossed my mind that perhaps I'd missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime "I was there!" moment. The kind of experience cherished by folks who saw the original theatrical releases of legendary fiascoes like The Swarm or Lost Horizon. But mostly, I just felt as though I'd dodged a bullet.

I finally got around to seeing The Apple some 25 years after its release, not long after it had resurfaced on the midnight movie circuit and emerged as a surprise cult hit.

But the circumstances surrounding my watching The Apple for the first time were not the most advantageous for a film this off-the-rails: I was in bed with a particularly nasty bout of the flu when my partner surprised me with a DVD copy of The Apple to cheer me up.

Maybe it was my very real flu-induced fever colliding with the movie’s fever-dream weirdness, but The Apple not only failed to cheer me up, it genuinely made me sick. 

1. Things started out badly when I gave myself a headache from trying to make out if the endlessly-repeated chant in the opening number is “BIM’s on the way,” “BIM’s the only way,” “BIM all the way.” or whatever the fuck.

2. The jewels glued to Shake’s front teeth looked less like glitter rock bling than grossly neglectful dental health, so that kinda turned my stomach.

3. My fluey stomach synced with the film's clumsy choreography and started turning sympathy flips.

4. The script was so rushed, chaotic, and nonsensical that it created the disorienting impression that I had dozed off at intervals, missing pertinent plot points. (I hadn't.)

5. This is a musical that clocks in at only 90 minutes. So why did it feel as long as Barry Lyndon?

6. Did my feeling so lousy at the time ultimately influence my first impression of The Apple? Yes. Was The Apple still pretty lousy without any help from me? Oh, most definitely. 

What's it all about, Alphie?
I hope you like George Gilmour's expression here 'cause it's the only one he's got 

By rights, my flu-viewing experience should have ended my having anything more to do with The Apple. And it was. That is until Christmas 2019 saw the release of a film that threatened to unseat The Apple as The Worst Musical Ever Made: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. 

The critical drubbing those CGI kitties received got me thinking of how it had been 15 years since I last saw The Apple, igniting the nagging question of whether...given how badly I felt...I had really seen the film at all. So, with the added inducement of a recent Blu-ray release, I decided to give The Apple one more try.

I have to admit, it was a considerably better experience. 

The passing of 40 years has been kinder to The Apple than perhaps it deserves. Of course, it’s just as silly as ever, but much of what I once found annoying has been softened through the distancing filter of time. 

I still think the music is pretty terrible, but the songs “BIM,” “Showbizness,” and especially “Speed” actually make me smile (OK, laugh out loud). They may be tacky, but they are also a lot of fun. In fact, the first half of The Apple is actually rather enjoyable. Unfortunately, the second half is bogged down by one too many lugubrious ballads and that weird evangelical turn the story takes.

The musical number "Coming," staged as Pandi's choreographed date-rape of a drugged Alphie,
is not only hilariously crass but takes bad taste to Springtime for Hitler levels

None of the performances gave me a headache the way they did the first time around, although from the start, I thought Grace Kennedy was a little too good for this film (her discomfort in that "Coming" number is palpable) and would have made a fantastic Lucy in the Sky in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band---a case of going from the frying pan into the fire, I know. And I discovered it's really not possible to dislike Catherine Mary Stewart, coming across as she does like a spunky, well-intentioned understudy shoved at the last moment into the star role.

What emerged clearer on second viewing is just how good Vladek Sheybal is. Playing a character saddled with a name no two individuals in the film ever pronounce the same way twice, Sheybal is the only actor to hit the right over-the-top tone without the effort showing. He reminded me of Karen Black when she began appearing in all those low-rent horror movies. She "got" and understood the weird...she didn't need to strike attitudes.

Vladek Sheybal appeared in the films Casino Royale From Russia With Love,
and Ken Russell's Women in Love and The Boy Friend

I enjoyed The Apple more on the second viewing, but finding out that I don't loathe the film isn't the same as saying that I actually like it. I'm afraid I still don't.
And just why that is, boils down to this: I wouldn't like a John Waters movie in which Donny and Marie triumphed over Divine and Mink Stole. Nor would I like an Auntie Mame in which the Aryans from Darian scare away the free-thinking bohemians.

Playing Alphie's cliche-a-minute Jewish landlady, Miriam Margolyes' character doesn't
have a name, but her performance is so full of ham she should be labeled not kosher

I like my cult movies subversive. Mainstream films always have people who look like Bibi and Alphie triumphing over the forces of evil (i.e., anyone who doesn't look like Bibi and Alphie). What's great about underground films is their anarchic attack on the status quo; they are movies that celebrate the misfits.

They advocate for the outsiders, for the socially shunned, and for the ones society has branded "different" or "strange." In these films, the conformity power balance is upended, and the underdogs of the world...those who don't fit into heteronormative boxes and non-inclusive social structures...are celebrated for their being true to themselves and for their uniqueness.

In The Apple, Alphie's rejection of Boogalow's world feels as much rooted in homophobia and diversity fear as in professional distrust. When I watch Rocky Horror, I relate to Dr. Frank N. Furter and his "unconventional conventionists," not Brad and Janet (who, even as the vapid hero and heroine, are still written with more complexity than Alphie and Bibi).

The Age of Aquarius
Menahem Golan takes a page out of An American Hippie in Israel (1972)

The Apple, for all its visual outrageousness and rock & roll posturing, has always struck me as being staunchly middle-of-the-road and conformist in its worldview. The narrative is anti-fascist, anti-corporate, and anti-capitalist, to be sure. But it never sat well with me how the film subtextually aligns all the interesting, queer, and iconoclastic people in The Apple with negatives (degeneracy, depravity, evil, fascism), while the hetero, white, white-bread hero and heroine are the only symbols of innocence and good.
Much in the way Can't Stop the Music has never been an all-time cult fave for me because of the self-repudiation inherent in its closeted take on The Village People, The Apple is anti-rock and roll (which everybody knows is the great liberator of all souls!) and celebrates conventional blandness too much for my taste.   

Apparently, Hell is a lot like Chippendales on a Friday Night

BONUS MATERIAL

Before they were Dandi & Pandi, Allan Love (he got the "L" out before the film) and Grace Kennedy had professional recording careers. Love, who was most recently in the restaurant business, can be seen in a 1978 musical video HERE. Kennedy, who had her own BBC variety show for several years, pays homage to that other 1980 musical flop Can't Stop the Music HERE. 

Before he was Alphie, Scottish singer George Gilmour (center) fronted the band The Bo-Weavles.

Ray Shell went on to have an extensive career in theater. Seen here (in considerably less makeup than Shake) he originated the role of Rusty in the 1984 London production of Starlight Express. He's also a producer, director, and author (among others, a book on director Spike Lee).

The Apple's lyricist George S. Clinton (l.) and composer Kobi Recht (r.) appear throughout the film as different characters. Co-lyricist Iris Recht appears as the receptionist in the "Showbizness" number.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2020

A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY 1968

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of movie marketing knows that any film calling itself A Quiet Place in the Country is certain to be set in a country locale that’s anything but. And by the same token, anyone remotely familiar with the works of Elio Petri—the Italian director/screenwriter of that Haute futuristic fantasm The Tenth Victim (1965) and the 1970 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner winner for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion—knows that any movie made by this unsung post-neorealist auteur is bound to be a barbed political allegory distinguished, in no small part, by a strikingly idiosyncratic visual style and a dynamic musical score.

Both presuppositions are realized to mind-blowing effect in A Quiet Place in the Country, an offbeat, exhilarating puzzle of a film that has a lot to say about man, muses, money, and madness. And it does so while oozing irresistible ‘60s-era inscrutability from every artfully-composed frame.

In this sequence, one of several punctuated by imagery alluding to contemporary and classic works of art, a faded beauty in a decaying villa (top r.) assumes a pose reminiscent of Jean-Louis David's 1800 Neoclassical portrait Madame Recamier (top l.). As the figure draws closer, the woman transforms into Rene Magritte's 1951 surreal parody, Perspective: Madame Recamier by David (bottom l.)

A Quiet Place in the Country is a Giallo-hued psychological thriller about the artist as outsider. A study in the creative alienation that charts one man's slow descent into madness as he wages war with inner demons and suppressed obsessions. In fashioning his subjectively fractured, paranoid vision of the world of art, Elio Petri takes simultaneous aim at consumerist culture and the moral decay that lies at its core. Specifically, the dehumanizing effects of the market-mandated practice of harnessing and harvesting creativity and artistic expression for the sake of profit.

A film that intriguingly combines diverse elements of style and genre, the tone of A Quiet Place in the Country shifts eerily--and joltingly--from dreamlike to nightmarish in service of a narrative that’s part murder mystery, part obsessive love story, and part horror film.

Vanessa Redgrave as Flavia

Franco Nero as Leonardo Ferri

Franco Nero is Leonardo Ferri, an abstract expressionist artist living in Milan. An artist whose success is both a source of guilt (he's the one who sets the exorbitant prices charged for his paintings), and resentment (he runs himself ragged filling arbitrary gallery quotas that only feed his belief that success has turned his art into merchandise--just another collectible consumer commodity). Stricken with an acute case of creative stasis and trapped within a kind of existential inertia, he fears that his methods of creation--a spontaneous, gestural, “action painting” technique---are becoming obsolete in the high-volume Pop Art world of mixed media and mechanical reproduction.
A modern artist pitted against modernism, everything about his work has grown too “too” for the contemporary marketplace: his prices too high, his methods too slow, his canvases too large, and his art too impenetrable.

Normative Dualism
The mental and physical in the creative process

With his two-month creative dry spell threatening to turn into three, stress and isolation take an ever-increasing toll on Leonardo's mind and psyche. Most provocatively, in serving to escalate his already conflicted feelings for Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave), his married lover who also just happens to be his agent.

The cool pragmatist to Leonardo’s exposed-nerve fantasist, Flavia—who has him on an allowance, keeps tabs on his work output, and is forever scribbling down figures in ledgers—loves him, but is shrewdly accepting of his paranoid distrust and need to cast her as the villain in their relationship. Flavia: (catching sight of him eyeing a weighty object d’art in his apartment): "Darling, Leonardo…you can’t kill me with that, it’s just a big paper clip.”

The ambiguity of perception figures significantly in how A Quiet Place in the Country builds suspense and consistently keeps the viewer on unsteady ground. Early in the film, Leonardo is depicted as the bound, passive, sex-object exploited both physically and creatively by the materialistic Flavia. The ready assumption is that we're seeing Leonardo's perception of the dynamics of their relationship. Later in the film, this scene is mirrored in a way that casts it in an entirely different light.

Owing at least part of his artist’s block to the challenge of trying to create meaningful work in the face of society’s capitalism-fed, art-as-consumer-goods ethos (he’s seen reading Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), Leonardo seizes upon the reasoned notion that the only way to get his inspiration mojo working again is to move away from the distractions of the city to a place of isolation and quiet where he can be at one with his thoughts.

Fate seems to oblige all too readily by placing in his path a remote, deteriorating villa that fairly beckons to him from the road. Although its condition is rundown and locals whisper about it being haunted by the ghost of a beautiful Countess who died there 40 years ago; the villa is nevertheless a secluded, bucolic spot offering Leonardo everything he’s looking for. And quite a bit of what he'll forever wish he'd never found.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

A Quiet Place in the Country is a sociopolitical, psychosexual haunted house movie that always feels a hairsbreadth away from submerging itself in its own late- ‘60s stylization. A thinking-person’s Giallo that incorporates all the familiar tropes of the genre (murder mystery, amateur sleuthing, graphic violence, eroticism, red herrings, etc.), its chief deviation from tradition—and key determiner as to whether or not this film will be your cup of tea—is its commitment to preserving the twitchy schizophrenic perspective of its abstract artist protagonist. Something achieved by presenting its rather straightforward story in as arty, willfully cryptic a manner as it can get away with without having to identify itself as avant-garde experimental cinema. It’s not that A Quiet Place in the Country doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end, it’s just they’re arranged in a different order. 

Fragmented Fantasy
A Quiet Place in the Country is a reworking of Oliver Onions' 1911 masterwork of supernatural fiction The Beckoning Fair One.  The story of a man consumed by his obsession with a seductive, potentially malevolent ghost.

But for me, the style IS the story of A Quiet Place in the Country, a modern gothic tasking the viewer with determining whether a chain of increasingly bizarre events befalling a brooding hero is rooted in the psychological or the paranormal. As obscure and enigmatic as Petri’s images may be (pretentious...sure, heavy-handed...yes, fascinating...always), they credibly convey Leonardo's mental disintegration and heighten identification with the character. Petri's intimate style also poignantly underscore themes in the film interpreting the creative impulse--the need to express oneself and be understood by others--as an outer-directed primal compulsion compensating for the inner-inaccessibility of the unknowable self.

Visual Artist
Estranged from his feelings, Leonardo tries to invoke anything resembling a human response from himself as he flips through slide images of eroticism and violence. Leonardo's unreliable perceptions are dramatized in the film's motif of windows (often barred), kaleidoscopes (distortions), mirrors (fractured and two-sided), peepholes (limited), and camera lenses (at a remove).

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Given my fondness for the hyper-stylized charms of Gialli, it surprises me to think just how late to the party I was in getting around to seeing my first Italian Giallo film as recently as 2016. The film was Lucio Fulci’s extraordinary Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), and it so knocked my socks off that I went from 100% unfamiliarity with the genre to having since added some 40 Giallo titles to my film library.

I’m not sure that I’ve yet reconciled myself to the violence (making me thankful for that fake-looking, poster-paint-red blood they used back in the day), but I never cease to be impressed by how accommodating the genre is to such a broad scope of narrative concepts. There’s room for everything from gumshoes to ghosts under the Gaillo banner.

Idée Fixe 

 Flavia, the realist, and ever the consumer, is preoccupied with wealth. Leonardo, a resuscitated sensualist since moving to the country, is fetishistically bewitched by a yonic scrap of clothing once worn by the woman he thinks is haunting the villa.

As an example of the “arthouse horror” style of Giallo, A Quiet Place in the Country is low on sensationalism, surpassingly high on atmospheric mystery, and takes a cue from its title by trading the gaudy colorfulness I usually associate with the genre, for a kind of baroque naturalism. The very effective result is that supernatural terrors take place in the brightness of day, and hallucinations and spectral visions are made all the more disturbing by being indistinguishable from reality.

Terrified at the prospect of spending the night alone after witnessing a particularly hair-raising
display of ghostly pyrotechnics, Leonardo imposes himself upon his maid and her "brother." 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

It’s been my experience that it’s very rare for a really intriguing horror film or mystery to have a payoff that lives up to its setup. The more disturbing the journey, the greater the chance the Big Reveal will prove anticlimactic. Against all odds, A Quiet Place in the Country ranks as one of those rarities. For me, it was an effectively compelling chiller with a doozy of a surprise ending worthy and fitting of all the with-it weirdness that came before it. 

By large measure, credit is owed to Oliver Onions’ impeccably-structured source novel; longtime Gialli cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller (Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Antonioni’s L’Avventura, and Andy Warhol’s two 3-D horror titles, Dracula / Frankenstein); and a rattle-your-bones improvisational music score by Ennio Morricone and Nuova Consonanza.

Autoerotic
Leonardo Becomes His Own Sex Object

But as a huge fan of the exquisitely elephantine Camelot (1967) I'd be lying if I said that any part of this remarkable film impressed me more than the reteaming of Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero... MY Lady Guenevere and Sir Lancelot (the 2nd of some five films they would come to make together). Playing emotionally enigmatic lovers, both actors inhabit their roles with charismatic ease (Nero's the best I've ever seen him), their real-life sensual chemistry breathing life into the film's hyperventilating eroticism.

What Do The Simple Folk Do?
Though Redgrave appears nude in several scenes, fans of Nero have to content themselves with discreet angles and loincloths. As we now know, he was saving full-frontal for when he turned 75 (The Time of Their Lives - 2017)

A Quiet Place in the Country is genre-faithful as a murder mystery, a Giallo thriller, and a supernatural horror film, but its presentation is perhaps too iconoclast and its appeal too niche for me to recommend it wholeheartedly. Personally, I was absolutely enthralled by the film from the first frame to the last, finding much in what Elio Petri had to say about art and alienation still relevant and echoed in contemporary films like Nocturnal Animals (2016) and Velvet Buzzsaw (2019).

There's a thin membrane separating impulse, instinct, and inspiration. A Quiet Place in the Country suggests the wall distinguishing between passion, obsession, and compulsion is perhaps nonexistent.

BONUS MATERIAL:

A reader (thanks!) brought it to my attention that the source material for A Quiet Place in the Country, Oliver Onions' novella The Fair Beckoning One, was also made into a (stultifyingly pedestrian) episode of the Hammer anthology TV series Journey to the Unknown. Starring Robert Lansing and Gabrielle Drake, the episode was broadcast in December of 1968. Although A Quiet Place in the Country was also made in 1968, it wasn't released in the US until 1970.

The TV version of The Fair Beckoning One

That Redgrave and Nero were considered quite the scandalous pair in their day, now seems rather quaint. The two met in 1966 while making Camelot, lived in sin (gasp!), and had a baby out of wedlock before separating in 1971.  Shocking stuff, that.
What makes their story the stuff of fairy tales is their reuniting after several decades apart, and getting married in 2006. A story made all the more romantic due to countless interviews given by the never-married Nero over the years claiming he would never marry and that Redgrave had been the love of his life. In 2017 the couple danced together on the Italian TV show Strictly Come Dancing (below).

1968                                                        2017

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2020

TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN 1972

Toys Are Not For Children, an unashamedly debauched ‘70s grindhouse trash treasure with the subversive smarts of arthouse cinema, is a psychosexual fever dream about childhood trauma and arrested emotional development. In keeping with the film’s kiddie-centric theme, and being something of a case of pop-cultural stunted growth myself, I offer an introduction to the film in the style of my favorite childhood cartoon show--The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle--a program that ended each cliffhanger episode with two pun-heavy either/or wordplay titles. 

Toys Are Not For Children 

(In the voice of narrator William Conrad) Be sure to join us for our next episode: 
 "Welcome to the Psycho-Doll House” or “Mourning Becomes Electra-Complex.”

Marcia Forbes as Jamie Godard

Harlan Cary Poe as Charlie Belmond

Evelyn Kingsley as Pearl Valdi

Luis Arroyo as Eddie 

Fran Warren as Edna Godard

During New Hollywood’s clumsy transitional years, when recently-relaxed censorship laws made it easier for explicit images of sex and sadism to proliferate on movie screens, low-budget exploitation films were faced with the dilemma of seeing the once-exclusive staples of their domain—prurience, sensationalism, nudity, violence, profanity, and sordid content—co-opted by the major studios. With 20^th Century-Fox greenlighting megabuck miscalculations like Myra Breckinridge (1970)  and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). And Warner Bros. bankrolling the X-rated, controversy-courting masterworks A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Devils (1971), how was a lowly, lowbrow independent expected to compete?

For many in the quick-play, easy-profit trade, the obvious solution was to raise the stakes by lowering the bar. To explore themes and topics even the majors might be squeamish about touching, and in so doing (perhaps inadvertently, but always inevitably), usher in the crazy.

Enter filmmaker Stanley H. Brassloff, creator of two of 1968’s more obscure “roughies” (a gritty subgenre of sexploitation, usually featuring sexual violence) Two Girls for a Madman and Behind Locked Doors, and the director/producer/screenwriter (with Macs McAree) of the disarmingly whacko Toys Are Not For Children. 

As if suddenly realizing it has an awful lot of perversion to shoehorn into a rather breakneck 85-minute running time, Toys Are Not For Children gets swiftly down to business in a doozy of a pre-credits sequence that perfectly sets the tone for all the bizarro that follows. To the accompaniment of ominous chords of organ music and considerable heavy breathing on the soundtrack, an astonished mother walks in on her teenage daughter writhing naked on a child-sized bed in an infantile, toy-cluttered bedroom, lost in a fog of rapturous masturbation while caressing a stuffed toy soldier and moaning “Daddy…Daddy!”

And…we’re off to the dysfunction races.

Barbie's No-Fun House

Furniture scale and decor emphasize the doll-like world Jamie inhabits

“How long has this been going on? The stuff you’re doing… you’re just like your father! Well, he’s too busy with his women. All he ever did was send you these stinking toys and you take them to bed. It’s unnatural. Do you hear me? Unnatural!”

The individual illustrating that any toy can be a sex toy when you’re toting around emotional baggage the size of a steamer trunk is 19-year-old Jamie Godard of Long Island, NY. An emotionally immature young woman who, if you'll allow for the gross understatement, really misses her absentee father.

It seems beloved daddy Phillip Godard was abruptly and unceremoniously kicked out of the house, never to be seen again, when Jamie was but six years old. Left in the toxic care of Edna, her embittered, sexually repressed mother, Jamie's method of coping was to cultivate a dissociatively idealized image of her father. A soft-focus, turbidly carnal image dramatically at odds with her mother's frequent, epithet-laden reminders to Jamie that her father is a whoremonger, a drunkard, and, like all men, an evil scumbag who wants only one thing from women. Well, two things, actually. Edna emphatically maintains that men only want housewives and whores...just so long as they're not the same woman.

Playing Around
Jamie finds her dream job working in (what else?) a toy store. There she meets and, as a means of escaping her mother, hastily marries a co-worker, Charlie Belmond. In this scene, Charlie expresses his love for the decidedly impassive Jamie under the watchful gaze of several toys. Most prophetically: a Betty Big Girl doll and one called Little Honeymoon (the space baby from Dick Tracy comics).

Left to cope with the psychological fallout of being raised by two monumentally ill-matched individuals with the relationship skills of an Edward Albee Second Act, Jamie hasn’t grown up so much as grown inward. Inhibited, sexually fearful, and emotionally shut off on any subject that isn’t related to either toys or her dad; Jamie lives in a cocooned world of developmental suspended animation. One that feeds the delusion that her Daddy isn't just the only man ever to love her, he's the only man who will EVER love her.
Like The Wizard of Oz, The Bluebird, and countless bedtime stories about little girls embarking on journeys in search of something elusive and prized, Toys Are Not For Children is a fucked-up Fractured Fairy Tale chronicling Jamie's perverted Pilgrim's Progress to contrive the world's most misguided father and daughter reunion.

Something Olde, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue
The blue, in this case, being Charlie's balls, as Jamie prefers honeymoon cuddling with her stuffed toy

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

One of the nice surprises about exploitation flicks is that while they remain refreshingly honest and upfront about their commitment to giving audiences only the most salacious, exaggerated take on a subject at any given time, behind the surface, a great many of them turn out to be remarkably subversive. 

The kind of movie Toys Are Not For Children sold itself as can be gleaned from the two act-of-desperation alternative titles it was rereleased under after initially bombing at the boxoffice. There’s the grossly misleading How to Make Love to a Virgin and the simply nonsensical Virgin Dolls. But Toys Are Not For Children is actually an outlandish incest taboo/titillation tease propping up a provocatively rendered commentary on the limited and contradictory nature of society’s assigned roles for women. 

Jamie finds a friend, surrogate mother, & role model in Pearl Valdi, a New York prostitute and single mother (looking very Jacqueline Susann in her Pucci dress and mountain of hair) who visits the store one day to buy a birthday gift for her 9-year-old daughter. Jamie suggests a toy oven:

Jamie: “She can cook for her friends!”

Pearl: “Heh, she’ll be doing that for the rest of her life!”

Jamie: “Oh, when you’re 9 it's fun to play house!”

Pearl: “As long as you only PLAY house...it’s OK.”

With its three female major characters, at times, Toys Are Not For Children feels like Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977) filtered through the twisted mind of John Waters. Jamie, Pearl, and Edna each represent a restrictive feminine archetype. Jamie is woman as the eternal child. The infantilized daddy’s girl expected to be the virginal, compliant, and dependent love-receptacle whose sexualized innocence she’s neither allowed to acknowledge nor own. Who gets to define what it means to be a "good" girl or independent woman? Too often it's tied to archaic, patriarchal notions of purity and the silencing of a woman's voice in deciding who has access to her body.  

Pretty In Pink
Even in the midst of the Women's Movement, the '70s trafficked heavily
in the fetishization of sexualized youth and the infantilizing of women 

If Jamie is a worst-case casualty of our culture’s mania for girls who mature sexually but never grow up, then Jamie’s mother Edna is the Donna Reed / Leave It To Beaver domestic fantasy yanked to the dark side. Literally a housewife in that she’s never seen outside the confines of her claustrophobic home (the film’s dollhouse motif, again), Jamie’s vindictive mother—like the proverbial madwoman in the attic—is characterized as crazy and irrational, but, as we learn, she’s the only one who sees what’s actually going on. 

Between the sleaze and shocking revelations, Toys Are Not For Children manages to squeeze in a surprising number of barbed observations about the narrow scope through which women are viewed by society. Through the subtly competitive relationships Jamie has with her mother (vying for the attention of her father), and Pearl (capitulating to Eddie, Pearl's pimp and bedmate), it's dramatized how women, for want of male-gaze validation (aka love), often adopt inauthentic, ill-fitting personas and fail to be mutually supportive allies to other women...even in instances of shared trauma. 

In its depiction of Jamie's traumatizing home life, the film points to the cultural contrasts in the ways marriage is framed for women (all Happy Homemaker fulfillment, no drudgery) and men (standard Playboy Joke Page stuff about loss of freedom and a lifetime saddled to the ol' ball-and-chain). 

I Don't Wanna Grow Up, I'm A Toys R Us Kid
Ironically, the first time Charlie meets Jamie, he's the one acting like a child. Driving a toy car through the aisles, upon catching sight of his future wife, the camera frames him so he's surrounded by gendered toys of domesticity: a toy over, vacuum cleaner, blender, dishwasher set, and hairdryer

Rounding out this triad of female archetypes is whore: the umbrella label assigned to any woman who falls outside the Purity Myth. As it happens, Pearl (who instantly won me over in her introduction scene by giving serious Jacqueline Susann energy with her big hair and Pucci dress) actually IS a whore, but a capitalistically unapologetic one with a maternalistic streak. Caring to Edna’s cold, colorful to Edna’s drab, and lively to Edna's cynical dispiritedness, Pearl becomes an unexpected, unwilling role model for Jamie. 

I'm Coming Out
Jamie gets herself a Klute haircut, a new wardrobe, and a new career.  

As with Altman's film, the three women in Toys Are Not For Children exemplify three distinct aspects of female identity. That these are simply the standard-issue complexities and contradictions that come with being a dimensional adult can serve as commentary on how society favors the assuming of a single role in life. Playacting, if you will. 

"That Jamie is a real doll!"
Charlie fails to conceal his annoyance at his boss Max (N.J. Osrag)
for insisting that married life must be pure bliss

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I can’t say exactly what expectations I brought to Toys Are Not For Children, I only know they were low. Making the mistake of assuming the film’s obscurity was indicative of its quality, I settled in hoping for nothing more than a newly unearthed, so-bad-it’s-good godsend. Is it low-budget? To be sure. Feature uneven acting? Without a doubt. Inadvertently humorous at times? Most certainly. But, much like when I saw the movie Dinah East (1970)--that other little-known exploitationer I discovered decades after its initial release--I came away from Toys Are Not For Children simply floored to discover a sharp, disarmingly perceptive, almost recklessly unorthodox film. 

Sex-phobic Jamie has a particularly bad reaction
to happening upon an amorous couple in the woods

Though not all of the film's provocative ideas are thought through, and its take on sexual psychosis is dodgy at best. But I can't help being impressed by the way the story--told in disjointed, time-hopping flashbacks--has the viewer effectively share Jamie’s fractured worldview and memory. Out of this grows a narrative tension that feels like the piecing together of a bizarre puzzle. 

The look of the film is colorful and toy-box-bright, giving forth with an eye-orgy of kooky '70s decor, fashions, and hairstyles. The performances run the gamut of being a step above Andy Warhol level to the unexpectedly affecting and natural performance by Evelyn Kingsley as Pearl. 

Depending on how you look at it, Jamie's development or degradation is given visual emphasis in these mirror shots that have the artwork in Jamie's room reflect her sexual "maturity." Top right: a tiny picture of a little girl hangs in a room cluttered with toys. Below: a large painting of a nude woman staring unashamedly at the artist (viewer).

As the 1970s progressed, exploitation films grew so increasingly standardized and mainstream, that genuinely offbeat, difficult-to-categorize releases like this all but disappeared. A fact that makes me regret that I missed out on the opportunity to see Toys Are Not For Children when it first came out. Certainly, amid the glut of male-centric action films and buddy movies I saw at the time, a female-driven exercise in eccentricity like this would have been most welcome. 

Of course, there are compensations. For one, I'm certain the Blu-ray copy available today looks better than the original print ever did. A lot of my favorite mainstream films have yet to see a DVD or Blu-ray release so it's something of a thrill that SOMEONE thought to exhume this forgotten gem and give us connoisseurs of "cinéma de l'étrange" an experience not easy to forget.

Twisted Toy Story

BONUS MATERIAL

I was surprised to discover the actress playing Jamie's perpetually
pissed-off mother was a former big band singer and jazz vocalist
who, in 1947, introduced the popular standard "A Sunday Kind of Love." 

Films Dealing With Themes Similar to Toys Are Not For Children

Toys in the Attic (1963): Family dysfunction, incest, and Yvette Mimieux as a childlike woman.

Secret Ceremony (1968): Family dysfunction, sexual abuse, Elizabeth Taylor as a maternal whore, and Mia Farrow as a childlike woman.

Secret Ceremony

Toys Are Not For Children

Several times in the film I found my eyes drawn to the distinctive art print Pearl has on the wall of her apartment. I discovered it's a poster for a 1967 exhibit at New York's Pace Gallery for surrealist Ernest Trova. The image is from his Falling Man series. Pearl had more class than I thought!

It's Time To Speak of Unspoken Things

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2020