LAST OF THE RED HOT LOVERS 1972

I remember when I was a teenager, there used to be a radio station format called MOR, which stood for "middle of the road." And as the name suggests, these surprisingly popular stations catered to the seasoning-free music needs of its still market-significant 34 to 65 listening demographic--folks who were concerned that The Osmonds were beginning to sound a little too "street"--by playing inoffensive melodic pop, soft-rock, instrumentals, and standards (i.e., elevator music). It served as a counterprogramming response to the late-'60s rock, soul, and R&B revolution that emerged from the youth movement, drug culture, and changing socio-political climate.

Middle Man

I mention this because, when it comes to movies, I tend to forget that around this same time (roughly 1967 - 1978), Hollywood was in the midst of its own revolution, dubbed the New Hollywood. A revolution the floundering studios responded to with its own brand of MOR counterprogramming designed to satisfy the needs of the middle-age-bracket ticket-buyer who still saw movies as primarily a "family medium" and went to theaters for escapism, not significance.

In the years following the breakout success of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), a struggling film industry began aggressively courting the rapidly-growing youth market. Embracing unconventional films with topical themes, profanity, and graphic displays of sex, nudity, and violence. The goal was to attract audiences by offering them what they couldn't get on television. While Hollywood traditionalists balked at the newfound climate of permissiveness, the college-age demographic seized the marketplace. It was the disposable income of the young that turned offbeat, taboo-shattering films like Midnight Cowboy (1969), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Last Tango in Paris (1972) into major boxoffice hits.

Meanwhile, television remained the dominant entertainment choice for the dwindling 35 to 64-year-old market. But, when given the right G or GP-rated inducement, they proved their age bracket was still capable of showing up in significant enough numbers to make such old-fashioned (if not downright primordial) movies as Yours, Mine, & Ours (1968), The Love Bug (1969), and Airport (1970) some of the highest-grossing films of their respective years.

Stuck in the Middle with You

The "Hollywood Renaissance" era of the '70s is rightfully remembered for its creative daring and for producing groundbreaking films like The Graduate (1967), Klute (1971), and MASH (1970). But they are also the years when doggedly routine MOR comedies sought to straddle the fence through stories that looked at the rapidly-changing cultural landscape through a reactive, decidedly middle-aged (primarily male, always white) prism.  

The undisputed master of MOR movies at this time was the late Neil Simon. He built an entire career out of glorifying the middle-aged, middle-class everyman who's bewildered by a world that is changing too fast. Having begun his career writing for early TV (Your Show of Shows, The Phil Silvers Show), the prolific playwright, screenwriter, and Broadway golden boy was a master of sitcom plotting and gag-heavy humor. All of which reassured ticket buyers that a night out with a Neil Simon movie was a guaranteed risk-free, comfortingly familiar experience. Dubbed the "King of Kvetch Comedy" for almost a decade, Neil Simon had his finger on the arrhythmic pulse of America's "middlers"— folks too old for the Pepsi Generation but not yet ready to join the Geritol set. 

Barney's Queen of the Sea
Sweet, savory salmon saute swimming in salivary succulence 

But by 1972, when even TV sitcoms were beginning to adopt a hipper, more contemporary comedy style (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, and Maude all premiered between 1970 and 1972) and Simon--who turned 45 that year, the same age as the main character in Last of the Red Hot Lovers--found that his trademark jokey, setup-payoff style had begun to feel dated even to his core audience. Which perhaps explains why the audience that had helped turn his early screen adaptations Barefoot in the Park (1967) and The Odd Couple (1968) into boxoffice hits went largely MIA by the time Star Spangled Girl (1971) and Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972) came out. 

Alan Arkin as Barney Cashman

Sally Kellerman as Elaine Navazio

Paula Prentiss as Bobbi Michele

Renee Taylor as Jeanette Fisher

If Classical Hollywood's fumbling efforts to join the New Hollywood youthquake were a movie, that movie would be Neil Simon's Last of the Red Hot Lovers. It's the story of Barney Cashman. Balding, happily married, settled-in-his-ways, Barney Cashman, who wears a blue suit every day when he drives his black 4-door sedan from Great Neck to New York to open his seafood restaurant. The routine sameness of Barney's life has him, at age 45, both contemplating his mortality and grappling with the nagging certainty that on the battlefront of the '70s Sexual Revolution, God has classified him 4-F. 

It's Barney's deepest desire to have just one afternoon of "exciting" in a life that has thus far been one uninterrupted stream of "nice." Neil Simon's midlife-crisis comedy of bourgeois manners chronicles Barney's earnest but disastrous pursuit of the perfect Afternoon Delight. 

The Peacock Revolution
Along with everything else, men's fashion underwent an upheaval in the '70s.
Bold styling and vivid colors signified youth and sex appeal

Although a Tony Award-nominated hit when it opened on Broadway in 1969 (with James Coco in the lead), Last of the Red Hot Lovers —the 7th of Simon's plays to make it to the screen—hit theaters during a downtrend in Simon's career and, like Star Spangled Girl before it, opened to terrible reviews and non-existent business. By the time it was released on VHS in the early '80s (when I saw it), it had earned the reputation of being the most missable of Simon's screen adaptations. 

So wouldn't you know it...coming to Last of the Red Hot Lovers with rock-bottom expectations and the participation of faves Paula Prentiss and Sally Kellerman as my sole interest, I wound up laughing louder, longer, and more frequently at LOTRHL than any other Neil Simon film I'd seen to date. That was more than 40 years ago. Today, even after multiple revisits,  Last of the Red Hot Lovers still remains my #1 favorite Neil Simon stage-to-screen adaptation.

Barney Whips Out His Schtick
The comedy in Last of the Red Hot Lovers is from a time when the mere sight of a middle-aged man in boxer shorts (37-year-old Arkin shaved his head to play 45) was considered a sure-fire laugh-getter 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM     

The obvious reason I love Last of the Red Hot Lovers is that it makes me laugh. A lot. What's not so obvious is why. It's not like I'm blind to the film's numerous shortcomings: Neal Hefti's oddly dispiriting musical score; director Gene Saks' (Mame) pedestrian approach to the material (it looks like a TV movie that ran into budget trouble); and the overall sense that the film's premise is too thin to support the level of repetition imposed upon it by its "comic triple" structure.

For those unfamiliar, the Comic Triple is the ages-old comedy writing principle that says things are funnier in threes. A setup built around - 1. normal, 2. normal, 3. surprise! 

A typical example is this exchange from Young Frankenstein (1974)-co-written by Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks: 

1. "Would the doctor care for a brandy before retiring?"

    - "No. Thank you."

2. "Some warm milk, perhaps?"

    - "No. Thank you very much. No, thanks."

3. "Ovaltine?"

Like Simon's earlier play Plaza Suite, Last of the Red Hot Lovers has a "3-in-One" structure (three one-act playlets united by the same male lead) that turns the film itself into a Comic Triple. But 98 minutes was an awfully long time to wait for a punchline for some.  

(Mel Brooks and Neil Simon were friends who both started as writers for Your Show of Shows in the '50s. Only a year apart in age, Simon never really shed his status as the comic darling of the blue-hair set, but Mel Brooks' broad farces and satirical movie homages struck a chord with young audiences and came to influentially exemplify the look of hip, college-crowd comedy in the '70s.)  

It's All in the Writing / It's All in the Casting
Simon's jokes hit most of the time. But for me, Arkin, Kellerman, Prentiss, and Taylor bat it clear out of the park with every swing. Seeing what these quirky, broke-the-mold character actors do with Simon's set-in-aspic material is why this movie is such a favorite

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

In Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Barney Cashman's failed trio of trysts in the New York apartment of his 73-year-old mother (empty two days a week from 3 to 5 when she's out doing volunteer work at Mount Sinai) begins in the winter of his discontent and continues through summer and fall. Making him a sort of frustrated man for all seasons. Each encounter brings about subtle changes in Barney, which should have a unifying effect and make the film feel more like a single narrative. Alas, the variance in tone and pacing of these sequences felt less like watching a movie with a cohesive plotline and more like watching the isolated sequences in an episode of Love, American Style.    

LOVE AND THE SENSUOUS WOMAN

"I get cravings. To eat, to touch, to smell, to see, to do.
A physical, sensual pleasure that can only be satisfied at that particular moment."

The first sequence is the most quintessentially Simonesque of all the episodes. A machine-gun barrage of wisecracks and one-liners delivered with surprising comic panache by an amusingly salty Sally Kellerman with a prototypically subdued Alan Arkin – the master of comic stillness – playing straight man. The occasion of two married people agreeing to meet for an afternoon of no-strings adultery has Simon applying his The Odd Couple formula of close-quarters dissimilarity-conflict to an unforeseen obstacle: anxious Barney is looking for romance while illusion-free Elaine ("A coughing woman of Polish persuasion") is looking for sex. 

What should be a semantic non-issue becomes a Wall of Jericho as Barney's stubborn need to justify his infidelity with sentimentality finds no common ground with Elaine's clear-eyed sexual pragmatism. Behind the witty barbs and comebacks in their talking-in-circles banter lies a sharp discourse about the death of romance in the age of Deep Throat and Portnoy's Complaint (two films that came out the same summer as Last of the Red Hot Lovers).

In her 2013 memoir, Sally Kellerman cited her performance in Last of the Red Hot Lovers as her proudest career accomplishment, which I'm in absolute agreement with. Reminding me of one of those silent wives in a Martin Scorsese mob movie, Kellerman's hard-edged Elaine Navazio is a standout and my favorite performance of her career. The writing in this sequence is perhaps the tightest and funniest, and Kellerman has a great comedy rhythm with Arkin (the two would team again in 1975's Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins).  

What hasn't been as obvious to me until multiple revisits is how hilariously in character Arkin's underplaying is. His performance is infused with dozens of small bits of business (the running gag of his non-drinker's reaction to drinking, for example) that not only set up and support Kellerman's jokes beautifully, but nicely establish many of Barney's behavioral details that pay off in latter sequences to illustrate his evolution as a red hot lover.

LOVE AND THE ACTRESS

"I don't need their stinkin' show. I'm more of a movie personality. 
Barbra Streisand, Ali MacGraw... that's the type I am."

The first playlet ended with Barney emphatically vowing "I will never, never, never do that again." In this chapter, which stands as the requisite "silly" episode in Neil Simon's 3-act formula (remember that passed-out hooker storyline in California Suite?), we learn that "never' for Barney is about six months. It's summer, and having shed his romantic illusions along with his winter suit, Barney is again inspired to entertain a young woman in his mother's apartment. This time it's Bobbi Michele (Prentiss), the "theatrically built" actress-singer he meets in the park. 
From Barney's outside-looking-in perspective on the sexual revolution, Bobbi represents all those beautiful, long-legged, mini-skirted, sexually-uninhibited women Barney sees and fantasizes about on the streets and staring out at him from the covers of sexy magazines. That she turns out to be Grade-A Looney Tunes turns their afternoon into a "be careful what you wish for" male midlife-crisis cautionary tale.

I'm a huge admirer of the woefully underappreciated Paula Prentiss, so I feign no objectivity when I say she's hysterically funny in this essentially made-to-order role. Not a popular performance even among many of her fans, but I find her brilliant. No one does kooky-sexy like Prentiss, her distinctive delivery and impeccable timing work to make the comedy in this sequence feel almost absurdist.

LOVE AND THE TIMES WE LIVE IN

Jeanette - "You're not appalled by the times that we live in? The promiscuity you find everywhere?"
Barney - "I haven't found it anywhere! I hear a lot about it, but I haven't found it!"

Last of the Red Hot Lovers gets a bit serious in this final installment. A family friend whose husband is having an affair (Taylor) plummets into a deep depression and solicits the by-now practically predatory Barney for an ill-advised revenge dalliance. In the course of trying to seduce the woman after she's already expressed she's having second thoughts, Barney has a Willy Loman moment where he's confronted with his moral hypocrisy and the very real possibility that he may not be the decent man he prides himself on being. Amidst this, the film seems to make the questionable (but no doubt comforting) leap that before the sexual revolution introduced so many gray areas, America was a bastion of heterosexual monogamy. Conveniently ignoring the decades of smutty sex comedies (some written by Simon himself) satirizing the morality of suburban bed-hopping.  

In later years, Neil Simon would improve at balancing comedy-drama. But this third act episode, which has Simon's characters dealing with some pretty hard-hitting truths, is written to be the broadest, most farcical sequence of them all. 

Perhaps on stage, it came off better. But with the intimacy of the movie screen, the skill of Renee Taylor's performance only emphasizes the sequence's whiplash shifts in tone. (Taylor is superb. How she manages to be screamingly funny one minute and heart-breakingly real the next is remarkable.) Does it make me laugh? Yes. Between the running gags of Jeanette's handbag and her retreats to the coffee shop, it has me in stitches. Does it work? Intermittently I'd say. 

Once again, I call attention to how good Alan Arkin is, and in this sequence, he has to work with coming off as kind of creepy and unsympathetic. But both actors redeem the material's shortcomings through the authenticity of their characterizations.

Looking like a flesh and blood Boris Badenov,
incognito Barney tries to make it to his mother's apartment unnoticed

As a journalist noted at the time, Last of the Red Hot Lovers is a sad comedy about a genuine cultural phenomenon of the time: the youthquake era was the first time adults didn't look to their elders for guidance on how to live their lives, they looked to the young.

It's hard to know what being middle-aged must have felt like at a time when so much of life around you seemed to be in flux for only the young, but everyone can relate to feeling left out, feeling as though you're missing out, or that the parade is passing by. With Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Neil Simon takes a witty and insightful stab at exploring the experience of a character who had to go too far to learn that being in the middle wasn't so bad.

BONUS MATERIAL

Iconic Looks - The Lynx Fur Coat 

I really love the look of Sally Kellerman's Elaine in Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Especially her enormous fur coat. As character-defining costuming goes, the lynx fur coat worked overtime in the '60s and '70s. I don't know if they ever went through a phase when they were considered sincerely chic or glamorous. But whenever a character is sporting one in a movie, it always seems to serve as a signifier of a certain kind of brassy, East Coast vulgarity. Living in California, I don't think I've ever seen one in person, but my first screen lynx sighting was in 1967's Wait Until Dark when it was worn by street-savvy heroin smuggler Samantha Jones (bottom). Next, in 1970s The Owl and the Pussycat, Barbra Streisand's model/actress wore her omnipresent faux fur coat like it was sex-worker armor.  

Sally Kellerman (June 2, 1937 - February 24, 2022)

The recent death of actress Sally Kellerman is what inspired me to re-watch Last of the Red Hot Lovers. In her 2013 memoir Read My Lips, she cites her performance in the film as one of her proudest accomplishments, and I can't help but agree. The first thing I ever saw Kellerman in was an episode of the Marlo Thomas sitcom That Girl titled "Break a Leg." It was broadcast Thursday, November 10, 1966, and it made an impression on me because I had a 4th-grade teacher I had a crush on who looked just like Kellerman in this episode. Although her most famous role (Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan) is from a film I really can't stand (Robert Altman's M*A*S*H), I loved Sally Kellerman in Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975), Slither (1973), Foxes (1980), Brewster McCloud (1970), and even 1973's Lost Horizon.

Neil Simon: Voice of the Urban Underdog

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2022

STAR! 1968

"Crickey! I'm tired of playing bloody virgins." - Julie Andrews 1967

When music icon Debbie Harry was asked in a 2019 interview if she would be interested in seeing her life and the legacy of Blondie turned into a musical biopic, she responded: “I’m not so sure that I’m terribly fond of them. The way the industry works and the way the artist works within the industry, it’s all very similar. The only thing that’s different is the personality of the artist. It’s basically the same old story, only with different performers, different faces.”

Ms. Harry nailed it. Whether set in the worlds of music, movies, or theater, biographical films--no matter how creatively envisioned--suffer from an elemental sameness. A formulaic, 3-Act cycle of “rags-riches-rundown-redemption” that may make it easy for Hollywood to keep reselling the same product with different packaging, but encourages the production of films whose only distinction is budget size and the degree of talent, dynamism, and charisma of the particular performer tasked with the job of being the celebrity impersonator. 

Seeing Double

Los Angeles, October 1968: Julie Andrews & Hollywood newbie Barbra Streisand were the Doublemint Twins of Roadshow musicals. Star! the eagerly-anticipated musical about the life of English Music Hall star Gertrude Lawrence, opened just three weeks after the premiere of Funny Girl, the equally anticipated biopic about Broadway star Fanny Brice. The similar films employed the same flashback framing device, each leading lady seated in a theater, looking back over her life. (Note La Streisand's positively lethal nails.)

Funny Girl and Star! shared near-identical scenes depicting a theater neophyte “comically” bungling an ensemble number; winning over an audience with a dazzling solo; routinely bumping heads with a stern but avuncular employer; and, de rigueur of the genre, suffering for love in mink. Where these two films diverge is that its stars at the time were on very opposite career paths: Streisand seeking to establish a screen persona, Andrews hoping to shed one. This proved to be the difference that made all difference.

Dame Julie Andrews as Gertrude Lawrence

Daniel Massey as Noel Coward

I adore Julie Andrews, yet I’m something of a Johnny-come-lately where her films are concerned. The first Julie Andrews movie I ever saw was Thoroughly Modern Millie in 1967 when I was 10-years-old, and I never saw another until 10 (which I loathed) in 1979. I was in my 40s when I got around to seeing Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music was unseen until 2015, and Star! only a few years before that.

I'm aware that my lifetime aversion to movies branded "clean" or "wholesome" is what kept me away from Andrews' two most iconic films, which is a pity, for they are both marvelous films I would have loved as a child. However, Star!--an overstuffed musical "sure-fire hit" that wound up one of Hollywood's more legendary "crash and burn disasters" (I'm looking at you, Mame and Cats)--is just the kind of elephantine entertainment that would seem to be right up my aesthetic alley.

Andrews, Bruce Forsythe, and Beryl Reid sing the popular 1921 Music Hall song "Piccadilly"

Discounting my usual complaint about overemphatic musical titles (those exclamation points!), I like to think I approached Star! with an open mind. But I gotta say, things got off to a very rocky start when this $14 million, spare no expense, travel the globe for locations musical epic hit me over the head with its “Fox contract player” casting vibe. Throughout the film, in scenes meant to be taking place in London & Paris, up pop familiar American TV faces like Eugene Roche (Mr. Ajax dish detergent) and Cathleen Cordell (stalwart of episodic TV) to break the illusion. 

Some 15 minutes into the movie there’s a scene set in a meticulously re-created British Music Hall, but verisimilitude flies straight out the window the second I recognize the cockney drunk harassing a young Gertrude Lawrence to be the same drunk who harasses Darrin Stephens in every episode of Bewitched set in a bar: none other than TV's Charmin-pusher, Mr. Whipple, aka character actor Dick Wilson.

Filmed on location in New York, London, and the French Riviera!
Well, you're just going to have to take the publicist's word for it, because between the rear-projection shots, obvious backdrops, and interiors so brightly lit they look like sound stages, it's pretty hard to believe Star! ever left L.A.  

Then there are the two Parisian theater/cabaret impresarios played by American actors (Alan Oppenheim and Richard Angarola) chipping away at my already overtasked suspension of disbelief by speaking with cartoon French accents. Indeed, fans of Valley of the Dolls will recognize Angarola as Mr. Chardot, Sharon Tate’s, sleazy French "art film" director with the Pepé Le Pew intonation.

Hitting perhaps the hardest is the lineup of actors cast as glamorous Gertrude Lawrence's paramours. Looking over this bunch, my best guess is that in order for a family film to legitimize its leading lady juggling multiple lovers without benefit of marriage, they sought to cast leading men guaranteed to drive thoughts of sex out of anyone's mind on sight.

Richard Crenna, Anthony Eisley, Michael Craig, and Robert Reed
If it was STAR!'s intention to generate sympathy for Gertrude Lawrence by presenting her as a woman cursed with attracting only the blandest, dullest suitors from several continents, it succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation

When production on The Sound of Music wrapped in 1964, Julie Andrews agreed to reteam with director Robert Wise and producer Saul Chaplin on a film about the life of Gertrude Lawrence. In the years before production began on Star!, Andrews completed three films (Torn Curtain, Hawaii, and Thoroughly Modern Millie), and most significantly, her fourth, The Sound of Music had become a global cash-cow, cultural phenomenon, and 20th Century-Fox savior.

I have no idea how the Gertrude Lawrence biopic was originally envisioned in 1964, but by the time it morphed into the musical reunion of the creative team responsible for the then highest-grossing motion picture in history, I suspect it outgrew itself.

"I don't know, but somewhere along the line, 'Shrinking Violet' got Sanforized" - Lucy Ricardo

Costing nearly twice as much as The Sound of Music with less than a third of its plot and none of its warmth or humor, Star! is a gargantuan production for no other reason than Julie Andrews was the #1 box-office star and The Sound of Music had made a mint.

Like many, I knew next to nothing about Gertrude Lawrence before seeing Star!, but years of reading show business memoirs and seeing movie biopics with "Story" tacked on the end (The Helen Morgan Story, The Eddy Duchin Story, etc.) resulted in a nagging sense of déjà vu from Star!'s depiction of Lawrence as a willful, ambitious girl from humble beginnings who achieves great fame as an actress, only to find happiness elusive because her professional desire to be “lots of different people" leaves her not knowing who she is or what she wants. 

Presented as a series of episodic, tangentially-connected highlights and lowlights interspersed between splashy musical numbers, the essentially unremarkable events of Lawrence’s life story (at least as presented here) left me wondering how in the world anyone thought $14 million and three hours were necessary to tell it.

Of STAR!'s seven Oscar nominations (0 wins), Daniel Massey was deservedly singled out for the film's sole nomination in the performing categories. He also won the Golden Globe, for which Andrews was also nominated.

Perhaps criticizing the film’s script for being superficial, its characters undeveloped, its supporting cast serviceable, and production old-fashioned is quibbling. Star! was never really selling Gertrude Lawrence in the first place. As implied by the movie posters declaring “Julie Andrews as The Star!”, Julie Andrews—her singing, her dancing, her wigs, and her costumes (by Donald Brooks)—was the whole show. And I have to say, as a showcase for a sumptuously glamorized Andrews in all her singing and dancing glory, Star! is an outstanding film record that I'm overjoyed exists. 

Andrews is in exceptionally fine voice and is clearly working her ass off. And rather than revisiting the tried-and-true, she's taking a genuine creative risk. I applaud actors (especially those labeled "stars") who try to spread their creative wings. Too many bad films have been made and far too many exciting talents dulled by surrendering to typecasting, going for the easy money, and pandering to fanbases obsessed with a star's “image.” 

While some newspaper ads heralded, "Julie Andrews is a different Julie Andrews in STAR!" others promised, "Julie Andrews as you love her!"--whatever that meant. As it turns out, she was neither and both. Consequently, STAR!, like Gertrude Lawrence's character in the Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, suffered from not being able to make up its mind. 

Although the sincerity of her effort shows (which may be part of the problem), with reluctance I have to say I never found Andrews convincing for a moment as Gertrude Lawrence (1968 Maggie Smith would have been ideal). A reluctant observation because I really do like Julie Andrews SO much and think, in addition to being very talented, she is and always has been a humble and gracious class act and charming personality. 

But for an actress who mostly radiates crisp efficiency and common sense to make real a character charitably described as an ill-tempered, hard-drinking, child-neglecting narcissist, Andrews needed the kind of special handling and solid material Doris Day received with Love Me or Leave Me, or Mary Tyler Moore with Ordinary People. Certainly something better than William Fairchild’s fatuous screenplay or Robert Wise's famously hands-off direction. Outside of its Michael Kidd choreographed and staged musical numbers, overall I feel Julie Andrews is poorly served by Star!, not the other way around. 

14-year-old Jenny Agutter (Logan's Run, Walkabout) as Gertrude's daughter Pamela Roper

As movie musicals evolve (de-evolve?) into pyrotechnical CGI displays of machine-gun editing and flying camerawork, an old-school, studio-bound movie like Star! is not without its pleasures. I knew when I first saw it that Star! was going to be a film I’d add to my collection and rewatch...but likely never again in its entirety. And I was right...Star! has joined The Music Man, Paint Your Wagon, Nine, A Chorus Line, and Rent as one of my movie musical “Fast-Forward Favorites.”

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE  -  The Musical Sequences  

My “Fast-Forward Favorites” are movies I visit most often with my finger poised over the FWD button on the remote so I can sidestep the unpleasantness and hone in exclusively on the joys. In nearly every film I place in this category, this means the musical numbers (George Cukor's The Women is one of the few non-musical films I most enjoy a la carte). The musical sequences in Star! hold a special sway over me because I fell in love with the movie's original soundtrack album long before I ever saw the film. I was a freshman in high school when I purchased the deluxe, photo-crammed, gate-fold Star! soundtrack LP for 99¢ in a remainder bin. It’s an absolutely brilliant song collection and I played it to death (still do) because it’s essentially a Julie Andrews concert album in disguise.

The use of music is where Star! differs from its 1968 look-alike Funny Girl. In Star!, like Cabaret, only four years earlier, all the songs and dances take place onstage or are sung in realistic performance. For the longest time, the discordant tone of the screenplay left me with the impression that the musical numbers in the film were unconnected to the action and that each time Dame Andrews breaks into song, the already overextended story grinds to a halt. But in rewatching the film in recent years and for this piece, I now see that most every song actually comments on the action or relates to Lawrence’s romantic and psychological conflicts. It's just that with the film's unwieldy structure, that particular thread isn't all that easy to find. 

Favorite Musical Sequences 

Dear Little Boy (Dear Little Girl)

Ironic as hell that my top fave musical moment in this Herculean production is Julie Andrews just standing still and singing with that bell-clear voice of hers. Star! was my introduction to many of the standards and showtunes in the score, and this Gershwin song from 1926's Oh, Kay! (those damned exclamation points, again) is lovely.

Burlington Bertie from Bow

I’m no fan of clowns, baggy-pants comics, or those maudlin, cured-ham vaudeville-burlesque hobo “swells” like Red Skelton’s Freddie the Freeloader...but this number is a keeper. The song itself is a witty delight and Andrews handles the many props and comic stage business with waggish aplomb. She often refers to it as the most challenging number she's ever had to learn.

The Physician

I love this clever Cole Porter tune so much, and the comical staging it's given really soars in spite of the cringe-inducing brownface adopted by the performers (the less said about that “Limehouse Blues” number, the better). I’ve heard this song interpreted by many people over the years, but Andrews' rendition is the top.

The Saga of Jenny

A defining characteristic I associate with Michael Kidd’s choreography (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Hello, Dolly!, Guys and Dolls) is that while most dance strives for the appearance of effortlessness, Kidd’s work displays a conspicuous strenuousness. That’s not a criticism so much as an observation citing what makes this number so impressive for me. Kidd puts Julie Andrews through the dance equivalent of a decathlon, but she wins the gold.

Damage Control

When Star! flopped, Fox pulled the film from theaters early, lopped off nearly an hour, and released it to theaters in 1969 under the optimistic, totally nonsensical title Those Were The Happy Times. While I've always liked the original (misleadingly modern) movie poster, I am mad about and positively mesmerized by the sheer, absolute flop-sweat desperation of the re-issue poster. "Be Glad they still make pictures like this!" ...that's like when you complain about the lima beans and your mom responds, "Be glad there's food on your plate at all!" And what's up with that "demented flower girl" artwork? ...by The Sound of Music poster artist Howard Terpning, no less.

BONUS MATERIAL

In 1999, Twiggy (The Boy Friend) and Harry Groener portrayed Gertrude Lawrence & Noel Coward in the Off-Broadway production If Love Were All. Never saw the show but the cast CD is terrific. Sets and costumes were designed by Julie Andrews' first husband, Oscar and Tony Award-winning designer Tony Walton (All That Jazz).

"When you flop in one part, always start in another as soon as possible." 

- Gertrude Lawrence STAR! screenplay

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021

CHINATOWN 1974

"Mrs. Mulwray, I think you're hiding something."

Whether for the prestige, visual opulence, short-hand history, or easy-access sentimentality, period films and costume dramas have always been a Hollywood staple and a vital part of movie storytelling. But in the 1970s, the need for some kind of collective breather from the relentless tensions of the “Now” (i.e., Vietnam War, Watergate, impeachment, oil crisis, inflation) produced a market-surge interest in movies set in the “Then.” Particularly the then of the 1920s and 1930s.

Some of these films were escapist homages to retro genres (At Long Last Love -1975). Some were style-fetish showcases devoted to the detailed reconstruction of the fashions, furnishings, and décor of the era (The Great Gatsby -1974). And some were trenchant exercises in ‘70s disillusionment whose nihilist themes were tempered by the distancing device of taking place in America's recent past (The Day of the Locust -1975). Roman Polanski’s Chinatown managed to be all three.

Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes

Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Cross Mulwray

John Huston as Noah Cross

The collaborative effort of the members of the “New Hollywood” Boys Club: producer Robert Evans (The Godfather, Marathon Man), screenwriter Robert Towne (Shampoo, The Last Detail), and director Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth), Chinatown had a bumpy, three-year journey to the screen (covered in deliciously intricate detail in Sam Wesson’s book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last years of Hollywood). But when Chinatown premiered in theaters in the summer of 1974, the many arguments, rewrites, firings, walkouts, and endless weeks of tinkering proved not only to be more than worth the effort, but stood as evidence of the degree of care and artistry that went into fashioning a film that many today regard as a modern masterpiece of American cinema. 

Love the composition of this shot. Even the body language of the characters is perfect

Hardly considered the sure-fire success its current reputation would suggest, Chinatown struggled through disastrous previews and a difficulty generating pre-release interest in a 1974 movie marketplace dominated by the twin publicity blitzkriegs of Lucille Ball's ill-conceived Mame and Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby. Three-time Oscar nominee Jack Nicholson (his most recent being a Best Actor nod for 1973's The Last Detail) was hot at the time, but there existed considerable doubt among many as to how he would come across in this, his first stab at a leading man glamour role. 

Meanwhile, Faye Dunaway's post-Bonnie and Clyde screen output had proved erratic at best, with her The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) golden girl patina coming perilously close to tarnishing after a string of arty flops and effective but unfruitful supporting roles. Then there was Roman Polanski...with his days as New Hollywood's European wunderkind a matter of history and coming fresh off two back-to-back boxoffice bombs (Macbeth -1971 and What? -1972), his name carried about it an aura of fall-from-grace tragedy (the Manson murders) in a town ruled by superstition.

Darrell Zwerling as Hollis Mulwray

Further contributing to the uncertainty surrounding the film's reception was the fact that a quick recounting of Chinatown's plot-- "A private eye in 1937 Los Angeles investigates a mystery involving a real estate swindle and the city's water rights!" --didn't exactly set the pulse racing. 

But what Chinatown had going for it was that it was an original. Not an adaptation of a previously-produced novel, film, or theatrical production. As '70s movies became more formulaically bloated (The Way We Were -1973) and market-driven slick (The Sting - 1973), Chinatown's creative integrity vs its dubious box-office prospects felt like a throwback to Hollywood's very recent past. Back to the start of the decade when difficult-to-categorize films like Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and Five Easy Pieces (1970) were being made because they were stories the filmmakers wanted to tell, not because they were sure-fire blockbuster material.

The first time I saw Chinatown, it had me in its hip pocket the minute those stylish opening titles appeared to the accompaniment of Jerry Goldsmith's mysteriously forlorn theme music. And though the film had an alluringly old-fashioned sound and succeeded in creating a vision of a past that felt lived-in, not decorative, Chinatown somehow managed to sidestep things that might have made it feel imitative or as paying affectionate homage to another movie…Chinatown looked and felt like the genuine article.

It didn't seem quite possible that Polanski and Co. had managed to make a film that worked magnificently as a mystery (the particulars of the twisty plot--murder, political swindling, family secrets ---are not exactly easy-to-follow on first viewing); achieved a kind of visual poetry (the movie looks swelteringly hot! How did they do that?), and was propelled by the emotional connection of compelling characters whose fates you came to care about (the performances are uniformly first-rate...right across the board). 

Chinatown, in both style and execution, is a jet-black neo-noir that realizes--with a persuasive canniness I still can't quite put my finger on--both Robert Towne's goal of writing a story in the tradition of Raymond Chandler Dashiell Hammett, and Roman Polanski's desire to create: “A film about the ‘30s seen through the camera eye of the ‘70s.” 

Chinatown gets everything right. In creating the slightly artificial authenticity of Los Angeles in the '30s, Polanski nailed it when he observed "People know this time because of the movies, not because of what was real."

Given a contemporary sheen thanks to its widescreen Panavision color photography that "feels" like B&W, Chinatown evokes the classic detective movies of the past via its keen eye for period detail and avoidance of so many of the nostalgia-craze movie gimmicks of the time: no diffused lighting, no voiceover narration, no self-conscious “period” jargon, and no knowing winks to the audience. And here's a bonus...the actors actually look comfortable and convincing in their period clothes! (For the alternative, aka, kids playing dress-up, see Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby - 2013 or  Mank - 2020). 

The result is a movie that's as satisfying as a genre entertainment as it is a dark and existentially layered contemplation on corruption, the destruction of innocence, and, as per Towne, "The futility of good intentions."

Chinatown provides many memorable "goosebump moments," this scene being one of my favorites. I absolutely love Dunaway's delivery and the struck look in Nicholson's eyes when Evelyn asks about the mystery woman in Jake's past. As we'll discover, Evelyn & Jake are two people united by the things they're trying to forget.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

One of the main reasons Chinatown made such an impression on me is that it was the very first noirish private eye movie I ever saw. 

In 1971 LIFE magazine devoted its February cover to America’s burgeoning nostalgia craze, and by 1974, everything from fashion to music reflected the nation’s fascination with life enjoyed in the rear-view. The summer of 1974 saw San Francisco movie theaters so overflowing with retro fare, it took considerable effort to find a film set in the present day: Chinatown, The Great Gatsby, The Lords of Flatbush, That’s Entertainment!, Mame, The Three Musketeers, Daisy Miller, Thomasine and Bushrod, Blazing Saddles, Jeremiah Johnson, Huckleberry Finn (of all things), and Our Time (a little-seen coming-of-age movie set in the ‘50s that opened at the Alhambra during the summer I worked there as an usher). 

The Two Mrs. Mulwrays
Diane Ladd as Ida Sessions. There is a subtle wit to Ladd's performance as the prostitute/movie bit player hired to impersonate Evelyn Mulwray. Miss Session's attempt to affect an air of moneyed aristocracy hints at her lack of success as an actress.

When Chinatown came out I was a 16-year-old movie buff with a passion for contemporary films almost to the exclusion of all else. Back then, my appreciation for classic movies was largely academic and aesthetic (i.e., I enjoyed reading about them and decorated the walls of my bedroom with posters of Marilyn Monroe, Glark Gable, and WC Fields), not practical. Which meant I hadn’t yet seen The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, or any of those classics on The Late Show about hard-boiled detectives and dangerous women. At sixteen I was much too in thrall of the then taboo-shattering adult themes and newfound unrestricted nudity, sex, & violence of ‘70s films to ever find the Production Code coyness of old movies to be of much interest. That is, except for musicals. Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend (1971) ignited my love for old MGM musicals and the films of Busby Berekely, but that’s pretty much where my interest in “Golden Age" Hollywood films began and ended. 

The latter point, my love of musicals, goes to plain why, when That’s Entertainment! and Chinatown both opened on the same day in San Francisco (Wednesday, June 26th), I opted for That’s Entertainment!. An option I exercised for two more weekends before getting around to seeing Chinatown.

Roman Polanski as Man with Knife

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Maybe it’s the Blu-ray talking, but I’m obsessed with what a fabulous-looking movie Chinatown is. The Oscar-nominated team of cinematographer John A. Alonzo, production designer Richard Sylbert, and art director W. Stewart Campbell give Chinatown an atmospheric sheen that is often breathtaking in its evocation of sun-baked Los Angles in the late ‘30s. 

But despite the obvious care and expense lavished on every frame, Chinatown's distinction is that it is a period film that has no interest in romanticizing the past. With traditionally swept-under-the-nostalgia-carpet realities like racism and classist privilege flowing like an undercurrent in a narrative propelled by graft, collusion, murder, and incest; Chinatown’s surface sheen creates a dichotomy that challenges the dreamy ideals one associates with old movies. Cynicism has always been a part of the detective movie genre, but no matter how nihilist the theme, by fade-out, the requisite virtues of honor, heroism, and the triumph of good had to be reinstalled. Chinatown, however, ends with a punch to the gut and the ground knocked out from under us.

Me in 1974:  "Wow, even in so-called simpler times, rich people were greedy and corrupt!"
Me in 2021: "Wow, this movie is almost 50 years old and the rich are still as corrupt and greedy as ever!"

PERFORMANCES

Robert Towne wrote the character of J. J. Gittes with pal Jack Nicholson in mind, so the star-making role of the principled private eye with a taste for Florsheim shoes and words like “métier” fits the actor as perfectly as one of Jake’s tailored suits. This is my favorite of all Nicholson’s performances and arguably his last real immersion in character before entering the “Wink-wink, it’s me! Jack Nicholson!” phase of his career. The entire film is from his perspective...Chinatown is Jake’s journey. But its mystery, tragedy, and heart (and my favorite character) is Evelyn Mulwray.

Jane Fonda in Julia (1977) - Even Robert Towne had Fonda in mind when he wrote Chinatown

Both Robert Evans and Roman Polanski have made it known that Jane Fonda was their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice for the role of Evelyn Mulwray. But when Fonda declined (something the actress denies), Chinatown gained Faye Dunaway…the jewel in Chinatown’s crown and the only ‘70s actress in my eyes to possess the combined intensity, inscrutability, aristocratic bearing, neurotic edge, old-fashioned movie star glamour, and grown-woman gravitas required to bring Evelyn Mulwray to life as something more than just another vaguely-drawn film noir femme fatale cliché. 

As Chinatown’s woman of mystery (she who must not be known until Act III), Evelyn Mulwrays’s impact has to be visual. A guarded woman who’s erected an immaculate façade to conceal just how badly she’s damaged, Evelyn intrigues because she is not at all what she seems. So defining a character trait is Evelyn’s appearance that when the film starts to peel away the layers of Evelyn’s very literal “mask” of makeup as her vulnerability is exposed, those moments achieve a poignancy that makes the film's tragic denouement all the more devastating. Faye Dunaway captures all this magnificently, but is seldom given credit.

Journalists applauded Polanski's time-consuming multiple takes and Towne's glacially slow writing pace as examples of their artistic perfectionism. Meanwhile, Dunaway's painstaking commitment to her character's obsession with appearance was dismissed as prima donna "difficulty" and made her behind-the-scenes clashes the only things people talk about when speaking of her contribution to Chinatown. Despite his early reservations, in the end, Robert Evans came to praise Dunaway's performance to the skies, albeit in his usual self-congratulatory way: "Dunaway's singular mystery on the screen was among the best casting choices of my career!"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

There are a great many '70s films that I love in spite of (or because of) their flaws. But only a few I'd call perfect. Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977) gets my vote for being a wholly perfect film, so does Ken Russell's Women in Love (actually a 1969 film, but I'm cutting myself some slack because it wasn't released in SF until 1970), and most definitely Chinatown qualifies. 

And by perfect I don't mean an absence of technical goofs or anachronism errors... it's more the feeling of everything fitting so well together that you can't imagine anything being improved upon. The feeling that a story has been told in precisely the manner the filmmakers wanted to tell it. In the case of Chinatown, everything falls into place so ideally, from the cast to the music to the dialogue to the score...watching it becomes an immersive, deeply satisfying experience that engages on so many levels. I never tire of revisiting it, and the film seems boundless in offering new things to discover even after all this time. But best of all, it still manages to move me. 

I'm no longer as totally destroyed by it as I was when I was 16, but at age 63, this masterwork of cinema persists in giving me waterworks every single time.   

Thankfully, films are frozen in time. People, alas, are not. In 1974, audiences drew subconscious parallels between the dogged tragedies of Roman Polanski's personal life and the cursed fate of J.J. Gittes. Today, I'm afraid the parallels linking Polanski and Noah Cross fairly hit one over the head.

BONUS MATERIAL

Actor Paul Jenkins, who plays Policeman #1 in Chinatown (1974), made his film debut as a policeman in Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968).

Chinatown was planned as the first film in a trilogy. A plan which ground to a halt after the weak boxoffice performance of the second entry, The Two Jakes (1990). Set in 1948, the Jack Nicholson-directed sequel sorely misses Polanski's gift for cinematic storytelling and gets my vote for film most likely to convince you that Chinatown didn't need a sequel in the first place. Still, I did get a kick out of seeing these actors from the original return. 

Poster art by Jim Pearsall 

Chinatown was a summer release, opening on Wednesday, June 26, 1974, at San Francisco's Coronet Theater (which had just hosted The Great Gatsby for 11 weeks). I fell in love with the movie poster the instant I saw it, purchasing it a full month before seeing the film. The artwork captures just the right tone of nostalgia, the shadowy figure of the hatted and pinstriped Nicholson leaving no doubt as to the film's noirish roots, the dreamy image of Dunaway's face framed by the trails of cigarette smoke. the essence of romantic longing. 

The water motif is worked in with the wave crashing against Nicholson's sleeve, it being one of several elements of the poster that refuse to stay within the boundaries of the frame. From the lettering to the heat-glare effect of the coloring, everything about this poster is just perfect.  

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021